Is community actually more exciting than being an economic hit man?

_____


Yes, someone actually asked me that.

Some people really love the largeness of the game of corporatocracy. They subscribe to the Ayn Rand philosophy that a small handful of individuals are just bigger and better than everybody else and they therefore have the right to play the game however they want to. Joe Sixpack is content to go to work and then drink beer and watch TV on the weekend. That's why it's ok to sell him toxic food, shelter, water and energy (and everything else). Those little guys are not really as important as the game we're playing, us big boys.

I'm not going to question the merits of Ayn Rand's philosophy. What I will question is - "If ya'll are so big and so smart and superior, why can't you come up with a better game?" Poisoning the earth and your fellow human beings is a pretty sorry excuse for one, really, because you're trying to destroy the playing field!

Can you imagine Shaq going out on the court with cleats that ripped up that beautiful wood flooring so everybody was tripping over it? Or maybe a spike in his hand that deflated the ball? What is exciting about that? If he did that, you would think he was crazy, right? Maybe you would want to forcibly remove him from the court, even.

Well, anybody who is observing what is going on thinks that the big boys and what they're doing is crazy too, because it is.

Some of the guys who are creating the most damage are getting genuinely scared, with the growing evidence about climate change and the degraded state of key aspects of our environment (like soils, water supply, etc). But they want to keep their unworkable game intact, somehow. They are just trying to slow down the destruction, so the game lasts longer. Which of them is saying, "No guys, sorry, we have to change the whole structure of the game, because it's a losing game, and everybody including us loses." Nobody wants to make that call, nobody wants to be the one that points that out. Nobody wants to confront what would actually have to happen to make the game last long enough for the next dozen or one hundred or more generations to enjoy it. If I'm wrong about that, and there is a member of the powers that be who is actually suggesting we scrap our failing cultural design and substitute a better one, I would truly love to hear about it!

Only when those people in real positions of power become willing to change the rules of the game so that life can truly prosper on this planet, will they become an asset instead of a liability. It really doesn't matter how great your abilities are, if you are using them to destroy the game for the rest of us, you are a party-pooper, a petty tyrant, a wet blanket. It is an illusion that you will lose by doing the right thing - you have everything to gain.

Some of the radical changes that are needed (minimally) would be:

1. Regulations that enforce true costs of doing business on those who are profiting from that business instead of passing those costs covertly to others (like our children). An example would be charging big agriculture to clean up dead zones in the Gulf caused by chemical run off from their fields. There is nothing that would motivate business faster to get clever about finding sustainable solutions.

2. Laws that effectively penalize those who destroy or compromise natural resources that all of us depend on (like water resources)

3. A change in economic statistical measurements - a GDP that shows a country is "doing well" when it is going broke from fighting wars and raping its future resources, and profiting from the sickness of its citizens is not a workable way to measure economic progress.

There are many more points, but this gives an idea.

Some people just don't see how they could play the game any other way. They are so stuck in it, they can't get outside and look. The first step to getting out is to consider that there may actually be ways to play the game without destroying the playing field. These are things you haven't necessarily thought of yet, but those possibilities exist, nonetheless, and can be discovered with enough intention and willingness to explore those realms.

It may involve changing some structures and activities pretty radically. That could involve some chaotic moments, a willingness to experience change, a willingness to reach beyond one's comfort level and to confront things none of us wants to confront. It doesn't mean, however, that you have to give up the size of game you want to play. If anything, you could have an even more rewarding and challenging game by making it more of an ethical game. There is no need to feel that you are going to lose your ability to play an utterly engrossing and fulfilling game by keeping the playing field there for the rest of us!

OK?

It may seem like there is a lot to lose by truly and honestly looking at what it would take to play a game that doesn't mess up the playing field. But there is far more to gain.

***

Creating Community

The driving force in nature, on this kind of planet with this sort of biosphere, is cooperation...The most inventive and novel of all schemes in nature, and perhaps the most significant in determining the great landmark events in evolution, is symbiosis, which is simply cooperative behavior carried to its extreme.

~ Lewis Thomas

Continuing cross country, I stopped in a small town near Austin to visit a dear friend who moved there a couple of years ago. The first thing I said when I saw her, is “Why Texas?” She is an alternative educator and a free thinker, not someone I would expect to move to the heartland of conservatism, where Bible verses are as common as advertisements on billboards on the backroads. She just didn’t seem to fit in.

