Hickory Bud

Uncertainty and creativity

2008-04-14T08:08:00.004-05:00

Last night we watched a wonderful movie, Rivers and Tides, about Scottish artist Andy Goldsworthy, who creates art in nature using elements of nature: twigs, rocks, ice and flowers. Much of his work is ephemeral, disappearing or transmutting as the tide comes in and out, ice melts, and the river flows. Other works, such as his stone fences and cairns, is longer-lasting but changes as the seasons change.

There is a sensuous appreciation of the materials of nature: the very nature of rock, for example, or sheep's wool, an attempt to get down to the very essence of things. There is also a willingness to fail, which I found as charming as the successful creations. It manages to be very thought-through, but also in the moment. Goldsworthy said he liked the sense of taking a work to the edge of collapse, of living with the uncertainty that things will hold together or fall apart.

That was the true gift to me of the documentary movie, because I seem to be living in such a time, not knowing whether I will gain some traction against this cancer, whether it will bide its time and decide to strike again later, or whether the treatments will not do what they are supposed to do. Whatever the reason is, I have begun making some small works of art again. It feels quite wonderful to be working with materials again, and to try through self-expression to capture the sense of hope that seems to be coming with the spring.

I am still here

2008-03-06T19:21:00.002-06:00

I am still fighting the cancer beast, have been to faraway doctors and back, and am recovering from a roller coaster of an experience with surgery and more.

I have learned tons about the health care system, but am not ready to draw any conclusions yet from my experience.

My attention recently has been turned in two directions (beyond my own healing):
The Oprah and Eckhart Tolle connection: visit www.oprah.com. to learn about this on-line learning experience that helps us live in the present moment (always good when the future looks scarey).

Also, as I recover, I have been thoroughly delving into favorite magazines. The latest issue of The Sun features an interview with Van Jones, an activist who believes environmental issues must be linked to issues of race, justice and poverty. As I have thought about environmental issues lately, it seems they must be linked to issues of economic empowerment. This is the only way the environmental movement can go beyond the white middle class "green" consumer in my opinion.

I much appreciate the friends and family who have been supporting me through my journey with cancer, and I look forward to the time when it is not front and center in my consciousness. Maybe with Eckhart Tolle's help, this could be soon!

A powerful mission statement

2007-12-18T08:19:00.000-06:00

I have finished my last chemo treatment for cancer and am now awaiting a scan which will find out if the chemo did what it what supposed to do. I am keeping my fingers crossed for no evidence of disease (NED)!

As is evident from my other postings, my healing journey has been aided and abetted by my interest in alternative and complementary care. A healing that I put at the top of my list in terms of its benefits is the Chinese energy therapy called qigong (or chi kung). Many people will have heard of tai chi, which is related to qigong in terms of its emphasis on working with the human energy field, which flows in meridians through the body. Qigong features simple hand movements, breathing and physical exercises which unblock energy logjams. Chinese medicine teaches that these energy logjams lead to disease.

In late October I went up to Chaska, Minnesota, to take a Level One class at the Spring Forest Qigong Center. Master Chunyi Lin, an international Qigong Master, started this center and offers learning opportunities and healings. Lin has written a book, Born a Healer, that recounts his tumultuous early life in China in the midst of the cultural revolution, how he became a healer, and the miraculous healings (including of cancer) that have resulted from qigong. The book also provides examples of some simple exercises for getting started at qigong. In my own case, these exercises help cure the depression caused by my diagnosis. I now do qigong exercises every day. The exercises help calm my frantically busy mind, and as a result I have been able to get a daily meditation practice going as well.

One of the things that I find most powerful and appealing about Spring Forest Qigong is its mission statement: "A Healer in Every Family and a World Without Pain." In these days when so many of us are facing middle age health issues, when health care costs are rising, and we wish to be more self-sufficient about our own health care, this mission statement really resonates.

Cancer is a disease which effects the total body as a system. In my case, I have thought it best to rely on a multi-faceted approach that combines Western medicine with many other treatment modalities. Qigong has been a positive step in my healing process.

Eckhart Tolle

2007-11-29T13:08:00.000-06:00

I certainly have much to be grateful for. Many people have offered advice and resources that have been very helpful in my new life as a cancer survivor. A friend of mine has been going through chemotherapy at the same time as I have. She found that the words of the spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle spoke to her powerfully during this difficult period. She loaned me a CD of his latest book, A New Earth. At first I was put out by the Tolle's melancholic tone as he narrated his own audio book. And, I found his voice made me sleepy. But in the moments that I have managed to attend to Tolle's words, I have found much that is worthwhile.

At random, several weeks ago, I opened Tolle's book The Power of Now, to these words: "Observe how the mind labels it [the present moment] and how this labeling process, this continuous sitting in judgment, creates pain and unhappiness... Allow the present moment to be. Whatever the present moment contains, accept it as if you had chosen it. Always work with it, not against it. Make it your friend and ally, not your enemy. This will miraculously transform your whole life."

Do you need to have a cancer diagnosis to deeply appreciate these words? I don't know how many times I have started to worry about the future, and have found myself returning to Tolle's advice. What is happening in my life right now is mostly good. I feel almost normal, my spirits are good, my attitude is positive. I'm not always in the present moment, and I am still quite interested in strategies and solutions that will support my positive outlook, but Tolle's world view has been a powerful adjunct therapy, day after day.

The problem with fats

2007-11-07T07:39:00.000-06:00

I am always thrilled when I find out that someone is actually reading this blog, and when I get an actual request to cover a subject, I feel I should hasten to the task. So when a friend asked me what I had learned about the various fats and how they contribute to health/disease, I thought it would be a good subject for a little research. The more I looked into the topic, however, the more difficult I found it to synthesize a response that could govern my use of fats at home. But here is my attempt.

Our bodies need fats to maintain our skin and hair, to protect cells, to transport vitamins and protect our organs. However, there are three main problems about the types of fats featured in the Standard American Diet (SAD). 1. We eat too much saturated fat. These fats raise our LDL cholesterol and contribute to heart disease, among other things. The fats are found in butter, lard, dairy products, coconut oil, meat, and some prepared foods.

2. Our fat consumption is too skewed towards Omega 6 fats. Check out the Wikipedia definition of Omega 6, which refers to the fatty acid portion of fats. Omega 6 fats are found in nuts, cereals, vegetable oils, eggs, and poultry. High consumption of Omega 6 fats has been linked to cancer, heart attack, high blood pressure, and depression. Over-consumption of Omega 6 fats has an inflammatory effect on the human system, which makes it a culprit in all of these disease conditions. Immunologist Stephen Martin says: "Currently, the ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 oils in our diet is about 15 to 1. We are drowning in pro-inflammatory oils such as corn, soy and safflower oils. These oils are precursors of arachidonic acid, the substrate for pro-inflammatory prostaglandins and leukotrienes. The high level of omega-6 oils in our diet is killing us...literally. "

Research is showing that Omega 3 fats, the kind found in flax oil, fish and fish oil, green leafy vegetables, and walnuts, can reduce these health risks. Science Daily reported on a terminal cancer patient who reduced his Omega 6 fat consumption to a bare minimum, and took mega-doses of fish oil to shrink his tumors.

Here is a handy table that indicates the mix of omega 6 and omega 3 fats in oils in everyday use. A friend asked if walnut oil was a good oil to use instead of some of the other more popular oils. The ratio of omega 6 to omega 3 in walnut oil is 5:1, whereas it is 83:1 in corn oil!

Another good resource for investigating the nutritional qualities of foods is Nutrition Data. From this source, I learned that cheddar cheese is high in saturated fats, but has an omega 6 to omega 3 ratio of about 1.6 to 1. So organic cheddar cheese in moderation, seems to be a good protein. Also, cottage cheese has some redeeming qualities. We need our healthy calcium for bones, too.

3. We are eating poor quality, chemically modified fats. Many agree that trans fatty acids are the worst type to eat. These are fats that are chemically modified so that they will be solid and have a longer shelf life. They are found in packaged cookies, chips, crackers and margarines. These fats increase your bad cholesterol. We should avoid hydrogenated or partially hydrogenated fats. In addition to the dangers of trans fatty acids, many of the fats we eat are rancid, genetically modified, and damaged through the cooking process. The refining process we subject oils to uses solvents and high heats, changing their chemical constitution, creating "free radicals" that can cause cancer and other diseases.

So, what does all this mean for our everyday life of preparing food at home or eating out? Here are my suggestions:

For cooking or salad dressing, use extra-virgin olive oil, or clarified butter. Better yet, make a simple salad dressing of balsamic vinegar and flax oil.
Use less oil for cooking and sauteeing. For example, saute onions in a tablespoon of broth and a tiny amount of olive oil.
Eat more foods with high Omega-3's: fresh, deepwater fish, flaxseeds, flax seed oil, and fish oil. Buy water-packed tuna and sardines in tomato sauce.
Avoid french fries, deep-fat fried foods, and processed foods.
Buy organic milk and dairy products, which are higher in Omega 3's.
Eat nuts in moderation. Walnuts, almonds, sunflower seeds, and pumpkin seeds all have redeeming qualities. I am down on peanuts because I am somewhat allergic to them. Here is what Dr. Andrew Weil says about nuts: "I... prefer almond butter and cashew butter, because they have a better fatty acid profile. And for snacking, I tend to choose raw, unsalted cashews, almonds or walnuts (an omega-3 source). If you do go for peanut butter, look for brands containing only peanuts or peanuts and salt (such as Laura Scudder's and Adams). Avoid those with hydrogenated oils, sugar and other additives."
Eat your fruits and vegetables! Consider lowering your animal protein to 4 oz. per day.

Ginger and other good foods and resources

2007-10-29T11:57:00.000-05:00

I have been working away to upgrade my diet to support my fight against the cancer beast. I am investigating a broad range of culinary ingredients that will make my taste buds sing and my body get healthy. The latest thing to come to my attention is ginger. Ginger has a long history as a home remedy for nausea. Since chemotherapy and radiation can be nauseating, ginger ale, and ginger tea have been recommended to help sooth the stomach.

There are lots of good sources of information on how to incorporate more ginger in your diet. I buy the big lumpy fresh ginger, and cut a thin coin of ginger off to spice up my green tea in the morning. Go to http://www.recipezaar.com/, and put "ginger tea" into the search engine to find a recipe to your liking.

But it gets even better when you consider that ginger could help kill cancer. The University of Michigan did a study that found powdered ginger caused cell death in human ovarian cancer lines. Here is what the press release says: "Ginger is effective at controlling inflammation, and inflammation contributes to the development of ovarian cancer cells. By halting the inflammatory reaction, the researchers suspect, ginger also stops cancer cells from growing.
“In multiple ovarian cancer cell lines, we found that ginger induced cell death at a similar or better rate than the platinum-based chemotherapy drugs typically used to treat ovarian cancer,” says Jennifer Rhode, M.D., a gynecologic oncology fellow at the U-M Medical School."

Ginger has also been studied as a therapy for Alzheimers, and for colon cancer. I am ramping up my ginger consumption. On the same recipe site I found an awesome recipe for Sesame & Ginger Carrots that I'm going to try tonight with fresh carrots I bought at the farmer's market. It is chok-full of healthy ingredients!

Since I write here so irregularly, I'd like to mention one of my new favorite blogs. It is called Grouppe Kurosawa, written by Stephen Martin, who has 2 Ph.D.'s, at least one in immunology. This is a guy who loves research! The Grouppe Kurosawa Blog is dedicated to a discussion of how natural medicines and easily obtainable over the counter medicines can be used to effectively and inexpensively treat a host of serious acute and chronic diseases, including HIV, hepatitis, asthma, allergy, arthritis, cancer, leukemia and diabetes. What makes me trust this source of information is not only Martin's expertise, but the fact that he is not also hawking supplements and expensive reports. This is truly medicine in the public interest. It is amazing that I have searched around and not found another site that is devoted to such a practical and essential subject. If anyone knows of another one, please let me know.

Some cancer care recipes

2007-09-28T12:52:00.000-05:00

The internet exerts a siren call to people like me, so I'm back, despite my last bleak entry vowing not to return until my paradigm shifted. I guess a shift has indeed occurred. I have shifted my focus from changing the world to healing myself. And the results of that process? So far, so good. I am suffering from a rare type of ovarian cancer and am half-way through my chemo treatments. Who knows what the months ahead will bring? All of you, dear readers, are living with uncertainty, but most of you just don't know it yet. I can report that uncertainty is not an impossible thing to live with; there is still time for everyday joys and lots of learning.

I am very grateful to all the people who have communicated with me by phone, email or in person. Changing and healing myself is clearly a group venture, and I have benefited from the wisdom of many. I have been spending a lot of time trying to make sense of this whole new journey, attempting to discern what gives me pleasure and what offers the opportunity for healing. Conventional medicine doesn't have a great deal of experience with my particular form of cancer, and it can be overwhelming sorting through all the information out there on complementary and alternative forms of treatment.

Nutrition and healing has been an interest of mine for at least ten years. This interest has grown since my diagnosis. There are many different cancer diets out there, and I have also discovered at least one good cancer cookbook. Some people have reported great cures from macrobiotic cooking, while others swear by juicing. Cancer diets seem to be long on general principles and short on tasty specific recipes, and tasty and healthful food really contributes to my quality of life. So I am going to share 4 tasty recipes, all of which have potential cancer fighting benefits. I'll share my sources for this assertion. All these recipes have been tested by me and are extremely tasty.

Fettuccini With Shiitake and Garlic Butter

Click on the recipe title to view this recipe on the recipezaar website. This recipe calls for shiitake mushrooms, found fresh in some parts of the country, otherwise available dried in stores with oriental cooking supplies. The Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center website has information on the research that has been done on shiitake mushrooms as a cancer cure. These mushrooms are a staple in certain oriental recipes, and substantial research has been done on their healing properties in Japan. If you use dried shiitake mushrooms, I would rehydrate at least 10 of them overnight in water. We found some fresh shiitake mushrooms at an area farmer's market, and thought the flavor in this recipe was out of sight!

Bran Flax Muffins

I found this recipe on the All Recipes site, where it was positively reviewed by 190 different reviewers. It uses an ingredient vital in any cancer fighting arsenal: freshly ground flax seeds. There is lots of discussion in user-oriented cancer groups about cancer preparations using flax seed and flax oil. Sloan Kettering's take on flax is here, but Stephen Martin, blogger at the Grouppe Kurosawa Natural Medicines blog, comes right out and says a flax muffin a day can have wonderful benefits. I'm not capable of sorting out the science on this, but Martin's credentials and orientation are impressive. Most important, these muffins, which I made for the first time today, are delicious!

Add-on note: where to find flax seed? I found flax seed at my local natural foods grocery store. If you don't have something like that nearby, you can check it out at your favorite online store. For example, amazon.com and vitacost.com both carry flax seed. It's best to get organic, and then store what you buy in the freezer until you use it.

Sweet & Sour Red Cabbage Slaw

1/2 C. Cranberry Honey Vinegar (or substitute some other light vinegar)
1/2 C. Olive Oil
1 1/2 tsp. coarely cracked pepper
3/4 tsp. dried thyme
1 medium head red cabbage, cored & thinly sliced
1 small red onion, thinly sliced
Directions: Combine vinegar, pepper, thyme, and salt in a large bowl. Mix well. Add cabbage and onion. Toss until coated. Salt to taste.

Cabbage is one of those cruciferous vegetables everyone has been telling you to eat. Cabbage is loaded with anti-oxidants, and red cabbage is loaded with vitamin C. The American Institute for Cancer Research has another red cabbage recipe on their website, which I view as a endorsement for the health benefits of red cabbage.

Lime Sorbet

2 cups sugar
3 ¾ c hot water
2 ¼ c lime juice (abt. 15 limes)
3 t. lemon juice
1 ½ T dark rum
2 drops green food coloring
1 egg white, lightly beaten

Dissolve sugar in hot water, add ingredients .Freeze. Before serving, process in food processor, then put back in freezer. This gives it a nice texture.

This recipe makes a ton of lime sorbet. A couple of days after my surgery, a friend of mine brought some of this stuff over. I swear the sorbet VIBRATED, it had such a dramatic effect on my taste buds. Man, this is good stuff. It is extremely high in vitamin C, and my system must have been calling out for this elixir. There's lots of controversy about whether vitamin C helps cancer; all I know is that my body LOVED it. Here is how Sloan Kettering describes the studies, debates, and some of the evidence about vitamin C.

My opinion is that science is not the answer to everything! Happy eating and abundant love and good health to one and all.

Last blog until my paradigm shifts

2007-08-03T09:14:00.000-05:00

When a person receives a life changing health diagnosis, it calls upon them to, well, change their life.

Although I have enjoyed writing this blog, and having the occasional exchange with the reader, my body notices that every time I engage in a lengthy sit at the computer, it is not enjoying itself. So, I am resolved to spend less rather than more time in computer related activities, and more time engaged in enjoying the present moment, and especially relating to nature.

One of the most exciting experiences in the last month was seeing a leucistic crow in my backyard. I know this is a crow, because it was strutting its stuff with 3 other certifiably black crows. I looked up albinism on the internet--although this crow is not white, and discovered there is another condition that can affect birds of a variety of species. Leucistic comes from the root leu, which refers to whiteness. So I had the wonderful experience of viewing an exceptional crow, which spent about 2 hours in my backyard.

I choose to regard the visit from this crow as a positive omen, and hope you do too.

So, my plan is to use my voicebox for its god given purpose, my hands to write, paint and do other good things, and leave the internet for occasional research and email exchanges. I would love to talk with friends who care about me. I can also be reached by a listed phone number in the Winona, Minnesota phone book.

With peace and love, Martha

Jeepers weepers

2007-07-30T15:51:00.000-05:00

Since I was diagnosed with cancer, I have been blessed with lots of new communications challenges. With my husband, I've launched into a new phase of constant truth-telling, which is combined with lots of checking back to make sure he isn't overwhelmed with the task of listening to ever-emotional me. Even before cancer, I was a weeper. If I had been born in the time of the Pharoahs, I could have hired myself out for funerals. I'm told this was a real job that was valued by those whose tear ducts were challenged. Tear ducts for hire were just as good as producing a few of your own.

Other family members and friends have to go through their own sense of shock and dismay at the C word. Each person has their own giftedness and quirkiness (just like me) that they bring to the task of communicating with a newly diagnosed cancer patient. They respond variously with avoidance, advice, sympathy, empathy and acceptance. I have to learn myself how to accept the full range of responses, even though there are some I like better than others. Too much sympathy can make me feel angry and weak; too much advice can make me feel resentful. Too much conversation makes my head spin. You would think that everyone is in a "no-win" situation when it comes to communicating with Martha. But I am flabbergasted by the prevailing sense of love and support, and that is truly wonderful.

The third group of people I need to communicate with is the health care provider, from the oncologist, to the nurse, to the receptionist. Here is where my weeping qualities become problematic. I am a continuously expressive person living in a culture that does not generally value feeling and expression. For some people, tears call forth a sense of calamity, for others fear or contempt, for others, the need to fix. Here is my dilemma: I am a weeper and I can't change that. Pharmacologist Candace Pert says, in Molecules of Emotion, "I belive all emotions are healthy, because emotions are what united the mind and the body. Anger, fear, and sadness, the so-called negative emotions, are as healthy as peace, courage, and joy. To repress these emotions and not let them flow freely is to set up a dis-integrity in the system, causing it to act at cross-purposes rather than as a unified whole. The stress this creates, which takes the form of blockages and insufficient flow of peptide signals to maintain function at a cellular level, is what sets up the weakened conditions that can lead to disease. All honest emotions are positive emotions."

I am not criticizing my health care providers. In the midst of all the negativity in the press about the health care system, I have to say that the health care providers I have worked with have been wonderful.

The fourth level of communication is with oneself. If anyone is at home with Martha the weeper, I am. Fortunately, I have been keeping a journal since 1978. My journaling habit is a wonderful resource and offers a location for no-holds-barred communication of every type. It is one of the assets I bring to my illness. I also have ample communication with my imagination and can express it through visual work. This is another wonderful gift that has become clear to me through my illness. The painting on today's blog is by me.

The fifth level of communication is between the self and the universe. Here I am blessed too. Signals keep pouring in from all quarters, synchronistic communications with crows, fox, trees, wind, and the universal divine force, not to mention the prayers that many people say they are whispering on my behalf. In the midst of such trials, such personal challenge, I experience so many gifts! Jeepers weepers!

When the shit hits the fan

2007-07-19T10:20:00.000-05:00

Since my last entry here, my life has been turned upside down. It recently became necessary for me to have surgery, and the surgeons discovered a tricky cancer inside. They removed as much of it as possible. Now, however, I am faced with the necessity of chemotherapy, and my mind is suddenly a swirling brew of feelings, reactions, ideas, hopes and fears about the healing process.

Today I talked to a friend of mine who has had cancer 4 times. She is one of the most positive thinkers I have ever met. She emphasized the importance of getting exercise, continuing your normal life, laughter, and maintaining a good attitude.

As readers of this blog might have observed, I am very interested in sustainability issues. Everyone has read about global warming, some people are aware of the possibilities that peak oil could drastically change our lifestyles; and there are many other limiting, unbalanced areas of our lives that can make one feel very pessimistic. Many people are thinking about what we will all do when the shit hits the fan.

Then, bingo, life intervenes, and the shit indeed hits the fan, and suddenly you want to shut out all the news, all the popular culture, and you want to jettison all of the difficult or uncomfortable areas of your life. Suddenly, all I can think about is healing, about prayer, about poetry, about beauty and beautiful music, about gratitude, and all those other former preoccupations are burned off in a new resolve to live in a better, more pure, optimistic way.

What I am wondering is, if this new attitude I am bringing to life is the one I should have adopted all along? If we all prayed unceasingly, created beauty unceasingly, strove for compassion, what kind of world would we be creating? Change may be happening one person at a time, one cell at a time, it could even be starting with me.

All for now. Thanks to those of you who have told me you check in from time to time.

Getting better

2007-06-28T07:36:00.000-05:00

I haven't been writing here much because I've been on vacation, and while there, developed a medical condition that put me out of commission for a while. It still isn't totally resolved, but being back home, learning more about my condition, taking a hand in my own healing, and getting some good support finally gave me the first good night sleep in about a week.

I have always been quite focused on health issues and remaining healthy, but when this one came up, specifically, I have enlarged and painful uterine fibroids, I didn't cope well with the increased pain and bloating. Pain tends to make everything else in life irrelevant for awhile. It's hard to socialize with others because during this past week I have been pretty self-absorbed.

One of several turning points came last night, when our Nonviolent Communications Group met at our house, as it regularly does. NVC, as we call it, is all about compassionate communications. Our bi-weekly group has focused on things like observing without evaluating, taking responsibility for our feelings, making requests, and giving and receiving empathy. The leader last night took a good chunk of time demonstrating empathy (with me as the grateful receiver), continually digging deeper into my emotions, needs and responses. Like a thirsty puppy, I lapped it up.

The ability to engage in empathetic dialogue is a beautiful thing that requires skills many of us lack. The more normal response, when someone tells you something like: "I'm suffering from painful fibroid tumors," is to say something like "that reminds me of when my daughter had a similar condition, " or "why don't you consider treatment X?" or "I'm sure you'll feel better soon." None of these are empathic responses, but are rather self-referential, problem solving, or politeness, which is not the same thing as empathy. True empathy actually provides a feeling of relief in the sufferer, which is what happened last night. I slept well, and woke up this morning feeling drowsy and grateful.

If these skills of empathetic listening could be taught, volunteers could go into hospitals and hospices, and bring lots of relief to sufferers. Maybe some of this training is already happening.

Last night before I slept I opened a book of quotes from Rumi to the following:
"When you feel pain, ask pardon of God;
this pain has its uses.
When he pleases, pain becomes joy;
bondage itself becomes freedom.
When you take a clear look,
you'll see that from God
are both the water of mercy and the fire of anger."

Some of this mystifies me a little, especially the anger part. Then in this morning's paper, I learn that blues musician James Armstrong is coming to our community tonight to perform. Armstrong recovered from a senseless assault by a stranger 10 years ago. He now plays the guitar without all the feeling in his fingers. In the paper, he is quoted as saying: "I believe part of the reason it happened was to slow me down and look at life in another way," Armstrong said. "Everything happens for a reason."

I am looking for the uses and learning's from this pain

Creating a complaint-free zone

2007-06-13T13:52:00.000-05:00

Several years ago, my spouse contributed some funds to a Unity minister who was doing wonderful work charting the evolution of consciousness from a Christian perspective. As a result, we began to receive Unity Magazine, the publication of Unity Church, which seems to be all about positive spirituality.

