5 Success Stories for 2015

Sometimes those working for social justice or towards a more sustainable world can feel overwhelmed by the odds we face.  It can seem that no matter what we do, the issues we face are becoming more entrenched, worsening, and becoming more widespread.

So, it can be worthwhile to take a step back and reflect on some of the positive achievements that have been made.  There are many that could be showcased, but here are just five. 

Keystone XL Pipeline Dismissed

Phase IV of the giant Keystone XL pipeline was to have brought oil from the oil sands of Alberta (Canada) all the way through to Steele City in Nebraska.  The pipeline would have added 800,000 barrels of oil per day to only worsen the problems of climate change.

However, in a massive display of public opposition including an unique alliance between mid-Western farmers and native Americans (the Cowboys and Indians Alliance) the pipeline was disrupted physically, politically and legislatively.  Opposition took place not just along the route of the pipeline, but throughout the US, with hundreds arrested at the White House in March, after tying themselves to the fence.

On 6 November 2015 President Obama rejected the proposal.  Bill McKibben, co-founder of the group 350.org, noted that this “is nothing short of historic, and sets an important precedent that should send shockwaves through the fossil fuel industry.”

Divestment Increases

One of the most innovative campaigns opposing the fossil fuel industry has been the Divestment Campaign.  Indeed, divestment was one of the factors involved in the cancellation of the Keystone XL pipeline.  The campaign calls on individuals and institutions to withdraw their funds from companies associated with the fossil fuel industry.  Companies targeted include banks, insurance providers, universities, large charities, and wealth funds, as well as smaller, local institutions.  Individual investors have closed their accounts with banks that continue to invest in the fossil fuel industry, and shifted to financial institutions that pledge to not fund such companies.

Some well-known celebrities, including Leonardo di Caprio, have supported this campaign and have committed to divesting.  The world’s largest sovereign wealth fund¹ (worth $945 billion) is the biggest divestor yet. 

The campaign now covers 43 countries and as of September 2015 it is estimated that over US$2.6 trillion has been withdrawn from the fossil fuel companies.  The value of divestments in 2015 rocketed by over fifty times the level it had been at just a year ago.  The 436 known institutions to have divested represent almost 650 million people world-wide.

The campaign is truly a world-wide, financially significant, phenomenon.

Making Bankers Responsible

Whilst most western countries were bailing out the banks and other financial institutions following the 2008 financial crisis, the small nation of Iceland took a decidedly different tack.  Iceland decided to make those at the heart of the collapse responsible for their actions.  So far, 26 bankers have been jailed in Iceland, with a combined prison sentence between them of 74 years.  This is in complete contrast to that of rewarding bankers elsewhere with bail-outs at the expense of everyday citizens.  In fact, Iceland intends paying every Icelander kr30,000 after the government takes back ownership of the second of the there major Icelandic banks.

Iceland is the only European nation to have fully recovered from the financial crisis, including paying back in full it’s debt to the IMF – ahead of time.  Asked how Iceland managed to do this, the President, Olafur Ragnar Grimmson, replied that:

“We were wise enough not to follow the traditional prevailing orthodoxies of the Western financial world in the last 30 years.”

Wise indeed.  Would that a few other governments had the courage to expose the fraud, corruption and deceit of the world’s banking systems.

Flagging Down Racism

Flags may be just symbols, but symbols can be very powerful.  For many black Americans the Confederate flag is a symbol of a system that was based on slavery, an extreme outward show of racism.

In 1961 the Confederate flag was flown from the dome of South Carolina’s statehouse to mark the 100th anniversary of the American Civil War.  It remained there as a symbol of opposition to the civil rights movement.  In 2000 amidst protests it was moved to a flagpole near a Confederate monument in the Statehouse grounds, as a compromise.

However, the massacre of nine people in an historic black church in Charleston in June 2015 sparked further protest, not just in South Carolina, but throughout the US.  The person accused of this crime had posted photos of himself posing with the Confederate flag and guns before the shootings.  Within a month of the racially inspired killings South Carolina lawmakers had passed by 93-27 votes a law requiring the flag to be removed from Statehouse grounds.

