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Friday, January 6th 2012

8:01 AM

Getting Real



“At birth we are connected to the real world and then, subtly, without our nascent consciousness even being aware of it happening, a veil is slipped over our minds. As we proceed through our lives layer after layer is wrapped around us to suppress any inquisitiveness we may have...We are enmeshed in lives that leave little room for inquiry, and so set in our ways by the constant forces that have governed our thoughts that we do not seek out truth – we only seek out what the system has taught us are worthy goals: money, material possessions, career progression, synthetic happiness and whatever “dream” our adoptive country is driven to aspire to.”
(Keith Farnish, Underminers, Chapter 6)

During my years as an active protester, usually involving standing by lots of different roadsides, the Doppler Effect played many interesting tricks with the abuse thrown in our direction. It was easy enough to tell who was feeling brave: the words, whatever they may have been, would increase in frequency. The less brave would find their words undergoing a descending diminuendo making it clear we had nothing to fear, despite the obvious bile expressed. The most interesting tricks involved both an up and down in frequency as some effort was obviously being put into the lengthy comments yelled out: those were the ones worth listening to.

So, alongside the chorus of “Fuck you!” “Get a job!” “Wanker!” and “Get a life!” were more unctuous morsels to digest, among which would appear – with surprising regularity – “Go and live in the real world.”

There’s an obvious unreality about holding up (as I later understood, completely pointless) banners alongside a road, or trying to give out leaflets to passers-by; but as I learnt about the nature of civilization, and particularly Industrial Civilization from my friends and various authors (some of whom would become my friends) that phrase really started to jar. I would think, “Fuck you! With your 9-to-5 jobs and your 2 week holidays on a crowded poolside and your aspirations to have a bigger television than your best mate that you drink fizzy lager with down the local pub-cum-meat market.” It wasn’t so much the person as the life regarded as “real” that angered me, and still angers me so much. Despite a good friend declaring that everything is natural, because it was at least the agency of something that was created by something that is natural, that doesn’t make it Real.

And that’s the crux of the matter. “Go and live in the real world” is actually a desperate need for belonging; a distrust, perhaps even a fear of anyone who doesn’t occupy the world that the speaker
(shouter)
himself occupies. Civilization has progressively created a world that consists not only of countless artefacts that would have most likely never been spontaneously created in a society outside of civilization, but also a mindset that denies the worthiness, even the existence of a world outside of the civilized one. “Go and live in the real world” actually means “Go and live in my world”.

It is entirely possible that all cultures have their own concept of what is real, and that anything outside of that culture is somehow less real. There is nothing sinister or even odd about that; culture, after all, is what defines how a group of people live, and creating the cohesion necessary to keep people in that group is bound to involve an element of elitism in the form of your particular worldview being more valid, or more “real”, than that of any other group. Of course an individual or group of individuals may wish to genuinely aspire to a different and heightened sense of reality, and that is certainly the case for those who are struggling to escape civilized society and live in a different way. But I believe that is exceptional, and in most cases we have always thought that our version of reality is more “real” than anyone else’s.

There is an interesting philosophical element to this. The idea that you can take a truly objective view of anything is patently absurd, and this has been addressed for many centuries certainly in Western philosophy. We are, after all, subjective beings: we inhabit a body that takes inputs from both the outside world and our own bodies, and contribute outputs that change both the outside world and our own bodies (assuming you accept the brain as the centre of our being and not just Woody Allen’s second favourite organ).  Our worldview is always going to be obscured by our subjectivity, and despite attempts to empathise with things that are not us, we are bound to see ourselves as slightly more real than anyone or anything else.  I’ll dip into that idea a bit more, later. For now I think it shows quite clearly that there is nothing wrong per se with the idea that your world is also your reality. On the other hand, what do we actually mean by the word “real”?


What is Real?

The guy in the white van, shouting surprisingly articulate abuse knows. What he means is more akin to worthiness and usefulness than any objective view of reality. He, as we have suggested, rightfully distrusts what is not familiar, but more than that he considers anyone who does not follow the rules set down by the culture he has grown up in as an unworthy and less useful member of that society. The fact the society White Van Man embraces with vocal alacrity is anything but worthy or useful to the global ecology and humanity as a whole is not relevant: he has been taught that what matters is the pursuit of wealth, material goods and industrial-scale leisure, and the means by which he can show off the attainment of these goals. The trees can go fuck themselves. Look at my house!

This is not a cheap stereotype – it describes the aspirations of civilized society in one of its many forms, varied perhaps by location or fashion, but essentially the same wherever and whenever in the civilized world you go.  A few years ago we went for a walk in the South Essex countryside, what remains between the roads, housing estates, retail complexes and car parks. Abandoned railway lines fascinate me, not only because of the chance to imagine what the usually wooded strip of embankment or cutting might have been like with trains running through it, but also because of the magical claim that wild nature has made upon the space, reclaiming a former industrial site for its own. As we stepped down off the embankment, made impassable by writhing brambles and washes of nettle, we encountered a gate and a sign that said, “Permissible Footpath”. What this means is that whoever “owns” the land has agreed to allow walkers to cross it along the existing footpath rather than paying off the local authorities so it could be diverted a few miles around this, as it turned out, golf course.

I hate golf courses. I hate golf courses with their own housing estates even more. As we sat on a sterile greenspace, eating eggs and apples I imagined what it would be like to wake up every morning overlooking acres of manicured grass, bunkers and neatly trimmed hedges, before going off to work in my Mercedes, returning later to play a round of golf and finishing off with a pint of carbon-pumped beer in the clubhouse. I turned to my wife and said: “This is really it, isn’t it?”

Bloody awful.

Yet that is the pinnacle of civilized reality. As we sat, itching to move on but still hungry, a groundsman walked up. He expressed disappointment that we were sitting on the edge of the fairway, explaining that a party of golfers were due shortly and that we should move on. Our diffidence was met with insistence. With wonderful timing, my wife stood up and said: “I don’t want to look at this any more.”


Real Reality

I quite like Richard Dawkins. His books have helped me to understand the nature of science and belief in ways that without him I would almost certainly have failed to; and almost certainly fallen foul of all sorts of fallacies and spurious ideas that seem to hang on like well-meaning leeches wherever I turn. Sometimes, though, he lets himself down. Here’s a quote from Dawkins on a radio show I listened to the other day:

“When you think about what [reality] is telling you, the science of reality, the science of physics, the science of biology is telling you why you exist; how the laws of physics has taken the simplicity of molecules and atoms and built them up over billions of years to make something so fantastically complicated that it can make up ghost stories, and read and write and listen to music and be loving and hating. Isn’t that just a stunning fact, and that’s what you get from reality. And any amount of magic, any amount of supernaturalism is just playing around...a cowardly kind of playing around compared with the wonder of understanding things through reality.”
(The Infinite Monkey Cage, BBC Radio 4, 27/12/2011)

Which all sounds fine and good, until you ask the question, “But what do you mean by reality?” If I’m not making myself clear then go to sleep, but first set an alarm. When the alarm wakes you up the chances are that you will have been dreaming. As you move rapidly towards a non-sleeping state you realise that the thing you were experiencing was what we in Western cultures call a “dream”; but during that state it is highly unlikely you would have been able to distinguish “dreaming” from “reality”. The quotes aren’t there to confuse you; they are there because there is no objective way to distinguish the different states while they are happening. As far as most people are concerned, when they are dreaming, the dream is real. I suspect Richard Dawkins might struggle to argue otherwise.

This, of course, puts the lie even more forcefully to the idea that the civilized way of living is inarguably more real than other ways of living. When we dream we are connected to our primal emotions and thoughts in a way that removes many of the cultural filters that block such connections in our waking hours. It is no surprise that many indigenous cultures do not distinguish between “myth” and “reality”, “dreaming” and “reality” or any other state we like to think is distinguished from what we blithely consider real.

So, when someone talks about the real world, the first thing you need to consider is from what viewpoint they are talking. The economic commentators and military experts on the television have a completely different view of what is real to, say, a bushcraft expert who has embraced the importance of a living, intact habitat. As for dyed-in-the-wool scientists: well, maybe they do have something useful to say, but only after they are happy to accept that 99.9999% of matter is, in fact, just empty, unmeasurable space...

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Friday, September 2nd 2011

3:42 AM

Underminers: A Practical Guide for Radical Change



I am writing another book. For a while it seemed as though ideas would get the better of me and the sack of pages that might hold those words never be filled. Writing gave way to doing, and Underminers sat on my hard drive and sheafs of paper halfway written - a block of wasted life in literary form.

The writing started back in November 2010 and the aim was to have the definitive guide to the theory and act of undermining the industrial system completed by the next Spring. Spring sprung and I was busy in the garden, busy in the community, busy with my family, even busy playing cricket - that most civilized of games, but something that also has so many primal instincts embedded in its execution that my lack of ability cannot detract from the joy of playing. By mid-Summer the writing had dried up, not only with the book but with the Unsuitablog and The Earth Blog.

I was still quietly undermining in the background, but with too many ideas flitting around my head and no suitable net to capture, or means to express them, the book looked as though it would never reach the end. I wrote to a friend; a small act of catharsis, but while easing the guilt, it couldn't make the blockage go away.

Undermining is potentially the answer to the problem of civilization and the means of rescuing the human race, and much of life on Earth, from end times. As I write, so-called "activists" and making hay from a pathetic display of Civil Disobedience on the steps of the Capitol building in Washington DC. All the better to stop a tar sands oil pipeline, they say. All the better to entertain the corporate elites as they plot their next energy artery. This is not undermining - it is quite the opposite, for it leads people into a sense that actions that in no way threaten the power of the industrial machine are worth spending time and energy on. Direct action is rarely undermining; it may help the process, but it may also make it more difficult - creating more locked doors and extra-vigilant security to deter those that would exploit the cracks in the system for its undoing.

A couple of weeks ago I made the decision to put what I had written online. Not in one go, but in chapters. A blog I had been adding to, to document the process of writing, thinking, failing to get published and other related things, became the platform upon which the book would be hosted. The Introduction, that I had already blogged about, was posted, and with the promise of the first chapter online in a week and another chapter to be posted every 2 weeks, I at last had a deadline I had to stick to. With five chapters already written I had 10 weeks to finish Chapter 6, which was already looking like some crazy, mammoth word-fest.

Yesterday I finished Chapter 6, which is no longer a crazy word-fest, although it is most definitely mammoth. The book, Underminers, will be completed in 20 weeks, or less. I have no choice now - people are watching, and reading.