The magazine that arrived today had an article that was made for my current situation. It explained the Purple Bracelet campaign, that started in a Kansas City church and has spread like wildfire around the country. The pastor of that church handed out 250 purple bracelets, and encouraged members to put one on either wrist. "He said that every time someone engaged in complaining, criticizing or gossiping, he or she was to move the bracelet to the other wrist. The goal was to avoid negative talk for 21 straight days--long enough, says experts,to change or form a habit."

Today I went to the website and ordered several of these free bracelets. If I could stop complaining and criticizing, if I could really stop it, I am sure it would have a transformative effect. I am all in favor of any practices that could dethrown the culture of criticism--both the quiet critical conversation that goes on in my own head, and the verbalized criticism of others.

I am a self-described expert on criticism. I have led several workshops on the topic, and have written a short booklet about the topic, which you can access for free on the link provided. Eleven years ago, my consciousness about the pervasive role of criticism in my life came upon me like a great awakening. I did a series of paintings on criticism and a host of other mental habits; the face of the chewing critic that initiated the series is at the top of today's blog. The entire process has been wonderful, but it did not cure me of criticism. I regard criticism, complaint and perfectionism as qualities that I struggle with, on an on-going basis, more than anything else.

For me, complaint and criticism is like a tumor that grows and grows until I aim the beam of awareness at it. Like a tumor, it periodically seems to grow for no particular reason, as has been the case of the last few weeks. So, I am delighted to experiment with, and tell others about yet another tool that may aid in shrinking the tumor of criticism and complaint.

How the world spirals

2007-06-06T13:15:00.000-05:00

Blogging, by its nature, is a form of commentary. My internal commentary has been a bit quiet lately, and I've reasoned that you shouldn't say anything unless you have something of substance to say.

So, I will speak with paint. This is a work in progress. There are some things I like about it, but I am not sure about the black. That could easily be changed. I am inspired by the view from my window, and this mandala was an attempt to capture some of those colors.

Perhaps I am trying to capture the colors of the world as I walk through it. There is a summertime mellowness in Minnesota right now, despite all the rain we have had lately. School is getting out, graduations have been celebrated, and Garrison Keillor came to Lanesboro, Minnesota to perform at the rhubarb festival.

It is our nature to proceed forward with our lives in a business-as-usual manner, despite the fact that spring is at least two weeks ahead of where it was last year, despite the worldwide reports of erratic weather, despite the fact that business-as-usual desperately needs to be challenged in our politics, our schools, our businesses, and our social and consuming life.

I've listened to two interesting and sobering radio shows recently. The first features scientist David Fridley, of Lawrence-Berkely National Laboratory, speaking on energy, China and globalization. He explains why biofuels will fail to solve our energy problem, and explains how the growth orientation of China and the U.S. prevents us from taking the hard measures that we must to deal with declining fuel resources.

The second, from Minnesota Public Radio, features political philosopher Benjamin Barber, who has written a book about how consumerism is keeping us in a state of perpetual adolescence. Why are so many adults reading Harry Potter books? Do we just want to escape from everyday stresses and strains? And why are we in such a state of perpetually aroused desire for things that we not only don't need, but may be harmful for the planet?

Trying to see the big picture

2007-05-25T10:00:00.001-05:00

Last week I went to a session on scenario planning, sponsored by a University group that is interested in sustainability. We were asked to imagine what southeastern Minnesota would look like in 2050, across a range of areas: natural resources, social environment, politics, economics, culture and technology. I found that I enjoyed projecting my speculations out to the future, and equally appreciated hearing versions of the future from others with different perspectives.

Scenario planning seems to be something my brain is eager to do right now. Several years ago I became attracted to mind mapping; I think I've blogged on this topic before. This morning I sat down and started to think about what I might put on a current Martha map, based on what I see happening in my own life and in the world around me. The easy conclusions about personal priorities are those I arrived at some time ago: 1) do all I can to invest in a sustainable home landscape right now; and 2) work to create a supportive and resilient community and especially neighborhood around me.

Some of the actions that are unfolding from the first priority have included: planting asparagus, a cherry tree, an apple tree, rhubarb, and more plantings to come; and home improvements aimed at reducing the solar exposure of our house in the summer. This is because I believe that local permaculture (or permanent agriculture) will be increasingly important in the years ahead, and because I believe rising energy costs and average temperatures will make it expensive to cool our house. Currently, larger savings can be experienced in terms of reducing our carbon footprint through conservation measures. Technology may make solar and wind more affordable on a household basis in the future, but it is not practical now.

The actions unfolding from the second priority have included: being an active participant in a local sustainability group, and starting a sustainability effort in my local church. This is slow community building stuff but it has some long-term promise.

The more difficult questions that I keep coming back to are: how does art fit into this whole scheme? and: am I called to be a leader in any different or new ways? Perhaps the questions are unanswerable and simply need to continue to be asked. My art is clearly a gift to myself and to certain others, but for a broad group it is simply irrelevant. This is not any self-criticism of its quality (although I do think higher quality work will demand attention in ways that average work does not), but rather an assessment of the quality of attention that people have available these days. If we think of attention itself--the ability to be present and take information in--as a finite resource and therefore an attribute of sustainability, I think we would have to conclude that most of us have our attention strained beyond sustainable levels. There's far more information and visual material available than we have the capacity to take in. If attention is an aspect of sustainability, most of us should be trying to gather back our attention from where it is scattered, often uselessly and even wastefully. Yet that is easier said than done, because one still has to make some decisions about where the attention will be focused.

Many people feel called to take up some form of art these days, whether it is visual art or music or writing. I think this is a good thing, because these art forms are a way of focusing our attention. Many others are being drawn to meditation, which I see as a form of clearing the slate of the mind so that we can think more clearly. I'm not a virtuoso meditator but have been trying to get some minutes in every day. The wisdom traditions assert that this is a good thing and I am taking it on some faith, because I find it difficult. I also have some faith that the continued attention I place on my art will help me in my ongoing efforts to try to see the big picture.

A short conversation with a CEO about sustainable transportation

2007-05-16T19:29:00.000-05:00

This morning I accompanied an friend of mine on a visit to meet with a former CEO of a major corporation in the town where I live. The company shall remain nameless, because my arrival in his office was a surprise and I respect this CEO as an individual. My friend is the director of an environmental resource center in a beautiful and ecologically diverse rural area. He is seeking funds for improvements to the center, designed to make it self-sufficient in energy terms, and neutral in terms of carbon footprint. These improvements include installation of a geothermal heating system, a solar energy demonstration project, and a biomass electrical generation project. He was seeking financial support from the CEO.

The two of us had been participants in a day and a half long program on scenario planning, that asked participants to consider the natural, social, political, economic, cultural and technological future of southeastern Minnesota. The effect of all this long-term thinking was to make me see more clearly the how much hard work there is to do if we are to get off our currently destructive course.

Anyway, I went along on this friend's visit to the CEO to listen, and to make a short pitch for this man to play more of a leadership role in persuading businesses to consider more sustainable transportation for their employees. "What is sustainable transportation?" the CEO asked. We get so caught up in our own jargon that we forget how to communicate with people who work in wholly different realms of work. I explained that sustainable transportation was transportation that conserved the resource (gas, and energy), such as walking, bicycling, carpooling, and taking the bus. It could also include trains and other transit forms, and it could include employee benefits like a guaranteed ride home for the carpooling employee who has an emergency. I didn't want the CEO's money, I wanted his leadership in our community.

This man has the reputation as an ethical and visionary leader, but he admitted that he had never thought about taking any special steps to encourage employees to travel more sustainably, even though there are demonstrable bottom line benefits both for the business and the employee. For the business, the benefits are improved health (oh yeah, we have an obesity crisis!), improved employee retention (employees like to work at places that demonstrate transportation flexibility), relief of parking problems, and access to a more diverse labor force. For the employee, the benefits are saving money, building community within the company, improving health, and oh yeah, saving the environment.

Last fall when I organized a sustainable transportation campaign in our town, I called the executive director of the local Chamber of Commerce, to see if I could secure business participation in the campaign, for example through bike to work programs and so on. She stated that the Chamber was a membership organization, and its members weren't asking for this kind of program. As a community organizer, I guess I need to be willing to cold call one business at a time, and start to educate them about these transportation issues.

I don't know why I should be distressed or surprised by this reality: those of us who are outraged, inspired, or energized by the global warming situation, who feel moved to action by peak oil, the loss of migratory songbirds, the relentless march of invasive species, the loss of agricultural topsoil--operate from a different set of basic assumptions from the CEO and the great mainstream. Perhaps most people have never become intimate enough with a woods to recognize that they are changing and are under threat. Too many people are living in a state of distraction, whether it comes from video games, television, the everyday demands of family and work, the seductive cascade of music emanating from their Ipods, or the exciting sale on now at Target. They can't see the woods or the trees.

So yes, I am disappointed that the CEO was didn't share my engagement with these issues, didn't seem persuaded that promoting sustainable transportation had a monetary and moral value. Maybe it's better to assume that we won't be bailed out of the coming crisis by big government, big business, the media or elected officials. Perhaps if I had received a glib or insincere response to my request, I'd go back to my comfortable little cocoon. The leader that is most needed at the present moment is the one I see in my own mirror, and I guess I should come to terms with that.

Leaderless Groups

2007-05-11T08:22:00.000-05:00

I've been thinking a little lately about how groups operate, based on my own participation in a number of voluntary organizations.

A couple of things moved this to my mind. First, I read an article by environmental entrepreneur Paul Hawken about the emerging environmental movement, which he says "is the largest social movement in all of history," adding that, "no one knows its scope, and how it functions is more mysterious than what meets the eye." What's mysterious about these groups, Hawken observes, in that they are fluid, atomized, arising spontaneously, and bound by ideas rather than ideologies. For example, he says, "we read that organic agriculture is the fastest-growing sector of farming in America, Japan, Mexico, and Europe, but no connection is made to the more than three thousand organizations that educate farmers, customers, and legislators about sustainable agriculture."

I happen to be involved in two of these groups, and what is interesting about them to me is their resistance to traditional models of leadership. One of them has been meeting continuously for at least three years. We do accept the rather loose control of having someone facilitate meetings, but everyone has resisted designating an individual as a leader. This does not mean there is an absence of leadership, but rather it means that leadership moves more fluidly from one individual to another based on the demands of the situation and the interests of our various members. We have succeeded in pulling off a World Cafe on global warming, have launched a Low Carbon Diet group, have educated electrical contractors about opportunities for electrical energy improvement rebates, organized a sustainable transportation week, and have hosted numerous small forums and meetings on sustainability topics. We have a website, a blog, and are collaborating with others on developing an environmental mailing list. All this has been done without the traditional apparatus of an organization: we have no budget, no board of directors, no staff, no meetings minutes, no dues, and no "Roberts Rules of Order."

When a group operates in this manner, things can get done easily and rapidly as group interests coalesce around an issue or approach to matters. Because most of the group members are responding based on their own internally generated priorities, actions that don't meet these needs simply whither on the vine. For example, the sustainable transportation week, which was one of my top priorities, failed to generate resonance with other group members. The project needed allies to be successful, and it failed to find these. In contrast, the World Cafe on global warming resonated strongly with enough members to make it a collective effort worth pursuing.

I contrast the behavior of this group to several more traditional groups that I have been invited to join. AAUW, the American Association of University Women, has an active chapter in my community. The organization has a long and storied history of good works and community building. Unfortunately, I found I was not attracted to the group based on both its more traditional form (membership dues, designated leaders, minutes, and so on), and to its less fluid content.

Despite the fluid content of these newer untraditional organizations, they still must develop an organizational culture. Stresses and strains arise not only to leadership failures, colliding values and patterns of domination, but due to the multiple levels of maturity and consciousness of group members. It takes real wizardry for leaders within these groups--self acknowledged ones rather than designated leaders--to navigate through these layers of ambiguity, harnessing the potential collective energies for good group work.

A springtime sustainable soup

2007-05-03T15:05:00.000-05:00

This weekend the farmer's market will open in our town. I don't anticipate there will be many fresh vegetables yet, but I'll be there to purchase a few plants, to greet the organic meat man, and perhaps to buy some good cheese.

I feel a tremendous rush of optimism this time of year; spring is definitely my favorite season.

With the sunshine comes all the little spring wildflowers, morel mushrooms, and dreams of garden bounty to come. Not that I am a skilled gardener. I am trying to learn as much as I can about permaculture, a term coined by Australians Bill Mollison and David Holmgren, referring to permanent agriculture--growing practices adapted to the unique growing conditions and mix of plants found in the existing landscape. Our backyard is populated chiefly by black locust trees, considered a pest in many parts of the country. Our trees are about 70 years old. They wait until June to leaf out, have small leaves that do not need to be raked, and delightfully fragrant flowers. To implement permaculture in our yard, I'll be gradually adding perennial plants, especially edibles, that take advantage of the unique qualities of our particular site.

Last year I planted some asparagus on the edge of our yard, theorizing that the late leafing black locust would permit the asparagus to get the early sun it needs. This year, I am trying to nurture an apple tree that also grows beneath the canopy of the black locust. I pruned the apple tree, and hung a homemade moth catcher in its branches. The following ingredient are mixed in a plastic milk jug: 2 cups of water, a banana peel, 1 cup vinegar, and 1/3 cup black molasses. I cut a 2" hole in the jug and hung it in the tree. This brew is supposed to have a fermented smell that will attract the moths that afflict the early blossoming apples.

The other thing that is coming up all over is garlic mustard. I've written about garlic mustard before. It is another invasive plant that has millions of seeds. The spring seedlings grow quickly and crowd out the native plants. It is very difficult to eradicate once it gets established. The plant has gained a foothold in our neighborhood, the seeds no doubt carried by the prolific deer who live around here.

I think about garlic mustard a lot; for some reason it seems to capture the dilemmas of the changes we humans have wrought on the landscape. I had heard that garlic mustard was edible but found the raw leaves bitter. This afternoon I boiled some garlic mustard leaves in chicken broth for 15 minutes, and found the taste quite palatable.

So, I present herewith a recipe for Kielbasa and garlic mustard soup, which we will have tonight. I'll update this blog with our reactions to the recipe. As I picked the leaves for my garlic mustard I went through the field of growing plants with my grass clippers and snipped off the little white flowers. Next year's crop of garlic mustard will be prolific enough without letting all the plants blossom.

A Springtime Sustainable Soup

Kielbasa & Garlic Mustard Soup

Ingredients
1 19 oz. can Cannellini beans
1 14 oz. can chicken broth
12 ounces turkey kielbasa
1 medium onion, chopped
3 garlic cloves
2 tsp. Worcestershire sauce
½ tsp. hot chili sauce
½ lb. potatoes, sliced
½ lb. cabbage, thinly sliced
3 cups fresh garlic mustard leaves, washed and sliced coarsely

Directions:
Place chicken broth, beans, onion, garlic, Worcestershire sauce, and chili sauce in a pot. Simmer covered, for 25 minutes. Add to the pot the potatoes, cabbage and garlic mustard. Simmer, covered for 25 minutes. Add salt and pepper to taste.

Options: substitute kale, spinach or collard greens for the garlic mustard.

Here are some more recipes for garlic mustard, which I found on a website called Prodigal Gardens. I would like to see a nutritional analysis of garlic mustard. According to Wisconsin herbalist Rose Barlow, "Mustards provide lots of calcium, potassium, and vitamin B & B2. Research has shown that all mustards, even commercial ones like broccoli, contain concentrated substances which help prevent cancer, including isothiocynates, beta carotene, vitamin C, and fiber."

Happy spring!

How One Thing Leads to Another

2007-04-25T08:31:00.000-05:00

This piece of artwork went through a considerable metamorphosis from its early beginning, illustrated in my April 9 post. I seem to be launched on a new series of paintings, and am feeling good about making art once again.

It is easier to explain why I stopped making art for six months, than to explain why I started again. I stopped because of the commercialism and superficiality of the whole art-making enterprise, because of the difficulty of finding audiences who actually take the time to look at one's work, and because art-making seemed fundamentally less important compared to the other things one could do, such as respond in a communitarian fashion to the big issues of the day: global warming, violence, and public health.

I stopped making art for long enough to remember that doing good is a lot trickier than it looks. People don't respond to pious lectures about what they ought to do, they don't do things that the times seem logically to demand, such as conserve energy, carpool, and start managing their land according to the principles of permaculture. Moreover, the community of do-gooders, the 150 people in town who can be counted to show up at the same music events, fundraisers, and lectures--are too pressured for time to engage deeply and collectively with the issues. My need for community and depth around sustainability is unmet.

What really made artmaking possible again was an appreciation of the gift aspect of art. I remembered that the process of making art was a gift to me. We all have our critiques of how society is. It is healing and affirming for the creator of art, to use artistic forms and media to visualize and bring into existence a version what beauty and wholeness could look like.

Giraffes sighted in Minnesota

2007-04-23T21:30:00.000-05:00

Four African giraffes (Giraffa camelopardalis) were recently sighted in southeastern Minnesota this Saturday, surely a sign that the planetary ecosystems are profoundly out of whack. There is much speculation about how the creatures, native to tropical zones, wandered onto a local university campus.

One theory is that the creatures are not actually true giraffes, but are a local mutation of the burgeoning white tailed deer population, a close relative to the giraffe. Vince Gray, a local biologist, suggested that a small band of Odocoileus virginianus (white tailed deer) mutated through natural selection to have much longer necks than normal. He theorized that deer populations have grown so huge that the low lying shrubs and trees normally consumed by the voracious mammals have all but disappeared, leading to mass starvation in some districts, and favoring those creatures whose necks allow them to find more food within reach.

Another more laughable theory, offered by environmental extremists, is that increases in planetary temperatures drove the animals to a more temperate climate, as is available in southeastern Minnesota, the region's "banana belt". Observors were unable to explain how the furry ungulates showed up in Minnesota, but Odin Skukrud, retired Marine Corps officer, speculated that Greenpeace orchestrated the kidnapping of the giraffes and their subsequent release in Minnesota in order to further the vast media-entertainment-environmental conspiracy of global warming.

A more practical concern aroused by the giraffe's visit was the damage a few of them could wreak on the university landscape. Giraffes eat 140 pounds of leaves and twigs per day, and the potential destruction to an urban forest is a matter of concern. Darrell Hedges, landscape supervisor at the University, was frantically looking for a trailer large enough to pick up and transport the four animals to an area where the effects of their tree-top browsing would be less pernicious.

Myra Earnest, member of a local pagan meditation group, said the visit from the giraffes was "a good sign." A giraffe's heart is about two feet long and weighs 25 pounds, making this the biggest hearted mammal in existence. Earnest said "the giraffes were lured to Minnesota through the power of attraction to the many good hearted people living in this area of the state." Her group planned a celebratory ritual which included the construction of a sculptural "Green Man" out of buckthorn bushes. She said the Green Man would then be thrown into the Mississippi River. Her group planned to seek a location for a permanent, year-round giraffe refuge/ritual center.

What to listen to?

2007-04-18T19:45:00.000-05:00

I've been engaged in multiple house projects, and also working on a painting, so my head has not been in blog-land. That doesn't mean I've weaned myself from the internet, however. These activities involve physical and manual labor, but not necessarily mental fire-power, so I've been wearing my Sennheiser wireless headset, while I walk all over the house listening to internet radio. It's a great product, by the way. Our house has an open floor plan, and I can listen to whatever I want without disturbing my spouse.

In between painting, I scan some favorite aggregator sites to find good things to listen to. Here's my top ten list of listening sites, one costs subscription $$ and the others are totally free.

1. Public Radio Fan. This is a directory of public radio sites from around the world; you can find out what is playing in music or non-music right now. I have become particularly addicted to Dig Radio in Australia, an eclectic radio station that has introduced me to some new musicians I like. I just ordered a CD by Joanna Newsome, for example, that seems very interesting.

2. New Dimensions Radio. We pay $9.95 a month for a listening club membership to this service, whose purpose is "to deliver life-affirming, socially and spiritually relevant information, practical knowledge and perennial wisdom through the voices and visions of those who are asking new questions and are looking at the world in positive and inspiring ways." When we first joined the club we spent hours listening to some of the best minds in the world, including David Bohm, Krishnamurti, Natalie Goldberg, A.H. Almaas, Larry Dossey, and on and on. Their offerings in the area of spirituality are extremely strong.

3. Global Public Media. This service features readable and listenable article on a "post-carbon world, " aggregating radio programs such as Canada's "Deconstructing Dinner," and covering a wide range of sustainability topics. Great place to learn about peak oil.

4. On Point Radio. This is public affairs programming on a broad range of topics, including the current news, science, arts and culture, and much more. Well organized and accessible radio archives.

5. Speaking of Faith: A program on religion, ethics and ideas, with host Krista Tippett. Her most recent interview of evangelical Christian Richard Cizik explodes conventional ideas of what evangelical Christians think. This program is the cure for stereotypical thinking about the major religions.

6. TED Talks. TED stands for technology, entertainment and design, and it features some of the big thinkers featured at the annual TED conference in California. Most of the presentations are short, maximum 1/2 hour, and video is provided, but I usually find it easy to listen without attending to the video. Most thought-provoking recent experience on TED was listening to Bjorn Lomborg explain which of the major world problems should be tackled first.

7. The Infinite Mind. Exploring topics like, Place, Laughter, and Bullying, among a host of others. Programs are available for free for a limited period after their first broadcast, but after awhile you may have to purchase to listen.

8. Learn Out Loud. Hundreds of audio and video broadcasts; politics, history, religion and spirituality are some of the best represented topic areas.

9. A-Infos Radio Project. This site aggregates offerings from a host of independent radio programs, a lot of them left of center. The quality of the shows is very mixed, and it can take a long time for the requested radio program to boot up, but this is a great place to search for info on obscure topics.

10. Democracy Now. I have to confess I have only listened to a couple of recent programs, but I invariably find host Amy Goodman well-informed and provocative. I plan to spend some more time here in the future. If you think the mainstream media is missing a lot of important information about the world, you are right. Listen to what's falling beneath the cracks here.

What are your favorite internet radio sources? I'm always looking for new finds. If I have any complaint about the current state of internet radio, it is that is strength is in breadth, not depth. If you have a topic you'd like to explore deeply, you still need books and other print media. For example, I'm looking for extensive information on permaculture, and a host of introductory programs are available but there is very little that lends itself to my practical "what's next?" focus.

In praise of carpooling

2007-04-13T14:04:00.000-05:00

I get a little discouraged from time to time that fuzzy green minded activists give so little thought to the real potentials of carpooling, as a way to save time, money, help the planet, and get to where you need to go. About a year ago I put a rideshare board up at the local natural foods store, and although there were a few people who used the board, 99.9% of the population never looked at it and never gave it any thought. In the basis of more than 20 person surveys, I have found that liberals and conservatives alike are reluctant to carpool.

I posted a card on the board that said the following: "Older lady in Hertown, Wisconsin periodically needs rides to Ourtown. Time and dates flexible, " including my name and contact information. It goes without saying that there is no bus, train or plane service between Hertown and Ourtown. And the older lady is quite sprightly but nervous about driving 185 miles across the state. She is sensible about this. One man saw my card and responded to it, saying that indeed he periodically made trips between Ourtown and Hertown and would be willing to help out. It finally worked out that I was able to take advantage of his offer. I understood that he was planning on leaving Ourtown on Thursday, and could drop me in Hertown. I was planning on returning with my husband, who had a related trip planned to visit elderly relatives, so this was a one-way carpool.

Steve and I talked on the telephone several times, and then exchanged emails so we could work out the details of the carpool. We must have both decided we could trust one another, because the way the carpool worked was this: Steve's son came to my house with the car and the dog. I dropped Steve's son off in Ourtown, and headed for LaCrosse in his car (with trusting dog observing it all in the back seat), where Steve works. We planned to meet at 3:30 in a parking lot near his place of work. For about 15 minutes I was worried that something had gone wrong with our arrangement, when I didn't see Steve. What I didn't realize was that he was going to arrive on roller blades--instead I was looking for a driver to drop him off. We eventually found each other in the large parking lot and headed for Hertown, a 3 hour drive away.

We found lots of talk about, but what I was most interested in was the socio-demographic background of someone who was willing to go to great efforts to carpool. The two of us must share a certain number of traits in common. So, following my conversation with Steve, I discovered where to look for enthusiastic carpoolers: people who are involved in mentoring children (we both are); people who are thrifty; people who are sociable; people who place a high value on civic responsibility; people who value the simple life; people who are practical problem solvers; people who have had enough good experiences in Midwestern small towns to be basically trusting of strangers; people who are physically active.