This is how she responded:

“When I moved here, men showed up from nowhere and started unloading our moving van without any questions asked. The women brought food. They welcomed us with open arms. Moving in, which can be exhausting, was a pleasure – it became a cheerful party.

“I decided to move here after I gave a seminar on parenting, and the people were so friendly, caring, open and willing to do something about it right away, I was vastly impressed. I spontaneously told them I wanted to move here, I liked them so much. They responded by passing around a hat that collected a meaningful chunk of money to help me do so. I have never felt so welcomed and appreciated anywhere in my life.

“When a house burnt down in this neighborhood, the whole neighborhood got together and rebuilt it – better than it was before. Today, my students are all going over to the camp next door, with the rest of the neighborhood, because the counselors are exhausted after a long summer, and the camp needs cleaning. We’ll get it done all together in a couple of hours – it would take them a couple of days.

“I have always wanted to live in a real community, and I have found it.”
Well, how could I argue with that? I’ve always wanted to live in a real community too. I’m impressed with this little town outside of Austin, where people live their spiritual values and have created quite a pleasant place to live. I’ve tried to create community, for years, in Los Angeles, and have gotten somewhere with it, but it has felt not unlike swimming through sand, to do it in a big city.

Los Angeles is anti-order – a system that sucks so many resources that people, even if they are making pretty good money, often still struggle to survive. Corruption and waste are everywhere and we all pay for it. You spend hours on the freeway, and there are so many errands, so many obligations, so many distractions, that there is little time left to help your neighbor. Most of my neighbors in the two houses I lived in, didn’t even know my name after years of living there, and I didn’t know theirs.

I did a little experiment – I started a community food forest in my front yard. I invited people to come on over and help out, plant some of their own crops in our garden, which was too big for us to care for by ourselves, with our busy urban lives, and help us in exchange for fruit, camaraderie, and some instruction on food forestry and permaculture. Lots of people came, and some of them even came back. Not one person took me up on my offer to come over to their house and help them clean their garage, though. Or paint their bathroom or weed their garden with them. It was sort of strange - jeez, if someone offered to clean my garage with me, you can bet I would take them up on it and serve them a nice dinner for their troubles. Not one person took me up on planting their own crop in our garden, either. One person offered to “rent a space” to grow stuff. I told her, no, we would not take money, she could just plant some stuff there. Having her energy there, tending her part of the soil, was all the pay we needed. She never came back. Maybe it was because we also told her this was a community garden, and she could have her own plot, but should think of being a part of the community nonetheless. I’ve had quite a few strange reactions to that concept on a broader level as well, in trying to create an intentional community.

“Does that mean communism? Does that mean I have to share my crops? Does that mean someone is going to tell me what to do, how to live? Does that mean there will be rules?”

Well, no. It means you actually get a say in things, unlike what happens in a megopolis like Los Angeles where your local “representative” also represents 450,000 other people, at least, along with the deep pocket businesses that funded his campaign, some of which don’t even have an office in LA. It means you get to think about what rules are meaningful and which are not, and define your boundaries. It means that you might end up helping others, but they will also help you. It means you share what you want to share, and others share with you what they want to share.

It seems silly that I would have to spell these obvious points out to people but almost every person I’ve spoken to about community (except those already living in a real community or having experienced one) are worried about these issues.
I’m sure there are plenty of people in LA who would love to have me clean their garage, and I was just attracting those who were not comfortable with that, for whatever reason. But what I observed from that was that people were just not used to having a real community around them, and were more comfortable “doing it all themselves ” no matter how much harder it was. Creatures of habit, they couldn’t break the mold and call me when they had a chore I could help with. Enough of us have been trained to “do it ourselves” and live on our own little island, that when a different paradigm is offered, we don’t trust it, or we can’t think with it, or we just forget about it and do things the way we’re used to.

As time went on, and we kept having our gardening weekends, people started to believe. They came with cuttings and left with samples of our chocolate mint. They collected soil and pots from our generous pile for guerilla gardening exploits. They came to share their knowledge and to glean from ours. And they came just to chat and hang out. It took time, but it was happening.

And then others started having community events of their own, in their own backyards – the seed was spreading. I believe that at people’s core, we all need community on a deep level. It is a primal drive that we have had drilled out of us by sitting in straight rows in public school, not able to talk or share with anybody else, and then moving to isolated cubicles at work, and coming home to houses built in neat, straight rows, with board fences isolating them, and no central gathering places for miles around. And few genuine community activities that encourage sharing and getting to know one another. Mark Lakeman, a founder of the community project City Repair in Portland, calls it “muted society, where the guts of community have been removed.”