You can read it too, by going to: www.underminers.org/the-book
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Wednesday, May 11th 2011

4:50 AM

Finding My Limit



It’s been five months since I last wrote for The Earth Blog; to be honest I’ve been doing better things, like working within my community, enjoying my family as they grow up, keeping the house and garden ticking over in the frigid winter months and welcoming the perfections of spring days with a wonder that only comes from connection with the place I now call “home”. I’ve also been writing a second book, but that’s a different story, and one that I won’t dwell on for now.

Five months and a new essay, but one that shares striking similarities with the opening of the last one – for this is also about making the most of what is within your reach, nurturing it and understanding it. I recall that ride over the hill into the teeth of the Autumn wind every time I make the same journey. The plum trees have just finished blossoming and I have found some fruiting cherries along with enough firewood to carry us through next winter on similar journeys – that and a procession of car-encapsulated people who must travel as fast as they can, as far as they feel merely to fulfil what they see as necessity. I have yet to ride to Kelso, another 4 miles or so further than my Melrose jaunt: there are busier roads and there isn’t much more to find and, yes, we drive. Sometimes, as last week, it is essential from my point of view (to collect that wood which now sits at the side of the house waiting to be sawn up); sometimes it is useful, and sometimes it is just for the pleasure of being somewhere else – usually when we are with someone else who wants to see what there is around us.

But there are limits. Often we make subconscious decisions that negate the need to vocalise our thoughts. “That’s too far” or “We don’t need to do that” take precedence over “That would be nice to do” more often than not. That doesn’t make us perfect by any means, and to be honest the pursuit of perfection is bound to end in failure – humans have randomness built in, and our foibles are often what distinguish character from bland compliance. I don’t want to be perfect; I just want to be honest. With that in mind, here’s a question we all need to answer:

Where is the nearest place to you that you like to be?

Yesterday I was reading through some writing, lying in the front room, sun falling on my face, birdsong floating through the open window. That was lovely. Today I was popping a couple of small loaves of bread round to a friend (I am experimenting with open loaves and have to make them small to fit the rising mounds of heated dough into the oven), and took the back way past sheaves of wild garlic, up the side alley where the ground never dries, and back to the main road where a cup of coffee always greets me in the house with the blue door. That is pretty special, and I can have tea if I want. Simple things, and so close; and you might have something like them. But for many people such idylls are harder to find, not necessarily because they are far away but because they seem unattainable. Are they, though? 

One of my favourite spots as a child was a tree in the middle of a broken up Tarmac parking area where my sister and I used to play imagination games, and hunt for slow-worms among the grass edges. It was a crappy spot that appeared like so many other bits of “wasteland” to hold no pleasures, but we thought it was special and would head for it in preference to the municipal park that would take 10 minutes to reach rather than a sharp sprint to the end of the road. The park was fine if we asked first and stayed together. The tree on the Tarmac was within the limit our parents defined as “just round the corner” so we could visit it whenever we wished. Its closeness was part of its appeal: in a way that tree was ours.

In summer holidays thousands of students from Britain go over to India, Thailand and Vietnam to experience something they then place on their Facebook and Flickr pages in the form of albums of joy – or perhaps gloating. I sometimes come across these, or others from American students in Machu Picchu; Australian students in London; X students in Y faraway place...all taking similar experiences and memories from somewhere the appeal of which seems to lie in its distance more than anything else. The oddest thing of all about these forays to faraway places is the lack of connection they generate. For some it may be a moment of mental realignment, but for most they experience only what their own cultural window can comprehend. They are observers in a place alien to them (though, sadly, becoming less alien with each new hotel, shopping mall and advert for Bud Light) – distance has brought them to what is essentially a very large television screen with fantastic surround sound.

That’s not to say that experiencing other cultures is wrong – it can make us see where our culture is going so wildly off-kilter as to have become the globally destructive force it is – but they are not our cultures, and so we can only make of them that which is within our experiential boundaries. We have to find our own special places, not borrow (and often steal) those which belong to someone else.

Which brings me back to the places we can go to now. Walk out of the door and keep walking until you find somewhere that belongs to you; places you feel a connection to. They don’t need to be green, flowing, sun-kissed or rain-washed. Do you know your neighbours? Could you knock on their doors and be welcomed in for a drink and a chat? Where is the nearest place you can join with people who are special to you – a local pub or a cafe maybe, or a community centre, bench, piece of pavement?

Such inconsequential places, and such seemingly trivial reasons to go there. Just a few words, a bite to eat, a passing smile, a friendship reignited, a love on fire. We ignore these local places because the civilized world insists that our boundaries are distant, we can achieve anything, we have no limits. The Diaspora of our mechanised, electrical, money-soaked commercial excesses has, indeed, reached round so far it hits itself on the back, and screeches past to take another lap of the little blue-green dot we live on. In universal terms Earth is a dot. In human terms it is all we can ever intimately know as a species, and as I look out of my window I can see – what? – a few hundred metres; a couple of miles if I get up high.

Why go further when what really make our days go round are those apparently inconsequential dealings with the things that are so close to us? Yet we choose to ignore them because there is a bigger world out there. I refuse to accept that and choose the places I can walk to, run through and, if I really want to open my mind up, cycle there and back. That is my limit; all I can really know, and love, and nurture.

One day we will be forced to accept that the limitless world we thought there was is closing in once more. Back to where we started, like the frog who refused to accept there was anything beyond the woods, not because the frog was stupid, but because the frog had all it needed right there in the little piece of world it knew.


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Sunday, December 5th 2010

7:56 AM

What If...We Stopped Using Money?



I hadn’t exerted myself until I felt sick for quite some time: the rasping breath, accompanied by the gag reflex as each shallower gulp of air oxygenates the blood just a little less each time – halfway towards the crest of the hill and heading into a fierce headwind; but there’s a little more story to tell before we reach the top of that hill....

Gary and I had been talking beehives. His two-dimensionally restricted knee joint reflected more than sufficiently on that time in both of our lives when we start to realise that we are getting on. What we want to do is not always lived up to by what our bodies are capable of doing. His current physical condition – one that entailed putting his life on hold and his income in jeopardy – brought home in the gloaming light of a blustery day the fallibility of people, whether individuals, couples or entire families, should things not go quite to plan. As I internally mulled over how I could help, our conversation continually skipped between spin bowling, South African history and the aforementioned opportunity to do a bit of collective bee-keeping some time in the near future.

Shortly after noon I had to leave his company and make the contour-filled bike trip alongside the Eildons to Melrose; and back again into that horrible headwind, already laden with Scottish butter, a guilty jar of coffee, and (the source of our conversational foray) two jars of Galloway honey – all contained within a rucksack that refused to stay simply facing backwards. As I crested the hill hundreds of red dots emerged to the left of me. Scattered across the grass verge were the wind-deposited bounty of a beautiful plum tree.

With around five extra pounds of weight contained within the self-aware rucksack, I once again turned up at Gary’s house; leaving shortly afterwards much bereft of plums, but considerably heavier of potatoes. Later that day the remaining plums would find themselves baked in a cake; and some of the potatoes crushed along with a few ounces of the Scottish butter.

A Barter Way

Barter is older than money – this is why. If you have something and you want something else then you have three basic options: you can just take the thing you want from the person who has it; alternatively you can give some of what you have in exchange for the thing you want; finally, you can sell some of what you have in exchange for something that has no intrinsic worth, but on paper (coin, slate, bead, wooden disc...) has some pre-agreed value, then use that virtual value to purchase the thing that you want. These three options show an increase in complexity, which reflects the way human society has gone since the earliest non-settled people became first co-operative, then civilized.
 
I want to stress immediately that the word “civilized” does not imply something positive: civilized simply means living in very large groups - so large that the importation of “resources” and the exportation of waste is necessary - as part of a hierarchical system of rule. It does not mean “being nice”. If anything it means the opposite.

The barter system – being the exchange of goods or services for goods or services of an equivalent, but not necessarily fixed value – is by no means the purest form of co-operative arrangement; for if we are to really live in such a way that people can genuinely rely upon each other for their basic needs then other forms of exchange and giving, including unconditional giving are also required. However, compared to the ludicrously complex cash and credit-based systems that have become the norm in civilized society, bartering has a level of purity and immediacy that most civilized people find extraordinary, even deeply uncomfortable. With a £20 note in my pocket I know, pretty accurately how much of anything I could now go and buy – and am confident that note would be accepted, at least in the country where I live.

Now, if I were to carry around a sack of onions that I had grown myself (slightly unwieldy, but it’s easier to explain this way) then what are the chances that these would be accepted in the same ready manner in exchange for, say, a fancy haircut or a pair of trousers? Pretty slim, I would say, even if the two parties were able to agree on how many onions a pair of trousers was worth. You might be lucky to stumble across an unusually liberated storeholder, or simply get the deal for the sheer novelty value – but as a form of currency in the civilized world, onions stink!

Here’s the thing, though - unlike notes and coins, onions have intrinsic value: they can be eaten to provide nutrition and flavour in a meal. There are no signatures on onions; no promises to pay back the equivalent in some other non-real asset; no need for state-backed guarantees in an increasingly untrusting and disconnected society. They are onions. They are onions in Scotland, France, Egypt, Indonesia and Australia. Not everyone might like them or need them, but at least you know what you are getting; and there are always the tomatoes in the other bag.

So why doesn’t society barter more? Here’s a list of some reasons off the top of my head; see if you can think of any more:

- We don’t trust or know each other well enough to agree an equivalent value for different things;

- We don’t understand the intrinsic value of things without a cash equivalent;

- There is no way of profiting from bartering without obvious fraud;

- We cannot easily store everything we desire for later use;

- Bartering gives little opportunity to attain status through material possessions;

- Bartering is socially unacceptable in a capital society;

- Bartering requires preparation and, usually, pre-agreement.

Whether you consider these things to be inherently negative will depend largely on how you currently choose to conduct your day-to-day transactions (as opposed to being forced to). I find having to prepare for a transaction, and being unable to profit from it as being two inherently positive things – but then I’m a bit weird, according to the norms of society, which is probably a major reason I have been able to conduct a fair bit of business without cash; people sort of expect it of me. Nevertheless, bartering is seen, almost universally in civilized society, as being something people used to do but is no longer possible or even desirable. Here’s one example of the prevalent attitude with regards to taxation:

It is quite normal for ferreted rabbits to be swapped at the local butchers shops for pork chops, or for grazing to be exchanged for field maintenance. Hay bales can act as currency in return for building work, home made cakes and repairs to vehicles etc. All very innocent, rustic and encourages a paper free environment but this can underpin what can only amount to potential income tax, corporation tax or VAT non-disclosure or even fraud.