I paid Steve $20 to cover some of his gas costs, and gave him a bag of homemade scones. I hope this was sufficient payback for him. One thing we never did was agree on what I would contribute beforehand. But things appeared to have turned out well.

Our civic celebration of Earth Day is coming up soon. I hope to continue my carpooling advocacy by surveying people about their attitudes toward carpooling, in the hopes of learning the formula that will make people accept this practical solution to so many transportation issues. I am perfectly willing to develop a reputation as a carpooling fanatic, even though I all too often drive around by myself.

Art: product or gift?

2007-04-09T20:29:00.000-05:00

I visited family over Easter, and while I was there, I went shopping, not because I needed anything, but I thought I would be interested in the novelty of stores that we don't have in our town.

I visited a major label store with employees who were gifted at chatting with customers. I rapidly discerned that I didn't need the green slacks that were on sale, so I sat in a chair to wait while my mother tried on hers. Stacked next to a display of marked down purses were 4 hand-painted canvases, all by an artist named Parker, featuring decorative floral patterns. Like the clothing in the back of the store, all four canvases were 70% Off The Original Price, once $142, now $42. What a bargain! I could hardly resist, but I did. Seeing these paintings gave me the clearest possible example of art as a product, something that has always been difficult for me.

Here's the dilemma of my creative process: my art-making skills are a gift. When I say that, I'm not claiming that I am a genius, but just that the process of making a painting is a gift to me, and the result is a gift for some people, but clearly not all. The problem is, I often feel uncomfortable about showing my work to others. I regard my work as a gift, but most viewers regard it as a product, and I can't stand having it assessed as a product. There is something about turning a painting into a commodity that feels horrible to me. And I felt a little horrible when I saw those canvases in the store, stacked neatly, marked down, firmly in the commodity category.

I wandered up to the store entry-way and a cheery employee asked me whether I had found anything. I confessed that I hadn't, but that my problem was, I didn't really need anything. She backed away with an awkward smile--the stores depend on people who keep shopping, whether they need anything or not.

As I watched the hordes of women bringing their purchases to the busy cash registers, I thought about all these people eager to give a gift to themselves--buying something, forking over their capital for a little emotional lift. But shopping is a dysfunctional form of gifting; its satisfactions are transitory and for the most part it tends to be wasteful and unnecessary. Jonathan Porritt, "environmental guru" and advisor to the U.K. government, says that our shopping is killing the planet, and we need to shop much less.

Perhaps what is needed is to start becoming aware of the function of the products that we buy: are they necessary commodities, like food or shelter, or are they gifts--an expression of gratitude? We are drowning in our piles of goods, transitory and shallow products that we don't need, that are no gift to ourselves and others. What is needed is a more imaginative way at looking at the gifts of our time and labor. I am re-reading a book that examines the role of creative works like art and poetry in a commodified society. It's called The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property, by Lewis Hyde. Like the just-begun painting at the top of today's thoughts, this book is helping me begin to re-imagine my work and my life as a gift, an expression of beauty and gratitude that has the potential of contributing to sustainability.

Mapping a positive future

2007-04-04T14:28:00.000-05:00

I spent some time today constructing a map for myself. Mapping is a wonderful process for anyone who periodically feels unclear about things. I was introduced to the Mind Mapping process through The MindMap Book, by Tony Buzan. I’ve kept a journal of my thoughts and activities for the past 30 years, but Mind Mapping helped me overcome the weaknesses of the linear thinking that prevails in most journal writing. I learned that the structure of our cognitive, sense-making process is radiant, that is, radiating out from multiple nodes and centers. The kind of writing I am doing here is linear, and its plodding, one-foot-in-front-of-the-other format makes it difficult to see the connections between different ideas. Mapping allows us to tap into insights from multiple directions.

I have had several breakthrough insights as a result of being able to make maps. In November of 2005 I was feeling oppressed and discouraged by what I had recently learned about some of the challenges our world faces, including: bird flus and other pandemics; economic meltdown caused by high debt levels; global warming; peak oil collapse; and on-going violence in the Middle East. I spent a month or so feeling depressed about it all, but then I realized that my gloom and depression served no constructive purpose. I needed to visualize some positive outcomes that represented a response to the life changing conditions that were going on. This consisted of some future-oriented statements that reflected what I would like to see happening in my own community:

1. Community Builds with a greater sharing of time & resources. People will be thrown back on the resources of other people. Those who thrive will be those with the greatest connections to community.
2. People spend more of their time creating, rather than spending. If money is in short supply, goods and services will still need to be offered and shared. As an example, if imported fruit is no longer available, people will need to garden and get creative with local food production.
3. People learn about and focus on healthy foods. Once we realize that the old industrial agriculture system is contributing to lower immunity and resilience, we will need to learn about the healthy alternatives.
4. People walk and use sustainable forms of transit to get around, resulting in healthier bodies. Too many of us are now obese, so if we use the car less, it would be a good thing. We can visualize a positive outcome of “imagining the future without cars" as peak oil pessimist James Kunstler predicts, or even much less car use.
5. People start looking at themselves as producers of something of value apart from the money economy. Economic collapse could be a great equalizer. Suddenly, the unique gifts of each person would come to the fore. We would need the community builders, the people with knowledge of plants and animals, the people with knowledge of practical health.
6. People become inventive on a local and personal level. Innovation flourishes. With the old systems breaking down, new solutions will be cobbled together, using the resources and materials at hand.
7. The creation of beauty is not limited to the specialists but becomes the province of many. The economy supporting the arts could collapse. The creation of things of beauty, art or music will be freed from its economic straight-jacket. All who wish to create will be able to do so.

This list could be dismissed as being too optimistic. However, the writers of the gloom and doom scenarios have no crystal balls. None of us know how events will unfold. My preference is to work on things will have positive effects, regardless of how events unfold. Keeping a vision like this in mind brings more resilience and power to my individual efforts to cope with whatever comes. Mind maps helped me bring it all into focus.

Real vs. virtual conversation

2007-04-01T14:29:00.000-05:00

I finally finished the book: Conversation: A History of a Declining Art, by Stephen Miller. The last pages of the book came just after a day spent in conversation. Yesterday, I took off to visit friends in a small town where I lived for 15 years, and spent from about 10:30am to 4:30pm in continuous, almost nonstop conversation. Then, when I returned home I needed to share the gleanings of the conversation with my husband.

It was an exhausting feat for an introvert, but at the beginning of my first conversation I felt almost a giddy feeling of happiness, at being in the presence of intelligent, conversible friends. I engaged 3 different conversational groups; each friend has particular gifts that I delight in, and each conversation had a totally different quality. I felt tired, but wonderfully rewarded at the end of the day, as I returned home.

What I harvested from the book Conversation was a sense of how the nature of conversation has changed over time. Miller posits that good conversation is composed of a felicitous mix of politeness, good humor, raillery and substance. Conversation is as good a lens as any with which to view our American culture. We have a great number of people who are tuning out of real conversation with any of the myriad conversation substitutes available: Ipods, TVs, video games, cell phones, email, and blogging, for example. We also have many visible examples of unproductive or violent conversation (e.g. Jerry Springer).

In my own life, I relish the opportunities for conversation that arise in my book club, in the course of my tennis games, in our nonviolent communication group (in which conversation itself is the subject of conversation), and in our dinner club. Fortunately, I have a partner who is interested in many different topics and is willing to discuss them with me. I am thankful for the conversations that I do have. I seem to be thirsty for much more.

It is possible to learn a great deal even from the virtual conversations that one has on the internet. But I celebrate the benefits of real face-to-face conversation, which yesterday allowed me to ponder aloud some of the following topics: who is to blame in our dysfunctional agriculture system? How does an artist who thinks of her work as a gift cope with a world in which art is primarily viewed as a product? How will we baby boomers care for one another when so many of us get old together? In the world of global warming, will it be possible to grow peach trees in Minnesota? Should we fear the melt-down of society in a post peak oil world? Is there anything wrong with us when we crave solitude?

Real conversation on these topics tires and satisfies; virtual conversation leaves one hungry. I love the evidence that from time to time someone reads these words. One step at a time, however, I hope to find more and more real (flesh and blood, conversations. I'm convinced it is essential to a sustainable world.

Group mind and the speed of change

2007-03-28T07:19:00.000-05:00

Not too long ago I finally got pissed off enough about the insanity of the ethanol situation that I posted a blog about it here, and also made some posts and diaries on other blogs. Not too long after that, I started to see negative news reports about ethanol in lots of places, including an op-ed piece in the Washington Post. It seems as though a whole group of us are having our minds made up at the same time. One year ago, the issue was on the radar of only a few people; now it is getting attention from many different sources and a new (not necessarily conventional) wisdom is in the process of being shaped.

What we see arising, in more powerful forms than before, is group mind. The internet is continuing to make massive changes in the way we think about things. I don't see it as bad; we need the wisdom of groups to tackle the complexity of the problems we will be facing. But it is an eerie feeling to sense that you are operating in the midst of a group mind.

Blogger Dave Pollard is concerned with the costs of group mind, suggesting that we are so affected by what others think that we are in danger of losing contact with our essential self. He says: "unless we are extraordinarily diligent and extremely self-aware and self-competent, we give up everything that make us us – we give up being nobody-but-ourselves and we become everybody else."

I think that the notion that we are separate from everyone else is an illusion. A statement like that demands proof from someone older, wiser, more well-read than I am. So many different mystics, philosophers, poets and theologians have already come to this point of view, I am hard pressed to find only one to confirm this statement. More than 60 years ago, Teilhard de Chardin hypothesized the development of a global nervous system, fueled by the communication which has now been made possible by the internet. "A world network on economic and psychic affiliations is being woven at increasing speed, " Chardin said, in The Phenomenon of Man. "It constantly penetrates more deeply within each of us. With every passing day it become more impossible for us to act or think otherwise than collectively."

For some, this statement may evoke the fear of being caught in a collective trap. But for me, it is hopeful, because the more we can inform one another's point of view, the better decisions we can make for all of us. The painting that I have been working on illustrates my notion of the self within the whole. I am a speck within one of the small circles, which is itself in the midst of a larger circle, which overlaps with other circles and is itself encompassed by a larger circle and square, and so on. When I see my emerging views about ethanol, or any other topic, begin to merge with, and be informed by those of others, I feel hopeful. In the past year, the discussion about global warming and its consequences has begun to move at a very fast rate. Will it be fast enough to make a difference? Who knows? At the very least, it will be very interesting to see how our collective consciousness grapples with, and addresses this reality.

Continuing the search for balance

2007-03-23T14:10:00.000-05:00

One of Murphy's Laws that operates in my life is a law of attention: the more focused attention I give to a particular project, the more attractive contrary activities become. For example, the more effort I put into blogging, expressing my opinions, researching topics, and so on, the more attractive free time and unproductive play become. The more time I spend on an introverted activity like making art, the more I crave sociable community action. The more time I spend on sociable community actions, the more I crave quiet walks in the woods. The more time I spend with heady intellectual people, the more I crave the company of expressive feeling types. And so on. In me at least, there is a constant search for balance, the balance between inner and outer, introvert and extrovert, action and contemplation.

In the North American culture, productive, external action is highly valued. The search for balance receives little external support. The cost of tuning into the prevailing norms is that we feel a constant pressure for MORE: more money, more happiness, more time, more play, more possessions, more activism, etc. I did a painting several years ago on this topic, illustrated in today's blog entry. It is called "Thick and Thin," and it portrays the two sides of a duality. I called this a family portrait of a ravenous cat who constantly wants more, despite her corpulent body; with her opposite who, by refusing sustenance, has reached a certain skeletal perfection.

This painting is one of a series of 15 I did, beginning more than 10 years ago, documenting my effort to overcome my fear of depression and identify limiting patterns in my life. The book on the topic is written, but my search for balance meant that I eventually abandoned the single-minded quest to find a publisher. You can read a little more about the topic here.

The image of Thick and Thin reflects a human habit that includes but also extends beyond the material realm. Whether we feel there is not enough money, not enough stuff, not enough time, not enough attention, not enough love—whatever our fundamental lack is, all these cravings blind us to the abundance that is potentially available to us at every moment. Our relationships with money, matter, and the body have an impact beyond our own corpus. Becoming conscious of our habits of consumption and attention can provide respite from the restless and relentless desire for more, that is destructive to us and to the world.

A balanced life: what can be more sustainable? I feel a little sheepish about encouraging visitors to come to my blog, and then disappearing for a week. On the other hand (and with me, there's always another hand), it reflects my healthy and necessary search for balance.

The saturday mess

2007-03-17T14:54:00.000-05:00

I was going to call this post, "The Saturday Gestalt", but then I looked the word up and found that gestalt means: "A collection of physical, biological, psychological or symbolic entities that creates a unified concept, configuration or pattern which is greater than the sum of its parts, " from Wiktionary, and its hard to see what unified concept I can make out of this particular Saturday. In addition, why use a complicated word like "gestalt", when "mess" comes a lot closer?

Maybe this is what happens when a crowd of blog ideas meets a multi-tasking Saturday. The hardest thing to fit into the whole mess was my central project this afternoon: the creation of Potato and Cabbage Bundles, for my Irish-themed dinner group which meets this evening. Since my dinner group members do not read my blog, I can confess that this must have been the most complicated cabbage dish anyone could possibly envision, that is, for a normal culinary human being. It involved steaming the cabbage, mashing potatoes with a whole host of yummy ingredients, burning the oil on the stove and filling the entire house with smoke while I searched for new radio goodies to listen to on the internet, cutting up parchment paper... and on and on, more steps than is necessary or sustainable--to stay connected to one of my central themes.

Anyway, the cabbage bundles are assembled and ready to bake, and I thought it might be interesting, to me at least, to list the other ideas, worries and funny things crowding into my brain on this particular Saturday. My last blog entry was on the theme of conversation, and the book, Conversation: A History of a Declining Art, arrived and is beckoning to me right now. Author Stephen Miller provides a fascinating introduction to the role of conversation in ancient times, whetting my interest with this description of Socrates by the politician Alcibiades: "Whenever anyone hears you [Socrates] speak or hears your words reported by someone else...whoever we are--woman, man or boy--we're overwhelmed and spellbound." Socrates was reportedly an excellent listener, and treated his fellow conversationalists with respect, urging them to examine their assumptions. If I were to meet such a conversationalist, would I be capable of examining my own worldviews, or am I totally bound up in my current positions?

I love to consider a range of ideas around a theme, so I particularly enjoyed Stewart Staniford's entry, "Innovation in Hard Times", posted on The Oil Drum, one of my favorite blogs. Staniford ponders how humans will respond to the coming challenges of peak oil, the melt-down in the housing market, and the damage caused by the Iraq war, to name the major crises de jour, by examining the number of patents granted each year, and analyzing the perspectives of the gloom and doomers like Jim Kunstler(author of the Long Emergency, which argues that peak oil will destroy life as we know it) to the optimists like futurist Ray Kurzweil, a computer visionary who foresees a future time when artificial intelligence will create technological innovations far beyond our current level of knowledge or imagination. This got me to thinking about whether I am fundamentally a pessimist or an optimist. I think I must fall on the side of the pessimists, mostly because of the ability of a small number of people--disaffected and angry--to make life extremely difficult for the peace-loving majority. So if the number of people whose lives go into crisis mode increases, it could trouble the comfort of many. And it certainly does seem as though a number of crises could come together and start to have spiraling impacts in ways that we cannot now foresee.

The melt-down in the housing market is beginning to receive more attention. Mainstream economic observers, such as Merrill Lynch, are now saying that housing troubles could cause a recession in 2007, and economic bears like Noureil Roubini say that we will have an economic hard-landing making waves throughout the world economy. After reading some of these assessments, I went for a walk through the new subdivision adjacent to my neighborhood. I saw that 4 McMansions, built on speculation by area builders, still remained unsold. At least two of these have been for sale for at least 2 years. This kind of information is not being reported in our local media, which usually rely on local Realtors for the predictable sound byte: "we are having a market correction but the turn-around is right around the corner." When you realize the level of inertia that supports mainstream economic optimism, you begin to worry about how people will cope when the difficult times do come.

As an antidote to all this pessimism, you might want to listen to Radio Canada International's audio feed on the topic: "Laughter is the Best Medicine," featuring about 6 minutes of hilarity with Surjit Lalli from Vancouver. It got me laughing.

The other recent humor source came from a paper sent to me by a group called Sustainable Belmont (SB), from Belmont, Massachusetts, just outside of Boston. It described efforts of SB to persuade community residents to cut down the amount of time spent in idling cars. SB received a grant that allowed them to obtain anti-idling signage, handouts and stickers, the Board of Selectman granted permission to hang the signs, the police agreed to issue complaints, and city staff was enlisted to distribute some of the signs. They must not have believed in the whole idea, though, because staff were observed idling their vehicles while hanging anti-idling signs. Somehow, this just hit my funny bone, especially since I also am involved in an all volunteer local sustainability group that has faced this kind of bureaucratic intransigence. I need to look further into the problem of car idling. I did find at least one case study that started to suggest some aspects of the problem.

So that's the Saturday Mess.

World Cafe, how to have a conversation

2007-03-13T11:45:00.000-05:00

Last night our local sustainability group hosted a World Cafe on the subject of global warming.

About seventy-five people came together to discuss the question: “How can we meet the needs of current and future generations in the face of global warming?” Our assembly included students from local K-12 schools, university students, educators, elected officials, community activists, health care professionals, entrepreneurs, business managers, and people who question the reality of global warming.

The positive aspects of the experience included an extremely diverse group, who seemed to want to continue the conversation (we didn't lose people to breaks), and some truly phenomenal ideas that were reported at the end of the event. Many people said they enjoyed the experience...I hope they weren't just trying to make us feel good.

The challenges: our conversation patterns are pretty ingrained...in many cases the quality of conversation didn't meet the ideals I imagined. The World Cafe process is supposed to help people build on each other's knowledge, and I got the sense that many people found this difficult or counter-intuitive. It is much easier to hang onto our own ideas than to actively examine, respond to, and develop the ideas of others.

What constitutes good conversation? I suspect that our hyper-technological, fast-paced, individualist world gives us few good opportunities to really learn what good conversation is like. Every once in a while I have a really great conversation with someone: I listen, I learn, and I feel heard, and I can think of few more satisfying experiences. But it's rare. I have the same bad habits as others do. Joe states his opinion, I state mine. We think we're having a conversation, but in reality we are two people speaking into our own bubbles.

The next book I want to read is Conversation, a History of a Declining Art, by Stephen Miller. I just listened to a radio conversation on his book, and learned some succinct critiques on the state of conversation in the United States: first, we have a fear of offending people, so we shy away from in-depth conversation on the topics that divide us. Second, we are suffering from an epidemic of opinionatedness--we are not really interested in listening to others but instead believe we must hang onto and express our opinions as a way of being authentic. In other words, we wear our opinions on our sleeves as if they were essential to our identity. Third, most of our conversations are functional in nature: we want something from someone. The best conversations are purposeless in terms of outcome or accomplishment.

America has a history of seeing conversation as a means for getting ahead. Books like Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking with the Stakes are High, express the purposefulness behind many of our conversations. I had a great deal of enthusiasm for this book and even received training in Crucial Conversations, but I can't say it made me a better conversationalist. The implied aim of conversation in Crucial Conversations is to work things out, to promote harmony, to help a company or organization advance its purpose. But these conversations may lack the beauty, humor, and good natured disagreement which Stephen Miller says is one of the hallmarks of a good conversation.

Our World Cafe was purposeful, because we were interested in learning what insights people might have on a complex topic. I did learn from some of the viewpoints expressed at our event, even as sound bite summaries. But I long for something more. As one caller to the radio show above said, "conversation is an end in itself--it is part of being a healthy human being. You've got to be willing to have your mind changed." I continue to want to have this kind of conversation, both for the pure joy of it, and also for the way it sustains the human community.

A question of balance

2007-03-10T08:32:00.000-06:00

After many months of not making art, I am once again working on a painting. This is a work in progress, which illustrates my current search for balance.

The sustainability of the earth is an issue of balance. When our own lives get unbalanced, our bodies become unbalanced; when many bodies get unbalanced, the parts contribute to an unbalanced whole. Al Gore's first book on environmental issues, which he wrote in 1992, was titled Earth in the Balance, and the title itself has become a popular metaphor for a world that seems to be tilting in a profoundly unbalanced manner, due to our human actions.

My recent meditation on the issue of balance was inspired by a memoir by Jungian analyst Robert Johnson, entitled Balancing Heaven and Earth. The book describes Johnson's attempts to create balance in his own life, between being and doing, between his desire for community and his need for solitude, between his feeling orientation and the necessity of living in a world that values thinking and sensation. I felt profoundly connected to Johnson's sensibilities: in Myers-Briggs terminology, we are both INFP's, a shorthand that describes us as intuitive introverts with a feeling orientation. Certain personality types predominate in different countries, as Johnson learned in the course of many visits to India.

"America is," Johnson said, "collectively speaking, an extroverted culture that prizes rational thought above all else and values people accordingly. We also place a high value on material things and how much money one can collect, and in that way we are a sensate culture. Our thinking and sensation functions have brought the scientific, technological, and mechanical aspects of existence to an apex in the West, of which we are justly proud. But we have done this at the expense of our feeling. Practically everyone in the West becomes lonely, discontented, and uneasy because our capacity for feeling is in a terrible state of disrepair..."

I have recently become aware that my introverted feeling function was feeling desperate and deprived. I have been wandering in extroverted thinking realms for the last 6 months, blogging, starting community projects, speaking before the City Council, and doing volunteer work. At the end of the day, I became aware that I craved silence, that human speech itself felt painful to me. To arrive at some balance, I restarted my morning meditation practice, and set aside some of my continuous striving for community improvement in favor of painting. It's unsurprising that the subject of my current work is a mandala. Mandalas are visual manifestations of our need and capacity for for wholeness, centeredness and balance.

Several people expressed dismay over the past few months that I had stopped painting. Two of them were artists. This isn't because of a thirst to see my work; rather it reflects an anxiety that access to the creative flow that feeds us all can be interrupted. This is why we need art on some visceral level. It is not so much that we need the material manifestations of art in our life, but we need the lubrication that artists provide for the human spirit. If we truly are interconnected with one another, cessation of the creative flow in one person affects others. This extroverted sensate world may not fully appreciate the creative liquid of the arts, but it nonetheless craves the oxygen that creative expression provides to a world out of balance.

The wisdom of the markets is a joke

2007-03-06T20:07:00.000-06:00

We Minnesotans have long prided ourselves on our problem-solving abilities, but today I read about a Minnesota first that should go down in infamy: the construction of the first coal-fired ethanol plant in Heron Lake, Minnesota. Folks, this is nuts! Is there any chance that this event will drive a nail in the coffin of the old "wisdom of the markets" adage? Investors, in their infinite wisdom, are putting their bucks behind a process that is going to burn coal, generating greenhouse gases, mercury and other pollutants, in order to fuel a corn-based ethanol plant. Robert Rapier, one of the main bloggers on The Oil Drum, recently wrote a lengthy overview of energy options which pointed out that the energy return on corn-based ethanol is very low, "Published studies put this number at around 1.3, but the return for fossil fuels in and ethanol out averages less than 1.1, " Rapier said. This means that for every one unit of energy input we expend on producing the energy, we get only 1.3 units of energy output.

The wisdom of the markets supported a coal-fired ethanol plant due to the rising price of natural gas, which is used in the 16 other Minnesota ethanol plants. The $97 million dollar Heron Lake plant is reportedly being financed by investments from farmers, which makes it clear whose interest this plant serves.

Could there possibly be a sugar lining to this whole fiasco? The idea of a coal-fired ethanol plant should remove all illusions that we are actually trying to solve our energy problems by producing ethanol. Instead, let's look at ethanol plants as what they are: an elaborate scheme to prop up corn prices in the Midwest, and to heck with any of the negative side-effects, including soil erosion, pesticide and herbicide use, increase in food prices, nitrogen run-off into the Gulf of Mexico, the drop in the Mexican peso and the rise in Mexican poverty due to the increasing price of tortillas, and on and on.

I'm also tired of Democratic politicians pandering to the corn-ethanol crowd. The standard party line is: "ethanol is a transitional fuel, until the technology improves so that we can..." and then they fill in the blank with something like cellulosic ethanol. Cellulosic ethanol could come from a variety of materials, including prairie grass, wood chips, or agricultural waste. Credible people argue for the feasibility of cellulosic ethanol, but the fact is, the wisdom of the markets has yet to support commercial production of cellulosic ethanol. If politicians really believe that corn-based ethanol plants are a transitional energy source, then they are perpetuating the same throw away mentality that got us into all this trouble in the first place.