Our tightly controlled system looks so incredibly orderly, and yet it is wildly disordered. There is so much potential energy being wasted, if one could see a picture of it, it would look like a flooded river pouring out of our communities. The individuated lifestyles we live are perhaps the most inefficient way that anybody has lived in the history of humanity. Yet, our “standard of living” is higher. Or is it? That subject will be covered in depth in another blog article, but suffice it to say, there is an illusory element to that.

It is just so much easier to survive when you live in a real community. Raising kids, fixing up your house, growing a garden, improving the community at large, are all easier when you can tap resources in the community readily. We have allowed formal governments to take the place of what ordinary people routinely did for each other a century ago. It isn’t more efficient, it isn’t easier, and it takes far more resources out of the system (incredibly wasteful and anti-order) than if the people of the community just handled it themselves.

There are movements to change this and they are truly inspiring. City Repair in Portland is a shining example. This is a model that any community can emulate and use to improve their neighborhood. The people of Portland have taken back their neighborhoods and streets and made them into what they want them to be, not what some city planner who had barely even seen the place, less gotten to know the people there, decided was “best.” The truth is, any of us can do this, wherever we are, and eventually, even governments are happy with this. That is because they are trying to do a job that is our job, and they will never be able to do it as well as we can.

http://www.cityrepair.org/wiki.php
http://www.cityrepair.org
http://www.yesmagazine.org/article.asp?ID=998

Don’t get me wrong. There are aspects of Los Angeles that I dearly love. I wouldn’t have lived there for 20 years if that wasn’t the case. There are amazing, wonderful people in Los Angeles, and amazing opportunities. Some people may say, there are tradeoffs for everything. But I’d like to think I could have my Los Angeles and my community, too.

Keep reading, for more examples of community and tips from those who have done it. How do you change the paradigm, the mind set and habits, of people who have been living in isolation, in the midst of millions of other people, for their whole life? It is possible, and it is being done in dozens of communities, all over the world.

Aesthetic solutions

I recently traveled across the southern US and had some interesting experiences from a sustainability viewpoint. Near Santa Fe, I stayed at the Permaculture Institute.

They have a community there, and offered me a stay in a beautiful adobe home for a very small fee. The founder of the Institute is Scott Pittman, well known permaculturist. His house, built of straw bale, had a couple of interesting elements to it. There was an indoor jungle/wetlands system that handled all the greywater and blackwater from the house (for those not familiar, greywater is all the used water from sinks, showers, washer and dryer, but not the toilets, which is blackwater). Big banana trees, a small pond with fish, a cherimoya fruit tree, lots of lushness. There were exotic birds flying through the trees, chirping. What a nice thing to have in the middle of the house! In winter it must be really pleasant to have that green there, at 7000 feet or so, it can get quite cold.

The terrarium gets light and heat from a panel of skylights which is diffused and limited in size so it doesn’t get too hot. They found out afterwards it did not provide enough light for the vegetation to produce much food, but it still provides lots of clean air and aesthetics. The skylights are angled so that in the summer the light hits the plants which absorb the heat, and in the winter, the light hits a thick adobe wall that absorbs the heat and radiates it to the back of the house, which has no heater and per the residents, never needs one. They also have a big masonry stove that takes a chunk of wood to get started, but if the fire is kept going in the winter, even at very low volume, it hardly needs any fuel to keep going. Per Scott’s wife, most residents in the area go through one to three cords of wood per year, but they take three years to go through one cord. The passive heating and cooling systems were well thought out throughout the house- using air flows, lighting, thermal mass, ceiling size, etc, to create heat where it was needed and prevent too much where it was not. It’s a large house with high ceilings, which would normally take more energy to heat and cool than the average home, but uses far less energy than most homes. Radiant heat from thermal mass is a superior heat by test, warming bodies more effectively and pleasantly than forced air heat, and without drying the air or stirring up dust.

Permacultureinstitute.org

Anna Edey (solviva.com) has been successfully growing copious amounts of food inside her home for decades, and her greenhouse design is one of the best out there. She uses a different type of thermal mass – the living bodies of chickens help heat her home via an attached chicken coop which transmits their radiant body heat into the house via the common wall they share.

