The Pinchot Perspective

Channel Rock Visit

Libba and I had a recent visit to Channel Rock, the retreat center in British Columbia where the Bainbridge Graduate Institute holds its orientations. Here are few pictures of the current state of affairs.

The New Composting Toilet

The new composting toilet was finished. It is a great example of one kind of high HappoDammo creation. It was made with mostly very local materials and a lot of love. The impact is small and the satisfaction large. High skill craftsmanship tends to put in a lot of love and happiness into each pound of matter. 

The windows on the bottom are where you remove the 2 year-old compost. You shift sides every two years, then wait for the compost to cook thoroughly. It comes our as an unobnoxious earth.

The addition on the right is an outdoor shower. 

 

The view from inside the Pilot House

Libba calls the new composting toilet the "Pilot House", because it looks out on the bay and feels like a the command center for a ship. (You have to be there to get the full effect.)

Cob House in Flower

The Cob House is the place where we cook, eat and hold some of our classes.

Seedlings in a cold frame

We are already starting the summer's food in the cold frames. 

Doug Fir Dragon

There were some strange going ons in the woods. We found a Douglas Fir in the process of transforming itself into a dragon. It had already begun climbing up a rock wall.

 

Libba and I had a great time getting a nature fix and still getting a lot of writing done. I created the briefing document for BGI's Visioning Retreat. She worked on her PhD dissertation.

Two Kinds of Forest Fire and The Logic of Prescribed Burning

A post in Worldchanging called Climate Action: Burning Forests to Avoid Megafires by Yale Environment 360 begins:

"Prescribed burns in the forests of the western U.S. will prevent larger wildfires and significantly cut the nation’s carbon footprint, according to a new study."

In a comment on that post @new_illuminati wrote: 

"It's been a common practice here to burn forest in the way you describe but the result has been decimation of diversity and destruction of soils in many instances."

The comment troubled me because I believe that prescribed burns are very often the right thing to do to protect nearby home owners and save forests. I worry that, without the whole story, concerned citizens fearing what may happen to their neighborhood and their homes will block prescribed burns. 

A prescribed burn in a forest near you raises the short term risk of fire damage, but it generally reduces the long term risk to your property, the surrounding forest and your life. In most cases, after some frank conversation concerning the short term and long term risks, we should be brave enough to accept the short term risk to increase our long term safety. We don't need the fact that the prescribed burns are necessary to restore the forest to a healthy condition or needed to fight global warming to decide that prescribed burns are worth the risk to property and forest to increase the safety and protect the property of the immediate community. Here is why:

There are two main kinds of forest fires, ground fires and canopy fires. In a ground fire the burn stays down near the ground, burning underbrush and smaller trees. It leaves the soil in good condition. Canopy fires burn the entire forest including the tops of big trees. They burn so hot that they sterilize everything both above the ground and down perhaps a foot into the soil. 

Canopy fires also send out balls of superheated gasses that can jump half a mile as a cloud of smoke and then burst into flame when they get to oxygen. These fireballs ignite new patches of forest. They can trap fire fighters between two walls of flame. 

When the fuel load is high and the weather is supporting it, nothing in the path of a canopy fire can be saved except by running away or a change in the weather. There must be a better way to manage our forests than to set up the conditions for canopy fires.

In many areas of the West, Native Americans managed the forest by setting frequent ground fires. This cleared out underbrush and many of the small trees, making it easier to hunt. It also created healthy forests. 

As the glaciers retreated trees and people moved in at more or less the same time. Thus many North American forests co-evolved with people who were setting fires in them from the beginning. People setting fires are thus as much a natural part of many Western ecosystems as any other creature. We have just forgotten how to perform our role in the ecosystem correctly.

The common alternative to prescribed burning is to suppress all fire.  This allows fuel loads to build up to the point where catastrophic canopy fires become almost inevitable. Compared to that danger, controlled burns in the right weather are far better than waiting for summer lightning to ignite same patch of forest during a dry period. 