I live in urban sprawl

2007-02-28T10:53:00.000-06:00

Some of the nicest people I know also live in urban sprawl. We are all creatures of our culture, we like big lots, open spaces and quiet, that's why we live in areas that provide these amenities. Everyone moves to their urban sprawl neighborhood hoping things will remain open and undeveloped. The things that attracted us here in the first place attract others, so the rural beauty that we loved is inevitably gobbled up by new development. But our world is changing, and our consciousness is changing because of what we know about global warming. It's time to stop doing business as usual.

Recently, the Mayor and City Council in our fair city signed on to the U.S. Mayors Climate Protection Agreement. One of the elements of this agreement, which has been signed by 400 Mayors nationwide, is an agreement to adopt anti-sprawl land use policies. It's worthwhile to stop for a moment and consider what urban sprawl is. As the Wikipedia entry on the topic suggests, urban sprawl is a loaded term, but it generally refers to single-use zoning, low density zoning, and car-dependent development. Leap-frog development is also a type of urban sprawl.

Many of the Cities signing on to the Climate Protection Agreement live in areas that are defined by sprawl: Miami, Florida, Seattle, Washington, Austin, Texas, Atlanta, Georgia. These cities are located in regions facing huge pressures for development. If you go to the website for the Mayors Climate Protection Agreement, and read the Best Practices guidelines for Cities, you see that there is a major focus on muncipal building improvements, green building principles, reducing car trips, retrofitting municipal fleets, and so on. These are all excellent projects and I applaud them. It is significant, however that the Best Practices Guide does not include any examples of Cities that are boasting about their efforts to combat sprawl.

Now, my car-dependent neighborhood is facing a proposal from a developer who wants to turn farmland into 37 single family housing units, done up in the traditional way. Everything the developer is proposing conforms to the current city regulations. How would anti-sprawl land use policies deal with the prospect of future development in my neighborhood?

Here are some suggestions:
1. Put a moratorium on new development in sprawl neighborhoods, until city planners come up with zoning designations on the remaining developable land that allow for a mix of residential, commercial, office uses, and even community agriculture that can be accessed by pedestrians or bicyclists. This implies a return to mixed use neighborhoods.
2. Provide incentives for developers to cluster housing in a manner that preserves open space, allows land for bicycling, walking, parks, and community gardens. Allow for housing diversity beyond single family housing.
3. Provide pedestrian and bicycle paths on pervious surfaces. This will allow natural water flow into the ground and prevent erosion. Pervious concrete is an idea whose time has come.
4. Avoid the use of curb and gutter and utilize vegetated open swales, preferably "engineered swales" with a permeable soil base.

Urban sprawl is energy-intensive because it increases our reliance on single occupancy vehicles. If we want to live more sustainably in the future, and become less dependent on our cars, we need to find ways to encourage city planners and developers to re-think how neighborhoods on the city's edge grow.

Snow Day

2007-02-24T15:27:00.000-06:00

My brain is on hold again. Thursday I left to visit my mother, a 3 hour drive away from here, then Friday I was forced to return home to beat the big storm hitting the Upper Midwest.

This morning my decision to return early was vindicated by 12" of new snow. It is challenging to dig out from a snowfall of that depth, even the fresh powdery kind. But I'm not complaining. It's kind of lovely to be put on house arrest due to the weather, especially when you are well stocked with food and entertainment. I also experienced the pleasure of neighborliness; as we were shovelling our driveway, a neighbor came out with his snow blower and made short work of the some of the heaviest drifts.

It was an odd snow storm in that it was accompanied thunder, which we listened to in the middle of the night as we watched the snow swirl.

Added interest was provided courtesy the National Weather Service, which has a LaCrosse, Wisconsin website with many interesting and desirable factoids on weather conditions, including snowfall totals around the region, satellite images, radar images, probability maps, drought information, and so on.

This is the most substantial snowfall I can remember in the last four years, the first huge mound of snow I created by shovelling in a long time. Its rarity makes it a pleasure, and also, thanks to the Weather Service information, the knowledge that we need this precipitation; as the map shows that most of Minnesota and Wisconsin is either abnormally dry or in severe drought conditions.

It looks like the snowfalls generated by this storm are heaviest in southern Minnesota and southern Wisconsin. I would like it to continue snowing here, but also hope some snow storms visit northern Minnesota, Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Last summer we visited Copper Harbor, Michigan for the first time. It is a lovely place, but I have never seen a more parched looking woods in my years of hiking the woods of the Upper Midwest. I found myself thinking of those woods, and wishing they would get rained on. Not only were all the lawns brown, but the forest ground cover looked collapsed and thirsty.

Now, I hope they will get some snow. Some parts of the country just expect massive winter snows, and when they don't arrive, it's odd. Check out George's Eagle Harbor Web, which reports that the U.P. is at a record low snowfall mark, and that Lake Superior is a "foot below average for early February." The good news is, extreme weather events are convincing more and more people that global warming is real. Scientists hasten to point out that extreme weather conditions do not in and of themselves point to climate change. But you can start to sort through what reputable scientists are willing to say about global warming by visiting the website of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The findings have been praised, parsed, and pooh-poohed all across the political spectrum. I wonder how many of the deniers have actually gone to the website to review the data as presented by the scientists. Oh well. Enjoy the snow!

Prioritize solutions, rather than problems

2007-02-17T08:09:00.000-06:00

I recently listened to a provocative talk given by Economist Bjorn Lomborg at the TED conference (Technology, Entertainment and Design) in Monterey, California. I listened, of course on-line. If you go to their website, www.ted.com, you can listen to a whole host of interesting and mind-bending talks. When it comes to thinking about problems, says Lomborg, we have two problems: one is that we should be thinking about solutions, and the other is that we should be employing economic tools to prioritize the solutions.

Solutions to some of the pressing world problems include big ideas like providing clean drinking water, putting a tax on carbon use, eliminating communicable diseases, and so on. After looking at the top ten world problems and their potential solutions, Lomborg said the best possible solution we should be working on is providing needed micronutrients such as vitamin A, iodine and iron to malnourished children and adults. This could be done on a cost-effective basis, according to the World Bank, and it would have a big impact.

Lomborg, an economist at the Copenhagen Business School, is not popular with a lot of environmentalists. His book, the Skeptical Environmentalist (which I have not read), unleashed a firestorm of controversy. Questions were raised about the statistics used in his analysis, his more optimistic view of environmental progress, and his rejection of the carbon tax and a number of other environmental solutions. I can't weigh in on any of these matters. What I resonate with is the practicality of evaluating the cost-effectiveness of solutions. He does not deny the reality of global warming.

My focus tends to be on world problems with the context of local solutions. Global warming is a world problem that could affect several billion people, and it is a problem in which local and even individual solutions are relevant. All of the potential solutions that might be examined have social, economic and health effects. While renewable energies such as solar and wind (especially in Minnesota) need to be supported and expanded, they are expensive solutions that usually lack local applications. The biggest impact for the smallest expenditure will come from energy conservation. An article in today's Washington Post (subscription required), documents the effectiveness of California's long-term efforts to conserve energy, through regulatory changes, building efficiency standards, more efficient refrigerators, and changing the color of a home's roof.

According to the article: "Today, as an energy consumer, California is more like thrifty Denmark than the rest of the energy-guzzling United States. While the average American burns 12,000 kilowatt-hours a year of electricity, the average Californian burns less than 7,000 -- and that's counting renewable energy sources."

There are plenty of lessons in this story for us in Minnesota. In contrast to California, Minnesota gets a much higher percentage of its energy from cheap coal. Our electric rates are 7.2 cents per killowat hour, compared to 13 cents in California. "Cost drives conservation," according to Chris Cooper of the Network for New Energy Choices. Electric rates are supposed to be much, much higher in Europe, but I have been unable to find any sources documenting this. With our reliance on cheap coal, we have poor incentives for electric energy conservation in Minnesota.

What is the moral of the story I am trying to weave? It is that if you want to be part of the solution to global warming, energy conservation is the most practical, cost-effective thing you can do. Plant trees on the south side of your house, to provide passive cooling in the summer. Carpool, to save transportation costs by as much as 50%. Turn down the thermostat. Buy energy-efficient appliances. Check my other website for 101 other sustainable solutions you can explore.

How we pay attention

2007-02-16T12:46:00.000-06:00

One of the biggest challenges when returning from a vacation is the immediacy of everyday demands and schedules that must be re-encountered, along with mounds of mail to be sorted, bills to pay, and so on. So you are penalized for the relaxation that you experienced while away, with a short period in which you try to catch up to your former self.

The other morning I woke up fully intending to blog about the transportation system in Costa Rica, but then life intruded and it never got done. So instead of the long, pithy essay I was going to write about it, I'll give you the extra short version: beware of the roads you improve, because they can lead to more tourism, which is a decidedly mixed blessing. Some of the Costa Rican roads I experienced close to the major ecological attractions are the worst I have seen anywhere in the world. They serve their purpose, which is providing access, but not to the hoards of people. It seems to be a rule in life these days: the beautiful places in the world are being loved to death by development and traffic.

Back to my post-vacation musing: it certainly does seem as though daily life quickly reasserts itself, with the half-life of travel memories fading rapidly by the minute. But the body seems to want to acknowledge the vast changes in scenery and diet, and so I am experiencing something like a sense of arrested development, not knowing entirely what to pay attention to next.

Prior to the trip I was feeling breathless with the speed with which more people are paying attention to environmental issues. The denizens of beaches, tour buses and hotels in Costa Rica and other vacation spots are paying attention to completely different things. The background chatter on the road is about logistics, beauty, expenses, opportunities, enjoyment. Who is to say that one thing or the other is what we should be paying attention to? What I know for sure is that we are what we pay attention to.

If you are in a situation like I am, where you have a choice about what you can pay attention to, rejoice! At times like these, when I am uncertain what to pay attention to, I return to the words of my favorite sages. In this case, the poet Rumi seems to capture a sense of what is necessary:

" When you do things from your soul,
You feel a river moving in you, a joy.
When actions comes from another section,
the feeling disappears.

Don't let others lead you. They may be blind,
or worse, vultures. Reach for the rope
of God. And what is that?

Putting aside self-will...

Don't insist on going where you think you want to go.
Ask the way to the Spring.

Your living pieces will form a harmony."

From RUMI: We are Three, Coleman Barks, trans.

Not living in future tense

2007-02-11T08:26:00.000-06:00

One reason to go on vacation is not to think, to purposefully stop thinking about whatever was on your mind when you left, to see the world anew from your new perspective, on the beach at Playa Samara in Costa Rica, or as you sit in the spacious lobby of a hotel in the outskirts of San Jose.

The thinking work of travel is what to see, when to go, how to get there, and it flows into conversation with fellow travellers from Australia, Barcelona, Denmark, and Portland, Oregon, all of them coming and going, filing away their impressions, food fancies, gripes and satisfactions. The peak moments of travel arise from glimpses of beauty, sudden camaraderie with fellow travellers, the sensuous pleasures of fresh fruit or warm ocean water, all fleeting, fleeting.

It is good to spend time observing those who are not preoccupied with global warming, but are carrying on with daily life, from the boys playing soccer on a field directly across from the Catholic Church, to an old man watering his plants, to a toucan sleeping in a tree, to a tarantula hunkered in his hole.

Life will go on in some form, even if the ice caps melt. There is plenty of change unfolding in the daily rhythms of life without constantly sorting through future scenarios of gloom and doom or even of positive transformation. It is enough, once in a while, to float on the waves of the moment, content to be precisely where you are. Costa Rica has a wonderful slogan that captures this feeling: Pura Vida.

Carbon credits in action

2007-02-07T20:29:00.000-06:00

I am writing this on the road, from Santa Elena, Costa Rica, where we recentlyvisited the Monteverde Cloud Forest, a vast preserve that protects manydifferent species of plants, animals, fungus and insects.We walked by a sign that indicated that the preservation of this particularforest preserve was funded in part, by carbon credits, funds given the CostaRican government by other governments and businesses to protect lands likethese, that are contributing positively to our carbon balance. It makes mevery curious to learn more about the financial side of how the carbon creditswork.It was good to see with my own eyes the good work that is being done in forestprotection. Our guide pointed out various plants that produce dopamine, usedfor Parkinson's disease, another one that was being explored for its benefitsin the AIDS virus, and a bee that produced honey that was supposed to be verygood for healing the eyes.

I asked if there were local herbalists who collected the knowledge about the plants and provided herbs to area customers. Our guides opinion was that the grandmothers had that knowledge, but now theypreferred to live easier lives. You can look at the forest as being a vast storehouse of knowledge, precious notonly for the carbon it is secuestering but for the healing properties that havenot been discovered. The forest is also intrinsically interesting for its beauty and diversity, the color and variety that is diminishing in most of theenvironments that surround us in the USA.

The roads that have taken us between various locations in Costa Rica range from good to horrible. One lodge owner said he hoped they would stay that way; good roads attract all the wrong kind of development. There is also an undercurrentof worry about tourism, the number one industry in Costa Rica. Since 9-11,tourism has been dropping. It is clearly a business that has its advantagesand disadvantages. The beautiful places in the world are being loved todeath--love expressed in the form of development. It is good to see theseissues being grappled with by a number of enlightened local lodging owners, whotake pains to use sustainable practices and educate their customers about thebeauty of this area.

Start a community carpool club?

2007-01-31T10:53:00.000-06:00

Last night I heard Wes Jackson, founder and current president of the Land Institute, speak at our local university. Jackson is renowned for his work in sustainable agriculture.
Like everyone else these days, he is very focused on the issue of global warming. Jackson said: “We hear unfathomable things from the climate scientists about global warming. What keeps us from emergency action?”

He compared our inertia with that of the Germans in the run-up to the Holocaust. Many people could see that something dire was coming, yet they did nothing. Jackson was very critical of those who think that by becoming more efficient in our use of energy, we will actually save energy. Technology and greater efficiency is not an answer, according to Jackson. Even though the efficiency of many systems has increased, our energy usage and consumption of natural resources still continues on its relentless upward climb. This conundrum is know as Jevon’s paradox.

The biggest return on investment will come from energy conservation, Jackson said. We also need to start measuring our progress by how resilient we can become, rather than how efficient we are in extraction.

Jackson’s talk came just before a trip that we have been planning for some time. This morning, I started to check into the long-term parking options at the Minneapolis airport, and found that the cheapest parking solution will cost us about $100. So, in addition to generating carbon by our trip to Minneapolis, and even more carbon on our airline trip, we have an additional $100 out of pocket for parking. If we could carpool to the airport with others, think of what we could save!

I have been a long-time advocate of carpooling, but have noticed that people seem reluctant to deal with the practicalities of hooking up with others on a drive. For those who are computer-friendly, however, there are wonderful systems available for putting like-minded people together. One of these is Google Groups. You can start a group of any kind, and set it up on any terms you want.

So, I decided to create a restricted community carpool club, with the idea that people could join on a completely voluntary basis, they could access the club messages via daily email digests or by visiting the website online, and they would register under their real names, with the idea that we were creating a network of trust. They would have to apply to the group manager (me), to get in. This morning I sent an invitation to join the club to 110 local people who are in my address book.

The way it will work is, if Susie Smith joins the group and offers a ride, and Laura Walker knows and trusts her, the carpooling match can be made with great confidence. However, if Laura Walker knows something about Susie that makes her reluctant to share car space, she can simply seek other transportation options. The idea is to make the group fully transparent and fully voluntary, and see if this helps overcome some of the reluctance to carpool.

People who join the group can be counted as visionary and courageous folks who are willing to join an experiment. The carpool club offers a way to start reducing carbon use, to help others, save money, make an impact on global warming, create community, and get to know others a little better. I am hoping this will appeal to everyone’s common sense and desire to make a difference.

If the people in this picture, likely from a Third World country, are willing to go to this extent to travel together, think of all we could do with our larger, more comfortable vehicles!

I have blogged on this before, but if you plan to travel by air, and would like to pay down your carbon usage, please visit Native Energy and consider paying an offset for your carbon usage. You make a contribution based on the amount of carbon generated by your activity, and Native Energy uses the funds to build wind farms in the Midwest. These carbon offsets are also known as Green tags. If you would like to learn more about carbon credits, there is a great article on the subject over at World Changing.

Suspending our point of view

2007-01-27T09:07:00.000-06:00

Yesterday was a busy day, what with blogging, volunteering at our local film festival, and attending a legislative forum on environmental issues. When we arrived at our final destination, a folk concert, my mind was spinning, processing all that had happened during the day. This is what happens when an introvert has a day that looks like an extrovert’s.

A background issue that is always going through my mind lately is: how can we more effectively collaborate? Lots of good people are becoming attracted to the environmental movement. But when we get together in meetings to try to decide on a unified plan of action, conflict, inertia, anger, fussiness, and a whole range of unproductive human responses begin to intervene. In our individualist culture we are so used to being our own masters of the universe, that when we arrive at the group we feel a great sense of un-ease. What to do about this?

I am not entirely sure yet, but a new book is pointing me toward some new ways to look at the issue. Presence: Human Purpose and the Field of the Future, by Peter Senge, Otto Scharmer, Betty Sue Flowers, and Joseph Jaworski, discusses how people can work together in organizations, comprehending the whole while they set aside their narrow point of view.

The book seems to offer some directions to expand on some of the things I learned on the tennis court recently. Namely, I have an intuition that my growth and development is linked with that of others, and that I can change how I think about things so that I am not the only one winning, but others win and progress as well. Thinking in this way requires us to suspend our normal point of view, to not only think about me me me me, but to think positively, and with some interest, about the experience of others in the room. It is not always easy to think in this way, but it is definitely an adventure.

Last night at the concert, I tried suspending my point of view in this way: I was finding it difficult to listen to the music because of the traffic going on in my own mind. I decided to try an experiment, projecting my mind into the minds of the 300 or so people who were also attending the concert. So I wasn’t thinking my thoughts, I was trying to be unified with all the other minds. This was a very interesting experience, in that it allowed me to actually begin listening to the music. The song listened to in that way was fantastic! My own mental traffic receded to a very minor position, and the beauty of the music rushed to the fore.

The concert setting is a pretty unthreatening place to experiment with tuning into the collective mind. I’ll report further on my future experiments in more challenging settings, like small groups where personalities and positions are well staked out. I believe that learning how to collaborate and work effectively together is a new frontier, especially for a person like me who has been an independent operator for most of my work life.

Will Steger and Global Warming 101

2007-01-26T13:45:00.000-06:00

Last night Will Steger, famed explorer of the Arctic regions and Antarctica, and J. Drake Hamilton of Fresh Energy(a nonprofit organization interested in charting a new energy course) presented a talk/slide show on global warming to an audience of about 1000. They reported speaking to similar size crowds all over Minnesota in recent months.

A great awakening is occurring in the population around global warming. The pictures and likely reality of huge chunks of ice surging into the ocean, raising sea levels and changing the climate beyond recognition is starting to penetrate our consciousness. The central question posed by the audience to the speakers after the presentation was: what can we do? Scientist say we need to reduce our carbon emissions by 80% by the year 2050. How will we ever do that?

Yesterday I reported on my efforts to save money and reduce my electricity use with a new light fixture. There are probably many other things I need to do to reduce my carbon use. The 310 pounds of CO2 saved over a four year period by my light fixture will be erased by the carbon generated by my next 600 mile car trip. We need lots of people regularly doing many small things to cut our energy use.

We have been reading the book The Low Carbon Diet: a 30 day program to lose 5,000 pounds, by David Gershon. This book outlines a number of steps readers can take to reduce their carbon footprint. We are already taking most of the actions outlined in the book. The next step is the more difficult one—working to enlist our neighbors in the effort. We’ve got to find a way to send the message beyond those who have already been convinced, to others who are living in the belief that the status quo is bound to continue. This will call on us to develop some expertise in the arts of persuasion and collaboration.

Last night’s audience was filled with believers, people ready to support alternative energy, buy CFL’s, and send postcards to legislators. The elephant in the room that was not mentioned, however, is our consumption habit. David Kostin, investment banker at Goldman Sachs, says that “Americans have shown a complete lack of self-control. The personal savings rate is at its lowest point ever, and has actually been negative since April 2005.” So, as is true with every issue intertwined with global warming, there are other ample reasons besides the climate to change our habits.

Amory Lovins, Co-CEO of the Rocky Mountain Institute, and an energy activist, says that there are a lot of easy energy-efficiency solutions that businesses and individuals can implement. He admits, however, that “the last time the U.S. saved energy very quickly—expanding GDP 19% while shrinking energy us 6%, during 1979-86—the main motivator was costly energy.” In the absence of rising oil prices, it remains to be seen whether images of starving polar bears, and warnings about the other disastrous costs of business-as-usual, will penetrate the consumer’s brain, and actually inspire behavior change. Talk is cheap, but I look forward to seeing the evidence.

How many environmentalists does it take to change a light bulb?

2007-01-25T09:50:00.000-06:00

Answer, only one, but it takes her six hours to research all the consequences

Maybe I exaggerate, but this decision sure seemed complex. We needed to change the ceiling light in our kitchen. The original fixture was probably installed when the house was built in 1976. It featured 8, 40 watt bulbs. We probably would have kept the fixture, but one of the sockets went bad, so we were left with seven good bulbs and one burnt-out one.

We have all been learning that we should be replacing our incandescent light bulbs with compact fluorescents (CFL), which screw into regular light sockets and cost 70% less energy. Even Walmart has gotten on the band-wagon. It wants to persuade every household to buy at least one CFL. There’s no question that this campaign could have an enormously positive impact. General Electric, which built its business on the old incandescent bulbs, is participating in the revolution. "The real issue is, if we don't do it, someone else will," says GE's ecomagination vice president, Lorraine Bolsinger, of Wal-Mart's effort to push CFLs. "It's old thinking to imagine that you can hold on to a business model and outsmart the consumer. You can't." It is good to see evidence that some businesses are capable of abandoning the zero sum thinking that General Motors used to kill its electric cars.

My decision to install a new ceiling fixture should have been a simple one. However, I learned along the way that compact fluorescents are not designed to work with dimmer switches. I had installed a dimmer switch on the light earlier as an energy-saving measure, so I would have to remove that.

The second task was to find a fixture large enough to cover the space taken by the previous fixture, a square flush-mounted model. This is where a lot of the woman-hours were expended, mostly because we had a 14” square fixture that needed to be covered by a 20” diameter ceiling light. A lot of the energy-efficient ceiling models use circline bulbs, round fluorescent bulbs, and this is the kind of light I purchased. These bulbs are very efficient, and are now designed to put out a softer, higher quality light. My circline bulb is supposed to last 6 years, or 15,000 hours. The negative side of fluorescent and compact fluorescent lights is that they contain mercury. Therefore, when they burn out, they must be disposed of according to the instructions from your local hazardous waste authority.

A surprising number of fixtures are designed specifically to work with halogen bulbs. These bulbs are 10-20% more efficient than incandescent bulbs, and they may last longer. Halogens burn hotter than incandescents, so they must be enclosed in a suitable housing.

LED lights (light-emitting diodes) are not suitable for ceiling lights, but they are the most energy efficient lighting method. They have a very long life span, some up to 100,000 hours. Tree huggers who like Christmas lights should be purchasing LED lights.

Wikipedia has a great site where you can compare the efficiency of incandescent lights to CFL’s. Here is my assessment of the cost and environmental savings of the new ceiling fixture over the first 3000 hours of service:

Old light fixture: electricity cost of 320 watts (800 hours/year @ $.08 per KWh): $76.80 plus cost of replacing 8 bulbs twice, $27.04, for a total cost of $103.84. Total Kwh usage:256 Kwh. We generate 1.55 pounds of CO2 per Kwh, so I would generate 396.8 pounds of CO2.

New light fixture: electricity cost of 72 watts (800 hours/year): $17.28, plus cost of two circline bulbs: $20.04, for a total cost of $37.32. Total Kwh usage: 57.6. Using the same estimate, I generate 89.28 pounds of CO2.

My circline bulbs will have another 12000 hours of service remaining, so the cost and environmental savings will be adding up, year and after year. Thrifty old me loves this!

Update:

Some interesting factoids on lighting from Adam Siegel, Dailykos blogger:

Lighting, today, accounts for 22 percent of US electrical use.
Much of this lighting is inefficiently used.
And, much of the lighting is inefficient. Compact Fluorescent Lightbulbs (CFLs) use roughly 26% of the electricity of traditional incandescent light bulbs (that date from the days of Thomas Edison) while lasting roughly eight times longer.
Light-Emitting Diodes (LEDs), which are penetrating into more lighting markets virtually every day, use roughly 20% of the electricity of CFLs for comparative lighting requirements. In other words, LEDs offer the potential for an over 90% reduction in electricity use from incandescent bulbs and will last almost over 50 times as long.