That might sound harsh but it is the hard fact. The dream of a paperless rustic society has to be shattered and simple tax legislation and the self-assessment requirement to keep good books and records intervenes. Clearly it is important to talk to clients to explain that undocumented and unrecorded ‘Barter’ is actually as dangerous and illegal as the ‘black economy’.

(Source: http://www.taxationweb.co.uk/tax-articles/business-tax/the-barter-system-%E2%80%93-the-hidden-evasion.html)

This is taken from an article entitled “The ‘Barter’ System – The Hidden Evasion”. Notice the patronising quotes around “Barter” and the insistence that bartering underpins fraud, regardless of the motivation behind it. Clearly the author, a tax advisor, is protecting her business, but what really comes home here is the notion that “this is not the way we do things”. I can’t begin to imagine the ire that a society based on not only bartering, but also giving and helping just because it’s the right thing to do would raise in the tax world!

And that alone is a very good reason to start using less money.

Less Money, Less Need

Let’s take a typical, albeit nameless, industrial civilized nation. A revolution of sorts has taken place, perhaps as a result of a lack of available money-earning jobs; perhaps because people have realised that cash and particularly debt are shackles that bind us rather than free us: around 50% less money is circulating within the personal tax system due to a plethora of part-time and lower-paid jobs, a huge number of people working for themselves and incorporating barter into their lives, and almost everyone being less profligate in their spending and borrowing. What would once have been hard financial times have been transformed into times of sharing, trust, low material need; and as a result the burden on the global ecosystem, the “resource” reservoir and the lives of people who normally serve the corporate system is relieved by a significant measure.

As a further result, the burden on the public purse becomes unbearable. Only half the money previously available is entering the system, and social collapse is imminent. At least, that’s what we are told, and most certainly led to believe by the simple fact that many people who don’t deal in money still have to declare their “income”:

If you engage in barter transactions you may have tax responsibilities. You may be subject to liabilities for income tax, self-employment tax, employment tax, or excise tax. Your barter activities may result in ordinary business income, capital gains or capital losses, or you may have a nondeductible personal loss.

Barter dollars or trade dollars are identical to real dollars for tax reporting. If you conduct any direct barter - barter for another’s products or services - you will have to report the fair market value of the products or services you received on your tax return.

(Source: http://www.irs.gov/businesses/small/article/0,,id=188095,00.html)

But if we did remove 50% of the money element from our lives, would that really lead to the societal collapse that the tax drain threatens to invoke; or is this just a way of making us complicit in the ways of the industrial machine?

In the absence of a truly mythical industrial civilization (who would want a mythical one when we have so many real ones to contend with?) I am going to use the latest available figures from the UK government to see what might happen in the event of a 50% drain in tax income. I fully acknowledge the scale of private involvement in what are ostensibly “public” services in most industrial economies; but would maintain that, in the event of a semi-cashless society emerging, reductions in spending on these services (such as electricity, water, telecommunications and transport) would easily match reductions in tax collection. Given this, it’s reasonable to just look at the effect of a 50% reduction in available income on services as a benchmark for the impact on the whole of society.
 
For this exercise I’ve used figures from a well-respected website that details public spending in the UK, helpfully also indicating what proportions of spending are through central government and which are through local government – this is relevant to how people perceive public services. By far the largest single chunks of public spending are Pensions and Healthcare, with 17.3% each. Now remember, we are not looking at the kind of slash in public spending that is currently taking place across the industrial world: a) it’s 50%, a far larger cut; (b) this cut assumes that the conditions exist whereby such a huge change in how we use products and services is made possible. Not only do we use less cash because there are alternative ways of doing things; we actually buy fewer non-essentials (it’s a relative term, but we’re talking things like electronic goods, vacations, most vehicles, luxury foods etc.) because the change in life has allowed people to appreciate what really matters.

So, looking at Pensions, we seem to have a sticking point already: but what is the purpose of a pension? Exactly, it’s to give people an income once they retire or are not able to do paid employment. But aside from the basic state pension, an awful lot of that fund is to pay for public sector pensions, which are quite generous. If fewer people worked in the public sector (they are bound to, because there is only half the tax coming in) then fewer people would need pensions. But if fewer people had above basic level pensions, how would they get by? Because people are spending less money – they are sharing, bartering, giving freely and getting when they are needy. Result: pension fund greatly reduced.

Healthcare is another huge cost, and this is one that could be cut much further than pensions: yes, people will still get ill, although with far more people focussed on their community the number and severity of, and need deriving from chronic conditions, particularly in the elderly, would be dramatically reduced – people look out for and care for each other better. Mental health costs, a genuine symptom of civilized society, would be way down as humanity’s real needs – in this case companionship and care – are far more readily available. Even acute conditions would be far less likely to develop severely as, again, people would be more willing to disclose problems and help deal with them at an early stage. And as we learn that cancer is an almost uniquely civilized condition, long term this may also start to reduce as the worst excesses of civilization are curtailed. This is no exact science, but you probably get a good idea of the wider implications of a more communal society.

The next largest cost on the list is general Welfare (15.1%), consisting largely of family and child financial benefits, and unemployment benefit. We are starting to face a few anachronisms here: in a barter-based culture, does “unemployment” benefit have any relevance? What about child benefit, the universal oddity that pays the same whatever the earnings (well, up to a very generous level) – does this fit into a culture of exchange where things like childcare (which are paid for through another family benefit), many essential food items, and all sorts of other things that CB was originally for are now greatly enmeshed in barter and giving? I’m not saying that there aren’t people in need; but there are certainly a lot fewer people in need within a co-operative way of living. This area of spending might become almost unnecessary.

Fourth on the list, and the last one in double-figures is “Education”, with 12.5% of the total public spend. We send our children to a local school, but are very much aware that the purpose of the public schooling system is to create good little wage-slaves for the future: at age 12 and 13 children in the UK are already having to decide where their specialities lie, so they can be funnelled through the system and placed in their employment pods (or on the “unemployed” pile) until they retire. This is why (a) we do an awful lot of real education at home and (b) our two children will be allowed to choose whatever subjects they like, undefined by whatever job aspirations the school system would like them to express. For the vast majority of industrial system families, school is also a very useful child-minding service – necessary because in a large number of cases both parents either choose to or find themselves having to go out to work. I’m not going to dwell on this much more: communal society; school system in tatters. We can learn in our communities.

So, that’s well over 60% of the public budget that can easily be cut by – oh, I reckon around 50%. What about the rest? Here’s a quick run through of the remaining big costs:

Defence: 6.6%

Not sure whether a more communal society would change any governments’ habits of a lifetime, but how much support would corporation sponsored and media cheered invasions get now?

Protection (police, courts and prisons): 5.3%

The main cause of crime is a lack of mutual care and attention; add to that the effect of the consumer society and it’s obvious what effect a change in values would have.

Central government admin: 4%

Hmm, less hierarchy and policy making – sounds like a plan!

Transport: 3.6%

A more close-knit and communal society travels less: less commuting, less need to “get away”, less desire or need for shopping or entertainment trips...

That takes it up to over 80%, with the other fifth being a quarter interest payments, and other services about to take a tumble like economic development (who needs corporations?), formal recreation and sport (time for a kick around, or a swim in the lake), waste management (it’s a less wasteful society by definition) and social housing (ok, that one can stay until we learn to build our own homes).

Feel free to accuse me of peering through rose-tinted specs – and you would be right if we were talking about the actual likelihood of a more mutually beneficial and communal way of living coming along under the current system of mind control – but I would contend that the benefits of living with far, far less money as a necessity are both economically possible, and then go way beyond simple economic sums. In short, the route to even a 50% reduction in our use of money is via enormous changes in the way we treat each other and ourselves; the way we look at the value of all things; the scorn we will inevitably cast upon the tireless system of birth-school-work-retire-die, that forgets to include the word “live” in its lineup. We could do a lot worse than simply consider a world without money, and then start to take some baby steps – get used to the temperature of the water, if you like, before taking a plunge into a different way of living.

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Friday, August 20th 2010

5:39 AM

Dispatches from The Earth Blog : Free Mini-Book



Looking Back, Looking Forward

This is no swan song; no sad farewell. Maybe, though, it’s time to pause a while and think back to what has been said. After more than 4 years writing a mixture of research articles, contrarian polemic, calls to arms and personal expressions of my search for something better, it is no surprise that the power of words sometimes needs reinforcing in its fragile, ephemeral state.

My friend Guy McPherson inspired this partial anthology of essays from The Earth Blog; his review of “greatest hits” on Nature Bats Last is dispassionate, letting the words speak for themselves. However, there is a proviso - the essays shown in this specially produced volume exist for a reason: writing on The Earth Blog is hard, often so hard that essays can take months from idea to publication. Each essay means something important, and the essays presented here I consider to be particularly important in reflecting the way I feel we must approach and tackle the problems inherent in the collapsing mess we were once proud to call Earth.

It is not an exhaustive set by any means; some important pieces, such as my interview with Carolyn Baker, and “100 Ways To Undermine The Industrial Machine” just don’t fit, so the web sites (The Earth Blog, The Unsuitablog and A Matter of Scale) and my book “Time’s Up!” - which some of these essays are extensions of - remain the primary source of information.

The essays are unedited, unabridged, and often very intense. The order in which they are presented is in the form of a branching journey, culminating in the only piece of complete fiction published on The Earth Blog. If there is a stepping-off point where you can most surely take charge of your own destiny, then that is probably it.

Over the course of the years I have been fortunate to come into contact with some very imaginative, brilliant and life-affirming people: I do not want to name individuals for fear of missing someone out; but rest assured, their influence runs through the lines of these essays. Invention may be the domain of the individual, but change is the destiny only of those who are prepared to come together and make it happen.

Keith Farnish August 2010,
Scotland.


To download "Dispatches from The Earth Blog" or read it online, simply click on the following link, or paste it into your browser address bar:

http://www.archive.org/details/DispatchesFromTheEarthBlog

The mini-book is designed to be printed double-sided on A4 with long-sided stapling. It has 28 pages (7x4) so can also be printed in booklet form using appropriate formatting. Note: text is generally 10pt, and sans serif, so reduced will be small, but readable.
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Tuesday, June 22nd 2010

7:02 AM

Anger Is Good



It took me a long time to realise that what I thought was my own free will was actually a mercilessly manipulated and largely predetermined way of living my life: “free will” was whatever this civilization told me was the “right” way to live. It took me even longer to accept that I didn’t have to live this way – that there was a multitude of other paths that my life could take, if only I could shake off the devil that seemed to cling to my back, always urging me to follow the “right” way; the way of the machine, the way of economic growth and the way of the cosy disconnected existence.
 
Then I got angry.
 