Of course, there is nothing in this act that suggests historic revision.  Recalling history and exhibiting memorabilia from those times is entirely appropriate.  However, displaying the Confederate flag on flagpoles in the state capitol would be akin to the Nazi flag being flown above the Reichstag in Germany.

Getting Real on Domestic Violence

Research by the World Health Organisation (WHO) in 2013 found that “worldwide, almost one third (30%) of all women who have been in a relationship have experienced physical and/or sexual violence by their intimate partner.”  In Australia the incidence is similar, if not, somewhat higher – possibly as high as 40%.

So, it was pleasing to note that the Queensland government, in August 2015, adopted all 140 recommendations in the report by the Special Taskforce on Domestic and Family Violence.²  Adopting the recommendations, the Queensland Premier, Annastacia Palaszczuck, noted that “the time is right for action and I believe the community has the will to change," going on to say that the State would work to bring about a shift in attitudes towards domestic and family violence.

Measures include funding for more crisis centres, a campaign of education, a review panel to identify gaps in procedures and systems, and funding to help develop services for clients. 

In an age of heightened awareness of domestic and family violence it is heartening to find a government willing to take on board all recommendations made by an independent taskforce.

Further Successes

As I write this blog news is coming out of Paris that an agreement has been reached that would see the nations of the world halt global temperature rise to 2 degrees, with a target of just 1.5 degrees.  The success or otherwise of this agreement will be seen over the next couple of years.

Let us celebrate these and other successes from 2015, and look forward to more in 2016.

1. Norway’s Government Pension Fund Global (GPFG).  It is likely to divest of $9 billion – $10 billion from fossil fuel industries.
2. Not Now, Not Ever: Putting an End to Domestic and Family Violence in Queensland.  Report produced by Special Taskforce on Domestic and Family Violence, chaired by Honourable Quentin Bryce and presented to the Queensland government on 28 February 2015.

Note: This is the final posting on this site for 2015.  The next posting will be in the second week of January 2016.

Beasts and Gods (A Review)

Democracy:  the hallmark of a civilised society, the pinnacle of our search for equality and freedom, the best political system ever devised.  Well, not according to Roslyn Fuller.

In Beasts and Gods: How democracy changed it’s meaning and lost it’s purpose,¹ Roslyn Fuller picks through our democratic claims to fairness, equality, freedom, and representation; and finds all of them wanting.

Fuller presents a compelling case against our electoral/representative democracy.  Using case studies from all over the world, plus devastating statistics, Fuller shows how modern democracy has enabled those with wealth to obtain political power, and then those with political power to gain more wealth.  Simultaneously, the rest of society are excluded from public decision-making and not even represented in the process.

With clear examples Fuller unpicks many of the myths that continue to support our hold on electoral democracy as a sacrosanct institution. 

• Representation is “mathematically impossible” when such a small number of citizens represent an entire nation.  Furthermore, Fuller claims, tinkering with the system will get us no closer to accurate representation.
• Getting elected costs money, meaning that those who are rich, or have access to money (from corporate donations etc.) have a greater chance of being elected.  Pulling together statistics from various nations, Fuller shows that as the amount of money spent in a campaign increases so too does the chance of being elected.  So much so that if one candidate spends just twice the amount of another, the chance of being elected can be 90%.  If that ratio  increases to 5:1 then the chances of election become 100%
• Not even the use of referenda can make a difference.  Because referenda are used so infrequently, they just become another bottleneck (as Fuller terms them), along with elections, for the rich to assert their influence.
• Participation is one of the greatest myths of electoral democracy.  Large corporations have the inside running and the rest of society is shut out.  Even using petitions only gives the petitioners the right to ask politicians to do something, they do not enable citizens to do anything.  Protest is often claimed to be essential to democracy, but as Fuller exclaims, “far from being a part of democracy, protest is a reaction to a lack of democracy.” (emphasis in original)
• Those who control the media essentially also control the political system and who gets elected.  Fuller uses damning case studies to prove her point.
• But it gets worse.  Once we get to international politics and representation, the problems at national level only get heightened, intensified and exacerbated.  Taking just one of Fuller’s many examples, the IMF is a case in point.  Although the USA has just 4.4% of the world’s population it has 16.7% of the votes on the IMF.  Japan at just 1.8% of the world’s population claims 6.2% of the vote.  Meanwhile, those on the Indian subcontinent with 20% of the world’s population hold on to just 2.8% of the votes.  This, and numerous other examples indicate how the poor are cut out of decision-making, thus exacerbating the power/wealth imbalance.