In most of the last hundred years, the Forest Service, and here my family deserves some of the blame, has done its best to suppress all forest fires. The results include "wilderness" ecologies quite different and far less healthy than those that were present when Europeans came to North America. The healthy ecosystems that greeted the European settlers had a park-like forest structure with abundant wildlife and open spaces in which to hunt.

But that was then. Now we face a difficult situation in many Western forests for two reasons. 

1. Clear cutting years ago created a race between large numbers of skinny, even-aged trees, all struggling for water and sunlight. Sick overcrowded trees are a prescription for canopy fire. 
2. Aggressive fire suppression has allowed fuels to build up in the understory as well as aloft. 

Many forests throughout the West are ready to burn catastrophically. Firefighting's share of the Forest Service's budget has soared from 20% to 50%. Still we are not prepared. As a result, he Forest Services fire strategy is changing. They will fight fewer unwinnable battles and instead retreat to fight in a time and place where the fire is less strong. They will put more attention of preventing catastrophic fires and less on fighting them. 

To prevent catastrophic canopy fires, overcrowded forests with excessive understory fuel loads need to be thinned. The understory needs to be cleared out.  In theory this might be done by selective cutting of the smaller and less healthy trees plus a huge number Civil Conservation Core teams to clear the underbrush. Goats might help eat what is left. But in most cases there is not enough money for such exotic solutions. 

Before the 2003 fires in the San Bernardino mountains, we were working to prepare the community to rebuild after them. I remember retirees being told to thin their trees and protesting that on a fixed income they could not afford to do so. Even the Forest Service was caught short. As I recall, when the Forest Supervisor estimated he needed a fuels reduction budget of well over $200 million, the Washington Office gave him about 1% of that. In most cases carefully setting fires in the right places at the right times is the only cost effective solution. 

Prescribed burning is not easy in forests that have gone too long without fire. It is even harder when, like the San Bernardino mountains, people have built houses in and near the forests.  Occasionally prescribed burns will get out of control and destroy property. But what is the alternative? 

Doing nothing will result in the loss of more houses, more forest and more fire fighters. Prescribed burns are a percentage game, a fact that will give little comfort to the homeowner whose house is lost in a prescribed burn that gets out of control. However, the policy of using frequent fires timed as best we can is a better bet for everyone than waiting for a big fire in the dry season. That way lies disaster. So we set fires to keep ourselves safe. Bizarre, but perhaps the only sensible thing to do. 

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(Credits: Photo of Prescribed Burn by smokeshowing using cc-by-nc, )

Intrapreneuring in Government

According to the 2005 Pandolfi report, employees in Forest Service  Enterprise Team Program were 1.8 times as productive as the average agency employee. The Forest Service has discovered a cure for bureaucracy that can work in any large organization.

The Enterprise Program is a intrapreneurial system for releasing the entrepreneurial passion of employees. The secret is choice and a well designed intrapreneurial system to make freedom work inside large organizations. This is the first of several blogs describing this miracle.

Imagine if the whole government, like the enterprise teams, were 1.8 times as productive. With that level of efficiency the Federal Government would save $1.578 trillion a year. Imagine if a major corporation became 1.8 times as productive.  

Because this new system for organizing work brings the freedoms and virtues of the free enterprise system inside large organizations, we call it “free intraprise.” (for intra-organizational enter-prise.) 

Enterprise team members remain Forest Service employees, but they live off the fees their intraprises earn by selling services to internal customers. The fees they earn support their salaries, overhead and expenses.

Among other services, Forest Service enterprise teams provide:

• Biological field work
• Planning services
• Ecosystem restoration
• Predicting fire risk and fire behavior 
• Trail construction
• Computer services such as database programming and website development
• Archeological services: preserving history and creating public experiences 
• Conflict resolution

In addition to making employees more productive, the free intraprise system also makes them happier. They have a level of freedom, honest feedback and personal growth that are rare inside a large organization. 

Typical comments:

“I think that my job with my Enterprise Unit is the best job that I’ve ever had.”

“The Enterprise program has made me what I am today.”