A few years ago, anger wasn’t something I considered to be helpful. My five years as a Greenpeace activist contributed to perhaps one slight change: a number of timber merchants would no longer stock illegally harvested tropical hardwood. More significantly I learnt about Non Violent Direct Action, or NVDA, a concept first introduced by the religious Quaker group, and adopted by a number of protest organisations around the world during the 20th century. The essence of NVDA is to ensure that whatever you are doing does not result in violence of any sort. Of course definitions of violence vary widely, with many environmentalists and environmental groups claiming that violence can be committed against not only people and other animals, but also inanimate objects. This is the view that most Western governments also hold. On the other hand, destroying a piece of machinery in order to prevent the discharge of a toxic substance – is that violence? Agreement won’t be coming along any time soon; but my experience in carrying out NVDA was that neither violence (against both animate and inanimate targets) nor anger would be tolerated: the two seemed to be tied up together to such an extent that on numerous occasions, activists were implored to “calm down” by others carrying out the same action, lest they do something they might regret later. This mantra of non-violence and non-anger burrowed into my head and stuck there; it took something startling to shift it.

A Corporation is a company that has the same rights as a human being – more so, in fact. In most Western legal systems, corporations are given preferential legal treatment compared to individual members of the public, especially when it comes to the enforcement of environmental and human rights legislation. The key to this is something called “limited liability”, which all corporations are now subject to: it means that the shareholders of a corporation are only liable for the proportion of the corporation that they own; in effect, the responsibility for the actions of the corporation as a whole is split amongst, potentially, millions of individuals. On the other hand a corporation, as a whole, can act as an individual. Noam Chomsky explains that up to the 19th century:

Corporations, which previously had been considered artificial entities with no rights, were accorded all the rights of persons, and far more, since they are “immortal persons” and “persons” of extraordinary wealth and power. Furthermore, they were no longer bound to the specific purposes designated by State charter, but could act as they chose, with few constraints.

(Noam Chomsky, “Market Democracy in a Neoliberal Order: Doctrines and Reality”)
 
The upshot of this is clear to anyone who follows the activities of corporations around the world: environmental negligence, corruption, labour abuses and scant regard for the rights of individuals. It was while watching The Corporation, an astonishingly thought-provoking documentary that I came across some of the very worst examples of corporate excess: those activities that take absolutely no account of the rights of individuals. I was particularly struck by the way that the people of the city of Cochabamba in Bolivia had fought back against both the corrupt actions of the city authorities and the profit-hungry motives of the services multinational Bechtel. In 1999 the World Bank provided a loan to the Bolivian government in return for which the government had to privatise all municipal water supplies – the contract for Cochabamba went to a Bechtel-owned consortium called Aguas de Tunari, which immediately put into effect strict control measures. When a private company is granted such control over one of the most basic human needs that it becomes illegal even to store the water which collects on the roof of your house, and you have to spend 20-30 percent of your income just on water bills, something is bound to give. What did give was the patience of the residents who – by enacting two general strikes and complete stoppages of the transportation network, as well as countless minor acts of sabotage and refusal to cooperate with the authorities – reclaimed their rightful authority over the city’s water supply. In answer, “The government responded with police, tear gas, and bullets as well as the repeated detention of civil society leaders.”
 
Despite the predictable and heavy-handed response of the authorities, the people won out, and Bechtel were banished, leaving a city authority very much with its tail between its legs. The reason the people of Cochabamba were so successful in their concerted efforts, both in scale and execution, was because they got angry – something snapped inside a great many people and that anger was realised through the power of their actions. Had the people not got angry then Bechtel would still control the water supply, and the outcome in terms of public health could have been horrendous.
 
This pattern is repeated throughout the world, throughout history: the participants of the 1381 English Peasants Revolt were angry; the working class French revolutionaries of 1789 were angry; the Tree Huggers of Northern India were angry. Success is not guaranteed, but unless the people themselves realise the problem, and understand that they can fix it, then the problem will never go away. Conversely, if the people understand the problem, know there is a fix, and have enough of their own drive and spirit to counter the cynical and barbaric Tools of Disconnection applied on behalf of Industrial Civilization, then they can fix the problem.
 

What Is Anger?

Strip away any of the connotations freely and often ludicrously associated with anger, and what it left is something surprisingly sober: anger is a protective instinct.

When answering perhaps the most important question of all: “What matters to us?” there are few responses that could be considered truly universal. Our most fundamental biological urges lead us to value family, and particularly our immediate descendents above all else; and despite the Industrial Machine insisting that divisive material gain is a virtue, we still deeply value friends, and those other people we depend upon, and who depend upon us. We also value ourselves: a fist to the face is guaranteed to be parried by the object of that assault, and a lethal attack will be met with a similarly lethal response – all other things being equal. And we value our natural ecosystem: the beautifully complex set of interactions between its multifarious elements that keep us alive. Yes, we really do – even though we often act as though we don’t.

What makes us angry is when the things we value are threatened. This is human nature: it is survival, and without this response we are little more than machines.

*   *   *

There are two types of anger, Constructive and Destructive. By Constructive Anger, I don’t mean the kind that makes you build a sandcastle with a billowing flag on it saying, “Save Our Crumbling World!” On the other hand, by Destructive Anger I don’t mean going around with steam coming out of your ears breaking and hitting everything that gets in your way – although it could mean that; it depends on the context.
 
Destructive Anger doesn’t achieve anything useful, and can sometimes make things worse than they already are. Interestingly, this means that the vast majority of protest marches, rallies and other symbolic events, if fuelled by anger, are destructive. Constructive Anger, on the other hand, does achieve something useful – even if it may not be exactly what was originally intended. For instance, if all the evidence you have to hand suggests that removing a sea wall or a dam will have a net beneficial effect on the natural environment then, however you go about it – explosives, technical sabotage or manual destruction – the removal would be a constructive action. If this action was fuelled by anger then your use of explosives involved Constructive Anger.
 
Much is written about anger being a negative emotion. I was moved to publish this essay by the appearance of a short piece equating reactionary rage and destructive violence with the deep-seated emotional anger response:

If you didn't realize it after Nopenhagen and the tea party protests, and the incessant rage on AM radio, we're definitely in the anger phase folks, and it's only going to get worse. The battle lines of ideology have been drawn. Even people we used to think were on "our" side may turn out to have irreconcilable differences once they realize the only choices they have are to double-down on BAU or to powerdown.

And I'm sorry to say that the environmentalists are going to be in trouble if they just lower themselves to this sorry level of vitriol.

I'm afraid that this sort of crisis of confidence may indeed lead to violence. If the country practically tore itself to pieces over something as simple as healthcare, how can we stay unified and bring all hands on deck in the face of peak oil and ecological collapse?

Such confusion over what anger really is has been spattered over the pages of self-help books for many years, the “anger is bad” mantra more recently becoming a mainstay of the environmental blogosphere. When quotes like Senaca’s “The best cure for anger is delay” and Ben Franklin’s “Whatever is done in anger ends in shame” are seen as a way of reasoning against one of our most powerful instinctive urges, then we clearly have lost sense of what it means to be human.

These negative connotations of anger, in particular their relationship with violence, are predominantly cultural. At the beginning of the 20th century, many American psychologists decided that all human emotions – rather than being a complex mix of internal and external, subjective and objective, conscious and unconscious – were only relevant if they could be observed objectively. Although Behaviourism, as it was called, came under increasing attack in the late 20th century for neglecting not just consciousness, but feelings, it shaped much subsequent psychology, and thus shaped the way society observes and understands itself. The simplification of emotion suited the development of “advanced” Western society perfectly: intense emotions, rather than being a poorly understood, often very personal manifestation of the human condition, could now be palmed off as “reptilian” or “primitive”. Rather than treating uncontrollable emotions in a holistic way, they were “treated” using barbaric, physical techniques including enforced isolation, lobotomy and electro convulsive therapy. This fear of the primitive and the need to defeat it is reflected in the views of earlier Enlightenment thinkers, such as Francis Bacon and René Descartes, who held the kind of ideas that Industrial Civilization embraced and increasingly used against nature:
 
The Enlightenment period saw nature as a dead and mechanical world, a view that permits people to think of ecosystems and their inhabitants as mere resources for human use. The ultimate purpose of this mode of thinking is absolute control over both living beings and material nature.
 
Francis Bacon, for example, hoped to conquer and subdue nature and “to shake her to her foundations.” For Descartes, animals were “soulless automata” and their screams in death the mere clatter of gears and mechanisms. Indeed, in this view, nature is nothing but a machine.

(Franz J. Broswimmer, “Ecocide”)

These views would seem astonishing if they were not intrinsic components of our cultural way of thinking. The understanding that emotions, such as anger, are not simply rabid, “primitive” urges, but are in fact complex things that require a deeper sense of awareness to fully appreciate, brings us full circle. The notions of Descartes and other Enlightenment thinkers, such as Isaac Newton, are indeed enlightening, but not in the intended sense: they reveal a deep distrust and fear of being part of nature, as though somehow being connected to it was a real temptation that they were scared of succumbing to. Industrial Civilization, as promoted by the views of the Enlightenment thinkers and enforced by countless players all becoming gradually addicted to the trappings of a certain way of life, demands that we remain separated and terminally disconnected from the very thing which we need to survive. Anger is a burning fuse that can either be extinguished or allowed to trigger something bigger.


Sublimating Change


 
When I watch a protest march on the news, and the organisers talk up the success of the protest, the word that immediately comes to mind is “sublimation”.

One will find hundreds, sometimes thousands, assembled in an orderly fashion, listening to selected speakers calling for an end to this or that aspect of lethal state activity, carrying signs “demanding” the same thing…and – typically – the whole thing is  quietly disbanded with exhortations to the assembled to “keep working” on the matter and to please sign a petition.
 
Throughout the whole charade it will be noticed that the state is represented by a uniformed police presence keeping a discreet distance and not interfering with the activities. And why should they? The organizers will have gone through “proper channels” to obtain permits. Surrounding the larger mass of demonstrators can be seen others…their function is to ensure the demonstrators remain “responsible,” not deviating from the state-sanctioned plan of protest.

(Ward Churchill, “Pacifism as Pathology”)

Ward Churchill’s brilliant portrayal of legal protest - particular the gaseous dissipation of the protestors at the end - demonstrates how symbolic actions (as opposed to those which achieve something) are merely a way of making people feel better; helping them bypass any useful emotions and instead, harmlessly drifting away. When you take part in a protest that does not directly threaten the thing you are protesting against, you are simply sublimating any anger you might have into whatever symbolic acts you have been led to believe will lead to change.