Fixing It

It would seem that democracy is broken and that we need to fix it.  But, asserts Fuller, what we have is not even democracy.  It doesn’t even derive it’s identity from Athens where we have been taught it comes from.  Our present system finds its roots in another city and another system – the oligarchic Roman Republic.  Whatsmore, Rome decayed from the inside and there are signs that our current electoral system is doing the same, for the same reasons.

So, what does Fuller suggest we do?  Look to the true source of democracy she replies: Athenian demo-kratia, literally "people power."  The Athenians had already tried elections and had discarded them as being not democratic enough.  They brought in two new elements in public dialogue and decision-making: the Assembly and the cleroterion.

Most of us will have heard of the Assembly, whereby any Athenian citizen² could turn up to participate in public discourse and decision-making.  Up to 15% of those eligible did so, a far cry from the 0.01% (or less) that make up most of the parliaments of electoral democracies today.  However, many of us will not have heard of the cleroterion.  It was a simple piece of technology that allowed for a very simple method of selecting public officials randomly.  Yes, randomly, much like a lotto system today.³

The Athenian democratic system had  a lot going for it, according to Fuller.  It was fair, it was representative, it was equal, it provided for freedom.  Most of all, it was – democratic.

But, can it work today?  Why not, replies Fuller.  She describes a number of already existing technologies and processes that enable the use of both direct democracy and random selection.  For example:

• Participatory budgeting which originated in Porto Alegre, Brazil, but now used in New York, London, Toronto, Cologne, Paris and many other municipalities around the world.
• Citizens Juries whereby citizens are randomly selected to make public decisions on a number of issues.  The use of such juries is wide-spread and have proved to be highly effective.
• Online technologies such as LiquidFeedback, Loomio and DemocracyOS can be used in much the same way that the Athenian Assembly was used.

Fuller’s book is a welcome addition to the discussion about the future of democracy.  If this review does nothing more than whet the appetite for those thinking about running for political office in order to change something to read this book first, then it will have done it’s job.  As Fuller asserts, it is not that we need to find alternative candidates to vote for:

“We simply need to create a parallel politics that encourages real democracy.  Indeed, when one is locked into a self-perpetuating system, which is what the electoral representative system is, this is the only approach that really has any chance of success.”

That is something that we can all do.  First though, get a hold of this important book and read it.  It will change the way you think about democracy.

1. Roslyn Fuller, Beasts and Gods: How democracy changed it’s meaning and lost it’s purpose, Zed Books, London, 2015
2. At the time (6th to 4th centuries BC) citizenship in Athens did not include women, slaves, children or metics (Foreigners residing in Athens).  However, such criticism does not deny the basic democratic ideas.  We must remember that even our electoral system has only allowed women to vote since the early part of the 20th century, and many indigenous people have been disenfranchised until very recently.
3.  Indeed, the cleroterion bore an uncanny resemblance to modern day lotto machines.

Let’s Not Cop Out

Effects of sea level rise in the Maldives

This week (beginning 30 November 2015) COP21 began in Paris.  COP being the Conference Of Parties, an annual gathering of the parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, adopted in 1992.  The avowed aim of this conference is to achieve a legally binding and universal agreement on climate, with the aim of keeping global warming below 2°C.

Some are claiming that 2°C is too great a warming.  Significantly, it is the least developed nations calling for a target of 1.5°C.  Mr Giza Gaspar-Martins, from Angola, and chair of the Least Developed Countries (LDCs) group said:

“The current plans to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions do not keep the world within the ‘safe’ temperature rise of 2°C. But from a Least Developed Country perspective, it is far worse than that. For the LDCs, economic development, regional food security, ecosystems, and the very survival of their populations and livelihoods are at risk if talks aim only for a 2°C world.”

