Dreaming the Future: Reimagining Civilization in the Age of Nature

 Dreaming the Future:  Reimagining Civilization in the Age of Nature by Kenny Ausubel

White River Junction, VT:  Chelsea Green Publishing, 2012

ISBN 978-1-60358-459-3

(xi)  It is the art of creating, in ecological designer John Todd’s words, “elegant solutions predicated on the uniqueness of place.”

(xv)  Hoxsey:  When Healing Becomes a Crime, film and book

…. The Hoxsey herbal treatment was a classic case history or medical politics - its therapeutic value twice upheld by federal courts while thousands upon thousands of patients claimed to be cured by it.

(3)  For all the chatter about the Age of Information, what we’re really entering is the Age of Nature.  After all, we didn’t invent nature.  Nature invented us.  Nature bats last, the saying goes.  Even more important, it’s her playing field.  We would be wise to learn the ground rules and how to play by them.

The solutions residing in nature consistently surpass our conception of what’s possible.  The quest to understand nature’s operating instructions is showing us how to design appropriately for human civilization by modeling human organization on living systems and adapting practical ways to serve human ends harmlessly.  They very genius of nature that we are destroying is precisely what we now most need to get ourselves through this bottleneck.

(4)  James Lovelock:  A geophysical system always begins with the action of a single organism.  If this action happens to be locally beneficial to the environment, then it can spread until eventually a _global altruism_ results.  Gaia always operates like this to achieve her altruism.  There is no foresight or planning involved.  The reverse is also true, and any species that affects the environment unfavorably is doomed, but life goes on.

(8)  As [Malcolm] Margolin has said, “it’s really important to get a view of humanity as not living apart from the world or destructive to it.  People by their way of living can actually be a blessing to the world.  But to be a human being, you need more than one generation to take this stuff up.”

(22)  As Charles Darwin observed, “It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change.”

…Resilience Alliance outlined some of the rules of the road in their book Resilience Thinking.

… Taking care of nature means taking care of people, and taking care of people means taking care of nature.

… Resilience thinking means abandoning command-and control approaches.

(24)  The heart of resilience is diversity.  Damaged ecosystems rebound to health when they have sufficient diversity.

(27)  Studies about social resilience - why some people recover from trauma and abuse - show that perhaps the most important factor is reaching out to helpers and mentors.

(32-33)  To create conditions conducive to life, nature has operating instructions that Benyus has distilled as “Life’s Principles.”  Life optimizes rather than maximizes - it designs for the good of the whole system, whereas maximizing for just one element skews the overall system.  It designs for multiple functions, creating efficiencies.  It matches form to function.

Life leverages interdependence by recycling all materials, fostering cooperative relationships, and creating self-organizing systems.  Life uses benign manufacturing with “life-friendly” materials, water-based chemistry, and self-assembly.

Life also constantly adapts and evolves.  It’s keyed to the local and it’s responsive.  It’s resourceful and opportunistic.  It uses feedback loops to keep learning and responding.  It integrates cyclic processes.  It cross-polinates and mutates.  It builds resilience through diversity, decentralization, and redundancy, allowing for failure and building in sageguards to avoid the possibility of crashing the whole system at once.

The principles appear simple.  Nature runs on current sunlight.  Nature banks on diversity.  Nature rewards cooperation.  Nature builds from the bottom up.  Nature recycles everything.  Life creates conditions conducive to life.

(33)  Quieting human cleverness is the first step in biomimicry.  Next comes listening, then trying to echo what we hear.  This emulating is hard and humbling work.  When what we learn improves how we live, we grow grateful, and that leads to the last step in the path:  stewardship and care taking, a practial thanksgiving for what we’ve learned.

(34)  Jay Harmon is one of our most gifted biomimics and a self-described strategic optimist.

… He came to realize that nature’s favorite form is the spiral.

(35)  Harmon is indeed now demonstrating that it’s more profitable to copy nature than to destroy it.  As CEO of PAX Scientific, a Marin County industrial-design firm that he operates with his wife and partner Francesca Bertone, he develops energy-efficient and ecologically friendly technologies.  PAX Scientific is revolutionizing industrial design working with companies in businesses as far-ranging as refrigerators, ships, and computers.