This process of sublimation is repeated in all facets of Industrial Civilization, from the Government Consultation and the Parliamentary Process through to apparently useful tools as Judicial Review and industrial Whistleblowing; all chances of real change are prevented by an array of gaping holes, channelling our anger into “constructive” activities. Because we followed the recommended course of action – the peaceful alternative - we feel sated and content that right has been done, even when nothing has been achieved.

*   *   *

The First World War, or Great War, was terrible in more ways than it is possible for a sane person to imagine. Emotional expression was a necessary outlet, and many poets emerged from this futile and politically motivated war; among them Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen. Both were talented and, significantly, both experienced the horrors of war on the front line, profoundly affecting them. Of the two, it was Wilfred Owen, the less financially privileged, though eventually a great friend of Sassoon, who made the greatest impression on the public. Undoubtedly charged with anger, his poems are an attempt to expose war for what it is and allow others to understand it. Generally recognised as his finest poem, Dulce Et Decorum Est reflected his “shift in tone from personal questioning to righteous anger”; an inflammatory “How dare you subject others to this!” that changed peoples’ perception of war forever:
 
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.

The words, “Dulce et Decorum est pro patria mori” mean “it is sweet and right to die for your country.” Owen realised that no war was worth the kind of suffering that his colleagues had to endure. In the three short verses that comprise that poem, Wilfred Owen used his anger to change the future: no longer would people willingly and blindly accept bloody battle – war would no longer be the easy option.
 
There are hints that suggest the power of anger as a motivation for positive action, throughout the visual arts, films, theatre and literature – artistic outpourings that often short-circuit the cultural limitations in which we live the majority of our lives. You find them everywhere. Contained in John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath” - a monumental story of lost ideals and corporate power – is the following passage:
 
Some of the owner men were kind because they hated what they had to do, and some of them were angry because they hated to be cruel, and some of them were cold because they had long ago found that one could not be an owner unless one were cold. And all of them were caught in something larger than themselves.
 
Who are the majority? They are the cold people; those that have accepted the way it has to be and got on with their lives, doing what the culture tells them to do. The kind people understand that there is a better way to act, and they treat others with respect; but they are not angry – they will not change anything. The kind people are like those who march, and petition, and hope that things will get better. The angry people understand that there is a better way to live. The angry people are different: they have the potential to change things because they do not meekly accept the circumstances that civilization has forced upon them.
 
The predefinition of anger I am proposing – returning the word to its rightful meaning – is as marked as the negative idea of civilization that many people reading this have already adopted, and which runs counter to the way we are taught to think from birth. Maybe we do need to find other words that can legitimately describe anger-type behaviour that is not constructive; but outside the realm of psychosis I believe there are situations where even the most profound forms of rage have a constructive application. We must not be afraid of anger: use it wisely by all means, but use it nonetheless.


A different version of this essay was originally published in the online book “A Matter of Scale”, http://www.amatterofscale.com
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Tuesday, May 11th 2010

8:32 AM

In Truth As In Beauty



I fear I cannot do this river justice. You can’t taste words or hear what they try to convey; yet as I sit on a bank of the Tweed, a few metres to the north of, and below the house we have just moved into, I feel I have a story to tell. Pity the poet without a muse – maybe you can also pity the writer without the means to express this enveloping beauty.

The river speaks a thousand words,
In a thousand tongues so old
And wise. The ages move downstream
In dialogue; clear, precise and cold.

Last month we said farewell to a house that had taken two children through their formative years – the first eleven and twelve years of their lives; had seen the joy and drudgery of family life pass through its doors; had welcomed friends and family, some of whom would pass from this world too early, some of whom would best be forgotten – such are the quirks of fate.

I often dreamed of living close to a river; in all honesty, though, I think the river chose us in the end...

(I had to leave the bank for a while to rescue a loaf of bread from the oven, and met my daughters coming the other way down the steep, twisting path. They had made red-brown paint from the iron rich sandstone scattered across the bed of a burn that feeds the main watercourse. Already the surroundings have invoked a creative surge.)

...that sounds odd, I know, but it’s worth putting it in the context of one of the core values of civilised society: the need to always push forwards in some way, the implication being that it is a fundamentally good thing to drive society towards some unreachable goal. I touched upon this idea of “progress” in my last article; here it takes on a different form, in the shape of my simple self, sitting on the bank of the river wondering what course of events could have led to this outcome. Sheer bloody-mindedness at certain points along the way, certainly, but I believe the outcome was far more to do with “letting go” and seeing how things turned out.

In November of last year we visited my parents at their new house for the first time; they having moved to Scotland a couple of months before. Whatever it was about the village (it’s really a small town) they live in and its people, we felt drawn to the area and upon our return home started looking for places to live. It turned out we couldn’t afford to live very near to them, not with the size of garden we were looking for, in order to grow food. But it seemed that the Borders of Scotland were a possibility. Then, over the Christmas period, we took the chance to view a house – a very cold one with lots of work needed, in a tiny hamlet with no shops – and were captivated by this area. Despite being stuck in a blizzard (or maybe because of it) we couldn’t stop smiling.

With that property not looking viable, we chanced upon a cafe in the nearest large town, and got to talking with a local resident, who gave us her opinion of the places worth looking at, and those best avoided! The journey back was treacherous, but we still couldn’t stop smiling. We returned to Essex and a few weeks later, having lost numerous nights to wondering what the effect of a move might be on the children (and us) began searching in earnest for places to live. In late January we put our house on the market, sold it within a week (to a chance viewer who happened to be passing the “For Sale” board), by which time we had selected four houses that we would view in a couple of weeks. The place we now live in was not on that list.

A few days before we left for the viewings, an unusual property appeared on the solicitors offices’ website. My sister came across it after I had at first decided it was too quirky, and urged us to view it. It became the new fourth house on the list. Then, on a very cold day in February this year we embarked on “The Great Viewing” during which my younger daughter managed to vomit in a pub close to the first two houses we looked at (both underwhelming), and didn’t feel too great in the third house. But we nevertheless accepted that the third house, in a village that was looking a bit run-down, might be the best option. Then we made our way to the final place – stopping at another pub en route (in which, thankfully, my virus-full daughter managed to keep her sandwich down) – which turned out to be so beautiful that we made a verbal offer on the spot.

Over the next few weeks, stress got the better of me somewhat – the inevitable result of dealing with two different legal systems – but somehow we completed our sale in time to make a proper offer on the house. We accepted that we wouldn’t win, and started to imagine life in the third house; not so bad, really. Then our offer was accepted.

(We will be joining our younger daughter at the Village Lunch in about an hour – it’s a sort of coffee morning, with soup and biscuits, which anyone can go to, and they do; from young families with babies, to the majority of the older children at the local primary school – including our newly settled-in daughter – right up to the oldest, most established pillars of the community. It’s only our second time; but we already feel part of village life.)

After less than a month in our new house, in our new village, in our new country, we are starting to realise we are not on some idyllic holiday out in the countryside, but part of a thriving, friendly community. All the boxes are unpacked – one psychological bind already cast off – and I have been planting seeds to at least give us some extra food come the autumn. At night, when we manage to gather enough wood, there is a fire burning in the front room taking a small burden off the local gas supply; and if we look out of the windows just as dusk takes hold, bats can be seen flitting across the sky, taking tiny insects from the air in their hundreds.

Time has passed since I started this essay – a few days in fact, because there are so many jobs to do at the moment – so now I tap away in the kitchen while my wife looks over paperwork and my younger daughter reads in her bedroom, having returned from the local junior school a few minutes ago. An interesting array of sounds disturbs the peace; not in some cacophonous rage, but like a gentle swatch of contrasting colours: the quiet hum of the fan on the laptop; the movement of feet and softly clanking door catches as people move around the house; birds, always birds, full of sounds constantly defying simile; and my own breath.

This is my beauty – not some civilised artefact conjured up as a commodity to appease whatever is currently in favour, but a personal beauty that defies description. Like the insects pursued by bats in the dusk light, real beauty only stays for a moment before moving on, changing, pulling at the emotions for a heartbeat then diving away to be found again some other day.

I am struggling to work out what it is that makes this beauty so much more real than anything we purposefully seek; what it is that so harmoniously matches our desire for the apparently unknowable. I can only conclude that it is that very transient nature – the ever-changing, never static fluidity of the world we inhabit – that, for a split-second presents us with a truth that shouts: “I am the now!”

Does that make sense? To put it another way: what feels best of all? Think of the moments where everything comes together just right, so that a sense of purpose, contentment and security combine with a breathless freefall...and then it is gone and you are left with a feeling that you have experienced something that must be the truth.

Hush! There is a whisper in the air;
A fluttering light, a touch so soft,
A pungent scent, a time so rare.
It fills your head and heart with truth,
With beauty, with life. Then blink!
The whisper is gone...for now.

Someone bring me that poet.

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Thursday, March 18th 2010

5:56 AM

Taking Back Our Words



Recently, I received a message from a group called Trees Have Rights Too. They want to create a Meme, a replicating cultural entity, from the word “ecocide”:
We want to get this word out into the public consciousness so that we can call for the restoration of ecocide territories and protection of those territories at risk of ecocide. Help us transmit this word as a meme and start using ecocide, posting it out there on blogs, writing about it, calling on those who can help stop the ecocide of the planet...let us know where it is turning up around the world and we will post it up.

The word ecocide isn’t new by any stretch of the imagination, and it forms the title of an incredible book by Franz Broswimmer that I urge every one of you to read if you can still get hold of it; but the use of a single word as a meme is an interesting concept and potentially powerful, even if the application of the meme seems flawed in this case. Why is it flawed? Because the plan doesn’t recognise a fundamental property of words: their malleability. In short, language is one of the most dynamic elements of human culture: any one word can change meaning rapidly from one generation to the next, even within a single generation; it can have several meanings at once depending on context, and – as we will see – it can be manipulated to mean whatever the dominant influence in a culture wants it to mean.

The meme is not the word: the meme is the meaning of the word.

That is not to say that individual words cannot be used to great effect; the group correctly identifies “genocide” as a seminal word of huge cultural significance, such that the Sudanese government took great pains to prevent the massacre of innocents by the Janjaweed in Darfur being pronounced as a genocide by the United Nations, and the Turkish government are still threatening political intransigence in the event that the state-ordered slaughter of Armenians in 1915 is ever referred to as genocide by the USA.

A very limited number of words have such power on their own, and it is highly likely that the cultural significance of a word, rather than its definition per se is the key to change through language. Few people are shocked to see the word “fuck” in print today, even though such occurrences caused extremely strong reactions in the 1960s. Yet, 50 years ago, Americans would routinely use the word “nigger” to describe people of African origin – something considered intolerable to the vast majority of people now. I agree that new words may be a useful tool where none exist to adequately express the gravity of the current ecological and humanitarian situation: we will indeed need to be able to express ourselves, rather like a whole new level of swearing!


