How do I summarise something consisting of 100,000 words, 17 chapters, four self-contained and entirely different sections, and containing the solution to most of the world’s ills? More than that, though, how can I make you understand that A Matter Of Scale may be the most important book ever written?

A hollow claim, much like everything that includes the phrase, “This book could change your life”, but the difference here is I am not trying to make a penny out of the work I have put into it – in fact I have spent years of my life, an awful lot of money and the last 12 months writing as though my life depended on it, in order to produce something that now has to stand up on its own merits. So please forgive me if I take a few words explaining myself.

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It was a couple of years ago that I conceived the idea of writing a book, while I was still working for a financial organisation, but growing more disillusioned with everything except for the few things that kept me sane: my family, my friends and the brief times I had had the chance to connect with something other than the consumer culture. By January 2007, I had made up my mind to ditch paid work for something I realised was far more important – it sounds desperately cheesy, but I realised there was a sense of destiny in doing what I was about to do.

By the time I left work I had pages upon pages of ideas, notes and references; most of them scribbled down during sleepless nights, idle periods at my desk and on the train travelling to and from London. I also had a very simple idea – something so simple that it just had to be right:

“What matters is what matters to us.”

It seems almost meaningless, but it was the first of many links and connections that were to come about as I delved further into writing. In essence, it means that unless we are (as humans) able to consciously experience something, then it doesn’t matter. That seems reckless, at best, but there was a mirror to this: because – and it became increasingly clear as I was writing the first part of the book – humans are being adversely affected, directly and indirectly by the actions of humanity. If it could  be made clear that it really was ourselves who matter most of all to us, it would be incontrovertible that we have to do something about the problems we have created. It would entirely go against what it means to be human if we knowingly ignored what was happening.

In order to make it totally obvious that there was a lot more unsettling stuff going on than most of us realised, I then had to look into all sorts of different areas for evidence of the effects of our activities upon human beings: forget, for a moment, that species are being wiped out every day and that habitats are being destroyed; what was most astonishing of all was that almost everything we were doing was affecting something else at some scale or another, and it was coming back to bite us. Whatever I read about, at every scale imaginable – bacteria, insects, birds, fish, trees, entire global ecosystems – it kept coming back with the same answer: we were causing our own demise.

The title was born: A Matter Of Scale.

Then I went on holiday with my family and gave myself time to think. Six weeks of thinking about the thing I had committed myself to: a book covering everything from problems to solutions, to be written in four months. “It’ll all be over by Christmas!” I foolishly thought.

By Christmas, I had finished Part Two: Why It Matters, and was halfway through Part One: The Scale Of The Problem. By this time I had already confused my “Readers Panel” (a group of volunteers who bravely offered to nit-pick their way through my writing) by sending them Part Two before any chapters in Part One; despite my claims that it didn’t matter which way round you read them. Part Two came easy – a background in philosophy helped, and being a human, it was relatively easy to write about my own species. On the other hand, I am not a virus, a nematode or a spruce tree: in fact, I spent most of my time in Part One learning about the subjects from scratch, and using that learning experience to try and make the subject as interesting and readable as possible. From what I have been told, I may, at least, have succeeded in writing a very nice ecological textbook!

Then came The Connection. Part Three was extremely difficult to write. Now I was exploring things that I had never gone into in much depth before, and to say my eyes were opened as I delved further into the subject, and my own developing ideas, would be a serious understatement. I’m not going to spoil things for you: simply to say that many people reading the book will end up in places they didn’t realise existed. Some of the places are beautiful, tranquil, deeply personal and moving; some of the places are truly horrible – because that is the difference between a connected life and the disconnected lives we are forced to lead.

By the time Spring emerged in the Northern Hemisphere, Part Three was being wrapped up, for the time being, and I was revisiting earlier parts of the book, clarifying, correcting and making some major changes in places where things hadn’t worked the first time. I was ready to write the final section, and yet I still wasn’t ready: what was the solution?

I knew it would come to me eventually, but I had no way of knowing when, and like all solutions, forcing it could make it worse. So I started writing: first about Anger, its place in the solution, and why it became part of the problem; then about civilization itself – the problem I knew by this time, was not humanity, it was the way Industrial Civilization had created a monster, a fake, disconnected humanity to serve its own ends – our place in it, and why it was so vulnerable; then I realised what the solution was and where it had to lead us. Those last two chapters were the most thrilling, and overwhelming pieces of writing I had ever done; and possibly ever likely to do.

I’m not quite done yet. Part Four still needs a couple of days work: it’s a hell of a solution, and I want to make sure everyone truly understands why it has to be that way, and how to carry it through. Oh, and also why so many other “solutions” are utterly useless. There is a web site which, at the time of writing, contains the first three parts of the book, readable online entirely for free. Remember at the beginning of this piece I said that I didn’t intend to make any money from this work? I am risking the wrath, and rejection, of any potential publisher, by insisting that the entire book will be online for anyone to read, regardless of what happens to the print edition – because, as far as A Matter Of Scale is concerned, what matters is that as many people as possible get the chance to find out the truth behind humanity, civilization, the state of the world and, most of all, themselves.

The entire book text will be online early in July 2008.

You can start reading now at www.amatterofscale.com.

Keith,
I just finished reading A Matter of Scale. It's great to hear from another free spirit, another truth-seeker, another person who recognizes the fundamental depravity and untenability of modern civilization. Ideas like this make me think of Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil - we now have the foundation for real action, we have the knowledge and educational tools for action, we have the consciousness of freedom, and now it's time to decide - what do we want to be, what can be redeemed, what is worth picking up and taking with us, what must be left behind, and where do we want to go... Nietzsche, as always, was writing of spiritual matters, and that's what we're concerned with here as well, but the message applies equally to the political, economic, social, and environmental abysses we now contemplate, to fall into or leap across.