Gaspar-Martins and the poorest nations of the world are supported by the Alliance Of Small Island States (AOSIS), who are already suffering the effects of sea level rise.  The chair of the Alliance, Thoriq Ibrahim from the Maldives¹ had this to say:

“Slower onset events like sea level rise and ocean acidification continue to assault our small states. Climate change in all its forms is a new reality for us and it is getting worse.”

He went on to say that

“a long-term temperature goal of well below 1.5 degrees must be reflected in the Paris Agreement, along with an indicative pathway for achieving it, including urgent peaking and deep mid-century emissions reductions.”

Those of us in the western-styled, rich nations of the world must take note.  It is the poor nations and the small island states that are experiencing the worst effects of climate change, yet they are the nations contributing the least to this change.  A simple graph plotting per capita GDP against per capita greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) is very telling.

In this graph the horizontal axis represents per capita GDP in US dollars and the vertical axis per capita tonnes of GHGs.  The vertical blue line marks a per capita GDP of $10,000 US – one hundred and twenty nations lie to the left of this line!  The graph is a scatter diagram with the red line representing the “line of best fit” showing the rough correlation between GDP and GHG emissions.
 
Telling, isn’t it?  Clearly, it is the rich nations that contribute most significantly towards GHG emissions and therefore climate change.

And we in the western-styled, rich nations continue to consume at ever alarming rates.  The richest 1/5th of the world’s population consume 86% of the world’s resources.²  Meanwhile one-third of the world’s population living in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, consume just 3.2%.

We must face it – it is our consumption patterns that contribute to climate change.  It is those of us in the western-styled, rich nations that continue to consume in great, excessive, obscene levels; who condemn those living in poor nations and small island states to the ravages of climate change.

Certainly, we must continue to ensure that our leaders put in place the policies needed at COP.  Certainly, we must continue to oppose mining and drilling for fossil fuels.  Certainly, we must continue advocating for renewable energy.

But, if we continue driving our cars to climate change rallies, continue to eat meat in vast quantities, continue to throw food away, continue to adopt the latest fads and fashions, continue to be hooked on electronic and telecommunications gadgetry then we will continue to cop out.³

Let’s not cop out.

1. The average height of the Maldives is just 1.2 metres above sea level, and the highest point is only 2.4m above sea level, making this nation the most vulnerable to sea level rise.
2. This 20% consume:  45% of all meat and fish,  58% of the total energy, 84% of all paper, have 74% of all telephone lines, and own 87% of the world's vehicle fleet.  (Source, worldcentric.org accessed 1-12-15)
3. Cop out is a slang term meaning to avoid or shirk responsibility, to fail to fulfil a commitment, or to provide an evasive excuse.

The Enemy is Us

It seems that humans have a great capacity to find enemies.  For millennia we have been fighting wars, ostracising those we are afraid of (e.g. lepers, homeless, beggars), discriminating based on gender, ethnicity, age, ability (or disability), and a whole host of other criteria.  In each case we have pointed our finger at the enemy - otherwise known as the other

For there to be an other, there must be a self.  Our western tradition has been that our sense of who we are as individuals, our self, is separate to and separate from all other selves. 

What happens when we construct our sense of who we are in this way?  We come to understand ourselves as essentially alone.  For some that aloneness comes quickly and can lead to depressive and even suicidal states.  For others, the dawning comes slowly.  But for most of us in western-styled societies the sense of aloneness is deeply entrenched, so much so that it is almost unconscious.  But, the effects are not so sublimated. 

Being alone brings on a sense of fear – a fear of the other.  That’s a frightening place to be and so we band together with those who are similar to us for protection.  We band together along religious lines.  We band together in ethnic enclaves.  Our ways of banding together have become many and varied.  But we have been able to shift our sense of being from one of isolation and fear to one of belonging and security – I becomes we.

With this collective identity we can attempt to overcome or at least control the other – the enemy. We have pursued that objective time after time through the millennia.  We know of the exploits of Alexander the Great.  We know of the Trojan War from the writings of Homer.  We’ve heard of Genghis Khan, the Crusades and the Hundred Years War.  Many of us now alive have lived through the Vietnam War, the Gulf War and now the war in Syria.