Stolen Language

But a lack of words is not really the cause of our cultural lethargy in the face of impending ecocide; it is that words have been stolen and co-opted to reflect the desires of the rulers of the systems we are subject to. Some of our most powerful tools have been taken from us – the pen is losing the battle against the sword. What we observe is that there is a whole tranche of words that no longer mean what they once did. One of them - “green” - has slipped away so rapidly, it seems easier simply to hand over the reins to the word’s new Masters:
This time we need something the marketers will never want to appropriate – and that’s why Brown may be the new Green. It’s the color of the Earth, of dirt – it reminds us that things smell as they compost, it reassures us that we do not necessarily need to put on a clean white shirt to go to work. But Madison Avenue does not like stains. Try saying “Brown Huggies.” It will never take off.

Or will it? I suspect that the moment ecologists start to use the word “brown” as something good then the marketing executives will be straight on the bandwagon, hosing down all vestiges of dirt to present to the consumer the New Brown in Town. Giving in is what we have become used to; but there is no Earthly reason for us to accept this corporate mauling of our language, as I wrote in a response to that article:
I don’t believe for a moment that the corporate world will let go of the word “green” without a fight, and I certainly have some sympathy with Nick [Rosen] in turning to our old friend “brown” – good old earthy brown, compost brown, manure brown, bark brown – but while brown is a colour you are far more likely to find in a woodland than in a shopping mall, it is not the only colour of life.

In fact life has a host of different colours: the vivid reds that signify the fruits of autumn and the segment of sun as it disappears over the horizon; the warm oranges of so many flowers, pebbles and leaves; the wide blue of the sky and its reflected light in the oceans; the white of the brightest cloud and the firmest mushroom; but most of all the green of leaves, of algae, of plankton – the green that means photosynthesis, that means oxygen, that means life.

Green is the reason we are here.

No corporation is ever going to take that away from us – it can try, but I’m claiming it back from the bastards who haven’t just stolen “green” for their own nefarious purposes, but are stealing the entire language from our lungs.

Words are enormously powerful; in many ways they are a defining feature of our culture, not only because of the number of ways that they can be used – in the form of poetry, debate, story-telling, song and innumerable others – but also because we have become conditioned to accept certain words as having significance beyond their physical incarnation. These words are more than just symbols – they are tools that can be, and are, used to manipulate the way we think and act.

“They behaved like animals!”

The use of the word “animal” in that context is not accidental; it derives from the Enlightenment view that humans were above the common animal whose screams were “the mere clatter of gears and mechanisms”. Despite us clearly being animals, the adopted viewpoint is that to behave like an animal is to be less than human. Is this your viewpoint, or were you taught to think like that?

It is some small relief that the German philosopher, Wittgenstein took the view that our internal experiences were isolated from what we would normally understand as language. He explained this in the context of pain, in that a person could reasonably question (through our use of language) whether we were in pain or not; but we could never doubt whether we are in pain or not – the experience is not subject to communicating that experience. This suggests that our internal self is isolated from the outside world by the lack of a useful interface, thus providing us with some protection from cultural interference.

Nevertheless, as we strive to communicate our experiences through words (among other things) such that others may understand them, we open up a door to these experiences, and in doing so allow a dialogue to exist. The interface between our internal experience and the external manifestation of these experiences is not a one way street. Words affect our emotions, they can hurt, they can heal, they can change who we are.

“I hate you!”

“I love you.”

Why do politicians make speeches? One could make the argument that they simply like the sound of their own voices, but in that case why not just talk to an empty room? The point is that politicians understand the nature of this interface between the external and the internal only too well. Rhetoric can sway opinion; true oratory can create lifelong beliefs: once more unto the breach brothers and sisters, fight them on the beaches and be the change you want to see.

Just words, surely?

No, not just words – ideas enshrined in policy and broadcast through the mouths of the common man, the paid-up celebrity and the pages of your children’s schoolbooks. Orwellian speak seems quaint and almost harmless compared to the ideas we are being asked to swallow – from the joys of wage slavery to the wonders of the infinite growth economy, via the imposition of “freedom” through the barrel of a gun. If you can dress it up in the right words then people will accept almost anything.


Reclaiming Words

It goes without saying that if we had to use words properly, i.e. not change their meaning to suit our own ends; then our ability to manipulate lives would be severely curtailed. To put it another way, if words had to be used in their unfettered form then we, as free-thinking human beings, would be subject to far less cultural manipulation.

That would be disastrous for the industrial machine.

I am absolutely determined to do what I can to help free words, and thus people, from the shackles of industrial civilization. That is an immense task, and not something I can achieve alone: however, if I can at least identify the most important words to reclaim – to “predefine” if you like – then that will be a start. After that we can work out how to reclaim the words.

I’d like to start by quoting from Time’s Up! to give a flavour of what I mean:
Some words, which we unwittingly use in neutral terms, are deeply grounded in civilization; as though that is the only way of being. ‘Consumer’ has become a general term for a person going about their daily life, when it actually means someone who is taking part in a consuming activity, like shopping or tourism. ‘Advanced’ and ‘Developed’ are terms used to describe cultures that are at the peak of human endeavour, when they are actually very specific terms to describe a high level of technological or economic activity; likewise, ‘Backward’ and ‘Undeveloped’ are used to put non-industrial, low-resource-use societies in a poor light, as opposed to ‘good’ civilization. ‘Developing’ is purely aspirational: it implies that a society or country that is not ‘developed’ is aspiring to become so. ‘Civilized’ and ‘Uncivilized’ are similarly used to imply positive and negative aspects of a culture or society when these words actually describe to what level it is based around living in cities. Words like ‘Savage’, ‘Wild’ and ‘Animal’ have been framed in almost completely negative terms, when they simply imply that something is natural.

Already we have a list of words that have either been manipulated to be positive when they are not, or negative when they are neutral or positive. The terms “negative”, “neutral” and “positive” are from the point of view of Natural Law - that which determines what is right for all life. With that in mind, here are the words that I think need reclaiming as soon as possible.

The civilized meaning is stated first, followed by the predefinition – a meaning that is simply descriptive and unbiased. The predefinition is what we should aim to use, as opposed to the civilized meaning, for which alternative words will be needed. Where a word has no predefinition, i.e. the word has no meaning outside of civilization, then it should not be used at all.

The list is not exhaustive, and I am happy to consider suggestions.

Advanced

Civilized meaning
Achieving a high level of adoption of one or more facets of civilization. These will include technology, finance, trade, industry, mass transportation, retail and construction. For instance, a Technologically Advanced society is one that is characterised by the intensive use of technology; a Financially Advanced society is one that has fully adopted capitalist principles.

Predefinition
Achieving a high degree of adoption of any positive aspect of society. This is not culture specific, so can mean, for instance, achieving a successful balance of food production and soil fertility.

Animal / Wild

Civilized meaning
Out of control; not observing any of the acceptable behavioural norms of civil society. Both words are used in the negative, and interchangeably, when referring to human behaviour, regardless of the context.

Predefinition
“Animal” means pertaining to the kingdom Animalia. “Wild” means undomesticated; not under the direct control of human beings.

Civilization (alt. Civilisation)

Civilized meaning
The physical manifestation of civilization is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as "a developed or advanced state of human society." In general terms, civilization describes a form of society that is more advanced (civilized meaning) than other types of society.

Predefinition
A form of society characterised by all of the following: settlements of 5,000 people or more; full time labour specialisation; concentration of surplus; class structure; state-level political organisation. The overriding symbol of civilization is the city, into which resources (see later) are imported, and from which waste is exported.

Civilized (alt. Civilised)

Civilized meaning
A wide-ranging term of approval, which can refer to the behavioural, functional or physical characteristics of something. It generally refers to that which is acceptable within human society.

Predefinition
Behaviour, function or appearance that is associated with civilization.

Consumer

Civilized meaning
A generic term for a human that lives within society. In common use, particularly in a political sense, the word is used interchangeably with “person”.

Predefinition
A person that lives exclusively within a market economy, where “consumption” implies the use of goods and services provided by that economy.

Developed

Civilized meaning
Almost always with reference to nation states, this describes a high level of economic achievement across a range of different indicators, the widespread adoption of free-market systems and behaviour indicative of mass-consumerism.

Predefinition
A state of finality in any endeavour.

Note: In cyclical societies (those that embrace natural cycles) “developed”, along with “developing” and “development”, are not especially relevant terms – “mature” is a more appropriate word.

Developing

Civilized meaning
This describes the movement towards a developed (civilized meaning) state. It is used as an aspirational word, suggesting a desire to be developed.

Predefinition
Moving towards a state of finality in any endeavour.

Education

Civilized meaning
The acquisition of various skills and knowledge required to take an active part in the labour force or power structures of a civilized society, attained via a system of schooling and vocational training.

Predefinition
The acquisition of various skills and knowledge required in order to survive and, where relevant, act as a valuable part of a society.

Job

Civilized meaning
A discrete role within society required in order to earn money such that the job-holder can buy goods and services. Having a job is viewed as a positive thing (cf. jobless / unemployed). The aim of education (civilized meaning) is to get a job.

Predefinition
A form of work for payment in cash, goods or kind. Job is a discrete subset of work, and in most cultures has no meaning.

Progress

Civilized meaning
Approximately synonymous with development, but can refer to a wider range of topics, including technology (technological progress) and science (scientific progress), and for which there is no clearly defined endpoint. The aim of starting any endeavour within civilization is to achieve progress.

Predefinition
To move towards achieving something. Although generic, this term is alien to most non-civilized cultures, as “progress” implies linear rather than cyclical behaviour.

Resource

Civilized meaning
Anything that is of use to civilization, usually for the purpose of enabling progress (civilized meaning). The term implies ownership of whatever is being taken and/or used: something is not strictly a “resource” unless it is either available to be used, or has been reserved for use by a nation / company / individual.

Predefinition
In non-industrial societies, all things are borrowed or lent; therefore “resource” has no meaning.

Savage

Civilized meaning
Usually akin to “wild” or “animal” (as a behavioural descriptor), but tends to describe the behaviour or appearance of entire cultures. Savage is always used in negative terms.

Predefinition
This word has no equivalent meaning outside of civilized society, but could be used in neutral terms in the same way as “wild”.

Sustainable

Civilized meaning
Although there is a recognised definition – leaving something in the same state as it is found – the term is much more widely used to mean something that is less damaging than the equivalent “unsustainable” process. The term is also used to describe goods and services in the same manner.