(38)  Jay Harmon:  Once it [PAX water impeller] sets up, the entire water body becomes a ringed vortex like a smoke ring, which is by far nature’s most efficient flow structure.  This is one of the reasons that we can impact very large volumes of water with such a small device and so little energy.

(48)  As educator David W Orr suggests, the ultimate object of ecological desgin is the human mind.  For the most part, solutions exist for the vast majority of our problems, aand the solutions residing in nature consistently surpass our concept of what’s possible.  It is not ultimately a technolgical issue, but a human perception issue.  The real environmental crisis is between our ears.

(51)  Here are some basic tenets of ecological medicine she [Carolyn Ratffensperger] helped outline:

The first goal of medicine is to establish the conditions for health and wholeness, thus preventing disease and illness.  The second is to cure.

The Earth is also the physician’s client.  The patient under the physician’s care is one part of the Earth.

Humans are part of a local ecosystem.  A disturbed ecosystem can make people physically ill.

Medicine should not add to the illnesses of humans or the planet.  Medical practices themselves should not damage other species or the ecosystem.

… Ironically, medicine itself is a highly toxic enerprise.  The health care industry emits nearly half the known dioxin and dioxin-linked compounds and around a quarter of the mercury released into the environment.

(52)  It’s well proven that the overuse of antibiotics has bred widespread resistance and precipitated a global medical crisis.  But what few realize is how much of the source is factory farming, which uses an estimated 29 million pounds a year in the United States alone at last count - on top of the 3 million used for people.  About 70 percent of all antibiotics sold in the United States are given to healthy food animals as a non-therapeutic treatment to artificially speed up their growth and compensate for the effects of unsanitary conditions on the farm.  Then the antibiotics migrate into land and water to breed even wider resistance.

… Across the United States, animals raised for food produce almost 90,000 pounds of waste _per second_.  

NB:  Methane

(67)  As the late Gaylord Nelson, principal founder of Earth Day, said, “The economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment.”

… And in times like these, as Albert Einstein said, “Imagination is more important than knowledge."

(79)  Another popular form of mimicry in plants and animals is crypsis, the art of concealment.  Keeping a low profile has potent advantages.

(90)  Ants also invented agriculture before people did, by 50 million years, and they are accomplishing two feats beyond the powers of present human technologies.  They are growing a monocultural crop year after year without disaster, and they are using an antibiotic so prudently that they have not provoked antibiotic resistance.

(108)  As the author EL Doctorow said, “We recognize two forms of citizenship, common and preferred.”

NB:  stock owners

… One thing is for sure:  a forty-hour workweek at the minimum wage will definitely not get you out of poverty.  We have been creating a permanent class of the working poor.

(108-109)  [Kevin] Phillips says that the decline of great economic powers is historically linked to four factors.  The first is “financialization” of their economies, as speculation replaces real production and commerce.

(109)  The second factor is very high levels of debt.  The United States is now the biggest debtor nation in the world.

… The third is extreme economic inequality.  

… Lastly, military overreaching usually seals the decline of a fading dominant economy.

(111)  In contrast, as the World Economic Forum documented, four of the five most competitive economies in the world have the most time-friendly, family-friendly, and worker-friendly policies.

(115)  What did [Tom] Linzey and his team do?  “Well, we have no pride of authorship.  We stole some language.  We went out and we took South Dakota’s work, where the anticorporate farming law is part of the state constitution.  It was driven into the state constitution by farmers and activists in South Dakota who refused to fight things by parts per million, by water pollution, by odor pollution, by end-of-the-pipe measures.  And that’s what’s wrong with environmental law:  It’s all end-of-the-pipe.  It waits until the problem is caused, then comes up with a solution.  Well, the folks in the Midwest didn’t want to be in that position, and they took these steps to drive this law and this concept into the constitution through a statewide initiative process that mandated no corporations in farming.”

(118)  You may remember the Boston Tea Party.  It actually began as a revolt against the East India Company after it enlisted the British Crown to exempt it from paying the tea taxes that applied to merchants in the colonies, thereby destroying any competition from small colonial merchants.  The American Revolution began as an anticorporate, antimonopoly rebellion.