As long as they have enough work, an enterprise team can “fire” customers who don’t treat them with respect or who ask them to do something that they don’t want to do. They can redefine their own jobs. 

When Tim Holden and Blaze Baker found themselves doing more work than they liked on traditional timber harvests, they created the Above and Beyond enterprise team to focus on the ecological restoration projects that are their passion. They have found plenty of  customers who want the same thing. In their first 16 months their enterprise had over $1.3 million in sales. As a result the Forest Service is more effective at ecological restoration and Tim and Blaze are living the life of those whose work serves their deeper values. 

The Origins of Enterprise:

The Enterprise Team System began in 1994, when John Phipps, then the manager of the El Dorado National Forest, read The End of Bureaucracy and the Rise of the Intelligent Organization and invited the authors, my wife Libba and me, to join the team that was reinventing the Forest Service. The team produced a report recommending a well regulated internal market for intrapreneurial services within the agency. Libba and I were thrilled. We had created free intraprise to liberate employees to bring their whole selves including their values to work. We believed we were on the verge of liberating employees everywhere.

The report sat on the shelf until 1998. We were crushed. Then John Phipps, assembled a critical mass of  leaders for implementing free intraprise in the California region. We launched ten enterprises in 1998, six more in 1999. 

The Enterprise Program struggled through years of neglect by the headquarters, kept alive only by the enthusiasm of its customers. Now the program is suddenly getting major support from the Washington office. If it grows, the Forest Service might once again become, what it once was, the premier example of a government agency that works. 

In future posts we will cover:

• The three design features that make the enterprise systems work
• The secret financial system that supercharges free intraprise
• The Enterprise Operating Principles
• The intelligent organizations of the future
• Free intraprise success stories

See also: Back to Intraprenering & Intrapreneuring in Accounting

Recovering from Climate Depression (An Opto Pesso Dialogue)

After each new piece of bad news on climate change I find myself struggling to find hope. Most recently, after reading James Lovelock’s book The Vanishing Face of Gaia, I woke up in the middle of the night crying. I don’t cry much, but I believed Lovelock’s prediction that in the coming hot climate, the Earth will only support about 20% of the current population. I lost hope that civilization will turn back in time to prevent a climate catastrophe. This post is about finding my way back to mental equilibrium.

I have hit despair about the future before. When this happens, two parts of me argue as I struggle to reassemble a bearable worldview without denying the bad news. There is the optimistic part of me whom, I’ll call “Opto” and his pessimistic counterpart, “Pesso.” The good news is that after their conversation I usually am back to a reasonably productive mood. This is a summary of the dialogue that brought me back this time.

Pesso speaking: Opto, please pay attention. You know that we are probably already past the tipping point on climate change. If not, we soon will be. There is no reason to believe that humanity will stop pouring CO₂ into the atmosphere until it is too late. Look at what happened in Copenhagen.

Global warming is not just ecological catastrophe. Much of the most productive inland farmland will turn to desert. Rising oceans will flood Bangladesh, the Dutch polders, the Nile valley and the low lying river valleys and deltas that provide much of the world’s food. Billions will starve. Coastal cities will be destroyed. This is the largest social justice issue ever. Humanity will be deciding which billion will live and which five billion will die. Only the rich, the powerful, the well armed and the very lucky will survive. Though I know they have a better chance than average, I am worried for our grandchildren.

And then there is the fact that the ecosystems and social systems we are working on will soon be destroyed. What is the point of anything? I swear, if I could get my spirits up enough, I would just party through the last good days and forget about saving the world. It is too late.

Opto: (Deep breath) OK. As you say, the situation appears to be horrific. But let’s not just assume that Lovelock is right. Collapse is not inevitable. Lovelock underestimates the adaptivity of the human species. We can still hope for a precipitating event that drives humanity to a sudden change of heart in time to avert the worst.

