"If you're in a bad situation, don't worry, it'll change. If you're in a good situation, don't worry, it'll change."
-- John A. Simone Jr.
11 Things You Can Do To Be Sustainable
Sustainability is not recycling. It is a process. A way of life.
- Practice a discipline that gives you real insight into your Self. Deal with what emerges.
- Draw a value web and ask yourself, “How can I strengthen ALL of these relationships?”
- No waste. Just do it.
- Develop a meaningful personal sustainability practice that you can commit to.
- Stop “fighting” global warming, poverty, (insert cause of choice).
- Begin working for systemic solutions to global warming, poverty, (insert cause of choice).
- Commit yourself and enroll others to realizing renewable, clean energy in your community NOW.
- Break old habits.
- Seek out and support sustainable businesses and business models.
- Do whatever works for you from all of those other lists.
- Stop reading lists.
Tags: capacity evolution, clean energy, global warming, no waste, personal sustainability practice, poverty, renewable energy, sustainability, sustainable business, value web
Sustaining Sustainability
Here at the headwaters of 2009 and the backwaters of the first decade of the 21st century I’ve got the crashing power chords of Rush in my head singing: “Changes aren’t permanent but change is.” Da da Da dum. Da da da dum…
The Obama era is ushering itself in and with it a lot of hope and opportunity. However, what are we hoping for? Where is that opportunity going to take us? Is that even, really, an appropriate question anymore? Think about this. Meditate on this. Please.
I don’t think we’re “going” anywhere. “Going” is linear. “Going” is an illusion.
My sense of things is that we are “happening”. We and everything else is “emerging” just as we, along with everything else is “subsiding”. Change is the name of the game. Change is changing change.
My sense of things is we have to become better at working and playing well with others. By “others” I mean both the people we work and play with on a daily basis as well as the myriad host of sentient beings blessing this planet and universe with their presence. All of God’s creatures. Not just the ones we want on our team, on our plate and in our garden but the ghosts of the Baiji still swimming in the murky hell of the Yangtze River as well.
The Yangtze springs from snowmelt in Tibet, by the way, and may also become a haunting memory one day if the capricious dynamics of global warming have their way…
We need leaders who are more than achievers (although, now more than ever, we need them too.) We need leaders who can ride the wild flux wave creating wakes of opportunity. We need alchemists who can change the leaden, oppresive beat of the industrial, fossil-fueled dirge into glimmering gold sun-shining circles of slam dancing electrons.
We need to re-discover hope. Bask in the warm winter glow of what could be instead of the November drizzle of what can’t. Re-imagine our Selves as the inter-related jewels holding each other in the shimmering embrace of Indra’s net.
Love. Man do we need love. I’m talking about Big Love here (although ain’t nothing wrong with the little one either). The kind of love Morihei Ueshiba was talking about when he said “Aikido is love“. It is the realization of our capacity to open up to and embrace each other, becoming something bigger, transcendent, simultaneously many and one.
This quote is a good one as well “A good stance and posture reflect a proper state of mind.”
And, finally, for now, let’s forget about “sustaining” our selves. Let’s set our eyes on the prize of flourishing. Sustainability is sustainable when we are looking out for more than just me. Sustainability is sustainable when we are engaged and interwoven, breaking bread and doing good work with one another. The more we can do to benefit those around us, the more potential for us as well.
Forget green. Let’s go full spectrum.
Tags: aikido, baiji, flourishing, global warming, Indra's net, Morihei Ueshiba, obama, Rush, sustainability, Yangtze river
The Absurdity of “Fighting” Global Warming
I have started collecting stories of sustainable practice. There are many of us doing so many things at so many levels, yet, when I talk with people in organizations or even in private I often hear a response sounding like, “I just don’t know where to begin.”
Often, when people tell me they don’t know where to start, it is in reference to “fighting” the malevolent specter of global warming. I’ve got news for you. We can’t “fight” global warming. It’s not an enemy. It’s an outgrowth of who we are, who we’ve been and what we’re becoming.
They only way we will make a significant impact on lowering the level of greenhouse gases we’re pumping into the atmosphere is to radically shift our energy generation and consumption practices as quickly and decisively as possible. We can’t “fight” global warming. We have to give in, give up and move on.
What is fueling global warming? Nearly everything we do. As I type away I’m also sucking up energy from the PGE power grid here in Portland which is, still to a great extent, coal fired. If we want to stop greenhouse gases from accumulating in the atmosphere we have to stop generating them. And, more importantly, we have to help other people stop as well.
This doesn’t mean villifying coal. Coal is not an enemy, it’s compressed carbon. We need to take our collective dis-ease with our current lifestyles and channel that energy into realizing fundamentally different ways of using and generating energy. I know, I know, renewable forms of energy are inefficient, expensive and not practical. The engine in an Oldsmobile wasn’t going to get us to the moon either.
What’s holding us back? We are. Change is hard, scary and uncomfortable, especially when you are a comfortably consuming American, Japanese or newly middle-classed Chinese. Give it up people. The dream of the last one hundred years is choking us with CO2. Let’s figure out and realize a better way.
Revolution is coming one way or another. Either we keep “fighting” global warming with ineffective protocols, accords and reductions (until the glaciers melt, sea levels rise and all hell breaks loose) or we leap forward to something that just might sustain ALL of us. We’ve done it before. We can do it again.
Let’s stop fighting and start being the change we need to see in the world. Rant over. Let’s get on with it.
Tags: change, climate change, CO2, coal burning, global warming, greenhouse gases, renewable energy
Happy New Year of Change
At the end of each year at the Kiyomizudera in Kyoto a kanji (Chinese character) is chosen to represent the old year. For 2008 that character was:
It means “change.” My sense is this is only the beginning. To quote The Second Coming by W.B. Yeats:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
What follows in Yeat’s poem is a vision of violence, bloody anarchy and descending darkness. I believe we have an opportunity here and now. What follows is what I’ve written before.
We can allow change to run it’s capricious and inconsiderate course and react to it, we can respond to it openly and courageously and do the best we can or we can be change, change change, shaping and creating the present and, thus, the future. We do as we do.
How do you do? Happy New Year.
Tags: change, Happy New Year, Kiyomizudera, The Second Coming, Yeats, 変