I imagine the target audience for this book are those you called the "kind" people, those who have spiritual potential but are still more or less mired in societal brainwashing, what you called the tools of disconnect. This is how I've long felt - there's no point speaking to "the masses", who are hopelessly, congenitally bound up in their conformity, stupidity, laziness, and cowardice. Rather, we must seek those in whom the human spark still flashes. A book like this, to use a metaphor I've encountered elsewhere, is like a magnet being scanned over a pile of dross, seeking to attract the true metal.

I guess that's why you say it's pointless e.g. torching an SUV dealership since the stupid things will just be restocked, while sabotaging a marketing campaign is worthwhile. Of course the ads will come right back as well, but besmirching the message, the symbol, can be more effective than physically destroying the item itself. (At least, given the current social and legal climate, with everyone paranoid about terrorism, people are prone to have visceral, knee-jerk reactions to physical destruction and never process the intended message, which may therefore have a better chance to get through if only the
image is counterassaulted.)

Preaching to the masses anyway still falls under the rubric of modern-civilized behavior. It's impossible to preach to the masses from outside civilization, which is where we want to go. We can only try to call out to potential kindred souls to join us. The Prologue to Nietzsche's Zarathustra offers an extraordinary account of the defunct spirituality of modern civilization, the folly and danger of trying to issue an anti-civilizational call to the civilizational masses, and the hard-won wisdom of seeking only comrades and companions.

You quote somebody saying "it's not knowledge we lack, but the courage to understand what we know". (Very reminiscent of Nietzsche's "We rarely have the courage of what we know".)
Yes - I know how intimidating the prospect is. Not for me personally, but for people we try to talk to about these things. It's common to encounter someone who intellectually understands or is willing to accept much of this, but who demurs at any point where it comes to acting upon this knowledge. I think
it's a form of hiding your head in the sand. The moment your knowledge is expected to take you beyond parlor games and party conversations, it becomes frightening and depressing.

Perhaps your way of developing the ideas in this book might be a way to help caress some of the reluctant into taking all this more seriously. Your writing in this book, if I may say so, seems rather gentle, even as it gets the idea across (as compared to e.g. James Howard Kunstler, who writes about a lot
of the same things, but with a far more aggressive tone).

[I mentioned "me personally". I'll just quickly describe my own journey so far. I actually rejected modern civilization on philosophical, spiritual, and aesthetic grounds back in college, long before I became an environmentalist, long before I ever knew the terms "Peak Oil" and "climate change". My
environmental and energy concerns have of course only confirmed me in my original path. So I don't look to energy descent with fear or any sense of loss, on the contrary I look to it with hope. Psychologically I'm fully prepared. On the other hand, in terms of skills (e.g. growing food), I'm still largely unprepared, and where I currently live there's little prospect of making much headway there. I need to figure out what to do next. So that's where I am on all this.]

The knowledge we have certainly is daunting. When you say we should systematically seek to stifle growth, this is as radically antithetical to the modern ethos as a call can be. It's a good thing that Peak Oil on its own militates the descent of energy and thus of modern civilization, since otherwise we'd remain with the intractable problem which has faced every reformer and revolutionary since the dawn of history - how to re-engineer hominid nature to purge greed? Indeed, I fear greed is likely to remain an issue even in the post-fossil fuel world (though of course it won't have anywhere near as much destructive traction).

I'll just randomly list some details of the book which resonated with me or coincided with some of my own long-held feelings and ideas:

-That the ideology of tire inflation and CFLs is an ideology of nibbling.

-That anodyne "freedoms" like voting have little to do with true inner freedom and everything to do with distracting us from real freedom. This is related to what you wrote about most protest ("legal" protest - you're certainly right about the cravenness of permit-seeking. What revolutionaries - they back
down if they can't get a permit!) ending up doing nothing but achieving an impotent catharsis. I loved the quote attributed to Goldman - "If voting changed anything, it
would be illegal". Here's two of my favorites: Democracy is two foxes and a chicken voting on what to have for dinner (from Nietzsche). The difference between tyranny and democracy is that in a tyranny there's one allowed point of view, while in a democracy there are four
or five - but if you deviate from these, you'll be persecuted just as much as under any tyranny. (Your discussion of modern "education" with those "25 aims" also made me think of this.)

-The conscription of technology - not just cars and TVs (the examples you mentioned, if I recall correctly), but cell phones, computers....

-How, where it comes to employer-worker structures, all we have is what Lenin called trade-union consciousness - unionization, minimum wage, government safety regulators, etc.

-The mutually reinforcing dialectic of speed and distance under modern economic and technological circumstances.

-I especially loved the quote about the subversiveness of bicycles. I never looked at them this way before, but now I'll never look at them any other way.

-The mirage of hope. Nietzsche rewrote the Pandora's box story to have it that hope was the greatest evil of all which had been in the box, and that it remained in the box since alone among the afflictions it is the one which retains its virulence not by flying away, but by insinuating itself ever deeper
into man.

You're familiar with FDR's warning against "fear itself", irrational,
free-floating, enervating, paralyzing fear, as opposed to the fear we transform constructively into action. That's the echo I heard when you contrasted irrational, irresponsible, prayer-chanting hope with hope transformed into action. Hope transformed into action - that's how I hope my life will sum up, and today that's all humanity can seek and still remain human. Hopefully your book will help mankind seek this.

"Nothing is innocent now but to act for life's sake." - C. Day Lewis

-Russ
(I also posted this as a comment at the Earth Blog post on the book.)

Russ, that was a truly heroic comment.It speaks for itself. I'm humbled and grateful.

Keith