Once we wake up there is a lot that we can do. Geoengineering technologies may temporarily hold back the temperature increase until we can reduce our emissions enough that it is no longer needed. We have had a good cry; let’s not sink into depression. In the words of Alex Steffen:

“The opposite of pessimism isn't “doing something,” it’s whole-hearted engagement with systemic reinvention.”

So let’s embrace the opportunity to do important work. Let’s go on the journey of a systemic reinvention of society.

Pesso: So be it my glib and fatuous twin. Let’s look at the system we need to address.

Lovelock became famous when he noticed that since life emerged on Earth 3½ billion years ago, the sun has heated up 25%. The Earth should have gotten much hotter, but it didn’t. Instead, with some minor ups and downs like ice ages and the current interglacial period, the temperature has had no long-term upward trend. Lovelock concluded that the planet has a self-regulating system controlling temperature, similar to the way a thermostat and a furnace control the temperature in your house or the way your body controls its temperature. But what causes this homeostasis?

Lovelock then made a startling discovery: Life plays a major role in the regulation system that kept the global temperature and ocean salinity in a zone that is habitable for life. When a purely mineral Earth would have been too cold, life put CO₂ into the atmosphere which warmed it. When the sun warmed and a purely mineral world would have grown too hot, photosynthetic organisms in the ocean bloomed and pulled more CO₂ out of the atmosphere, cooling the planet. Lovelock concluded that life acts as superorganism, doing what organisms do, adjusting its environment to suit its own survival (see great Rolling Stone article).

The idea that life as a whole acts to create conditions habitable for life is called the Gaia Hypothesis. It does not sit easily with the neo-Darwinist "selfish gene" paradigm and therefore is troubling to most scientists. However seeing life on Earth as part of a homeostatic control system fits the data better than any other theory to explain the historical stability of the climate and ocean salinity. For this reason it is now widely, but not universally accepted.

Opto: This is not like you. This sounds like good news. Life is taking care of us. She may have more tools than you or Lovelock can see.

Pesso: Currently life acts to cool the planet. The sun is very slowly getting hotter, which means that life has to work ever harder to cool the planet. Sooner or later the task of cooling the planet will be too great and life will fail. The temperature will shoot up and life as we know it will be over.

Humans are now making Gaia’s job harder by adding to the warming. At some point the system shifts from the negative feedback that keeps the system under control to positive feedback, that will lead to a runaway temperature increase. Lovelock suggests that the move from negative feedback to positive will result in rapid runaway temperature rise, much of which may occur in less than a decade from when it starts accelerating.

I always thought climate change was about the fate of my grandchildren and their descendants. Now I see that it will probably affect me as well. Worse, I fear for my descendents even more than I did when I thought there was still time to fix the situation.

Opto: The good news, if you can call it that, is that there is a likely stopping point to this rapid temperature rise. Lovelock points out that there are three stable temperature regimes which have repeated themselves over time:

• The ice ages;
• The interglacial periods (one of which we are in now); and 
• The “greenhouse” periods that average about 6°C (11 degrees Fahrenheit) hotter than now.

The Earth’s climate ran away into a greenhouse period 55 million years ago. Eventually Gaia recovered and the temperature came back down. Even if we go to a greenhouse period, we can come back again.

Pesso: Sure but the recovery took 100,000 years. I take less cheer in this than you do. In Climate Change on a Living Earth Lovelock presents a graph showing that “when the CO₂ in the air exceeds 500 ppm the global temperature suddenly rises 6°C and becomes stable again despite further increases or decreases of atmospheric CO₂.”

I find the stability of the hot periods depressing for three reasons:

• The stability means it is hard to get back to a cooler climate. Just reducing emissions 80% may not be enough. We will probably be stuck in the greenhouse for a very long time.
• The stability means that most of what we are doing is meaningless. Slowing down emissions a bit may alter the timing of the sudden temperature increase by a year or two, but we still end up in the same hot state at the same temperature with the same disastrous results.
• At 6°C hotter than now Lovelock predicts the planet will only able to feed about 20% of today’s population. Billions will starve.