Affirmations in action

2007-01-21T07:42:00.000-06:00

I've been using a book called The Life We are Given, by George Leonard and Michael Murphy, to direct my thinking over the past few months. Leonard and Murphy were early leaders in the Human Potential Movement, and wrote their book to provide people with ideas for daily spiritual, physical, and mental practices that could help us grow. One of their main suggestions is that individuals construct personal affirmations, visionary statements or mantras written in the present tense that direct the positive steps they would like to take.

I've been repeating one of my affirmations over and over on this blog, which is to bring a beginner's body, mind, enthusiasm and zest to my art, writing, community work and tennis. Now I'm here to report on the results of putting this affirmation in action on the tennis court.

I have been involved in some competitive tennis matches organized as a round-robin. Eight women are matched up with a different person in the group every two weeks, play a singles match, and report on their results. Wednesday night I showed up for my appointed match, with my positive and zestful affirmation in mind. Even so, I was nervous, I wanted to win, and I could feel my heart rate speeding up. I lost the first set, although I thought I was playing pretty well. On the break between the sets, my opponent told me that she thought she was playing better than she had ever played. This intrigued me. As I was about to begin the second set, this thought occurred to me: what if my good progress on the tennis court was actually connected to my opponent's progress? Was it a mistake to focus on winning, when instead I could focus on the win-win proposition that both of us would grow in our skill and enjoyment? I immediately could feel that this was an excellent affirmation, and that I felt pleased and excited about affirming tennis as an avenue for both our growth, rather than winning. I experienced a surge of positive energy.

I went on to win the next set and the match after a lengthy tie-breaker. The match lasted 2 hours and 15 minutes, an extraordinarily long period of time for a middle aged person to play singles tennis. We both played well. But my biggest excitement was not only the win, but the power of the new affirmation. Could this idea, that my growth and progress was enhanced by the growth and progress of others, be applied to other areas?

My insight was confirmed by another writer for whom I have great respect. Beatrice Bruteau, in her book Radical Optimism, suggests that the ideal for human life in community is "inter-independence, not the sharing of lacks but the sharing of abundance." She has been studying the evidence from science and mathematics that "cooperation is a natural feature of an interactive system and that under certain conditions it is more advantageous than exploitation. We have been used to thinking of life as a "zero-sum" game (what one wins the other loses: positive gain and negative losses sum to zero); most of life is actually not zero-sum, but a game in which either all parties gain or all parties lose."

The negative effects of our zero-sum thinking have been demonstrated in many areas. The other night we saw the film, Who Killed the Electric Car? a documentary which describes how General Motors created a well-designed, quiet, fast, exhaust-free electric car in response to California air quality regulations, and then proceeded to work hard to rescind the regulations, dampen demand for the car, and collude with other manufacturers to destroy the infrastructure for electric cars. Why did they do so? After they created the car, they concluded that such cars, which require far less maintenance than our traditional cars with internal combustion systems, would destroy economies of dealers, who depend on our expenditures for oil changes and repairs to stay afloat. General Motors eventually took back the leased cars from their customers, and destroyed every one.

Think of the progress that we could be making in so many fields, if we learned to see ourselves as living in an inter-connected system in which our progress is mutually inter-dependent! My personal hope is to see how this new affirmation, which was tested and lived on the tennis court could be applied and lived out in other areas of my life.

Films and support for your environmental passions

2007-01-18T13:05:00.000-06:00

Lately I’ve noticed more people interested in global warming, sustainability issues and environmental issues. Numerous churches, including my own, showed the movie “An Inconvenient Truth.” Without any prompting on my part, the Christian education director asked for advice on environmental films that could be shared with students. Then I ran into someone who was concerned about the number of people driving single occupancy vehicles into our city to work. “What could be done about it?” she wondered aloud. Yet another friend told me of the heroic efforts he had been making to bicycle to work. These are all anecdotes, yet they give me the feeling that something is stirring in this land.

I think a lot of us have had the illusion for a long time that we are the only ones who care about the environment. If you go to any earth day celebration, you’ll clear up that misconception. But I think the sense of isolation speaks to the absence of any sane or supportive rhetoric coming out of our state, regional and local political leaders for a long time.

Four years ago I told a candidate for the Minnesota House that I hoped he would speak out about environmental issues. In the course of the campaign, he did not do so. (He lost, probably for different reasons). All the stinking consultants were advising candidates to lay low on environmental issues. No one wanted to sound like an extremist. The right wing noise machine did a great job of marrying the word environmental to extremist. As a result, those of us who cared about the environment did our bit, got our recycling together, engaged in small-scale guerrilla warfare whenever a particularly noxious proposal gathered steam. But we felt we were alone. And now, in 2007, the times have changed, and we realize we aren’t alone. There probably was a huge silent majority who was similarly cowed.

It is impossible to underestimate the contribution Al Gore has made with his advocacy and especially An Inconvenient Truth. He is giving cover to people who care about the environment. It’s not an interest that is reserved for the paid environmentalists. A great number of people, artists, Sunday school teachers, farmers, hunters and business people care deeply about the environment.

For all who hope to educate themselves and others, a couple of films are highly recommended and can be affordably viewed by individuals and groups:

An Inconvenient Truth (2006). Available from any DVD store

The True Cost of Food. A 15 minute funny and educational film prepared by the Sierra Club. Available free or as a download.

Thirst. A documentary about the rush to privatize water around the world. 62 minutes. Can be purchased by an individual for $37.

Who Killed the Electric Car? (2006) A documentary about a futuristic car that threatened the business model of those who created it. Available at any DVD outlet. 91 minutes.

End of Suburbia (2005). Introduces the topic of peak oil, and how oil depletion will cause the collapse of the American Dream. 77 minutes. Available from its producer for $26.

The Great Warming. A Canadian documentary on global warming. Premiered on PBS. Check out availability on their website. 90 minutes.

Further film viewing ideas can be explored at the Grinning Planet website. Or, if you are going to be near southeastern Minnesota, check out the multiple movie and speaker opportunities at the Frozen River Film Festival, January 25-28.

Values of the next generation

2007-01-12T18:12:00.000-06:00

Yesterday I listened to Midday on Minnesota Public Radio, and the featured speaker was Judy Woodruff, who recently interviewed people aged 16-25 to learn more about their values. Woodruff, a journalist who has worked at CNN, NBC, and PBS, was surprised by some of the things she learned in her interviews, which were apparently corroborated by a larger study sponsored by the Pew Charitable Trust.

She reported that people in this age group, which she calls "the Generation Next" are more liberal than their parents, but 81 percent say that "getting rich" is their main goal, while 51% want to be famous. These are mind-boggling figures that reflect either incredible optimism or incredible naivete. The only way we can make sense of these changing values is to realize that human consciousness itself is in a continual process of flux, so that our value orientations are not those of our parents or our children. Value orientations evolve based on a complex series of life changes, variations in world conditions, and new sources of information that form each generation.

I've blogged before about Spiral Dynamics, the developmental theory that says that human consciousness evolves, so that as a baby we are focused on survival, as a child we want to exert our power, then gradually we learn to follow rules, and later we become focused on personal fulfillment in a rather calculated way. This latter stage of development is called the Orange Meme. In the book Spiral Dynamics, the orange meme is described as follows:

Strive for autonomy and independence
Seek out 'the good life' and material abundance
Progress through searching out the best solution
Enhance living for many through science and technology
Play to win and enjoy competition
Learn through tried and true experience.

The Orange Meme is non-dogmatic, achievement-oriented, image-conscious, competitive, calculating and strategic. According Ken Wilber, the Orange Meme is seen in "The Enlightenment, Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged , Wall Street, emerging middle classes around the world, cosmetics industry, trophy hunting, colonialism, the Cold War, fashion industry, materialism, secular humanism, liberal self-interest." He adds that Orange Meme individuals represent " 30% of the population, 50% of the power."

I had to laugh when I saw the cartoon at the top of this blog, which was originally published in the New Yorker. It's a cartoon that expresses the value chasm between people who are in the Orange Meme, and other value orientations like my own that are more focused on collective challenges. The Generation Next probably is proceeding with a high degree of optimism, determination, and pragmatism, which are not bad qualities. We need to have some of these qualities if we are to have any hope of attacking issues like global warming, avian flu, or peak oil. I would be unable to labor away on the various sustainability projects that I enjoy without a certain amount of optimism about the ability of people to make change, either individually or in groups. But my will to work is motivated by pessimism about the environment and long-term economic trends. So I suspect that "Generation Next" will be in for a rude awakening.

Many of the people who deny global warming is happening, or would rather close their eyes to the phenomenon, have an Orange Meme value orientation. On the other hand, some may be hoping to make a profit from the challenges posed by these "end of the world scenarios." Regardless of your orientation, I just discovered a new site that features actual scientists discussing climate change issues. Check out Real Climate for yourself. I'll put the listing up on my blogroll of honor.

Getting organized

2007-01-09T20:24:00.000-06:00

On Sunday a group of people met at our church to watch "An Inconvenient Truth," the documentary on global warming. About 70 people showed up for the movie, and 40 stayed afterwards to discuss their reactions to the fil and possible local responses.

The solutions that were offered to cut our carbon emissions varied widely. One person wanted to leave notes on the windshields of cars left idling outside filling stations (suggesting they turn the car off!). Another wanted to question state subsidies for corn ethanol plants. A third wanted people to participate more thoughtfully in recycling programs. Every time people meet around a table to discuss solutions to global warming, there are many ideas and little consensus.

We invited people to come to at least one more meeting to dicuss how our congregation could craft responses to the implications of global warming. At least 20 indicated a willingness to do so. What is the best way to make use of this willingness? I've been reading about how to be an effective organizer and have yet to come to a good conclusion.

Here are some issues that affect the organizing task:

1. How do you find enough people who are willing to spend time to learn about the topic of global warming? What is the best vehicle and strategy for learning?

2. Is it best to keep working with people who already believe global warming is a serious problem, or is it important to start arousing the consciousness of those who are unaware of this issue?

3. How do you reach young people, who are so plugged into their Ipods and other forms of electronic communication that they are already overwhelmed and over-dosed on information?

4. What arouses people's self-interest around activism on global warming? It's all very well to say that we should worry about the polar bears, but most people need a more direct connection to the issue to understand why they should care.

5. Is the best strategy to find a worthwhile project combatting global warming, say planting trees, that allows people to create a connection to the topic through action?

I am going to be researching answers to these questions. In the meantime, I started re-reading a classic book from the 1970's, Rules for Radicals by Saul Alinsky. It is amazing how fresh and topical this work sounds 35 years after it was written. What I appreciate about Alinsky is how he manages to be pragmatic and optimistic at the same time. He regards organizing as a creative process, which is certainly part of its attraction for me.

Here are some of the quotes that seemed so fresh and prescient to me:
" As an organizer, I start from where the world is, as it is, not as I would like it to be."
"Dostoevski said that taking a new step is what people fear most. Any revolutionary change must be preceded by a passive, affirmative, non-challenging attitude toward change among the masses of our people. They must feel so frustrated, so defeated, so lost, so futureless in the prevailing system that they are willing to let go of the past and chance the future."
"...an organizer...is a political relativist. He accepts the late Justice Learned Hand's statement that "the mark of a free man is that ever-gnawing inner uncertainty as to where or not he is right."

According to Alinsky, the world is divided into 3 types of people: the Haves, who are dedicated to maintaining the status quo; the Have Nots, who are resigned and fatalistic, but have glowing embers of hope inside, and the Have-a-Little-Want Mores (i.e., the middle class), who are tepid and rooted in inertia, but nonetheless have been the source of the great change leaders of the past centuries. Alinsky cites Gandhi, Lenin, and Thomas Jefferson as some of the many change agents from this group.

The Haves are doing their best to ignore global warming. The Have Nots are too preoccupied with survival to pay much attention to it, but they will suffer the most when gas prices start to rise again, when electricity costs rise because of the need for more air conditioning, and when social systems of support get overwhelmed by the rising costs of obesity, and the health care impacts of global warming.

I will pass along two websites that seem to provide a good introductory overview to community organizing. The First is the Neighborhood Funders Group Toolbox on Organizing. The second that is particularly germaine to organizing around global warming, is the Citizen's Handbook, a community-building resource from Vancouver, British Colombia. An excellent resource for congregations interested in organizing around global warming is the Minnesota-based Congregations Caring for Creation, which has lots of excellent ideas and resources.

What does sustainability mean?

2007-01-06T10:53:00.000-06:00

When I was planning a week-long public relations campaign to persuade people to walk, carpool, bike, and take the bus, I was going to call it, "Sustainable Transportation Week." A PR consultant told me that I should change the name, because no one understands what sustainable means.

Since this blog purports to be about sustainability, I thought it would be worth something to try to understand the word and idea with more depth and clarity. In the process, I discovered a fun new website on the origin of words. I looked up the word "sustain" and found that it comes from old French-sustenir: "hold up, endure," and also is related to sustenance, the "action of sustaining life by food." The term sustainable growth dates from 1965. This is a fairly recent use of the term and may account for why it is still confusing to some people.

The term "sustainable" in general usage often refers to the preservation of natural resources. This morning I got going on this train of thought for a simple reason: I was thinking about serving refreshments at the upcoming showing on "An Inconvenient Truth," and wondered what kind of liquid refreshments to provide. Pop cans and plastic pop bottles aren't sustainable and don't preserve natural resources. Moreover, the demand for Coca-Cola, Mountain Dew and other kinds of carbonated beverages is an artifact of our poorly-designed, consumer-oriented society. It just takes a small amount of extra labor to substitute for the enormous waste of buying and disposing of commercial pop bottles. (I found a lovely recipe here for Southern Tea that I will make available for those at our movie showing who want a sweet drink with caffeine).

Does the goal of creating a sustainable world seem simple or arduous? I think it only seems arduous because we have become accustomed to both convenience and poor design. Every day I am reminded about the effects of poor design. I formerly worked as a city planner, "designing" neighborhoods like ours that are totally dependent on the car to provide access to grocery stores and other vital services. It is extremely difficult now that the neighborhood is built up to factor in such services. We love our house, which was built in 1976, but think that it was poorly designed from a sustainability perspective. For example, cathedral ceilings and an open floor plan make it easy for hot air to rise-so the inhabitant of the upstairs roasts while the downstairs occupant shivers. These are just two examples of the way poor designs make us use too many resources. A sustainable lifestyle is not wasteful of natural resources. More positively, living in a sustainable way contributes in a positive fashion, to helping life hold up and endure.

Living sustainably brings me back to my intention of bringing a beginner's body, mind, enthusiasm and zest to all that I do. It makes me think I can use this intention to discern the sustainability of my actions. Does this action add to my own sense of agency, enthusiasm and zest? Does it provide a similar opportunity for others?

Solar energy: attractive but not practical yet

2007-01-04T20:51:00.000-06:00

Last year we decided to do some research on solar energy for our home. We happen to have a roof that is nicely oriented to the south, and doesn’t have any leafy trees obscuring the rays of the sun.

Minnesota’s solar resource is said to be as good as Austin, Texas or Jacksonville, Florida. According to this map (http://www.nrel.gov/gis/solar.html), that is true. But sunshine states like Arizona, California, and Nevada, are clearly the prime locations, with larger numbers of predictably sunny days.

We asked a solar contractor to come to our home and evaluate it for solar panels. Here is all the practical stuff we found out: a grid-connected 2 KW solar array would take care of approximately ½ the electrical energy needs of our household. Our household consumes 6,800 kilowatt hours (kwh) per year, somewhat below the national average in the U.S. of 10,654 kwh.

The cost of a 2 KW solar array would be $18,000. Minnesota provides tax credits of $2,000 per KW, so that would reduce our cost to $14,000. This is assuming we could get the tax credits. The State Department of Commerce’s website says that they have a backlog of applications waiting for the funds available. The federal government would provide an additional credit of $2,000. That would reduce our cost to $12,000 upfront.

Electrical energy costs an average of $.077 per kwh. This means our annual electrical expenses are $525. An investment of $12,000 would cut that cost in half, to $262.50. Even if electrical costs continue to increase by about 7% a year, as they have over the past 6 years, it would take a long time to pay off our investment.

The biggest cost is constructing solar arrays is the cost of silicon, a mineral found in sand. According to InvestorIdeas.com, solar-grade silicon is expensive to make, and prices pf silicon have increased from “$25/kilogram in 2004 to around $200/kilogram in 2006.” This is having a negative impact on the growth of solar power.

A friend of mine has a house that is completely off the electrical grid. Between Christmas and the New Year, we had a string of extremely cloudy days. His batteries got very low because he was unable to produce any solar power. He cheerfully got by with candles, but admitted that his wife was not as good-humored about the inconvenience. This same friend informed me of a new technology that hasn’t reached the commercial level. A company called Prism Solar Technologies in New York has apparently developed a method to concentrate the rays of the sun using holograms. This could cut the cost of solar modules by as much as 75%. Expect investor frenzies to follow any new technologies that can bring down the price of solar.

Until these new technologies become practical, solar energy is only a solution for the most environmentally motivated and well-heeled homeowner. This is one reason why those of us who want to cut our contributions to global warming must find other ways to do so. I’ll have more to say about this in the days ahead.

Subjecting a decision to the sniff test

2007-01-03T12:10:00.000-06:00

Yesterday I spent five hours designing a submission to a community art project. The project involves the manufacture of 30 large great blue herons, which will be decorated by artists and financed by local sponsors. The aim of the project developers is “to support the development and promotion of arts projects with community longevity such as a community art center, a sculpture park, fine and performing arts projects or experiential community arts events.”

After my submission was complete, I started submitting it to the sniff test. My current sniff test relates to manifesting my intention, which is to “bring a beginner’s body, mind, enthusiasm and zest to my art, writing, community work, and tennis.” Did I bring enthusiasm and zest to the design project, and would I bring enthusiasm and zest to other aspects of the creation, which could include working to raise funds from sponsors, in addition to spending long hours executing my design on a 7 foot tall heron?

I am sorry to say, the project didn’t meet my sniff test. I think I came up with a fairly innovative scheme for the heron, but execution of the scheme did not generate enthusiasm or zest, and I felt even less enthused by the prospect of laboriously painting tiny fish, frogs and aquatic beetles on the heron, should my submission be accepted by the jurors. So why did I spend so much time on the submission? Because the project met my need to be identified in the community as an artist. I have mentioned my current difficulties in explaining myself, here and here, in previous blogs.

One insightful commenter responded to my conundrum, asking; “What if re-instating the ego consistently at dinner parties and such had the effect of making us less alive? What if all the talk of self actually concretized the self, solidified the structures, making it harder to be free to become a fluid alive being?”

I am currently reading the book Radical Optimism, by scientist/theologian Beatrice Bruteau. It’s a lovely, lovely book. Bruteau says “we have developed a cult of the descriptive self.” We become so identified with our descriptions, with the image we have of ourselves, that we lose contact with the real person who exists beyond the descriptive self. The real person is that aspect of the self that is not defined by comparing and contrasting ourselves to others. When we identify with our image, we separate ourselves from others; when we lose our identity, we can remain connected. We also experience more freedom. Bruteau says: “we no longer experience ourselves as a being of fixed nature, of static reality. We have more of a sense of ourselves as the process-of-being, as an ever-renewed act, a continuous motion of living, which is God’s ever-present act of creating us. Looking toward other persons, we sense them also as creative acts of God, being made fresh from moment to moment, not limited to the descriptions of their past qualities or acts.” The challenge of living the beginner's body and mind includes acting from the real self, as opposed to the descriptive self. The result will be more freedom and more connection to others.

I guess the idea of working on a project so that I can maintain my descriptive identity doesn’t meet the sniff test. As an observer of this project from its inception, I feel compassion and appreciation for the organizers. How difficult it is to design a community project that will meet the sniff test of the community as well as the participants! I think there is an art to designing such projects. This seems like a fruitful subject for future blogging. Welcome to 2007!

What is the beginner's body and mind?

2006-12-30T09:45:00.000-06:00

My intention is to bring a beginner's body, mind, enthusiasm and zest to my art, writing, community work, and tennis.

As a middle-aged person, I have neither a beginner's body or mind. But thinking like a beginner, remembering times when I was learning and enjoying as a beginner, brings a different feeling tone to what I can imagine for myself. What we can imagine, we can also make real. A beginner's mind has a thirst for learning, a sense of enthusiasm, and a broad scope for possibilities. You can forgive yourself as a beginner, you know you are learning, you allow yourself to make mistakes, and are excited about the idea of progressing. The beginner is unencumbered by the thick overlay of societal conditioning and expectations.

One of my most joyous beginner's art experiences was participating in the Mayday parade, organized by the Heart of the Beast Theatre in Minneapolis. I made a large papier mache fish for the parade in the only colors available: fuschia, turquoise and lime green. I inserted myself in the fish, and with an assortment of other finned critters, marched in the parade. I loved everything about this, and the creation of this exuberant fish was great fun. What would it really feel like FROM THE INSIDE of my head, to feel as excited about artmaking as I was when I made that fish? I don't have the answer, but the question is a very promising one.

What are my memories of writing? It hasn't concretely felt joyous, but it feels nonetheless like a necessity. I received a diary when I was a young person, and started writing boring things in it--who I talked to that day, what I had for lunch. That never did anything for me. Then, I got the idea of writing about what was important to me, and it made my pen move. In my early 20's, I read the diaries of Anais Nin, and started journaling. I once had a boyfriend who tried to talk me out of journaling. He wanted me to express all those thoughts to him. That was no good. I have been writing continuously for myself, for 30 years. Now my words are being seen by the small audiences that come to this blog. The blogger's world is certainly the world of the beginner's mind, and I think that is a good thing. Many, many people have started blogs. It demonstrates that a large number of people are bringing a beginner's mind of curiosity to the work of writing and communicating with others.

I love the idealism of young people. Sometimes I am able to tap into that beginner's idealism in my own community work. The world is full of people who are eager to explain why something can't be done. But to the beginner, anything is possible. I still naively believe that people can be persuaded to change their transportation habits, not just to save money, not just to reduce air pollution, not just to lose weight, but because it is a good thing to be in physical and visual contact with one another, on the street, on our bicycles, in carpools, and on the bus. So, yes! I still have access to the beginner's mind in my community work.

When we stop thinking like a beginner, we think we know all the answers. Know-It-Alls are afflicted with the disease of wanting to be right. It is extremely difficult for such people to remain open to new knowledge. We have plentiful evidence that there are too many people in high places who suffer from the arrogance of knowing everything. I am sticking my neck out now...I'm going to suggest that adopting a beginner's mind might be a good practice for more than just me.

To Mom for Christmas

2006-12-27T13:51:00.000-06:00

I don't design a Christmas card every year, but this year I did. The image is of a gift tag that reads: "To Mom". The "from" line is hidden by a leaf of garlic mustard, growing here in Minnesota, in the month of December.

I am probably one of the few people to regularly blog about garlic mustard, as I did in this early post. When a friend spent a half hour ranting about her efforts to eradicate garlic mustard from her backyard, it got my attention. The plant had been invisible to me until I started looking for it, then I started to see it everywhere in the woods that I love. The reason that it is currently growing in the woods, even though it is December, is that the plant produces seeds so profusely that they begin to sprout after several days of sunshine. Instead of having our normal cold December, we've had a mild month, with cycles of warm and cool, but not all that cold.

If I was hungry, I could be picking these attractive rosettes, and sauteing them as one would do with other fresh greens you find in the springtime. I haven't tried cooking garlic mustard greens, yet I surely will one of these days. Garlic mustard is an invasive plant that grows rapidly and squeezes out other native species of plants.

The Christmas card is dedicated to moms everywhere, especially Mother Earth, who certainly needs some better gifts from humans than she has received in the last 10,000 years or so. Humans have been doing what comes naturally for a long time. Wherever human populations grow and become successful, soils have declined, and edible and non-edible species have become extinct. We are similar to garlic mustard in that we reduce species diversity. So I would argue that we should regard garlic mustard as something of a kindred spirit. Like humans, garlic mustard flourishes when we have mild winters.

My hope during this holiday season is that the Christian/Christmas message of caring for all creation filters down to members of the Christian flocks. I am somewhat encouraged by the news that congregations around Minnesota have been learning together about the effects of global warming and steps that could be taken to work with local communities to improve ecological health and sustainability. Congregations Caring for Creation is a Minnesota-based coalition of churches who are studying creation care and social justice. My own congregation is inviting others to watch a screening of Al Gore's documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, on January 7. Coincidentally, the screening date coincides with Epiphany, the day the eastern Churches celebrated the birth of Christ.