Adding a rain catchment system to the house could provide water for non-potable use (or even potable with a good filter) – see oasisdesign.net. Choosing food, such as sprouts and other items that grow in small spaces, could increase the amount of nutrition that is provided. A combination of these techniques and the ones used at the Permaculture Institute, could create a structure that would provide much of the resident’s food, energy and water needs within the structure itself!

When trying to create systems that produce more than they use in resources, that live lightly on the earth and perhaps even contribute to her bounty, these techniques become key.

Designing a life with these elements does not involve austerity, but abundance - it is far from punishment!

Anna’s home designs are aesthetic, pleasurable masterpieces, full of light and life – imagine reaching for a delicious, organic, heirloom tomato while you are bathing with sunlight streaming through greenhouse glass above you, or as you are sitting at your kitchen table. Imagine watching birds flit from branch to branch in the nearby atrium as you relax in your living room. Imagine walking a few steps to pick a ripe banana in the middle of winter, surrounded by lush greenery. Imagine the coziness of curling up in bed in the middle of winter in a room heated with radiant heat, emanating from the walls and floor.

Imagine having an energy and water bill that are so low as to be almost nonexistent. And imagine experiencing the feeling that you are helping the planet by living like this.

Living “green” truly offers the potential of a higher quality of life, from every angle. Which only makes sense, doesn’t it? What is good for the earth and its living creatures should also be good for mankind, who is, after all, a part of the larger dynamic of all life forms.

Intentional community

A healthy social life is found only, when in the mirror of each soul the whole community finds its reflection, and when in the whole community the virtue of each one is living”

Rudolf Steiner

"In the shelter of each other, the people live."
Proverb-Gaelic

Trying to start a self-sufficient intentional community can be an interesting game sometimes. Really, it’s interesting all the time, but angles of interest change as the process evolves - there are always new surprises.

We are a bunch of artists and dreamers, planning on creating a sustainable community using permaculture principles (permaculture means permanent culture or permanent agriculture, and is a systems design science that allows one to create sustainable human systems that don’t deplete resources of other human systems or ecosystems).

Artists and dreamers vs the hard realities of self sufficiency - growing our own food, creating our own energy, building our own shelters – hm, sound like a recipe for disaster? Well, maybe. It’s hard to imagine a bunch of citified poets getting their fingernails dirty by using a backhoe to reverse stream bed erosion. But one might be amazed at the poetry that can be composed while doing such tasks, while our happy and productive chickens and alpaca roam free in our sylvan food forest and our straw bale homes await, warm and inviting at the end of the day.

Alas, we are not yet there, and our poetry is written while sitting at our desks, in our city apartments, our wasteful refrigerators filled with food that too often arrived there via the use of a truly and obscenely amazing amount of fossil fuel, our forced air heat purring, we flail away on our high speed computers, with our gas guzzling cars sitting patiently in the garage.

Many of my acquaintences, except for the most dedicatedly serious dreamers, have at least hinted that they couldn’t see how I was going to get from here to there, and why would I even want to try? I was going to end up working sixteen hour days just to eat! (Though with permaculture techniques, we plan on ending up spending less time producing our own food than we do paying for and shopping for it now, and it will be fresh and organic.) We were going to have weird crawly things in the straw bale and wouldn’t it burn down if a spark hit it? (Well, I guess the imagery brings back 15^th century thatch with lice and puppies leaking from it, even though straw bale housing is not only incredibly energy efficient, inexpensive and comfortable, but is also extremely fire resistant, earthquake proof and aesthetic, clean and bug free, once you finish it with adobe or like material.)

Of course, there is work involved in setting up a community like this. You have to research where you want to move, figure out your resources, and work out the financing and the logistics of arriving and setting everything up. Additionally, because we are doing this as a group, not just a single family or individual, we have to create an appropriate legal and social structure for the community, so people can come and go if they want, but we have some control over what type of person we end up living with so intimately. We have had to research the best ways of providing all of our own food and energy, truly sustainable shelters (which means checking out building codes first and exploring non-traditional building methods), and controlling our water use so as to maintain the level of water available on our property, rather than cavalierly depleting the aquifer supply like there is no tomorrow, literally, as is happening all over this country and many others.