Opto: I know the predictions and I struggle with the images Lovelock evokes. But I see no reason to be paralyzed by them. It is not inevitable that we flip into the hot zone. The history of climate change suggests less predictability than Lovelock suggests and I still believe humanity will wake up to the danger and respond vigorously.

We do not understand the dynamics of global climate well enough to make firm predictions. For example, suppose the ocean conveyer (including the Gulf stream) stops and we shift rapidly into a new ice age. As large sections of the Earth turn white, more of the sun's energy would be reflected back into space, lowering the average temperature of Earth. Furthermore, the ice age would be quite a wake up call. People would begin caring about and doing something about human impact on climate and we would have some time to reduce emissions before flipping into another hot era.

Suppose we go beyond 500 ppm of CO_2. We still might delay the temperature increase long enough to get our emissions under control. For example, we might cool the planet by putting sulfur into the atmosphere, As we have learned from volcanic explosions, sulfur in the atmosphere blocks some of the sun’s heating energy. Pinatubo’s explosion cooled the world for several years. We might cool the planet by increasing photosynthesis in the ocean thereby sucking CO₂ out of the air. We …

Pesso: “I know an old lady who swallowed a fly.” Sometimes the solution is worse that the problem it solves. How do you know that that is not the case here?

Opto: I don’t. But that is why we should get to work testing and modeling and discussing geoengineering ideas. We don’t want to suddenly find out we have to use them on a large scale without having done smaller tests first.

Pesso: If geoengineering becomes popular, people will think we don’t have to curb emissions, that we can pollute all we want and geoengineering will fix it. As a result doing the research may make the situation worse by delaying action to cut emissions.

Opto: The reason human efforts to stop climate change have been so pitiful is that we haven’t seen the sudden catastrophic event needed to alert the population to the danger. New Orleans almost did it, but the press did not report it as a climate change story. This will change when we have a sufficient sudden demonstration of climate change. Once the powers that be decide that stopping climate change is in their interests, the media will change its tune and shortly thereafter the population will be ready for something serious to be done about climate change.

Pesso: By then it will be too late. Like Alex Steffen, I do not think technological fixes will allow us to green our consumptive lifestyle. Stopping climate change would require a complete change of lifestyle as well as of technology. That will not happen nearly in time.

Opto: Perhaps not, but even if we flip to a hotter period, the human species will survive and rebuild as we have done after the ice ages. There are many things we can do to adapt and thereby reduce suffering, death and ecosystem destruction. And we can begin building the systems that will eventually get us back to an interglacial period. Lovelock has underestimated the ability of our ingenious species to figure out ways to feed itself and amuse itself under difficult conditions.

After the great plague came the Renaissance. I believe that after whatever horrors there are in reducing human population to fit what may be a significantly reduced carrying capacity of Earth, humanity will become much more responsible for our impact on the planet. We will have another, much deeper, renaissance, a coming of age as a species.

If Lovelock’s predictions of rapid climate change come to pass, Gaia and her power will become an ever present reality in human consciousness. Our religions, our myths, our history and our science will make us afraid of angering her again. Religions will reemphasize the role of humanity as stewards of the Earth. In partnership with the dynamics of Gaia, we will restore ecosystems and bring the temperature of the planet back to a more habitable range.

For now there is good work to be done getting humanity ready for the hotter times ahead. As we despair of stopping climate change, we can move some of our attention from fighting climate change to finding ways to reduce the human suffering in the likely event that Earth does get much hotter and dryer. For example we can work on the post-warming food supply, rising water, drought and refugees. These can supply many generations of meaningful work.

Business opportunities in solving these challenges that I will cover in future blog posts include:

• Low water use food production
• Rising ocean solutions
• A rising ocean hedge fund
• Refugee hosting systems
• Offshore aquaculture
• Sea colonization
• Vegetarian diets
• Fostering resilience
• More nearly self sufficient communities
• Peace and security in a time of declining resources
• Resilient energy systems
• Higher HappoDammo Ratio ways to be happy

Pesso: That all sounds great, but how do you live with being a member of a species that is destroying the planet and shows little sign of learning to be responsible. Some days I am deeply ashamed of being a human.