Following the American Revolution, corporations were kept on a tight legal leash.  Corporations could be formed only to undertake public projects, and could exist for just a finite period.  After that, they could be rechartered only if they could show they existed for the public good.  Their directors and officers were held personally liable for the actions and harms of the corporations.  All that began to change with the 1886 Supreme Court ruling that corporations were persons.

The Corporate Rights Elimination Ordinances that have been passed in Pennsylvania gives communities the right to refuse to recognize their corporate constitutional rights at the municipal level.  The argument shifted from contaminated sludge to the Constituion.

(121)  People were coming to understand what Thomas Jefferson had warned against over two hundred years ago:  “I hope we will crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government in a trial of strength, and bid defiance to the laws of the country.”

(122)  Tom Linzey:  So we said, “Yeah, we could do that.”  We went back to the office and began drafting the Corporate Rights Elimination Ordinance.  After Porter Township, unanimously voted to adopt a binding law as the first in the country to pass a binding ordinance eliminating corporate constitional rights, another township followed in early 2003.  Then another rural municipal government.  We were at the beginning of the beginning, and we’d discovered some new tools.”

(124)  Perhaps, just perhaps, we’re in this mess today not only because we don’t live in a democracy, but because we’ve never had a democracy in this country.  Indeed, perhaps the corporate cultural I.V. in our arms has been working so well that it’s hard for us to even imagine what self-government would look like.  We assume that we’re working within a framework in which majorities actually make governing decisions.

(132)  Tom Linzey:  We’ve tried to build an environmental movement on the basis of nature as property.  Environmental regulations and laws are all based on Congress’s authority under something called the Commerce Clause.  In fact, when Congress passed he Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and National Environmental Plicy Act and even the Endangered Species Act, they were all done under the Commerce Clause authority, which essentially says that nature is commerce.  Western philosophy and law treat nature as property.  It’s really a shake-up when people start syaing that right-less things should have rights, at the very least the right to exist.

(133)  Wild Law:  A manifesto for Earth Justice by South African environmental attorney Cormac Cullinan

…  Tom Linzey:  What’s fascinating is that over a dozen municipalities in the United States today working with our organization have passed local laws that declare that ecosystems have rights to exist and flourish of their own, and that anyone in the community can step into the shoes of the ecosystem to protect it or vindicate it.  Damages have to be measured by the damage to the ecosystem and damage awards have to go back to restoring the ecosystem itself.  It’s a fundamental shift in the law.

(138)  Over a series of months, they shaped and expanded that language, and in 2009 the people of Ecuador approved the New Constitution, becoming the the very first country in the world to recognize in its Constitution the rights of ecosystems to “exist, persist, regenerate and evolve.”

…  In 2010, CELDF [Community Environment Legal Defense Fund] became a founding member of the Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature, an international organization formed to buidl a global movement ot recognize nature’s legal rights, and is currently chairing its Legislative Assistance Working Group.

(143)  To succeed in this momentous transition, we’re being called upon to cooperate on a grand scale.  It requires the equivalent of a wartime mobilization, yet its purpose is precisely the opposite:  to create peace.
NB:  War also can create peace, supposedly

(145)  People said, “We’re at war with these people because they’ve harmed us.  They’ve done wrong to us.”  The Peacemaker [Huron who founded the Iroquois Confederacy] replied that the pursuit of peace is not merely the pursuit of the absence of violence.  Peace is never achieved until justice is achieved.  Justice is not achieved until everyone’s interests are addressed.  So, he said, you will never actually finish addressing everyone’s issues.  You can’t achieve peace unless it’s accompanied by constant striving to address justice.  It means your job will never end.

(162)  In the wake of the crash and looming bankruptcies, professor Gerald Epstein of the University of Massachusetts-Amherst proposed a “Green Bank of America” and “Green Citi Bank.”  That would be a real public option.

… Distributed energy systems provide much greater efficiency as well as security, in part because huge amounts of energy are lost in long-distance transmission.  The leading model is Denmark, where distributed networks generate half the country’s electricity and have cut carbon emissions by nearly half from 1990 levels.

(163)  At a meeting of global spiritual leaders, Chief Oren Lyons of the Iroquois Six Nations recalls the words of a Japanese elder who distilled the essence of the crisis we face into four words:  value change for survival.