Here's hoping that parishioners, with or without Al Gore's help, experience some epiphanies about global warming and creation care. All of us, Mother Earth included, could use the spiritual help.

Counting my blessings

2006-12-23T16:38:00.000-06:00

A short post today. Like a lot of people, I am planning on kicking back, cooking, spending time with family and friends, counting my blessings.

Yesterday I helped out our local hot food delivery service, delivering meals to about 8 households here in town. It was touching to enter the homes of some of these people. One was a man, I would guess 60+ years old, seated in a wheelchair, with two legs amputated mid-thigh. I presumed he was a military veteran. He had the remains of a stogie in his mouth, and his entire very small, very dark house reeked of smoke. I placed the little containers of pudding, hamburger gravy, mashed potatoes, pudding and peaches on his crowded kitchen table. "Merry Christmas," I said. The corners of this mouth turned up just a little.

I headed out to my next delivery, which was to another elderly lady I'll call Verna. I came to the door and Verna answered. "I'm here to deliver your meal," I said, and pushed the door open. "Oh, I didn't know someone was going to deliver a meal," she said. "Your name Verna?" I asked. "Yes, I'm Verna." I took the liberty of assuming I was to deliver the meal, no matter what, and started unloading the little containers on her spotless kitchen table. "I get a little forgetful at times, " Verna said. She showed me a Christmas card, a picture of her nephew in a pumpkin patch. "Isn't that a great picture?" she said. I agreed it was, wished her a Merry Christmas, and urged her to eat her meal, eat it all up. She seemed amenable to do so.

My dad died of Alzheimer's more than two years ago. It is a heartbreaking disease. I don't know if this woman has relatives who look in on her, or whether she is descending into forgetfulness by herself. I wrote a comment on the volunteer sheet: "Alzheimer's? Forgets she gets meals delivered."

My last delivery was to yet another humble apartment. An elderly man greeted me. A younger woman, I assumed who was his daughter, snuggled on the couch. They were preparing to watch TV and spend some time together. It was a great relief to see that the man had a companion.

I came home saddened by some of what I saw, exalting in homes that demonstrated evidence of people, companionship, serenity, decoration. One woman had a beautiful smile on her face. I am definitely counting my blessings this holiday. I am grateful to the many folks who share their blessings with others.

Christmas lights and sustainability

2006-12-19T14:30:00.000-06:00

Now, I’m really setting myself up as a grinch on this topic. It seems Christmas tree lights are something everyone loves. Today’s paper has a story from the Associated Press recounting the lengths that some people will go to ensure their homes are extravagantly illuminated for the holiday. A homeowner in Wisconsin pays $300 in extra electrical bills per month to light their winter wonderland. They start decorating in October and don’t have everything taken down until April.

I’ve already said that I’m not the kind of person who decorates much for Christmas. Okay, I do have two small artificial Christmas trees. They have lights on. They make me happy, much as the more elaborate displays no doubt satisfy their owners.

But this article comes a day after I spent some time on the internet researching facts and figures about a nearby coal-fired power plant, in Alma, Wisconsin. An internet website, www.scorecard.com, provides background information on air, water and chemical pollution for every county in the United States. I went to this site and entered a zip code for Buffalo County, Wisconsin, where the Alma plant is located. From this I learned that between Dairyland Co-op, and Foremost Farms, 415,000 pounds of hydrochloric acid, 117,000 pounds of nitrate compounds, 68,700 pounds of hydrofluoric acid, 349 pounds of mercury, and 202 pounds of lead, along with assorted other heavy metals, were discharged into the Buffalo County environment in 2002.

According to my electrical utility, 52% of my electricity comes from coal. I understand the percentage figures are quite similar in other areas around the United States. We need our coal fired plants for the energy that keeps this computer running, the refrigerator functioning, the Christmas tree lights going, and many other essential and not-so-essential services.

Any time someone talks about global warming, and the need to cut greenhouse gases, a large percentage of the gases they are speaking about come out of the smokestacks of coal fired plants. I understand that new coal-fired plants have been built that are not as dirty as the old plants, like those in Alma.

According to The Earth Policy Institute:
” Particulate matter from coal combustion has long been known to harm the respiratory system. Now recent research has shown that small airborne particulate matter also can cross from the lungs into the bloodstream, leading to cardiac disease, heart attacks, strokes, and premature death.

In the United States, 23,600 deaths each year can be attributed to air pollution from power plants. Those dying prematurely due to exposure to particulate matter lose, on average, 14 years of life. Burning coal also is responsible for some 554,000 asthma attacks, 16,200 cases of chronic bronchitis, and 38,200 non-fatal heart attacks each year. Atmospheric power plant pollution in the United States racks up an estimated annual health care bill of over $160 billion.”

I was curious to see if I could find data that suggested that the health of Buffalo County citizens was being adversely affected by the power plant. Could it have been a fluke that in 2004, Buffalo County had the highest mortality rate in Wisconsin? Could it be a coincidence that mortality in all Wisconsin Counties but six are declining, and that Buffalo is one of the six? These figures are despite the fact that Buffalo County is in the top one-third in Wisconsin in terms of available health care, health behaviors, and socio-economic figures.

If global warming isn’t enough of an incentive to encourage us to conserve our use of all forms of energy, let’s think of doing it for our health, for everyone’s health. People need to know that our electrical expenditures have costs that are not limited to those that come out of our own pocketbooks.
Footnote: The good news is that some households are turning to LED Christmas lights. This technology uses 95% less energy, and lasts 10 times longer.

A new intention for the turn of the year

2006-12-16T09:57:00.000-06:00

More than two weeks after a Heartland Institute leader asked members of a group to answer: what is your intention? I have come up with one, and it isn't what I thought it would be. My intention is to bring a beginner's mind, body and enthusiasm to my art, writing, tennis and community work.

For years I've been walking around thinking that there was some One Special Thing I was meant to do, and once I identified what that thing was, I would be filled with the energy of clarity on up to glory and fame. The problem with this notion is that I am a curious and idealistic person. If you look at the decisions I have made in the course of my life, I have always twisted and turned away whenever One Special Thing threatened to dominate my time. I began to think there was something seriously wrong with me because I couldn't settle in to that One Special Thing.

Several ideas got me to think differently about this. First, I started reading The Life We are Given, by George Leonard and Michael Murphy, two pioneers in the human potential movement. Leonard and Murphy developed an Integral Transformative Practice (ITP), a disciplined system of meditation, exercise and affirmations for helping people realize their potential. The power of affirmations--short, positive statements that describe a positive change as a present condition--has been demonstrated to me many times in my life. I knew I needed some new affirmations.

Then I attend the Heartland Institute event and was challenged to state my intention. My response to this question took me backward to the myth of One Special Thing, and I felt all the pain and disappointment with myself for not having One. I tried to reconcile the tension I felt between creating an intention and Meister Eckhart's statement that we should "work without a why." Theologian Matthew Fox wonderfully interprets this Eckhart statement in his book, The Reinvention of Work. He suggests we look at the various roles we play in life in a freer way, and consider, from within those roles, what feels like love, freedom, compassion and spontaneity from the inside.

The next step in my learning cycle was to attend a talk by the Catholic motivational speaker Matthew Kelly. Kelly said that we are called by the divine to be the best version of ourselves possible. This seemed clear and inspiring, yet had nothing to do with the straight-jacket of thinking I had to do One Special Thing. I followed up Kelly's talk with yet another dose of affirmative thinking from Louise Hay, whose book You Can Heal Your Life, I have read several times. Hay says we create our reality by the mental messages we program into our thoughts.

What finally pushed me to the clarity of my intention, which inspires me without being One Special Thing, was viewing the DVD The Secret. I share the criticism some have made of this movie that it focuses too much on helping people achieve blatantly materialistic goals. However, there are still some good ideas to be considered. The essence of "the secret" is that the universe is organized through the power of attraction, and we create our reality by asking for, and visualizing what we want to feel. This emphasis on the power of feeling tied everything together for me. I realized that a coherent intention could be framed around feeling, rather than a rationally discerned One Special Thing.

I realized that what I want to feel is the beginner's mind of excitement I first felt when I started volunteering for a community group at the beginning of my career, that urged citizens to save water, recycle, and conserve energy. I want to feel the beginner's mind of enthusiasm I first felt when I started silk painting, and was amazed by the creatures that started to flow out of my brush. I want physically to feel the rush of enthusiasm I experienced in all four corners of my body when my tennis skills were just starting to develop. It seems to me that the intention to cultivate a beginner's way of feeling, with all the zest, enthusiasm, hope and idealism that implies, could be a very good thing.

Tis the season for...self pity

2006-12-15T08:25:00.000-06:00

I admit it, when I'm under the weather, I crave a care giver, and even though my cold is receding, I built up a little resentment for the lack of the perfect care my Mom used to give me when I was sick.

I recognize the forlorn feeling that bubbles up in this situation as something very old in my repertoire of mental habits. When I was trying to get in touch with my personal demons a decade ago, one of the recognizable creatures I visualized, came to life in a painting I called Aunt Pity, named after an aunt of mine who lived a most forlorn life.

I've worked with Aunt Pity long enough to recognize that a sense of entitlement lies underneath her behavior. She believes she is entitled to be treated well. The sense of entitlement may be a particular vice of those with middle class upbringings. We are used to getting what we want, and when we don't, we may respond with self-pity, anger, resentment or even outrage.

It's true that we may have indeed been the victims of some sort of injustice, unfairness, or inconsideration, when we feel self-pity or resentment. We may feel aggrieved at being denied our rights. A founding document in our nation was the Bill of Rights, and we pay lots of attention to the ongoing process of extending these rights to everyone. I think as a nation we have a hyper-active sensitivity to injustice, and can easily perceive ourselves as victimized. Our collective sensitivity makes the holiday season a particularly vulnerable time.

The upside of the holiday season is the spirit of gratitude that flows from many who recognize that their lives have been manifestly blessed, and seek ways to share those blessings with others. Many also experience the dark moist or hot emotions of self-pity, anger or loneliness. We want Christmas with all the trimmings: material gifts, family harmony, festive celebrations, great food, perfect churches, and wonderful decorations. If too many elements are missing from this perfect picture, we can engage in our habitual form of dismay or despair.

This is why for me, the sustainable Christmas is the simplest one. A simple holiday makes me realize how much I have to be grateful for. This good feeling carries me through the short, darkened days, to the birth of something new.

The recovery process

2006-12-13T15:43:00.000-06:00

I've been recovering from a cold and have consequently wanted to rest and relax a lot lately. I find that the internet sites that interest me when I'm healthy seem irrelevant when I'm healing. Is there a message there?

The stages of home treatment for a cold seems to follow a natural progression:
1. Denial: the cold doesn't seem bad, and I try to fight it off through aspirin, zinc lozenges, and affirmations, continuing my regular daily activities.
2. Engagement: the cold starts to settle in. In engage in a more pitched battle, combining cold remedies, fighting off the inevitable need to slow down and rest.
3. Acceptance: I'm sick. I spend an entire day in bed, sleeping and reading, following all the rules, taking cold remedies as advised.
4. Entrenchment: this happens when I try to resume my normal activity level. The cold finds a place to get entrenched. In my case, it produces a persistent chest cough.
5. Reassessment: Because the cold is persisting, I begin to get suspicious of all the pill-based remedies I've been using thus far. I begin to explore healing on a deeper level. Out come the stashed home remedy books. I stop taking everything, and go back to the basics: rest, copious amounts of water, raw garlic 3 times a day, and reading.

This last step begins to have some salutary effects. One of the books that has had enduring value to me in my health-restoring efforts over the years is Home Remedies: Hydrotherapy, Massage, Charcoal and other Simple Treatments, by Agatha Thrash, MD. It's out of print but you may be able to find used copies out there.

The simple remedies Thrash offers come from simpler times, when the patient didn't have quite so many options to consider, and there was less expectation of a quick fix. Thrash says:
"...it becomes obvious that almost anything that is done merely to alleviate symptoms cannot effect a cure, but actually interferes with the genuine healing processes of the body itself."

The human body is a thing of remarkable beauty and complexity. This fact was driven home by my recent visit to the Body Worlds exhibit, the amazing result of a German anatomist's efforts to display what goes on underneath the skin of real human beings--corpses whose bodies and body parts were injected with a plasticizing substance to become permanent. The Body Worlds exhibits have been seen by 20 million people around the world. It has been interesting to visualize my congested lungs, for example, now that I can see their shape and location in the body so clearly.

There is no denying the power of complex interventions to cure our medical ailments. But the healing process must begin on a simple foundation: rest, patience, and the establishment of a relationship with the dis-ease. Without this foundation, the search for a cure can lead us to counter-productively suppress the symptoms, or to overdose on the myriad choices offered by conventional and alternative medicine.

Dinner party conversation

2006-12-10T21:10:00.000-06:00

Recently I went to a dinner party, attended by some seemingly good folks who I am just getting to know on a superficial basis. It's always difficult deciding how I am going to describe myself to people I meet for the first time. You'd think by the time I arrived at middle age, that there would be more of a fixed quality about me, rather than an ambiguous shifting between artist, writer and environmental advocate with dubious means of support.

The long and the short of it is that if you have half an intention of being a practicing mystic, there's very little way to speak the truth about it at a dinner party, unless you want to grind the conversation to an immediate halt.

So instead, the conversation is predicated on a fiction--that I am an artist (presumably trying to make, sell and show art of a certain defined type); or a writer, writing for clients--for who would write from themselves? So I told a questioner that I had recently written a piece on communicating about global warming, which is true--what I didn't mention is that the publication commissioning my work is "The Carp", a free newspaper out of rural Red Wing, Minnesota.

Perhaps mystic and theologian Meister Eckhart was able to avoid the problem I've been facing by completely avoiding dinner parties. His challenges were greater. As a theologian and monk within the Dominican order, he was condemned by Pope John XXII of heresy in the 1320's, a charge that could have resulted in his execution by burning. Eckhart's heresy was to believe that we each could "give birth to Christ in our souls." A people centered theology like this certainly contradicted the orthodox views.

I've written before on Eckhart's statement that we should "work without a why." Another verse of Eckhart's, translated by Matthew Fox (another theologian who was censured by the Vatican) takes this concept even father:

All works are dead
If anything from the outside
compels you to work.
Even if it were God himself compelling you to work
from the outside,
your works would be dead.
If your works are to live,
then God must move you from the inside
from the innermost region of the soul--
then they will really live.
There is your life
and there alone you live
and your works live.

So let's imagine a dinner party of all mystics, a delightful thing to imagine. Perhaps the subjects of conversation would proceed along the lines of Bohmian dialogue, a form of communication devised by physicist (and mystic) David Bohm. The mystical dinner party would begin with a silence that was broken when someone had a revelation. In this dinner party, the non-mystic who blundered in with a typical dinner party question like "what do you do for a living?" would be met with profound acceptance and quite possibly more silence.

Anyway, it could be that I am a professional mystic, or a mystical blunderer, because I seem to teeter-totter between purposeful, intentional action and directionless wondering about how to "work without a why."

A randomly beautiful thing

2006-12-06T20:21:00.000-06:00

I went into Pier I imports, a home furnishings store in St. Paul, after my workshop was over. I was in the mood to find a little gift for myself. Twenty-three years ago I used to come to this very neighborhood to visit my Jungian analyst. I would tell her my dreams, weep a copious amount of tears, and head off to the nearest Haagen Daz store to lick my wounds and an ice cream cone. I was feeling a little forlorn on this day as well, a little raw from my lack of clarity about what my intention was.

My eyes landed on a vase of holiday "thingies"- little bouquets of shiny disks, randomly collected in a nosegay of beads and wires and splashes of white, red and pink. They captured this little ray of hope I was carrying inside, the hope that beauty had some redemptive value. I particularly liked the fact that they were cheap and asymmetric. I knew at once that I would put these flashy nosegays in the branches of my artificial Christmas tree, and when I got home, that is what I did. I just looked at that tree and felt irrationally pleased.

I have been enjoying Beauty Dialogues with Amy, check out her website. I thought I would share a manifesto on beauty, written by the Chilean poet, Gabriela Mistral. It is helpful to the artist trying to think about beauty:

Decalogue of the Artist

I. You shall love beauty, which is the shadow of God over the Universe.

II.There is no godless art. Although you love not the Creator, you shall bear witness to Him creating His likeness.

III.You shall create beauty not to excite the senses but to give sustenance to the soul.

IV. You shall never use beauty as a pretext for luxury and vanity but as a spiritual devotion.

V. You shall not seek beauty at carnival or fair or offer your work there, for beauty is virginal and is not to be found at carnival or fair.

VI. Beauty shall rise from your heart in song, and you shall be the first to be purified.

VII.The beauty you create shall be known as compassion and shall console the hearts of men.

VIII.You shall bring forth your work as a mother brings forth her child: out of the blood of your heart.

IX. Beauty shall not be an opiate that puts you to sleep but a strong wine that fires you to action, for if you fail to be a true man or a true woman, you will fail to be an artist.

X. Each act of creation shall leave you humble, for it is never as great as your dream and always inferior to that most marvelous dream of God which is Nature.

- Gabriela Mistral Translated by Doris Dana

Initial thoughts about beauty

2006-12-03T21:10:00.000-06:00

In conversations over the past few days, I noticed some statements people made about beauty.

An interior designer said that beauty can improve the world.
A teacher said that exposure to beauty could reliably do more good than acts of social action.
A priest quoted Pope John Paul as saying: "It is...necessary to create lifestyles in which the quest for truth, beauty, goodness and communion with others for the sake of common growth are the factors which determine...choices..."

Digging a little into my remembered store of aphorisms from the sufi poet Rumi, I remember one in particular: "Let the beauty you love be what you do." It's a particularly apt aphorism for an artist, who is presumably charged with creating beauty. But I need more proofs.

I see nature as being able to create beauty that is so exquisite in its detail. The beautiful array of colors and variety of pattern on a beach far exceed what an artist could create. I look at what nature has created, and feel the inadequacy of what I can create with paint and brush.

Another problem is the tendency in our culture to turn beauty into a commodity. The artist may enjoy the creation of beauty as a process--but the commodification of that created thing is not lovely. A philanthropist in our town is spending millions of dollars buying art which is loaned out to a local museum. The paintings being purchased have an intrinsic value because of their beauty, and an extrinsic value as investments. I calculated that one of the paintings on recent exhibit, a Monet, was purchased for about $2 million. As I gazed at this painting, was I engaged in worship of beauty or wealth?

Beauty is a subjective thing. History and commerce elevate beautiful people, beautiful destinations, and beautiful art. But when the philosophers speak of pursuing truth, beauty and goodness, what they really must be referring to is the human capacity to appreciate beauty in many contexts. When we can see the beauty in the face of an elderly friend, in the pattern of worn paint on the side of a building, and in a teenager's quirky sense of humor, we feel love, interest and connection. When we make a choice to focus on ugliness: political corruption, pollution, people's shortcomings, we disempower our goodness. An aphorism that I know to be true from my work as an artist is: we are what we pay attention to. It must be that by paying attention to beauty we awaken love and connectedness to others.

This is the first time I have tried to understand why beauty must be important. I still remain unconvinced that the beauty I have the capacity to create can actually serve others.

What is your intention?

2006-12-02T19:22:00.001-06:00

I think I've mentioned before that I am interested in good conversations about topics that matter. This desire is what drew me to a Thought Leader gathering in St. Paul, Minnesota, a guided conversation designed by the Heartland Circle, an organization devoted to leadership development through thoughtful inquiry.

The discussion around the circle was started by Apple Valley Mayor Mary Hamann-Roland. She told the story of being left a widow with four children, 13 years ago after her husband died of a massive heart attack. Her desire to construct a meaningful life on the ruins of this shock led her to create an innovative environmental education program in the Apple Valley schools, and later to foster community development, innovation, and a "green" municipal center when she became Mayor of this suburban community. All of the accomplishments emanated from an intention she developed as a new widow: to create a positive legacy in Apply Valley. The question she asked those gathering around the circle was: what is your intention?

It was an interesting, and for me, extraordinarily difficult question. It's not as if I've never asked myself that question before. Indeed, I've asked it during my entire work life. The question: what is your intention?- asks you to think in a planful, purpose-filled way about how your direct your life. The question for me seemed to go beyond--what do you want to do?--asking me to think about the outcome, the results, in visionary terms.

Of course, the response to such a question varies infinitely from person to person. For one, it could be to provide support and loving care to your family. For another, it could be to continue learning. Still another could have a very specific focused intention, such as, "to be the best possible 3rd grade teacher I can be." There is no right or wrong answer to the question. I suspect that most people live without a clear intention, fulfilling the roles they have found themselves in and trying to do the best they can.

Why was this such a difficult question for me to answer? It is because the answer implies an ability to make clear choices, to commit to action in support of the intention. I am far more at home in the world of possibility than in the world of choice. I accuse myself of being something of a dilettante, moving from being an artist to a writer to an environmental advocate based on the way the winds blow in my corner of the world.

When you make a choice, declare an intention, decide that something is important, your work is just starting. For example, when I made a choice to start writing a blog, I felt a sense of responsibility to my choice. When I decided to take a break from making art, I anguished over dropping this commitment. Yesterday, after the Heartland event, I spoke with a musician who asked my why I stopped making art. Maybe I'm living in an either-or world, that says, you can make art, or you can try to contribute to the world, but you can't do both. I would love it if I could believe my art really did make the world a better place, or if I could find an approach to working on art and sustainability simultaneously.

Fourteen years of work at artmaking has given me much in the way of personal enjoyment. Even when I succeed in bringing this work to the world, via exhibits, websites, and art sales, I find it hard to convince myself that the work is contributing as much as I would hope for. Something has to change. While I wait to discern how my gifts and own deep needs can mesh with the situation in my community and the world, the only clear intention I can express is to remain open, and to surrender to the next step when I sense some spaciousness and excitement there.

What are your rituals for the season?

2006-11-29T11:10:00.000-06:00

I've been reading a book written by Human Potential Movement leader Jean Houston more than 25 years ago. It's called Life Force: The Psycho-Historical Recovery of the Self. Houston, who was mentored by such seminal figures as Margaret Mead and Teilhard de Chardin, acquired a very broad view of history and culture from a young age. Throughout her career she has been interested in the use of ritual to tap into our connections to our historical roots.

Houston says: "The word rite comes from the same root as art and order. Like all real art, like the movements of sacred dances, ritual provides organic order, a pattern of dynamic expression through which the energy of an event or series of events can flow in an evolutionary process toward a larger meaning or a new stage or level of life. It offers us ways in which our transitions may be illuminated." Houston believes that rituals can help illuminate cultures, evoking hope during a time of societal transition. As the year 2006 wanes without the characteristic cold and snow of other late Novembers, I long for a ritual awakening of hope and possibility.

Our seasonal transition in late November is towards the holidays, Christmas for Christians, Hanukkah for the Jews, Kwanzaa for African Americans, secular celebrations for others. What are the rituals that we use to commemorate this seasonal transition, with shortening days as we approach the winter solstice?

Many people engage in the rituals of house decoration, decorating their yards with pumpkins and scarey figures during Halloween, turkeys during Thanksgiving, and myriad lights, sculptures, and creches during Christmas. Good rituals are rich in sensory detail. Are they doing so because they crave more sensory participation in the seasonal transition? It seems as though there are 2 kinds of people, those who decorate, and those who don't. I am of the second type. Those who throw themselves most whole-heartedly into the trappings of the holiday may be putting a great deal of emphasis on the externals, in the hope that they will be echoed by inner feelings of happiness and peace. We approach this time of year with a great desire for illumination, and similarly try to fill it with rituals of holiday parties, shopping, gift-giving, travel and decorating.

What I hunger for during this time of year is a sense of mystery, and I don't get it through the external trappings. My most memorable Christmas eve was a quiet walk at night with a friend through snow, out to a bridge over a river. Our path was illumined by moonlight. As we approached the river, which appeared to be frozen over, we heard a thundering sound in the water. Was it a beaver, signalling alarm, or a very large fish jumping? It was too dark to see, but it didn't matter. Our walk was a ritual made us feel connected to some deep and beautiful mystery.

Talk in a Box

2006-11-24T09:44:00.000-06:00

On Thanksgiving, our family spent a little time playing with a game I discovered in a magazine. It's called Talk in a Box, and it is simply a box with a series of questions on cards that can be used to inspire conversation. Around the table, there is plenty of random chatter about family and food: where my sister-in-law got the recipe for the Bourbon sweet potatoes, how Uncle Vic is doing, and memories of Thanksgivings past. Conversations tend to fall in familiar patterns, and there's not necessarily anything wrong with that.