Opto: Self hatred will not make anything better. I believe that humanity is not a mistake, that in the end we will prove to be good for Earth. If we get depressed because Gaia theory suggests faster and deeper climate change than the IPCC, let us also look at positive implications of Gaia theory. Whether it is God or Gaia, there appears to be an intelligence at work taking care of our planet.

In an almost religious way, I choose to believe that Gaia (or God) has allowed humans to evolve for a reason. If we think of each species as an organs in the planetary super-organism, what is our function? Here are a few possibilities:

• In order to protect herself against asteroid strikes, Gaia had to allow the development of a dangerously technologically competent species. Of existing species, only humans are equipped to predict the trajectory of asteroids or conduct operations in space. Since a major asteroid strike could sterilize the planet down to the level of a few extremophile bacteria, building such an asteroid defense system is a high priority for Gaia’s health (and should be for humanity).
• Humans will probably turn out to be the reproductive organ of Gaia. Of the species around today, only humans are close to being able to package up a variety of other species and carry them across space to find other hospitable worlds. Noah’s Ark may be the metaphorical instructions for this enterprise.
• The sun will continue to grow hotter. Gaia has held the temperature in the hospitable zone for 3 ½ billion years, but the hotter the sun gets the more Gaia must do to keep the temperature down. At some point removing CO₂ from the atmosphere will not be enough. At this point humans can build sun shades in space. There are even plausible plans for moving the Earth’s orbit further from the sun to compensate for the sun’s growing heat. [BBC, New Scientist]

Thinking about things humans can do for the survival of Life on Earth makes me feel good about being a human. It let’s me believe that Gaia or God has created us for a reason. Are we in the toddler or the adolescent stage as a species? Either way, the fact that we are irresponsible and breaking things does not mean we will not grow up to be a highly valuable member of the earth-life community. Although we are not nearly as unique as we think, there are some things that only humans can do. My bet is that we will be kept around to do them. I’d like to work on that premise. Now is a good time to begin practicing for our role as stewards of the Earth.

Pesso: Arrghhh! Do you have any idea what people will say if you talk like that? Calm down!

Opto: OK, let’s not publish this post. But I feel better anyway. Off to work.

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(Credits: Photo of Opto and Pesso by Cayusa using cc-by-nc, Photo of Cracked Earth by Qousqous using cc-by-nc-sa, Photo of Ocean Conveyor Belt by Thomas Splettstoesser of US Global Change Research Program and is public domain (a work by the US Federal Government), Photo of Berber Tents by Robbie's Photo Art using cc-by-nc-nd, Photo of Asteroid Impact by Don Davis of Nasa Images and is public domain (a work by the US Federal Government). )

The HappoDammo Ratio

In the summer of 2004, I was in a workshop at Hollyhock in BC when my son, then about 28, said, “Dad, you can’t stay indoors all week in weather like this. Why don’t you play hooky for one afternoon and let me show you how my generation has fun.”

He took me to the Linnaea School’s disc golf course. It was in a beautiful forest, mostly Douglas Fir and Western Red Cedar, with a knee-high understory dominated by Salal and Sword Fern.

Disc golf (or frisbee golf ) is played much like traditional golf, except that one throws Frisbee® like discs instead of hitting a golf ball. The “holes” are traditionally metal baskets, though in this case they were just old five-gallon paint buckets painted red and nailed on top of a cedar post.

We played 36 holes and then decided to go to for a swim. At Haig Lake we took off our clothes, swam to an island half a mile away, ran around on the cliffs, were chased by yellow jackets, dove back in and swam back to our clothes.

As I put them back on, I realized that we had had a very happy afternoon and done a tiny fraction of the environmental damage done by a typical afternoon of golf followed by a dip in the club pool. No bulldozers were used to make the Linnaea course. No trees were cut down; no sand hauled in; no pesticides, herbicides or fungicides or irrigation were used. I guessed that we had achieved at least the same level of happiness with less than one thousandth of the environmental damage.