Predefinition
An activity / process that causes no net degradation of the natural environment in which it is performed.

Undeveloped / Backward

Civilized meaning
Any group of people, or any political system that has not attained a high level of economic achievement across a range of different indicators, the widespread adoption of free-market systems and behaviour indicative of mass-consumerism. Both of these words have negative connotations, and are used interchangeably, although the former - being the more politically correct term – is used more widely.

Predefinition
“Undeveloped” means not having achieved a state of finality in any endeavour. “Backward” has no meaning in non-civilized societies.

Work

Civilized meaning
This is almost always synonymous with “job”, meaning an activity the purpose of which is to earn money. There are various origins of the words for “work” in various languages — “work”, “labor / labour”, “travail”, “toil” in English, “arbeit” in German (cf. the related “earfothe” or “hardship”, in Old English), “ergon” in Greek, and so on. The ancient meaning usually includes the concept of grief, suffering and trouble1. This, along with historical connotations (for instance, “Arbeit macht frei”) explains why “job” is used in favour of “work” by politicians and corporations.

Predefinition
Any activity required to achieve an outcome. In physics, work is simply the amount of energy expended, with “useful” work being the amount of energy over time that is effectively used in the execution of a task. The converse is “non-useful” work, or wasted energy over time.


Use your words wisely.

This essay forms part of a larger campaign to take the power of words away from the dominant culture; some of the work will be featured on The Unsuitablog.



1 - Thanks to Peter Goodchild (via www.culturechange.org) for this information.
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Saturday, February 20th 2010

11:01 PM

Radio Ecoshock Interview: Alex Smith with Keith Farnish



I had the great pleasure of being interviewed by Alex Smith of Radio Ecoshock, on 4th February 2010. Alex puts heart and soul into keeping this bastion of radical environmental broadcasting operating, and is a throughly nice guy too. In the show, which can be heard by clicking on the link below, Alex was first joined by Tim Garrett, a physicist from the University of Utah, who has couched a concept I introduced in The Earth Blog last year in scientific terms - in short, the generation of money always leads to the generation of greenhouse gases! My bit starts about 28 minutes in:

http://www.ecoshock.net/eshock10/ES_100205_Show_LoFi.mp3


AS: What if civilization is a disease, fatal to life on Earth as we know it? That’s the view of Britain’s Keith Farnish, author of the book, “Time’s Up! An Uncivilized Solution to a Global Crisis.” You might not like what he has to say – or maybe you will. I’m Alex Smith, fearless host of Radio Ecoshock, Keith welcome to the program.

KF: Hi Alex, how are you doing?

AS: Well, good, and I gather you tried Greenpeace for about 5 years, but got frustrated with that carousel of protests and then no real change.

KF: Yes, there was only one action that I ever did that was satisfying, and it was the only action that actually involved something really changing. The problem with most of the – and I’m not going to target Greenpeace in particular, only because I’ve got direct experience with them – but, most of the mainstream environmental groups seem to think that you achieve change by going along with the status quo; by kow-towing to whatever system is in place. And of course you’re going to achieve change relative to what’s going on at the moment, but it’s not significant and if you – and as we go on I’m sure you’ll realise that the kind of change that’s required is certainly not the kind of change that groups like Greenpeace are looking forward to.

AS: Well, you describe our current society as a Culture of Maximum Harm; can you elaborate on that?

KF: Yeah, I must admit those aren’t my personal words – I took them from the peerless Derrick Jensen who some of your listeners will be aware of, and Derrick has written long time on the problems of civilization, particularly Industrial Civilization. The Culture of Maximum Harm really is a way of describing how the system that we have tries to achieve its aims. Imagine that you’re trying to get from one place to another; most people would go from one place to another, they wouldn’t really think about what they’re damaging or the way that they’re doing it in one particular way or another. The Culture of Maximum Harm tries to achieve its journey by taking as much as it possibly can, and by doing as much damage as it possibly can. And the reason it does this is because it has one primary goal, which is achieve continuous growth – and that’s economic growth, in terms of the word “growth” – and economic growth cannot be sustainable. So, this culture, which I believe is unique in human history, is doing something that is uniquely destructive. In other words, it is the Culture of Maximum Harm – it is the most harmful way that humans can exist.

AS: One of your maxims is that corporations cannot be green, why not?

KF: A corporation – and this certainly does follow on from what I just said – a corporation exists in order to achieve economic growth, it exists in order to achieve profit. Worse than just an individual trying to make a bit of money, a corporation wants to make sure that it maximises the amount of return for its shareholders, and in order to do that it has to cause damage in some way, and it does that through a variety of methods. Either it keeps cutting corners, and those can be corners in environmental terms, so it could be ignoring environmental legislation, or it could be paying people as little as it possibly can, or it could be trying to do things as cheaply as possible, in the dirtiest way possible; or it will try and make this profit by taking something that wasn’t there in the first place. So, to take an oil company as an example: you can’t make something from nothing, but if you have a source of energy underground then effectively you’re taking something from nothing...you’re taking that oil, you’re going to burn it up; the act of burning it up makes you money, and that is essentially how a corporation runs and makes its profit – by taking something that it didn’t have to put back in. Corporations are never going to be sustainable by their nature, because of the way business operates.

AS: You also dismiss governments as any part of the solution; why do you think politics has become so irrelevant?

KF: Well, it’s a very sad tale; I think it goes back to the history of empire, and the British Empire is a very good example of this. Empire has been always intrinsically tied up with trade. The British Empire was a trading body; it was so large because it reached out to as many places in the world as had things that it could take. So, Britain essentially owned India, South Africa, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and many other territories – I think that’s a very good example of how governments are tied up with industry. If you listen to any politician give a speech of any length you will always hear the word “growth”, you will always hear the word “economy”, and that is because the primary role of a government within Industrial Civilization is to keep the economy growing. It’s essentially no different to a corporation, and it doesn’t necessarily have to be that way, but I don’t believe that any government of any size exists in this society that isn’t just like a corporation now.

AS: Apparently NASA’s James Hansen agrees with you – in his review of your book on Amazon, he writes, and I quote this for listeners: “Keith Farnish has it right, time has practically run out and the system is the problem. Governments are under the thumb of fossil fuel special interests; they will not look after our and the planet’s well being until we force them to do so, and that is going to require enormous effort. Professor James Hansen of NASA.” Keith, James Hansen is now taking a lot of flak from climate deniers and their ilk for saying that.

KF: I’m not sure it’s necessarily worrying him too much; he has been taking flak for at least the last 20 years from everywhere that possibly could give him flak – the coal industry hate him, the oil industry hate him, an awful lot of Senators hate him, and when he stood up in front of the Senate in 1988 to essentially explain to the American government the potential horrors we were going to face from climate change, he was public enemy number one as far as the US government was concerned. So, this is a little bit of a flash in the pan, but it ...the words that are being used in relation to James Hansen, and myself, are certainly strong: I’ve been described as a “terrorist” and, by connection, so has James Hansen, words like “genocide”, “eugenics” they’ve all been used in relation to my book, and therefore in relation to James Hansen. Absurd, yes, because at no point have I ever said I want to kill anything off or destroy anything, it’s...I genuinely do feel for Hansen because he has put probably more than anyone else, of himself into trying to achieve something which is completely dispassionate, it’s altruistic – he’s not doing it for himself! If he was doing it for himself then he would be a businessman, and James Hansen doesn’t make much money; he’s an adjunct professor, he’s a research scientist. He doesn’t really have anything to gain from this, and he’s lost an awful lot in terms of what...he could have gone on and become a highly successful scientist working for a corporation; he chose the other alternative, he chose to stick to pure science, objective science, and he gets hit a lot for this. Certainly this isn’t the first time, and certainly won’t be the last time he’s going to get hit for this. I’m proud to call him someone that thinks in a similar way to the way I do.

AS: Getting back to your book, I think we all fear that our economic system is on life-support. You’ve called for an end to industrialised civilization, saying it will fall apart anyway; why should we help it go down – wouldn’t we be sabotaging our own way of living?

KF: well, we would be sabotaging the way of living that is highly destructive – it depends how dependent you are upon it. I believe that there are certain dependencies that we can do without. I’m not talking about immediately walking away, going off grid, throwing away your job or anything like that; we’ve all got to live, we’ve all got to feed our families, we’ve all got to keep warm, got to have a roof over our heads and there are many situations in which people are tied to this system, so I would be reckless to say that you must abandon this immediately. However, economic growth is not something that can ever be sustainable, so essentially by not having economic growth what you’ve taking away is something that always takes, something that always destroys – and that’s got to be a good thing. And I don’t believe that not having economic growth will be destructive to anything but the systems of power that dominate the way we live.

I think that undermining, or sabotaging the economic growth machine is a fundamentally good thing; some people have said and written that that is effectively terrorism – well, yes, in a way because the...there is something, and I don’t know what the term that is used in the USA but in Britain it’s called Critical National Infrastructure, and the large financial organisations within the UK are protected under various laws, various security laws, and no doubt they are protected under the various Patriot Acts and other laws in the USA because they are considered to be fundamental – they make money for the economy. It is a complete misnomer to place them in the same context as the kinds of things that actively save peoples’ lives like medical services. Yet, they are considered – these financial organisations – are considered by governments to be just as important as medical services, as the water supply, as the food supply, and there’s got to be something wrong there.

AS: This is Radio Ecoshock with Alex Smith. We’re talking about kicking it all over with author Keith Farnish. One key idea in your book “Time’s Up!” is that of Connection – can you describe that for us?

KF: It’s very difficult to describe more than one’s personal idea of connection but I can give you an idea of the background. If you look at the way humanity has existed for hundreds of thousands of years, it has required a fundamental connection to the cycles and the processes that take place around the various groups and communities. These groups and communities wouldn’t be able to survive if they didn’t understand the cycles of nature; if they didn’t understand the different ways that animal and plant life, and other forms of biological entities co-exist. So, in effect, these people, as have existed for far longer than civilization has, are part of nature – they are deeply connected to the natural ecosystem. Civilization tries to pull us away from that – it gives us this alternative way of living which requires us to be disconnected and, what I’ve written about extensively in the book is that we have to become reconnected, otherwise I don’t think that we can really understand how disconnected we have become.

There is a myriad of different ways of connecting; it’s unique to the individual: writer Carolyn Baker talks about this in far more strident terms than I do, and she considers the idea of Connection to be a deeply spiritual thing and, in a way, it is because it brings things out of you that most people – certainly people within civilization – haven’t realised have been within themselves. So, when you sit on a beach, or when you sit in the woods, or when you walk around and listen...you really listen, and really smell and taste and touch what’s around you, then it does bring something out in yourself that is spiritual, in a way. But that’s the Connection coming out, this is something that is fundamental to who we are as human beings and unless we understand that deep connection between humanity and the rest of nature then I don’t believe we’re in a position to really understand what we’re doing to the world and how we can get back.