Not only do we plan to live light and ethically on the land, but we want to do so in a way that provides aesthetics, camaraderie, community support and other quality of life factors to our members far beyond what most neighborhoods have ever even thought about. Our community structure will allow people to get off the economic hamster wheel of mortgage and debt, permanently, while experiencing abundance in many ways, freeing themselves for the truly important pursuits in life – things like self-fulfillment, healthy and fulfilling relationships, aesthetics, and pursuit of their deepest dreams and goals. Oh, yes, and a bit of fun and games as well :-)

The vision we’ve created of this community is so exciting and viscerally attractive that most people, once we thoroughly explain it to them, want to live in such a place. Many of them prefer that we create it for them, so they can arrive, put their feet up on the couch and sip their freshly blended mango coolers while writing poetry. Hey, we want to do that too! But there are a couple of things that need to be done first….

One barrier is this: most people are too busy running madly around the hamster wheel, buying stuff and then paying off the debt, to spend any time or energy figuring out how to get off of it, regardless of how miserable it might make them feel (well, that’s the idea, right?). If someone offers them a nice, dainty little stepstool to walk off and try something different, maybe they will consider it. What they may not understand is that the reason they feel stressed, and “too busy” to do anything about it is because of the nature of the hamster wheel. It is, at its core, debilitating to the spirit. It makes you want a vacation, to go out on the weekend and “relax”, and try to forget where you are – on a hamster wheel. It is one step up from having a chain around your neck, but then again, maybe not. A slave at least knows that he is a slave.

Ay, and there’s the rub. That is why we find ourselves in a hamster wheel culture in the first place – because we became too stressed out to notice why we were stressed out or do anything about it, and we were waiting for someone else to hand us the stepstool to escape, and oops, they never did….

There is a possibility that they never will. Which is why we’re willing to do the work of building our own. And you know, you are always more likely to get exactly what you want if you do it yourself rather than leaving it up to governments, multinational corporations, authorities and other relatively disinterested parties.

It helps when one is a visionary dreamer – envisioning assists the acquiring process. But if one is also willing and able to take steps to reach one’s dream, then you have a powerhouse! The good news is, anybody has the capacity to become a powerhouse. And it has to do with creating that stepstool gradiently. Find one thing you can change to improve your life, that will give you more freedom to pursue what is truly important to you. And then find the next thing, and the next. If you just put one step in front of the other and keep doing that, you actually do arrive, eventually.

One of the major goals of our community is to create an environment that is conducive to bringing out the best in people, that offers them what they most need spiritually, emotionally, physically, to achieve their deepest and truest goals – on all of life’s dynamics. Philosopher L Ron Hubbard breaks these down into eight expanding circles - the urge to survive and goals for self, for family, for groups, for all of mankind, for all living things, the universe itself, spirit, and one's relationship with infinity or the Supreme Being (however the individual wishes to define that for themselves - we are a non-denominational, inclusive community). One can compare the activities of any community to a very high quality of survival on each of these dynamics - what if a community based the majority of its actions and resources towards increasing that quality for the individuals within it?

Ay, but the second hero’s task, once one frees oneself from the hamster wheel long enough to look around and notice what one's options really are:

To create such a community in the first place, one must already be in a position, to some degree, of being able to manifest those goals within an environment that is not at all conducive to assisting one to do so. An environment, in fact, that is downright hostile to the idea in many, many ways.

And that is where the process gets very, very interesting.

This is what our current culture is and does in so many ways – it creates barriers, some of them extremely formidable, to reaching our deepest and most heartfelt goals. Future blogs will go into much more detail about exactly how it does that - though there is already plenty of info about that on the ‘net, the way we put it together is relatively rare. Some of it is so insidious it is very difficult to see, unless one happens to spot the curtain flapping and the little man inside, manipulating the controls. But the good news is that thoroughly understanding the mechanics of the manipulation alone can help free one from its influence.

One could ask how we allowed ourselves to get into such a position in the first place, and you know what? Each individual's personal spiritual path best provides those answers, but we are having to confront these truths about ourselves and how we got here, and rise above the situation, some way or other - as a group as well as individuals - in order to make this ideal community happen. We must create that community within ourselves, in disagreement with everything around us that is against it, first. And that experience alone, even if we were never to arrive at our land, is worth the journey.

We will share that journey with you in this blog. Welcome, and enjoy!

myspace.com/theedgebetweenuniverses

Our artist's cooperative

myspace.com/earth_food_solutions

Our food forest web site

http://www.permacultureactivist.net/articles/articles.htm

Articles on permaculture

http://www.permaculture.org/nm/index.php/site/classroom/

Basic info on permaculture

http://www.ic.org/

Intentional communities web site - lots of resources!

http://www.strawbale.com/

Great resource for straw bale building

http://www.volunteerministers.info/en_IN/solutions/pg003.html

Explanation of eight dynamics