As those thoughts were drifting through my head, I saw a simple arithmetic formula that seemed to me to point to an important and obvious truth.

The name “HappoDammo Ratio” seemed a little goofy, but I couldn’t think of one I liked better. Now it seems to have stuck.

As it turns out, the HappoDammo Ratio is a useful compass for navigating the challenges of our time. In order to deal with climate change, poverty, toxic accumulation, resource exhaustion and a host of other problems, we are either going to have to figure out how to get more happiness from less stuff or we will keep on increasing consumption until the systems on which we depend crash. The HappoDammo Ratio defines the fundamental challenge of our times. It points to the possibility for vast improvements over the current course of society.

I use the HappoDammo ratio for lifestyle and purchasing choices, new product design, organizational improvement, analyzing government policy, etc. In my own life, I fly less and enjoy life at home, which is higher Happo and lower Dammo. I have a motorcycle that gets 50 mpg and is more fun than a car. However, if I take a systems view it may not be higher HappoDammo because it makes my wife unhappy. So I take the bus and meditate along the way. I'm just learning.

In business, I look for creative ways to make customers and employees happier using less stuff. More happiness is what people want and will pay for. Less stuff is usually less cost. Understanding what makes people happy is a critical 21^st Century business skill. This way lies profit as well as hope for our society.

For those hoping to shape society in other ways, the HappoDammo Ratio provides a powerful creative paradigm. For environmentalists it suggests a shift:

From: Recommending sacrifice for the good of nature and future generations.

To: Advocating for greater happiness today as well as in the future.

This is a far more appealing proposition.

The HappoDammo Ratio gives me hope. Many current ways of striving for happiness are so ineffective that it won’t be hard to discover less resource intensive ways to produce greater happiness. In future blogs I will discuss business opportunities that the HappoDammo Ratio uncovers, ways to measure happiness and damage and more information about what actually makes us happy.

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(Credits: Photo of Disc Golf Woman by Oberazzi using cc-by-sa, Photo of Riviera Country Club Golf Course by Dan Perry using cc-by, Photo of Disc Golf Course by Dave and Lisa using cc-by-sa, Photo of Happy Cambodian Girl by mrcharly using cc-by-nc-nd)

Gaia was Glad: A Poem

Gaia was glad that the difficult phase 

Of adolescent rebellion was over. 

Her biosphere had finally recovered 

From loathing and self-destruction. 

She was moving again in the direction 

Of self regulation and a salubrious complexity. 

Her very promising brainy biped, the humans, 

Had been through a rough period of adolescent aggressiveness, 

Both with themselves and with other denizens of earth. 

Finally they had learned the benefits of impulse control 

And found ways to behave as a species 

With harmonious restraint. 

They were beginning to practice 

Their role in asteroid defense

And cooling the planet.

As she told her friends in other galaxies, 

Like any mother, she was relieved to see 

That the life she had reared 

Did not come from a bad seed. 

Why Do I Blog?

The theme of this blog is dreams, large and small, of a positive future. The beat, in the newspaper sense of the word, is the future of business, the economy, civilization, and living systems of our planet.

I am interested in plausible positive visions of the future because they are much needed and in short supply. By plausible positive visions I mean visions of a future worth living that take into account the evidence that civilization is on a path to disaster. To steer our way to a decent future we must embrace challenges such as climate change, the growing distance between rich and poor, future natural resource shortages, racism, toxic build up and loss of genetic diversity. How can we find the courage to do so? 

According to Rollo May in The Courage to Create:

We are called upon to do something new, to confront a no man’s land, to push into a forest where there are no well worn paths and from which no one has returned to guide us… this requires a degree of courage for which there is no immediate precedent…

This courage will not be the opposite of despair. We shall often be faced with despair, as indeed every sensitive person has been during the last several decades in this country. Hence Kierkegaard and Nietszche and Camus and Sartre have proclaimed that courage is not the absence of despair; it is rather the capacity to move ahead in spite of despair.