But I like to mix things up a little, and Talk in a Box is a method that allow for that. I asked my mother to go through the box and pick some questions that she thought would be interesting for dicussion on Thanksgiving Day. Learning what questions excite people is part of what fosters good conversation. The questions I find intriguing might leave someone else flat.

The most memorable question (to me) around our table was: If you could spend a day with anyone (unknown to you) of your choosing, who would it be? Some of the answers around the table were: the comedian Robin Williams, human potential movement figure Jean Houston, and investor Warren Buffett. From the conversation that ensued I learned that in addition to being a comic genius, Williams does a lot of charity work.

Conversational skills are said to be declining, due to our busy lifestyles, dispersed families, and the large amount of time we spend watching TV or surfing the internet (my vice). My own thirst for conversation is affected by a somewhat isolated lifestyle. As a self-employed artist and writer I don't have a lot of work colleagues. Writing this blog is one attempt to start a conversation. I'm not forcing myself on anyone, however. I like the randomness that might bring a conversant here.

I'm going to keep looking for flesh-and-blood conversants on topics of interest to me. In the meantime, I'll pick a Talk in the Box question each day, and think about it. Today's question: "What sounds do I find soothing? Troubling or disturbing?" I enjoy the chatter of birds in the morning. As a child, the sound of my mother ironing, the soft thud of the iron combined with the hiss of steam, signaled comfort to me. Troubling sounds are usually harsh mechanical sounds, chainsaws, motorcycles or lawn-mowers. We do seem to have a lot of noise pollution in our lives. But I'll leave that subject for another conversation.

Breaking out of the old molds

2006-11-21T20:21:00.000-06:00

I am spending much of my time getting ready for Thanksgiving, family arriving and the holiday season. My sister and I agreed that we would make gifts for one another this Christmas, rather than going out buying something that we weren’t sure the other person needed. So, I have been trying to think about what aspects of my life, my experience, or the work of my hands are really worth sharing with my sister’s family. It is a challenge to break out of the old Christmas mold.

A friend said: “oh, you’re an artist, that will be easy.” But it isn’t, because my artistic side seems to be resting right now, waiting for a new sense of meaning to animate it. I consider the situation of my fellow artists in this corner of the state. Most of them are getting ready for Christmas sales, making things large and small to take a guess at what the Christmas consumer would like. They need to make a living, and many enjoy the sense of conversation and appreciation that is aroused in their exchange with potential buyers. In previous years I would have been doing the same thing, applying for Christmas shows, getting things framed, making cards to sell, and so on. It just doesn’t make sense to me anymore, however.

As I was engaged in my preparations I listened to a talk by David Bohm, recorded and in the archives of New Dimensions radio. The talk is titled: “Creativity, Natural Philosophy and Science.” Bohm was a leading theoretical physicist who was also deeply interested in the human condition. In his radio conversation, Bohm said that the sense of rewards and punishments kills creativity. This immediately seemed true to my particular situation. The art world is a rewards and punishments system that has its own internal logic, but it’s often very different from whatever motivates the individual artist.

An artist in touch with her muse can create work that is commercially successful. I started my career as an artist making silk paintings. To my surprise, they started selling. After about five years as a silk painter I wanted to try some different forms of expression. My awkward new works were not welcomed in the small pools in which I introduced them. I kept working away, finding a voice and expression that made sense to me. Trying to take some of these creations and fit them into the rewards and punishment system of the art world felt like trying to put a round peg in a square hole. The system itself loomed as a seemingly insurmountable barrier to my moving forward.

Bohm said that the principal barrier to creativity is the mechanicalness which comes out of excessive thought. We keep thinking, thinking we can find solutions to the problems, but because of the mechanical quality of our thinking, we only encounter more problems. Bohm created a system of dialogue, which he saw as a way of breaking out of our rigidity. The point of dialogue is to look at our own assumptions as well as those of other people—and actually to find a way to suspend your own assumptions. Every once in a while I stumble into such a dialogue with another person, but it is rare indeed. It would be a creative act in itself, to hold our assumptions lightly enough to see them, and let them go in conversation. These kinds of conversations, whether through Bohmian dialogue, or a World Café, a Thought Leader Gathering or some other system, seem very attractive to me right now. I do see some new form of dialogue as being necessary to my creative process.

How well do environmental groups work?

2006-11-18T11:17:00.000-06:00

What’s the biggest issue for me right now? Effective action, and how to work with others. Recently, 3 members of our local sustainability group met to talk informally about future directions for the organization. Although all 3 of us are interested in sustainable development, we had 3 very disparate views about how an organization goes about carrying out a mission.

One wanted to focus on leadership development, helping people learn about systems thinking. Another wanted the organization to continue operating on an informal, adnoc basis, investigating the potential for various renewable energy projects. I expressed an interest in relocalization planning, an effort that has been launced in a number of communities around the world to respond to the ramifications of peak oil.

In a previous blog I discussed spiral dynamics and how it explains some of the variations in value orientations among people. Our sustainability committee members clearly have a Green value orientation. According to Spiral Dynamics, people with a Green value orientation:

Explore the inner beings of self and others
Promote a sense of community and unity
Share society’s resources among all
Liberate humans from greed and dogma
Reach decisions through consensus
Refresh spirituality and bring harmony

Sounds like sweetness and light, doesn’t it? However, 25 years ago I worked for another organization that clearly had a Green profile. All decisions were made by consensus, including the very difficult decisions of who to fire, due to the loss of a substantial amount of funds. The decision-making process was agonizing and inefficient. When I became director of the organization I knew we could not survive if we continued in our egalitarian decision-making mode.

Now, 25 years later I am again connected to an issue that I have long cared about. In the absence of meaningful action on the federal level, voluntary organizations are sprouting up around the country to work on community responses to sustainability. Renewable energy development, tree planting, and sustainable transportation are some of the initiatives that local folks are taking on. If we are to be successful, we must learn to capitalize on the strengths and overcome the inherent weaknesses of Green thinkers. On the strength side, Greens will be inclusive, welcome the expression of feelings, and idealistic about what can be accomplished. On the weakness side, the Green’s desire to please all people will make it difficult to move to action.

Despite these worries about the weaknesses of groups, there are positive things coming from some of the internet models. The development of Wikipedia is an example of distributed intelligence, where a large and diverse group of people come together to create a constructive resource. I am very curious whether the benefits of distributed intelligence can somehow be marshaled for community-based sustainability solutions. Stay tuned, I’ll report what I find out.

Value Orientations and an Introduction to Spiral Dynamics

2006-11-14T20:04:00.000-06:00

Several years ago I first was introduced to a developmental theory called Spiral Dynamics, by a woman who was herself a dynamo. EJ Niles, then a 70 year old Unity minister, had first become attracted to the thought of Teilhard de Chardin, a Jesuit priest, paleontologist and philosopher who died in 1955. Teilhard theorized that consciousness has been continually evolving from cell to organism, and that mankind might perfect itself by degrees over time. Her interest in evolution was further piqued by her exposure to the thought of psychologist Clare Graves, as elucidated by Don Beck and Chris Cowan in their book Spiral Dynamics.

The theory of Spiral Dynamics states that consciousness evolves in a somewhat linear manner, from early stages, as for example when babies are solely interested in survival, to more complex stages, as when the individual focuses primarily on protecting and extending their power, to later stages characterized by orientations towards order, progress, and communitarian interests. Niles went on to engage in extensive bible scholarship that revealed how the contents of the bible itself, with its multiple authors and dates of authorship, demonstrated the evolution of consciousness in its expressed world views. You can read more about EJ Niles work at www.etbible.org.

A good summary of Spiral Dynamics is available at the Wiki site, or at www.spiraldynamics.net. When I first learned about Spiral Dynamics I felt a glimmer of hope about the human condition, a sense of possibility instead of the pessimism I saw all around me. The idea that humans could evolve to a more advanced state meant that we were not condemned as to remain in stages of consciousness that fostered only conflict and gridlock. Perhaps we could as a species evolve to a place where we would begin to have greater understanding of and compassion for others point of view. In the several years since I learned about Spiral Dynamics I have concluded it is a useful tool for understanding the diverse human value orientations that inform a whole range of human actions.

Recently, I have been thinking and writing about the value orientations that Americans bring to the conversation over global warming. Learning how to meet people where their values are, rather than convert them to our view of the world, is the new task of communicators about global warming. Although it is nearly impossible to dislodge people from their fundamental value orientations, you can speak to them in terms they understand, bringing them to understand global warming in their own language.

Our persuasive messages need to reflect an understanding of three main value orientations in America, which affect everything from attitudes towards global warming to gay marriage and war. My understanding of these three groups comes from Spiral Dynamics (SD). The stable center, which I would call the “Order” group (designated as the blue meme in SD) is represented loosely by patriotic, church attending citizens who largely trust figures of authority. Some prominent figures in the evangelical Christian group, which is a subset of this group, became educated about global warming and are now actively promoting behavior change from a stewardship perspective. The term “creation care” resonates with this group. Most of the major Christian denominations have surprisingly progressive language about global warming in their national policy statements. There is a growing opportunity to get these folks enlisted in constructive action as long as you avoid attacking religion, the country, or figures of authority.

The second major group, the “Progess” group (designated as the orange meme in SD), is primarily business or entrepreneurially oriented, believes in progress, and holds optimistic views about the prospects of technology. These are the groups that will figure out how to construct and finance wind turbines, that will put together ethanol plants, that will be the sources of innovation and the designers of the Kyoto accords. Both the Democrats and Republicans have been aiming at this group with a message that says: “our nation’s energy policy is behind the times and needs a new, 21st century approach.” The implication is that technology, innovation, and business will construct rational solutions to the problems posed by global warming. You can alienate this group by suggesting that progress or profits are evil.

The third major group, the “Green” group (also known as the green meme in SD), consists of cultural creatives, feminists, deep ecologists, animal rights advocates, believers in group consensus, teamwork, and social justice. People who call themselves environmentalists belong to this group. Most of the Earth Day celebrations have their appeal here, and the major environmental organizations, Greenpeace, Audobon, Sierra Club and so on draw their support from the Greens. Despite their good intentions, many have argued that this group has lately been unsuccessful in gaining converts to their cause, due in part to communication strategies that are alienating rather than empowering. Greens sometimes express a surplus of outrage and pessimism over global warming, which tends to overwhelm listeners and make them feel that little can be done. On the positive side, Greens are some of the most passionate advocates for environmental restoration.

I am idealistic enough to believe that knowledge about these value differences can help us overcome the conflicts we generate when we disagree with people who have different value orientations. I am also pragmatic enough to recognize that only a small percentage of the population has the ability to step outside of their own values enough to see this big picture.

Coping with speed and complexity

2006-11-11T14:42:00.000-06:00

Last night we were scurrying around to eat, get some errands done, and get to the theater on time. I felt an unpleasant amount of tension around this hurrying. And yet the choices I have made make my life a lot less complicated than others. I picture people with full time jobs, kids, demands of school, and I just can’t imagine how it’s done.

I tried to remember if my parents had hectic schedules. I don’t remember them hurrying, I don’t remember a mad rush to get out the door. My father came home for a relaxed lunch. At night, when work was over, it was over. The TV was in the basement and we didn’t spend a lot of time watching it (I watched it more than my parents did). Instead, we read, or puttered around the house.

One thing I am most nostalgic about from my summer vacations as a child is the sense of boredom. I used to whine about it a little, but I was stuck coming up with ways to entertain myself. That amount of free and open time seems like an incomparable luxury today. Somehow I’ve bought into a lot of the cultural messages about accomplishment and activity—I deeply disapprove of myself when I am not doing something productive.

The world is becoming more and more complex. Change is occurring so rapidly in so many systems, there is no way we can keep up with it. A German business magazine, brand eins, gave 8 ways to avoid complexity:
1. Do not do business
2. Reduce your activities to zero
3. Don't leave the house
4. Don't call
5. Don't talk to anybody
6. Stay in bed
7. Close your eyes
8. Stop breathing

I don’t want to avoid complexity, but I am very interested right now in trying to make sense of the way things are unfolding now, the combination of problems and opportunities hitting our communities and our world. If I try to simultaneously consider things like peak oil, global warming, and political changes, the amount of complexity rapidly exceeds my ability to make sense of it all. The only way I seem to be able to continue my sense-making activity is to reduce the stimuli, in some of the ways mentioned on the list above.

Those who are unable to periodically reduce the stimuli, to slow down time just a little, are doomed I fear, to understand things simplistically, or not at all. Art making has a healing quality in this overloaded world of stimulus in which we live. If we can focus our attention on sensory areas: visual information, music, touch or taste, we can cut through the mental clutter. I offer this as a hope for those who want to remain in the world, yet not be totally controlled or overwhelmed by the speed and complexity of these times.

A small town tackles sustainable transportation

2006-11-10T15:00:00.000-06:00

I am working on a report about my week promoting sustainable transportation, from October 4-11. We sought to persuade the public to try out walking, bicycling, carpooling, or taking the bus. The campaign involved public relations, strategizing and framing issues, and working with others.

One of the biggest challenges was finding partners with passion or commitment to the vision of the project, which was described as follows:
Our vision is of a community with a multi-faceted transportation system that provides alternatives to driving alone. Reducing the number of vehicles on the road cuts vehicle emissions and noise, decreases congestion, extends the life cycle of existing roadways, promotes a healthier community, reduces need for parking lots, and saves money spent on fuel.

In order to find effective partners for the project, we had to find frames of meaning they would connect to. These were invariably different from my own motivational frames—which were centered around worries about global warming, peak oil, and a personal ethic of thrift, which made me passionate about carpooling. Although there is wide concern about global warming and peak oil, there still is a lot of uncertainty about these issues in many people’s minds. Moreover, the negative effects of these trends will ripple out over decades, and it is difficult to capture attention and action with such a time frame.

The issue of transportation is complex and there is no single group, either public or private that seems inclined to look at it from a systemic basis. For example, the local Chamber of Commerce is very interested in transportation from an infrastructure development perspective, i.e. more roads, more bridges, better airports, etc. The Chamber does not have members clamoring for more carpooling or bicycling however. So creating partnerships with the business community was another challenge.

We were counting on rising fuel prices to create a teachable moment, spurring citizens to consider transportation options from an economic perspective. Unfortunately, fuel prices fell rapidly by $.75 from August to October, alleviating some of the economic worries that had been more intense during the peak summer driving months.

A frame of meaning that ultimately resonated with many people was health and obesity. Many different groups and individuals are worried about the rising health care costs and the epidemic of obesity. Baby boomers are entering early retirement, and their preoccupation with health is causing some of them to get more physically active through walking and bicycling. Businesses are dealing with rising health care bills and see walking and bicycling programs as helping their bottom-line from the prevention perspective.

We learned much about the complexity of this topic and the perspectives of the diverse potential partners. We learned that the reasons that people will try alternatives to the single occupancy vehicle are diverse. These motivations will probably remain in flux based on events beyond our control. Health is probably a good unifying theme for future events: focus on the health of people and health of the planet.

Transportation accounts for about 20% of all greenhouse gas emissions. In addition to concerns about global warming, a parallel discussion is occurring in energy circles over prospect of peak oil. Proponents of peak oil argue that petroleum is the fundamental linchpin of our present democratic society. As cheap oil/energy/gas quietly fades into history, lives around the world will change. Sustainability is about building resilience. Our community, like every other city in North America, needs to build more resilience into its people and transportation systems.

Sustainable transportation is a concern for everyone. Leaders in government and business need to speak out about the disadvantages of our reliance on the single occupancy vehicle. Greater use of all the transportation options will help businesses and individuals save money, prevent obesity and therefore lower health care costs, reduce demand for parking structures, and lower air emissions. Walking, bicycling, carpooling, taking the bus and tellecommuting are the new common sense.

Election results, what is behind the door?

2006-11-07T16:54:00.000-06:00

I contributed my share to the mess that is American elections, supporting the candidates of my choice financially, with letters to the editor, an afternoon of telephone calling, and this morning, 4 hours of getting out the vote. My efforts were replicated by thousands of people like me, sincere, well-intentioned, convinced in our beliefs, holding opposing views. All of our grass roots efforts were further multiplied by the mega contributions of the monied, the celebrities who loaned their names to candidates, the corporations who contributed to political action committees, the political operatives, campaign strategists, public servants and crass political opportunists, all of us generating a tremendous din of campaign noise aimed at convincing that small percentage of Americans who are independents, undecided, swing voters, people whose views wavered and moved with the winds of scandal, political fortune, attention and attention-suppression.

During my two hours of telephoning, I felt pure relief every time I got an answering machine or a busy signal. I felt chagrin when a woman would answer the phone, run to get her husband, and then have to give him the bad news that I was calling about politics. The friendly calls were like little oases, the people who didn’t need to be convinced, the saintly few who didn’t melt down with impatience over another political telephone call. I suppose it could be argued that we have to do it because the other side is doing the same thing. But there certainly HAS to be a better way. Couldn’t we find a political genius who instead of applying her skills to manipulating the public, could actually find a way to help us have real conversations with one another about what’s important? Is there no way to put any limits on the senseless political advertising, the sound bites cluttering our mailboxes, emails, and television screens with negative, simplistic argument?

The current election system is an affront to anyone who cares about sustainability. The process of voting is cumbersome, time-consuming and difficult, especially for those who must work a visit to the voting booth into a complicated and busy life. I don’t have too many worries about voting irregularities in Minnesota, but I think the Oregon style mail-in voting process is worth considering.

As I wait like everyone else for the election results, I’ve been working on my painting project. I finished the first layer of decoration for the 3 part screen, settling on a feathery leaf design for the background. I’m not sure yet what additions I will make to this basic design. The process and gesture of painting provided a welcome break from politics.

Images of sustainability

2006-11-04T17:15:00.000-06:00

My desire to paint has been dormant for a couple of months, until I came up with another pretext to paint. The pretext was the prospect of family visiting during the month of November, and an old screen room divider that desperately needs to be turned into a lovely thing. So I have spent a day sanding and priming the divider, and am now faced with the prospect of 6 new blank surfaces, each measuring 17” x 63”, that need to be filled with living imagery.

This prospect is sending me back to favorite art books. The idea of two panels of 3 each suggests a narrative framework for the paintings. An internet search on the subject of Japanese screens led me to an exhibit done by the Asia Society of New York in 2004 on Japanese folding screens created from the mid-sixteenth century through the late seventeenth century. These screens were apparently created with themes depicting the social and cultural ideals of the time.

This is just a little exciting because I have been thinking about issues of sustainability, paying special attention to how we communicate about such topics as global warming, transportation sustainability, and food system sustainability. I have noticed how rare it is to hear or see anyone with a visionary perspective about the kind of sustainable society we would like to create. I am inclined to believe that people who could think in this way would be highly useful to all of us. Artists can try to create visions of a sustainable society, in the same way as the screen painters of 16th century Japan. Writers and community organizers, techies, inventors, teachers, homemakers and engineers can also describe and try to live out such visions.

I think we all need to engage in as much positive visionary thinking as we can. The planet is going to continue, regardless of how much destruction we humans wreak on it and one another. It seems likely to me that future generations will be living in a world that is hotter, drier, with less biodiversity and greatly reduced fisheries. We could rely a lot less on single occupancy vehicles. Central cities could become more viable and the expansion of automobile dependent suburbs could slow. As the cost of transporting finished goods increases, local and regional farming and manufacturing could regenerate.

The environmental doom and gloomers have their role. It would be great if elected officials and leaders would pay attention to their warnings. I think it is counter-productive for those of us who can see some positives in our future changed world to spend too much time listening to the pessimists. This is not to say the pessimists are incorrect in their assessments. I hope that some people will be inspired to great constructive action when they learn that the fisheries will be depleted by 2048.

For most of us, however, this news is disempowering. The street level activists in Minnesota and Oklahoma who want to do something about the oceans will be left depressed and wringing our hands at the future prospects. Those who are already tuning out the news will turn away more emphatically. Strategically, if we really want to change the world, we need to give much more voice to the positive visions. This gives the activists something concrete to do, it lures the disempowered back into engagement, it gets more of us creatively involved in the continued unfolding of our evolution.

Central themes in America's culture codes

2006-11-02T20:21:00.000-06:00

I just finished reading “The Culture Code” by Clotaire Rapaille. Rapaille is a Frenchman who developed expertise in learning how ideas become imprinted in humans based on their cultural upbringing. He has shared his expertise with leading companies to help them market products around the world, based on the distinctive national “culture codes.”

A culture code is an idea-set that emotionally animates people when they are making crucial decisions. The most well-known American culture code is belief in the American dream. Anyone with something to sell to an American would do well to make sure that the message is “on-code”, that is, it resonates strongly with American idea-sets. This applies to everyone from political candidates, to automobile manufacturers, to community activists.

American culture codes present formidable challenges to anyone who might question the standard American way of doing things. Rapaille says that America is an adolescent culture, and exhibits this quality in many ways: “intense focus on the “now,” dramatic mood swings, a constant need for exploration and challenge to authority, a fascination with extremes, openness to change and reinvention, and a strong belief that mistakes warrant second chances.” As a young culture, we are prone to all the mistakes and enthusiasms of adolescents. We don’t ask our elders (other countries, for example) for advice. We are attracted to figures with adolescent qualities: Bill Clinton, for example, or Michael Jackson.

Our adolescent qualities as a nation can help and hinder us. Jungian psychologist James Hillman says America’s innocence is what gets us into trouble: “…that's our American addiction: the addiction to innocence. That's our only addiction. It's not drugs and it's not marijuana and so on. It's the addiction to not knowing. Not wanting to know.” He says America has an ability to plan, but the Iraq war, and the failure in New Orleans to respond to hurricane Katrina, reflect a failure of imagination: we couldn’t imagine what would happen if the plans didn’t work out.

Rapaille’s insights about American culture codes helps us understand verbal and pictorial frames that will resonate with Americans. His code-work provides information to advertisers and others who would like to shape our response to our experience in the marketplace of things and ideas.

Hillman is puzzling over the more difficult task: how do we rescue the American people from our own immaturity? These are useful questions to ponder as we look at a world of increased complexity. The next generation of global changes may call on us to link our youthful capacity for innovation with a more mature ability to envision and imagine the consequences of the actions we take.

Work without a why

2006-10-27T07:16:00.000-05:00

I seem to be going through a phase in my life where everything is up to question. For the past twelve years, I've been calling myself an artist. Yesterday, someone asked me what I do for a living, and I was confused. I told her I was an artist, but it seemed like a lie.

I've thought of myself as a spiritual person. I go to church regularly. I sing the hymns with gusto and recite the creed. But ask me what I think about God, and suddenly I'm unsure. I used to think of God as a friend, a cosmic energy, an eternal listener, but now, the God-buddy system doesn't compute for me any longer. I miss the relationship but the old way just doesn't work anymore.

So I stopped painting and picked up the pen and the telephone. I started to organize, cajole and persuade, around environmental issues that are important to me. But not much later, I had new doubts about it all. As the campaign season heats up to a fever pitch, I wonder whether anyone can really convince anyone else of anything.

I'm now inhabiting a writer persona, but in a culture that is drowning in information, who would want to read one more thing? At least no trees died to bring these words to light (or not more than one notebook page worth).

The good news is, I'm not depressed. I go through my appointed rounds with kind of an edgy energy. One moment I'm researching immigration policy, the next I am writing a letter to the editor, and the next I am looking for a recipe with feta cheese. Something seems to hold it all together. I've read enough of the mystics to think that the way of unknowing is what's next. The mystic's brains must not have been as cluttered as mine, though.

From Matthew Fox's rendering of Meister Eckhart:
"As long as we perform our works in order to go to heaven
we are simply on the wrong track.
And until we learn to work
without a why or wherefore,
we have not learned to to work
or live or why."

Minnesota state senate candidate evokes fears about immigrants

2006-10-26T18:38:00.000-05:00

I’ve been thinking and writing a lot lately about how issues are framed, focusing primarily on environmental issues.

Yesterday I received an inflammatory mass mailing from friends of Minnesota State Senate candidate Brenda Johnson, raising fear and confusion about foreign immigrant workers. The campaign literature relied on language and images of fear, criminality and otherness, showing hazy images of people climbing over walls or through the holes in fences. It got me to thinking about how central framing, the use and misuse of language, is to what passes for political discourse.

Of course, the mailer is misleading. Here, far from the southern border, is a state level candidate focusing on issues of immigration that are primarily set by the federal government. The literature creates a climate of fear about foreign immigrants, many of whom provide their labor at rates that make it possible for area farmers and other businesses to prosper. The images on the mailer evoke dark skinned people; there’s no danger of confusing these with illegal Canadians, for example.