The battle with the enemy is not always a war though.  Discrimination, oppression and subjugation occur without full blown war erupting.  Women have been seeking relief from male dominance for at least two centuries¹ – sometimes referred to as the battle of the sexes.  Racism has been a blight on human society and continues to be so.  Homosexual couples are only now beginning to obtain similar rights to heterosexual couples. 

Sometimes the enemy is not other human beings – it can be an idea or product.  The War on Drugs and the War on Terrorism are two such recent examples.

Indeed, the concept of self has become so entrenched and dominant that the sense of other is extended beyond that of other human selves – it extends to other life forms, indeed, to the Earth itself.  And so, we rape, pillage and exploit the Earth.  We wish to dominate nature.  In fact the notion of man (sic) against nature is so well established that it is almost a literary genre.

Finding the enemy is convenient for our sense of self, for our identity.  We find that enemy in the other, in someone or something outside of ourselves.  Over the millennia we have always managed to find that external enemy.

Now we live in a time of climate change and we look for an enemy to blame, an enemy that we can point to and say – “look , they did it, they are the cause of our pain and suffering.”  But, no matter how hard we try, we cannot find that external enemy.  The truly uncomfortable fact is that we must point the finger back at ourselves and say – the enemy is us.² 

That realisation, when we make it, awakens us to a new sense of who we are.  With such a new awareness we may find not only that we do not need enemies; we also find a greater, deeper sense of who we are as well.

As we head towards the UN Climate Change Conference in Paris can we expect answers from that forum?  The possibility is unlikely.  The answers lie with and within each and every one of us.

1. Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women was published in 1792.
2. In 1970, for the first Earth Day, Walt Kelly (the creator of the cartoon strop Pogo) created a poster to promote Earth Day in which Pogo the Possum  is preparing to clean up the mess made by humans in his environment.  The poster carries the line: We Have Met the Enemy and He is Us.

Turning Society Inside-Out

The world needs to change.  Society needs to change.  Individually, we need to change.  Many have said that we are at a cross-roads.  Either we will break-through, or we will break-down.  We have a choice.  But our choice cannot be informed by or rooted in our old ways.  We need to make new choices, create new patterns, create new ways of living and being. 

To do that means not accepting top-down solutions.  The top-down, government-knows-best approach is clearly unable to provide us with the answers, solutions and future we desire. 

That means that must turn society inside-out.  Our society has to be created by us, from the ground-up.  It has to be created locally, yet in combination with other local initiatives, rather like a massive web of inter-linking local initiatives that encompass the whole world.

Can it be done?  Yes it can. 

There are dozens of examples world-wide of communities attempting to create and design their own futures, without relying on central authority or governments.  Here are just four examples:

Demanhur

The Federation of Demanhur is an ecovillage located in Italy’s Piedmont region.  Founded in 1975 the village now houses over 800 people with Demanhurites participating in one of four levels, from permanent occupants through to those that live elsewhere but maintain a social and/or spiritual link with the village.  Houses in the village can house anywhere from 10 to 20 people, with all of them federated under the auspices of the Federation of Demanhur.

Findhorn

Perhaps the most well-known ecovillage in the world, Findhorn, in Moray, Scotland, was founded in 1962.  The community subscribes to no particular creed or doctrine, making it accessible to many who may be put off by other villages of particular faiths or doctrines.  Instead, Findhorn opens its doors to well over 5000 people every year from all over the world who come to workshops on the workings of an ecovillage.  Its prominence as a working example of what can be achieved has been recognised by the United Nations Centre for Human Settlements by awarding it the UN Habitat Best Practice designation.

Findhorn’s decision-making is vastly different to that of most of the world’s parliaments, senates and congresses. 

“Decisions are made by a process of listening to or reading information about a proposal, asking questions to learn the facts, and also meditating to open a space for intuitive information to be included in the decision-making process. Sometimes silence is used to create this meditative space, called 'attuning', where each person does their best to find an inner state of mind in which goodwill is foremost and any outcome will be one which serves as the best for all. Sometimes people share their thoughts, feelings, and any other information gained from attuning, and then a vote is taken.”¹

Gaviotas

The location of Gaviotas in Los Llanos (the Plains) of Columbia and amidst the cocaine growers, guerrilla groups, and ever present military and paramilitary forces make this an unlikely setting for an ecovillage.  However, this intentional community, founded in 1971 has made some amazing technological innovations.  For instance, they developed a children's’ seesaw that provides the energy for a water pump.