I live with the knowledge that the path our civilization is on threatens the life support systems on which we rely for our existence. And yet I have hope that there is much we can do both to reduce the climate changes and to mitigate their effects. Let us imagine a plausible future worth living. Then we will find the energy to work aggressively towards its realization. 

The human race is failing to act boldly to address critical challenges that we must address to guarantee the continued existence of a peaceful orderly society. It is time to act, otherwise, as we run out of resources and habitable lands, humanity will descend into barbarism, widespread starvation and continual war punctuated by frequent terror attacks. In the future, even more than now, social justice and the environment are part of a single system.

Why, for example, do we not act to stop catastrophic climate change? It is not for lack of information pointing to the problem. Is it because most people, short of giving up most of what they believe makes them happy, do not see a alternative to going on more or less as we are.

I will be seeking a future that spreads the benefits of society more broadly to all members. We need this not only because it is fair but because the power of the disenfranchised through terror is increasing. We can’t afford to steal from others to the same degree that we have done in the past.

This blog is a creative exploration of more positive ways to face the future. I hope the conversations this blog participates in will contribute to what I believe is one of society’s major creative challenges: the creation and sharing of new visions that attract people in their lifesyles, politics and businesses to move joyfully toward a future that can work for future generations.

This blog will contain:

• Designs for small parts of a future worth living
  • Product and service designs that point to a happy future
  • Social and cultural patterns and institutions
• Larger system visions
  • Economic system ideas
  • Geopolitical dreams
  • System conditions for long term viability, ecosystem health and human happiness
  • Design principles for a happy future
• Discovery of leverage points for large system interventions to get us moving toward positive futures. See my blog post Where to Intervene in a System.

Where to Intervene in a System

So you want to change the world (or some part of it)? According to Donella (Dana) Meadows, you can be a more effective change agent if you choose the right place to intervene. She goes on to say that most people pick the wrong places to intervene, which makes it hard or impossible to succeed. 

We knew Dana Meadows not only as an thought leader, but also as a farmer. She loved working on the land and was at home with animals. Once on a horse and buggy ride, our horse shied vigorously at a mailbox. Where others might have been scared, Dana just laughed and laughed. Despite her fame, part of her was just a down-to-earth farmer. She was also one of the pioneers in using systems thinking to address big environmental and social challenges. 

Even when Dana knew the direction in which a system needed to change, she often found herself struggling to change it. However, over the years of both frustration and success, she became wise about what works and what doesn't when changing large systems. She came to believe that most of the things people do to change systems are either ineffective or worse, effective, but in the wrong direction. She distilled her learning in the classic article Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System. 

In Leverage Points Dana lists and then explains the relative usefulness of 12 different ways of changing a system. Like a David Letterman Top 10 list, she goes through her list backwards, starting with the least likely to be effective and ending with the most. This lets her show why the leverage points most people start with are unlikely to work and why intervening in other ways works better. 

Here is her list of “Places to Intervene in a System” (in increasing order of effectiveness):

12. Constants, parameters, numbers (such as subsidies, taxes, standards)
11. The sizes of buffers and other stabilizing stocks, relative to their flows
10. The structure of material stocks and flows (such as transport networks, population age structures)
9. The lengths of delays, relative to the rate of system change
8. The strength of negative feedback loops, relative to the impacts they are trying to correct against
7. The gain around driving positive feedback loops
6. The structure of information flows (who does and does not have access to what kinds of information)
5. The rules of the system (such as incentives, punishments, constraints)
4. The power to add, change, evolve, or self-organize system structure
3. The goals of the system
2. The mindset or paradigms out of which the system – its goals, structure, rules, delays, parameters – arises
1. The power to transcend paradigms

If you, like me, yearn to be a more effective change agent, I suggest checking out Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System. Dana gives real examples of interesting change projects, the underlying systems which needed to be changed and where effective leverage could be found. She explains each of the list's intervention types and why she found some types more likely to be effective than working directly on the variable you want to change. I reread this paper from time to time and I always learn something new.