(164)  The First People’s Original Instructions:

Take only what you need, and give back as much as you take.

Take responsibility for sustaining the web of life.

Because all life is connected and related, respect your relatives and each other.

Pursue peace through justice in a process that never ends.

Be grateful.

Enjoy life.

(168)  An estimated 25 percent of emissions produced by people in industrialized nations can now be linked with the foods they eat.

(171)  Among its [the EU’s] structural innovatioins are two policies:  works councils and codetermination, which go right to the heart of power.  Works councils give employees significant input on working conditions, as well as codecision rights on some aspects of finances and some consultation rights on new technologies, mergers, and layoffs.  They contribute to efficiency by improving the quality of decisions and worker buy-in.

With codetermination, workers elect representatives to supervisory boards.  It has fostered cooperation with management and benefitted businesses.

(172)  Organic Valley, the $500 million farmers’ co-op, delivers returns of 2 percent while meeting its mission of saving the family farm.  Spain’s Mondragon Corporation, the nation’s seventh-largest industrial enterprise, is partnering with the United Steelworkers union to creat manufacturing co-ops.  Holland’s large Rabobank Group, founded in the 1800s, operates on cooperative principles and is owned by shareholder customers and employees.  The data show that employee-owned firms tend to outperform thier peers, and foundation-owned ones perform at least as well or better.  In Europe, co-ops contribute 12 percent of GDP.

(185)  John Mohawk, Seneca historian:  The culture that I came from saw the universe as the fountain of everything, including consciousness.  In our culture we’re scolded for being arrogant if we think that we’re smart.  An individual is not smart according to our culture.  An individual is merely lucky to be a part of a system that has intelligence that happens to reside in them.  In other words, be humble about this always.  the read intelligence isn’t the property of an individual or a corporation or something - the real intelligence is the property of the universe itself.

(187)  [John Mohawk] The Creator is the force that gave that plant consciousness, as manifested in its compounds and in its shape at that moment.  When you’re talking to that plant, you’re talking to the essence fo the spirit of life in the universe, not just on the Earth.  Whatever it is is not confined to here.  You can look up in the sky and see that we’re not the only place that’s occupied.  There are other beings in the universe besdies us.  That’s the old spirituality.  Acquire that consciousness, and it becomes extremely difficult to rationalize pollution.  acquire that consciousness and it becomes very difficult to rationalize cutting down trees to make board-feet worth of dollars out of them.   

I propose to you that spirituality is the highest form of political consciousness.

(188)  [Lyall] Watson identifies three pinciple sources of this disruptive evil in ecology:

a loss of connection to place

a loss of balance between both numbers and distribution

a lack of diversity

(189)  R. Buckminster Fuller’s  mission statement for humanity:

To make the world work

For 100 percent of humanity

In the shortest possible time

Through spontaneous cooperation

Without ecological offense

Or the disadvantage of anyone.  

(194)  Dennis Martinez, founder of the Indigenous Peoples’ Restroation Network, a working group of the Society for Ecological Restoration International:  http://www.ser.org/iprn/defalut.asp

…Omar Freilla, Green Worker Cooperatives, a South-Bronx-based organization dedicated to incubating worker-owned green businesses in order to build a strong local economy rooted in democrary and environmental justice:  http://www.greenworker.coop/

Elaine Ingham is a soil biology researcher and the founder of Soil Foodweb Inc:  http://www.soilfoodweb.com/

(195)  Luisah Teish, Jambalaya:  The Natural Woman’s Book of Peronals Charms and Practical Rituals, Carnival of the Spirit (New York:  Harper and Row, 1985)

http://luisahteish.org

(196)  Business Alliance for Local Living Economies [BALLE]:  http://www.livingeconomies.org

(199)  Edward Tick and Stephen Larsen, The Practice of Dream Healing:  Bringing Ancient Greek Mysteries into Modern Medicine (Wheaton, IL:  Quest Books, 2001)

(200)  Gerald Epstein  http://www.umass.edu/research/research-umits-facilities/political-economy-research-institute-peri

Two European banks known for their ethics and progressive policies are Triodos Bank (http://ww.triodos.co.uk/) and Rabobank (http://www.rabobank.com)