AS: The next step, you say, is to focus on the Tools of Disconnection. What are some of the ways we become separated from real being and the natural reality?

KF: I put down ten Tools, but there may be even more of these; it was really a way of making people understand the different ways that we live have, all of them, disconnected parts within them, so for instance some of the Tools I’ve suggested are, for instance, the way that we’re advertised to – this idea that we can have a wonderful way of living, but as long as it’s in terms that the corporations sell to us. There are other Tools like authority and if you look at the work of Stanley Milgram, for instance, in the 1950s he demonstrated unequivocally that you could make people do whatever you want them to do providing you have this chain of command – this form of authority; and authority is fundamental to the way that civilization works. You have a hierarchy, you look up to people, some people look down upon others, but essentially we play our parts because there is this authority.

But all of this is different; this is not connected to the real world. There’s other Tools of Disconnection which are much more obvious, like abuse – physical abuse – you have military forces which are, all around the world, abusing people, are killing people; and you look at, for instance, what goes on in China constantly then whenever anyone steps out of line and goes against the status quo in China then they are “disappeared”. They are taken out of the system because there is the potential that they may make other people realise that this isn’t quite the way to live – it isn’t quite the way that we should be going along with things.

One of the Tools of Disconnection which is particularly powerful which, unfortunately, a lot of environmentalists are guilty of is the idea of Hope. And I think it’s very, very telling that Obama used hope as his most powerful tool for looking towards the future. This message was coming from someone who is, to all intents and purposes, at the head of the system. He has some good intentions; however, the idea of giving someone hope takes away your ability to act: rather than going out and actually doing something, if you can just be given enough hope – if you can be given the idea that if you just hope enough then things are going to get better then it disables you. It stops you doing things. So I consider Hope to be one of these Tools of Disconnection as well.

AS: Paul Simon famously sang that there are a Hundred Ways to Leave Your Lover and, Keith Farnish, you’ve found over a hundred ways to undermine the system. Can you give us just a couple of examples?

KF: There’s an article I have written on The Earth Blog which is...it’s not complete yet, because I keep discovering all these little things. I mean I want to be very clear that the idea of Undermining the System is not about...this is not about the things that have been written about in the blogs recently about destroying cities and blowing up dams and things like this; the Undermining is about undermining these Tools of Disconnection. It’s about giving people their freedom back, it’s about giving people their minds back so they can reconnect – so they can live in a way that humanity was meant to live.

But there’s lots of these ways, and one very easy example is simply turning televisions off; so if you can turn a television off in a public place people actually realise – and I’ve experimented doing this in public places – people suddenly come back to their senses! They were blindly watching this screen churning out adverts, and the TV went off - and I’ve got a remote control device that actually does this – and suddenly they’re looking around going “Oh!” and then they go back to their normal lives. But there’s lots more of these things: you could subvertise advertising billboards, so writing things on billboards that actually go counter to the messages the advertisers want you to do. You could send out fake press releases as a company representative, actually giving the truth about what the company are doing. So, “PRESS RELEASE: So-and-so company admits to environmental mismanagement.” Well, of course, the company wouldn’t do that but if you manage to do it and you make it look convincing enough then you’ve undermined that company. But there are dozens and dozens of these things, and I think they’re only limited by the imagination.

AS: If I understand you correctly, a few people can start a trend that radiates into much bigger things. You speak of the power of Pioneers and Early Adopters; tell us about that.

KF: The idea of stratifying society, for want of a better term...it’s really something that you see all the time: the concept is called Diffusion of Innovations and it’s just one of the ideas that I touch upon, but it’s...you’re always going to have these Pioneers, you’re going to have people that take up an idea and they don’t just agree with the idea, they actually act on it. So there are an awful lot of people out there – a surprising number of people – who are really taking the bit between their teeth and starting to live in ways that are far closer to the way that humanity was meant to live. And there are other people who are a bit further up, they are a bit further on the timescale and it’s a larger chunk of people – these Early Adopters – and they may be influenced by these Pioneers because they might be in the same peer group or the same social group, and so they’re more likely to change than had these Pioneers not been there. And then you have the much larger chunks of people which are the bulk of society, the Early and the Late Majority and this is what you would probably call in America the Middle Classes, in Britain we call it Middle England: the people who the governments are always trying to appeal to. This is going to come much later, these kinds of changes, but it can’t happen unless these earlier groups start changing, I believe.

It’s a little bit more complicated than that because you also need these Connectors and Mavens and Salespeople, which people have read about in The Tipping Point; these things all fit together as does the Undermining. But you don’t actually need millions of people to be actively changing to create change. As long as the momentum gets started up and it’s done in the right way, then quite fundamental change can happen with just a few people.

AS: Suppose we hurry the process of crashing civilization; what do you picture happening next?

KF: It’s not a nice thing to think about, this idea of crashing civilization. There are various writers like James Kunstler, and Carolyn Baker who I mentioned, who are very much of the mindset that it’s going to happen anyway, and it’s going to happen soon; and, in fact, is happening as we speak. Certainly with the economy we’ve seen a few of these effects, of what happens when a mismanaged economy collapses – and the people at the top continue to cream off what they want, but the people at the very bottom suffer the most. This is a symptom of the kinds of things that are happening at the moment: this is crash. Oil crises are going to happen – I believe we’ve reached the oil peak; you’re going to have other kinds of peaks as well, you’re going to have peak gas, you’re going to have peak nuclear. As the energy supplies run out then you’re going to get a strange situation which probably mimics what’s happened with the economy, whereby the people at the top get what they want, and the people right at the bottom suffer the most. And it’s the people who are economically at the bottom who, and particularly urban people, who do tend to suffer most when anything like this does happen.

I don’t think you can be too explicit about this: if you are in a situation when you’re going to suffer anyway, because of any of these crashes – and they are going to happen – then you’re the people who really need to gear yourselves up for this situation. Read authors like Sharon Astyk, who writes wonderfully about gearing yourself up for hard times, and try and get out of being so dependent on Industrial Civilization. It’s not easy but there’s certain things you can do to simplify your life that can protect yourself against it. I don’t want to cause a destructive crash; I want to somehow get the situation where we’re in control of this slow downfall of civilization. And I think that’s a much kinder way of going through the motions of a collapsing civilization than just having this shock, after shock, after shock which is going to happen as the economy, the energy, water and all these other things start crashing.

AS: Where can people find your blog if they want to follow up on this?

KF: Right, well I’ve got a website that’s got the whole book on, which is the unprinted version – that’s www.amatterofscale.com. I run something called The Earth Blog, which is www.theearthblog.org, and on this I publish various essays which, many of them have been extensions of what I’ve written. And there’s also a site called The Unsuitablog - that’s just www.unsuitablog.com - and that’s starting to contain these ideas, these Undermining Tasks; it’s been about greenwashing up to now, but I think we’ve got to start getting a bit active, and start thinking about how to get round this system that tries to take everything away from us. The Unsuitablog’s going to get a bit edgy in the future, and that’s probably the one to keep an eye on.

AS: This is Radio Ecoshock with Alex Smith. We’ve been delving into deep green thought with one of Britain’s more controversial thinkers, Keith Farnish. He’s the author of the book, “Time’s Up! An Uncivilized Solution to a Global Crisis”, published by Green Books. Thank you so much, Keith.
 
KF: Thank you, Alex.
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Friday, January 22nd 2010

7:25 AM

A Last Toast To The Old World (Fiction, Perhaps)

We wanted to take the train, but the train wasn’t there. “Cancelled Forever”, someone had scrawled across the board that had once announced engineering works.

Walk? An epic journey south if we had no other choice; but the guy in the taxi was alive after all, just snoozing between rides. He admitted the sleeps had been getting longer, but could be persuaded to drive to Brighton for a bottle of sloe gin and some aged chocolate.

*  *  *

We drove into what could have once been any day in Anytown, except for the uncanny silence. Back in the Civilised Time the long hill between the railway station and the esplanade had shuddered with traffic: now, as we made our delicate way down the cracking asphalt it felt for the first time as though nature was winning through. Clumps of daisies poked up between paving slabs; buddleia loomed down from window sills, prising apart the cement, and turning the light-etched walls into a pretty purple picture. Clouds of insects were preyed upon by the birds that criss-crossed the chasm between the moss-dressed buildings.

We both stopped at the unlit traffic lights, more out of habit than anything else; there was still a part of me that urged a crowd of strangers to appear from out of some side street or emerge, laden with bags, from the now dusty and subdued shopping centre off to the right.

Of course we had to do the walk: the driver had given us an odd look when we asked him to drop us off at the station, but by that time the car had been running on air. He knew some “people” over in Kemptown who would be able to top him up again; we only knew that we had to retrace our steps for the last time.
Beyond that lay uniqueness.

*  *  *

You can do anything if you set your mind to it – cider in this case. Trees keep growing and apples keep falling: squeeze enough of them, let them sit for a while and . . . people used to drink cheap, refrigerated lager, and keep drinking it until they fought or fell down. There was a lot to get angry about, but eventually The Machine did most of the work itself; we just cut a few of the strings.

There’s still plenty of plastic around, though – behind a door round the back of the Wetherspoons was an unopened pack of disposable tumblers. We took three, just in case, then crossed the road to the seafront and tumbled onto the beach.

*  *  *

We sit on the shingle as it breathes in the sea. Incoming: each wave is absorbed by the honeycombed voids between the grains . . . a second’s embrace before the water seeps back into the sea.

Whoosh . . . shhhh . . . whoosh . . . shhhh . . .

Incessant but random. Sometimes a larger wave strikes the shore, rushing upwards, bestriding the hollows and touching the tips of our toes.

Tiny bubbles sparkle like glass beads rising up the sandy-yellow liquid in our cups. As they burst, minute puffs of moisture expand and settle down onto the surface of the cider, echoing the sea-froth at our feet.

We look at each other and push our cups together, gently buckling, and toast everything we left behind that was good. Through her tears I can’t help but notice a glint, and then her face opens into a daylight smile.

“It’s finished, isn’t it? All the bad stuff.”

“Probably,” I reply.

*  *  *

Did we deserve another chance? Perhaps not.

As we crunch our way towards Shoreham she points at the smokestack on the old coal-fired power station: idle. Dormant? Extinct?

The wind pushes some pebbles across our path, and in the sky the starlings shake their ephemeral blanket over the setting sun.

“Let’s chase it,” she says.

So we run.


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