The United States has been debating who to let into our country since the mid 1800s, and those of us who have been comfortable here for many generations have forgotten our roots. Johnson’s own Scandinavian ancestors probably came here for the same reason today’s immigrants do: to escape political or religious oppression and poverty. Norwegian Einar Haugen wrote a ballad about immigration in the 1880s. A verse in his ballad says: “We desired to show we were grateful, And were anxious to be of some use; We took hold of the roughest of jobs here, Just to show them what we could produce.”

The political world right now is being run by the undecideds. In 2005 GOP pollster and strategist Frank Luntz traveled to the UK to examine voter’s moods. Luntz discovered that "nothing riles the undecideds ... more than immigration." It is very distressing to see political talking points developed in a national context, being used to manipulate responses at a local level.

Another verse from good ole Einar says: “We were not in the ranks of the wealthy, And our homes took a long time to build, We sought work that would earn us some money, For our youngsters were hungry and chilled.” Who are these people, who move out of the undecided column only when motivated by fear? And why haven’t we found a way to make the humanitarian issues posed by immigrants part of the frame?

A cloudy crystal ball

2006-10-24T19:10:00.000-05:00

I’ve spent the day processing a flock of pessimistic outlooks. Yesterday I received a year 2007 forecast from business coach Mike Jay, who sees a number of converging crises, both geopolitical and economic, as likely to trigger a global recession in the next 18 months. I heard Jay speak recently at a workshop in Madison, Wisconsin.

The forecast sent me out on the internet looking for corroboration. One link led to another pessimist, the economist Nouriel Roubini, a professor of economics at New York University. Roubini sees the collapse of the housing bubble, the decline of oil and other commodity prices, and falling demand for durable goods as triggering a recession in 2007. Roubini’s alarm about declining oil prices is contrary to the mainstream economic views that lower energy costs are good news for the consumer.

I also found it difficult to mesh his views with those of the peak oil theorists, who argue that oil prices will be increasingly volatile as world oil production reaches its peak levels of production, within the next decade or so. These pessimists argue that increasing oil commodity prices will start to have catastrophic effects on the economy, as consumers and businesses struggle to adapt too late.

The more I read about any of these issues, the more I am aware of my own limits as a consumer of information. It is tantalizing to think that one could scope out the future blossoming or unraveling of the economy, and make decisions to protect yourself and your family. There is too much uncertainty in the system. Mike Jay says the level of complexity in our systems has gone beyond the ability of most of us to make sense of it all. As peak oil, global warming, the housing bubble, high levels personal and governmental debt converge in my mind with global tensions and insecurities, I tend to fall on the side of the pessimists.

We are all prisoners of our own points of view. I called the painting at the top of this blog the fortune teller demon, and I painted it about 9 years ago to become aware of my habit of making predictions about the future based on the past. We all do this, but very few of us truly have the skill of precognition. Most of our crystal balls are cloudy. Perhaps I am a prisoner of my own tendency for pessimism, but the optimists could be similarly deluded.

So what is a person to do? The crystal ball is cloudy, but it’s a good idea to be prepared. We need to prepare ourselves and be committed to creating the kind of community we want to live in. The strategy I find most convincing was expressed by permaculture activist Rob Hopkins. Hopkins said: “I deeply question the morality of responding to a crisis by running in the opposite direction and leaving everyone else to stew. For me, peak oil and climate change, and the challenge that they present, are a call to return to society, to rebuild society, and to engage society in a process that can offer an oil free world as a step forward and an improved quality of life.”

***
About the fortune teller demon:

This creature frets about the future, staring in a crystal ball where the worst things are sure to unfold. Its pessimism comes from its curious evolution in the desert, far from the watery habitat in which more viable species usually flourish.

From the Facing the Beasts book project.

Some Thoughts on Ordinary Heroism

2006-10-22T15:33:00.000-05:00

I took several days off from blogging in order to attend the Bioneers Conference in Minneapolis. The conference, ending Sunday, October 22 in San Rafael California and 18 satellite communities, brings together a diverse crowd of speakers and attendees from every walk of life. The common thread is an interest in “the restoration of the Earth’s imperiled ecosystems and the healing of our human communities.”

The Bioneers conference offers a one-stop shopping experience for people who are interested in learning about everything from electric cars, to solar energy, to community activism, leadership, local foods, organics, global warming, alternative currencies, to mushrooms and biomimicry. We left the conference yesterday, midway through the second day, overwhelmed with information and the weight of the alternately stirring and depressing assessments of the state of earth.

When I last wrote about communicating about global warming, I was filled with enthusiasm for an assessment done by the Institute for Public Policy Research, in the UK, which concluded that a discourse about “ordinary heroism” could capture the imagination of a subset of citizens who have yet to engage with the issue of global warming. The argument was that the groups framing messages about global warming should engage the public with the meme of being ordinary heroes who would help save the environment.

In the wake of the Bioneers Conference, I am less enamored with the ordinary hero strategy. On one hand, a speaker who heroically challenges us to question our lives of complacency and ease, can trouble our thoughts and inspire us to change. All too often, however, I find the outrage drains my energy. I fear the tendency of all too many people to heroically elevate their points of view contributes too much to the gridlock and divisiveness that seems so prominent a feature of our everyday discourse. I respect what the advocates have done, but it doesn't seem to energize my own desire for action.

James Hillman, scholar, Jungian analyst, and one of the national keynote speakers, said that a great many of us suffer from thinking disorders. We think we know what is wrong, and we can be paralyzed by this critical knowing. Every positive proposition meets immediate criticism; the wrongness of others grows in dimension as we focus on it. As a result, Hillman said, everything and everyone divides into opposing positions. The cure, the basic therapeutic move, is to search out the meaning of the symptom.

If our society suffers from too much superficiality, too much certainty, too much independence, the answer, Hillman argues is in “doubt, disorder, deviance and dependency.” It’s already too easy for us to think we are special, ordinary heroes, because of what we buy or wear, the solar collector we put on our house, or the raw food diet we so virtuously adopt. It’s a lot harder to hold our positions lightly, to be open to learn from others, or to question our basic assumptions. But these practices may be precisely the form of ordinary heroism most called for these days.

Why isn't global warming a political issue?

2006-10-18T13:34:00.000-05:00

Yesterday’s newsletter from Open Democracy writer James Crabtree is on the subject of global warming. It asks the question: why is discussion about such an important issue missing in the American elections? One of the reasons, Crabtree says, is that views about global warming are split along partisan lines. “Only 23% of Republicans think it's important, but more than half of Democrats do.” Do Democrat message framers reason that they need Republican votes to win, and decide to avoid focusing on this issue for fear of alienating them? Or is it simply the fact that other issues are currently better at motivating political change?

Both parties have access to the same focus group information, indicating that volatile gas prices and hurricanes have attracted people’s attention. Most of the campaigns are about reinforcing the frames people already have around the global warming issue, with slight tweaks using code words their target groups will respond to. Many people, particularly men, don’t believe in global warming, but think that temperature extremes are a natural cycle. You can see the current frames-in-use by comparing the issue statements of Democrat Amy Klobuchar in Minnesota, who says “I will fight to reduce global warming by adopting legislation to limit greenhouse gas emissions,” to her Republican opponent Mark Kennedy, who makes no mention at all of either global warming or climate change, but instead speaks of protecting the environment and reducing dependence on foreign oil.

GOP Pollster Frank Luntz says, “nearly all Americans agree that our nation’s current energy policy is behind the times and needs a new, 21st century approach.” You can review the Luntz memo here: it outlines how Republicans should address the issue. Several days after I learned about the Luntz memo from a media organization called Action Media, my own Republican congressman, Gil Gutknecht, hit his constituents with a glossy mailer that hit all the Luntz talking points. The talking points that many partisans agree on is advocating renewable energy and decreasing dependence on foreign oil. Neither global warming nor climate change are part of the Republican pitch.

Those of us who would like to be effective advocates for change on a national, state and local level face some of the same dilemmas as the politicians. If we say it’s a crisis, people will tune us out. They won’t respond to messages blaming them for their destructive, consumptive habits, and they may feel insufficiently compelled to action by messages urging them to do “one small thing”. Here it is important to acknowledge the contribution made by Al Gore in his movie documentary, An Inconvenient Truth. Gore found a way to communicate effectively about the science behind global warming. His movie may prove to be the tipping point that moves Americans to a new attitude.

Many thinkers are trying out new frames that will capitalize on this new attention. George Lakoff, who is best known for his examination of the stern father frame that informs the Republican message, says that people who hope to change attitudes about global warming would do well to cast the issue in terms of health and security. Jeffrey Feldman, a frequent blogger on the subject of frames, says that progressives need a larger frame than global warming. He cites Thom Hartmann, arguing that the gradualism implied in global warming fails to capture the magnitude of the response needed. Instead, he says, we should talk about parts of the planet “shutting down,” which is a big story that will elicit greater response.

I thought this was an interesting approach until I read the more lengthy and nuanced background information on communicating about climate change, put together by the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. I was particularly impressed by some recommendations developed by the Institute for Public Policy Research in the UK. The academics, policy experts, and media advisors seem to agree on several keys points:
*We need to treat the argument over global warming as won. The deniers will make lots of noise, but the weight of scientific information will make these folks increasingly irrelevant.
*Quiet down the rhetoric; instead make efforts to show people exactly how patterns of climate have changed, so that acceptance of global warming becomes the new common sense. Use visual images and stories wherever possible.
*Treat climate friendly activity as a brand that can be sold. Highlight stories of “ordinary heroes” who are achieving success in battling global warming through purchases or new behaviors.

This blog entry is a distillation of information from a variety of sources. Obviously, any particular communications campaign about global warming or its constituent solutions needs to be targeted to the learning curve of a variety of different audiences. A one-size-fits-all approach is not going to work.

Action Media makes a very important point about advocacy and persuasion on environmental issues in their booklet, “Defining We in Environmental Advocacy,” which you can download. For too many years, caring about the environment has been the province of environmentalists. This has allowed an entire movement to be pigeon-holed and marginalized. Instead, we should realize that we are all environmentalists: mothers, writers, artists, accountants, car dealers, teachers and entrepreneurs. Concern about global warming is something that affects us all, and calls forth our engagement whatever our position is in life. The stories we use to engage with others around the issue should reflect the commonality we experience within this diversity.

Moving beyond our efforts to become ordinary heroes with our behaviors around global warming, it sure would be wonderful to have visible political leaders making use of their policy powers and the bully pulpit to push the issue into a new dimension.

Garlic mustard, deer and people

2006-10-17T07:10:00.000-05:00

A friend who loves to garden got me to thinking about garlic mustard. With great frustration, she described her efforts to eradicate this invasive plant from her property, located on the edge of an urban woodland, including multiple applications of Round-up, and zealous scrutiny of every inch of her land, to prevent plants from getting re-established from seed. Garlic mustard, a plant native to Europe, has rapidly naturalized from its introduction in New York throughout the northeast and also is common here in the Upper Midwest. The plant has a two year life cycle. First year plants are rosettes of leaves growing close to the ground, while the second year plants flower and produce profuse numbers of seeds. The plant in both stages crowds out many native plants.

Deer prefer native plants and do not browse on garlic mustard. However, they spread the small seeds, which get caught in their coats and dispersed throughout the woods. In our neighborhood, deer are also over-abundant. Our house similarly sits on the edge of an urban forest. Some of my neighbors think feeding the deer is a lovely thing to do. They have trained the deer to associate our neighborhood with LUNCH. Not only do we have large number of deer, but the deer have gotten used to munching on just about anything we plant. In our yard, this has included baby rhubarb (and I thought those leaves were toxic!), tomato plants, a spruce tree, and a newly planted cherry tree. As a result, I have developed a certain level of hostility toward deer. I even had a dream in which I was inciting my spouse to the murder of baby deer.

If you think about it, deer, garlic mustard and people have something in common. We are flora and fauna that are extraordinarily good at adapting to this environment. All of us are responding to the biological imperative to be all we can be. Garlic mustard plants are opportunists who have found a biological advantage, and played it for all that it is worth. Deer populations have roared back from their low point in the 1930s, when there were only about 300,000, to approximately 30 million at present. Motor vehicle collisions and crop damage are some of the problems associated with our high deer numbers.

We could go on at great length about the problems associated with the adaptable success of humans. Pollution, global warming, extinctions, war and violence are a few of the issues that come immediately to mind. Like deer and garlic mustard, we humans also have some redeeming qualities. Unlike deer and garlic mustard, we have the capacity to be aware of our role in the ecosystem. When I get discouraged about damage we humans have done, I think about the deer and garlic mustard too. All of us are living out our biological imperative. Unfortunately, the fittest and most adaptable survive, and then we must all deal with the consequences of their success.

I try to look for the silver linings. On November 4th, hunting season begins in these parts. The style of hunters varies greatly from one person to the next, but the season reinforces a habit of attention to nature, which is not a bad thing. The hunters need to do their work, or deer numbers around here would be unmanageable. Many hunters donate their venison to food shelves and feeding programs, which is a good thing. Venison is a lean, healthy meat and is not raised in industrial conditions, unlike most of our other meats. I have acquired a taste for it, benefiting from the gifts of hunters I have known.

Garlic mustard is certainly a pest, but Wildman Steve Brill, a well-known naturalist and forager, has identified it as a tasty edible plant. The infant plants, mustard sprouts, taste like garlic. The rosette-shaped leaves are an edible green that tastes best in the early spring or the late fall. During a time of the year when there is little left to forage in the woods, the garlic mustard is still there.

I guess there are some silver linings associated with humans too. I’ll leave you to think about those.

Insights about cars

2006-10-15T11:34:00.000-05:00

Yesterday I spent an hour with Chris Schneider, owner of a Honda dealership in LaCrosse, Wisconsin. Every Saturday morning Schneider offers a free clinic about hybrid cars. Not only does he have a passion for educating the public about Honda hybrids, but he makes common cause with individuals and groups that are promoting wind, solar and geothermal energy. Schneider proves you can be an environmentalist and capitalist at the same time.

In addition to fuel efficiency, one of the big benefits of a hybrid car is its ultra low hydrocarbon emissions, those gases that promote global warming. Honda has plans to bring a cleaner burning diesel engine to market in 2009. The advanced engine design will have a catalytic converter that runs as clean as conventional gasoline vehicles. Diesel cars are about 30% more fuel efficient than gasoline engines.

I am the happy owner of a Honda Insight, and hope the designers at Honda and other car companies have success in bring less polluting and more fuel efficient cars to market. I fear that the rate of technological innovation and consumer acceptance won’t happen fast enough, however. As reported on World Changing, many observers share my pessimism. The climate is catching up to the reality of increased carbon levels with alarming speed. Meanwhile, less than 1% of the cars on the road in North America are hybrids.

We are starting to wake up to the reality of global warming; the question is, how long will it take to translate this awareness into action? In August 2006 Zogby International surveyed American voters and found that 74% are convinced that global warming is happening. Furthermore, 72% say that industries should be required to reduce their emissions to improve the environment. A growing number of opinion leaders also believe in the concept of peak oil, which states that the era of cheap oil is over and our economies will have a hard time coping with higher and more volatile prices.

Regions with the highest level of social capital may be in the best position to cope with the uncertainties that ripple through our lives as a result of global warming and peak oil. Social capital is a term that refers to our willingness to help each other out during times of crisis. Hurricane Katrina exposed the low levels of social capital in Louisiana, as thousands of individuals were stranded without help when the levees broke. Communities with high levels of social capital may be early adopters of practical conservation strategies such as carpooling. What does this mean for you and me? We need to reach out and create relationships with neighbors, building the basis for trust and hence greater social capital. Last weekend my spouse carpooled to a conference in northern Minnesota with someone from the same town. Two others from our town also attended, driving alone on the 600 mile roundtrip journey. My hope is that we alter our habits at least as rapidly as the car companies do, developing enough social capital to make such individual-centered decisions increasingly rare.

If you must travel, buy Green Tags

2006-10-13T10:55:00.000-05:00

This summer, high gasoline prices got our attention, but did we change our driving behaviors? The author of an article in Business Week examined the data and observed that Americans “Can’t Stop Guzzling. ” Gasoline consumption on July 4, 2006, was 2% higher than in the previous year. Now, three months later, gasoline prices have declined, further reducing any incentive to change our fuel consumption habits. Moreover, demand for oil in India and China continues to grow.

With the levels of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere already at record highs, and no sign of change in consumer habits, the planetary science experiment called global warming continues on its roll.

Even motivated advocates at first find it challenging to change driving habits. We unloaded my father’s station wagon earlier this summer and bought a used hybrid car at a premium price. Then, we struggled to change our household driving habits, carpooling on our trips downtown. We continue to come to terms with the fact that family members live at some distance away, and long travel is sometimes necessary to keep in contact. Moreover, we are finding it difficult to let go of the lure of the road. A stay-at-home lifestyle, parsimoniously avoiding any energy expenditure, is unappealing.

A transitional solution is now available to those who need or want to travel: purchase Green Tags. Green Tags are an exchange mechanism that function like carbon credits. You can analyze your household carbon expenditures by entering your household and travel information into a calculator that will determine how much carbon you generated during the year. There are many carbon calculators online; one is found on the Inconvenient Truth website. We did the calculations on this site, and found that our household contributed 8 tons of CO2 to the atmosphere last year.

Then, we purchased Green Tags from Native Energy to provide financial support to this privately held Native American energy company that is involved in wind energy. Another popular Green Tag organization is called Terra Pass. A search on Google or Wikipedia will reveal additional Green Tag providers.

We need to continue doing the hard work of changing our travel habits, but until we get there, Green Tags are a constructive approach.

Hush! Don't say it's a crisis

2006-10-12T09:15:00.000-05:00

Yesterday I described a number of converging challenges we face in a fairly succinct fashion. It would be possible to use more dire language, and say much, much more about the state of the environment, about agricultural issues, about the stresses and strains on our educational system, about the effects of drought both here in the Upper Midwest and around the world, etc., etc., etc. And I didn’t say a peep about the international situation, wars and our part in them, about terrorists and what they want to do, or about politics and corruption. Don’t hide, because I’m not going there.

I’m not going to write about that stuff, because you, me and everyone else are tired of hearing about crises. “School Funding in Crisis?”—reads a headline in this morning’s paper. What does that make you want to do? Does your cup of coffee drop from your hand as, trembling, you grab the phone book to call, and register your concern with your elected official? Not likely. The more common response is to move to the next article, concerning the crisis in Iraq, to skim the editorial page, where someone is talking about the crisis in health care, to read Dear Abby, where someone is having a crisis with a 3-year old, and finally settle, with great relief, on Sudoku or the comics, where at least no one is trying to bum you out about anything. Or maybe you are like the majority of the population, tuning out the whole news enterprise, because there are too many real life diversions and responsibilities capturing your attention.

This situation is a real problem for people like you and me who care passionately about certain issues. We’ve got to find a way to frame the issues so they can be understood in bite-sized pieces. We have to find language that gains allies, rather than language that polarizes and turns people off. We have to ask people to do something they can do, so they can feel they are part of the solution. And we have to be willing to ask them nicely at least seven times, because marketing specialists say that’s how many repetitions it takes before an idea sinks in.

Yesterday was the last day of Try It! Transportation Options week in our fair city. I was going to call it Sustainable Transportation Week, but a marketing guru I contacted nixed that idea. “Nobody understands what sustainable means,” he said. “Why don’t you name the week after what you want people to do?” That marketing guru was Dick Brooks, of Action Media in Minneapolis. If you go to the website, you can get a great little book in pdf format. It is called “Defining We in Environmental Advocacy,” and it attempts to give advocates some ideas about framing their issues, so they can be understood, and heard. I heard Brooks speak at a regional meeting last December. He specifically said that advocates should avoid using the word crisis, because it means it’s too late.

So I made my best attempt to communicate around the issue of transportation. I pointed out that a lot of us could stand to lose a few pounds, observed that obesity was jacking up health care rates everywhere, reinforced the readily held opinion that gas prices are going to be volatile, and slid in global warming as a small subtext. There are some very simple things we all can do about these problems: we can walk more, bicycle more, take the bus, and carpool. I know from personal experience that the habit of carpooling takes some time to develop, even in a family of two. We just need to try it!

So, we got a start at tackling a problem that has huge ramifications. Now, I just need to find a way to ask people to Try It nicely, at least six more times.

Simplicity and sustainability

2006-10-11T08:38:00.000-05:00

I went to a number of talks yesterday. I heard Robert Sweetgall speak at a local middle school. Sweetgall is a motivational speaker on the subject of walking. He has walked across America, and he got the crowd of 150 moving by throwing frisbees into the audience, creating competitive groups of walkers by age, and encouraging us to reveal our health concerns to the person we were sitting next to. The sweet simplicity of walking is something we all need to get back to.

The solutions we need to pay most attention to, in order to deal with the challenges we face, are the simplest ones. It would help if our elected officials and business leaders paid attention to these solutions, but most of them aren't, so it's up to all of us.

Our converging challenges, as I see it, are these:

Poor health, chiefly obesity, which is going to put a huge strain on our own pocketbooks, as well as those of government and employers. Sweetgall said that for the first time, the life expectancy of Americans is now expected to decline, due to our low physical activity levels.
Peak oil--which doesn't mean that oil is going to run out, but that the cost of extracting it will become increasingly expensive.
Global warming, which at the very least in the Upper Midwest will lead to increased cooling demands during the summer months.

Among those who accept these propositions as real threats, there are many who hope technology will provide the answer. While I agree that technology could provide some answers, on an individual level, the more productive solutions will be the simple ones.

Why? Let's just look at a household like ours. We would like to cut our electrical use. Most of our electricity comes from coal burning power plants, which contribute to global warming. Over the past year and a half, we have been investigating alternative energy solutions. Our home consumes roughly 570 kwh (kilowatt hours) of electricity per month. We have a nice, south facing roof that would be perfect for a some solar panels. A solar installer came to our home, and told us that we could get a 2 KW system for $18,000. This would cover roughly half of our electrical usage. The State of Minnesota offers a $2,000 rebate per KW solar system, and the federal government offers a $2,000 tax credit. This would reduce the cost to $12,000. But this is not a financially sustainable solution for a household that only spends $700 a year on electricity.

Wind power is also not a financially viable solution for an existing residential household. Even though our home is on top of a hill, surrounding vegetation and low prevailing winds in this area of the state make wind power a marginal proposition. When this is combined with the still emerging state of rooftop wind systems, wind is a technology that doesn't measure up to the pragmatic tests.

So the homeowner interested in reducing household energy use must fall back on the simple solutions, largely passive cooling strategies in the summer. Next spring would be a great time to plant trees on the south and west sides of your house. Until the trees get large enough to provide real shade, consider blinds that reduce the amount of sunlight coming into your house.

Cities also need to get behind tree planting. Many of our neighborhoods lost massive number of trees from Dutch Elm disease. There is no better time than the present to start growing a replacement forest.

My real complaint is about our belief in technology. As long as we believe technology will bail us out of our fixes, we remain locked in a passive attitude towards our energy future. Simple, cost-effective solutions move us into an active role as problem solvers, contributors to the collective solution.

Describing a vision

2006-10-10T14:40:00.000-05:00

I am learning about how to do this. Many of the available blog names were gone. I settled on hickory bud because it was available, and it is a tree native to this area of the country. In the spring, the hickory buds are of surpassing beauty.

The tree is prized for its strength and flexibility, assets I consider important for these times. Also, the tree apparently symbolizes storm energies, driving rain and thunder, the kind of "brainstorms" that hail down from above. All of these attributes make it an attractive tree from a symbolic perspective.

I am an artist who has arrived at a point where I find it impossible to just sit in my studio and paint. I am interested in connecting with people who have sustainable visions they are trying to put into action.

Hickory Bud, first day

2006-10-10T14:00:00.000-05:00

This weekend I was inspired by a visit to a sustainable home created by a couple living in rural Minnesota. Christian and Jennifer have constructed a 2400 square foot home that is off the grid. When they learned the cost of a new well in their rural location would be $22,000, they designed a rainwater cachment system, with three 2500 gallon cisterns in the basement. When they learned the cost of bringing electricity to their site would be $12,000, they spent a little more, and with photovoltaic cells and a wind generation, will be able to meet all the needs of a modern household. A masonry stove is designed to efficiently burn the wood they'll use to keep warm in the winter.

The entire house is a system that pleases in every way imaginable: from the aesthetics of the limestone stove, to the Vermont slate floors that will keep cool in the summer and retain heat in the winter, to the overhang on the southward facing windows (with a high solar heat gain coefficient) that keeps direct light out in the summer but allows it in during the winter, to the non-toxic clay paints.
You can read more about the house at www.lichtnstein.org.The house is a manifestation of my vision, both for myself, and this blog, which is to find a marriage between beauty and preservation of the world.