The scientists and engineers drawn to the community have become proficient at developing engineering solutions specific to the local issues and environment.  When solar hot water panel manufacturers explained the costs and difficulties associated with solar technology, the inhabitants of Gaviotas came up with their own solution.  Notwithstanding the often overcast weather of the region, Gaviotas engineers came up with solutions better equipped to deal with the local conditions, and did so using cheaper, local building materials.

A further benefit of developing local solutions has been an improvement in the health of the population in the surrounding area.  Gaviotas has developed cheaper, more efficient, more ecologically sustainable water supply systems, and this has had a direct benefit in terms of supplying people with cleaner, safer water.

The Llanos area was at one stage part of the Amazon rainforest, but had become denuded of this ecological system.  More than 1.5 million trees have since been planted by the inhabitants of Gaviotas.  These trees have provided the groundcover needed to enable tropical rainforest species to regenerate in the area.

Neve Shalom

Neve Shalom (meaning Oasis of Peace) is a cooperative village established primarily to show that two peoples (in this case Israelis and Palestinians) can live side-by-side in harmony.  The brainchild of an Egyptian, Bruno Hussar, the village is midway between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.  Hussar established the village as a way to promote interfaith dialogue in the war-torn area.  Administratively the village is run by a number of elected committees, with half the representatives of each committee being Israeli, the other half Palestinian.

Although the community itself is small, its reach is large.  It is estimated that since 1980 over 35,000 people have been educated there, including many of them as facilitators in non-violent conflict group encounter skills.

Where To?

Where to next?  More of these intentional, cooperative, sustainable, radically democratic ecovillages will be necessary.  We are seeing the beginnings of global shifts towards these styles of living with the emergence of movements such as Transition Towns, voluntary simplicity, permaculture and dozens of small groups of people coming together to create alternatives to the business-as-usual, growth-oriented and harmful ways of the past. 

These groups are no longer demanding leadership from above; but are intentionally building and creating, from the inside out.

1. www.finhorn.org  Frequently Asked Questions, accessed 17 November 2015

Was Ned Ludd right?

Ned Ludd

Was Ned Ludd, the 18th century lad who supposedly smashed a couple of textile machines right?  His name gives us the term luddite – famously applied to English textile workers who protested at the introduction of labour-saving technology in the early part of the 19th century.

Looking back on the unease of Ned Ludd from the 21st century it is possible to contend that he was right to be worried about technology, although not for the same reasons.  Many of the most pressing concerns of today have come about because of our fixation on technology.  Two examples help to illustrate this point.

The invention of the internal combustion engine has, arguably, been the one piece of technology that has contributed more than any other factor towards climate change.  Fourteen percent of global greenhouse gas emissions come from the fuelling of the engines of transport.  There is little indication that this is reducing or likely to reduce.

Over the past fifty years the number of car registrations world wide has increased seven-fold.  Not only has the number of vehicles increased, but the distance travelled per vehicle has also increased – almost doubling in the last forty years.  Certainly, the fuel efficiency of vehicles has increased, however, the fact that we are now travelling further, means that each car is using more fuel per year now than it did forty years ago.

Massive technological innovation in the agricultural sector, although increasing yields, has had some disastrous consequences.  The technology has allowed for the deforestation of large swathes of South American, African and Asian rainforests – the “lungs of the earth.” 

The much vaunted Green Revolution was a technological fix that was going to solve the problems of starvation and hunger in many of the poor nations of the earth.  The failure of this technological approach is now well documented.  The introduction of crops that required large investments of expensive fertiliser, seeds and irrigation had the effect of displacing many subsistence and poor farmers from their lands and only means of livelihood.

Perhaps Ned Ludd was right.

That’s all in the past though isn’t it?  The technology of the future will surely solve our problems.  Well, maybe not!

Difficulties with technological solutions

There are inherent difficulties with putting faith in technological solutions.

First is what is known as the Rebound Effect (or Jevons Effect), which notes that when an efficiency gain is produced one of the effects is to increase consumption of that item or another item.  The increased fuel efficiency referred to above is a good example of this.  Although vehicle efficiencies have increased, all that happened was that vehicles were driven further and so the actual fuel usage increased. 

Examples such as this can be found everywhere, consider another.  The efficiency of transporting fresh food from one side of the planet to the other has increased, so that consumers in rich nations are now able to eat whatever food they want year round.  The effect upon climate, soil erosion and manipulation of crops has been disastrous – all because of technological efficiency gains.

Technologically we currently have the ability to transport people much more efficiently and sustainably than we do.  The technology of public transport is well developed, but do we use it as wisely or as effectively as we could?  The short answer is – no!  Why not?  It just isn’t socially acceptable to do so.  We would far prefer to use our own private vehicle.  Social acceptance is one of the big hurdles to overcome with any technological advancement when it comes to sustainability.
 
When businesses adopt technology advances then the gains from that are often reinvested into increased production and consumption rather than to reducing either.  Thus, the current economic model encourages further growth and development because of technology, not less.

Furthermore, the business model of increased economic growth is predicated on further consumption.  Hence it is in the interests of business to privilege technology ahead of other sustainability options.  No wonder we hear so much about technological solutions to climate change, biodiversity loss, water shortages and other problems.

Perhaps the biggest difficulty with the idea of putting our faith in technological solutions is exactly that – putting our faith in techno-fixes.  Relying on, or having faith in, technology allows us to not have to think about some of the more fundamental questions related to how we humans impact the earth and its other inhabitants.

We are currently consuming approximately one and half times the Earth’s sustainable replenishment rate.  Those of us in the rich nations are the worst culprits.  We are consuming anywhere between four and nine Earth-sized planets worth of resources per year.  This is the real issue we must face – our over-consumption.  That has little to do with technology.  If anything, it requires us to reduce our reliance on technology, not create more of it.

Relying on technology to solve our issues is rather like those who put their faith in cryogenics: freeze me now, and thaw me out when technology has found a  cure for aging.

Let’s face it.  We have some serious thinking and acting to do, and it has to do with our individual, and collective, lifestyles and expectations.  Our fixation on techno-fixes is misplaced.  It is our global consumerism that we must tackle if we are to solve the issues that face us.

Maybe Ned Ludd was right.

Community Development Degrees

Do you want a job in community development?  These days it is possible to get a qualification in community development.  A Masters of Community Development, even a PhD if you so desire. That’s a good thing isn’t it?  People become trained and qualified to deliver community development programmes, plans and projects.  It must be good.

Well, no, not really.  Like any upper level educational qualification it sets the haves against the have-nots.  If I have a degree in community development then that suggests I know more about the process of community development than many of those in the communities I am working with.  And that is absurd.

The very notion of community development is premised on the understanding that local communities are capable of understanding the issues that face them, of working out solutions, of discovering what skills they already have, and determining the resources they need.  Community development degrees set up an “expert” mindset that may lead some to believe that they do not have the necessary intellectual, psychological or emotional resources to become “experts” in their own community.  Once that thought takes root then a downward spiral ensues.

Of course it is highly desirable that those who choose to work in community development undergo learning and development opportunities.  But this learning should be firmly rooted in active, experiential, participatory styles based in community settings. 

One of the earlier models developed within community development settings was that of the Action-Reflection model of learning and practise.

The model simply suggests that following analysis, we act.  But that is not the end.  Action-Reflection says that after we have acted, we analyse and reflect on what happened, what the effects or outcome was.  By doing this we learn what went well, what went badly, what more we need to take into consideration.  With this new understanding it is now possible to plan our next action.  The cycle then repeats, and continues to repeat. (see diagram)

A key element of the Action-Reflection model is that of learning from experience.  The maxim of “learning from experience” is often bandied about, without too much thought.  Action-Reflection, however, notes that we do not necessarily learn anything just by having an experience.  The experience must be actively, consciously, reflected on.  It is the active questioning of the experience that allows for the learning to take place.  We must actively ask ourselves: what did we learn from this experience?

Having a degree in community development may be required by many employers, but having the ability to consciously reflect on experience, in participation with the community itself, is of far greater benefit to the community.  Ultimately it is also of greater benefit to the community development worker themselves.