The Petro-Canada and Esso gas boycott

There;s an online initiative afoot to have people target the two biggest oil companies operating in Canada ((Petro Canada and Esso), boycotting them until they bring the price of a litre of gas down to a dollar. The assumption is that oil companies are in cahoots to keep the price artificially high and we can break their “cartel” by forcing some companies to break rank. Related to this is the idea that speculation is causing the price hike we're seeing.

If those were were the causes of the high prices, this would be a great strategy. But the increase isn't mainly due to them. It's the rising cost of discovering, extracting and transporting oil that's behind the hike. Peak oil is here and oil prices are not to go down – ever – with the exception of some surface price volatility.

It's a natural reaction when hard times hit to look for someone to blame. Instead of thinking we're the 99%, look at what we can do, there's a thread of “look at what the 1% is doing to powerless us.” We actually do have power if we're ready to use it.

That power comes from person to person support and work together, from imagining and building what we want for a more beautiful world, from developing greater self-reliance and “community glue”. It won't help if we ignore reality – the end of growth as we've known it – and find a scapegoat for our unwillingness to see. What's truer is that 100% of us have benefited from cheap oil – it's fueled every part of our modern world and the lifestyle we enjoy.

If there's an upside to less available oil is that we may put less of it into the atmosphere, even though what we've already placed there is going to be a central fact of life for future generations.

Do All in Fun, "Comrade!"

The idea of the end of growth changes everything about our world. None of us wants to hear that – none of us want to know that – but for me it's become a reality. For you too? I'm not going to make the case here. Richard Heinberg's book The End of Growth does that powerfully but doubtless you've been following growth's progress and have made up your own mind. I'm assuming the end of growth to be true in this post. This means that our economy is never going to get back to material growth; there can be great advances in life and culture but we'll have much less energy to do it with. That fact changes everything.

If that's true, how do we come to grips with a phenomenon like this? With a lot of hard work, thought, grieving, caring and building perhaps. But at the risk of being glib, I'll outline a quick and dirty path for responding to the challenge of “the end of growth”, roughly the one I'm following myself. There can be many formulations but these are mine today.

My mini-map consists of three steps: deep agreement that the end of growth is indeed true, imagining a future we want that takes this into account, and taking steps to create it. Deep Agreement, Imagine Future, Create. First letters come down to DAIFC . . . “Do all in fun, comrade”. 

Here's what that looks like!

Deep agreement

We don't really believe that the end of growth is coming, even if we do. That's because this notion goes up against some very strong conditioning that we all have. I mean, everyone and everything around us shouts that the institutions and dynamics around us are going to continue on their present path. So we see one thing, and the world reflects back another, or at least has a story about another, called Business as Usual.

This dissonance between the two sets up a lot of conflict within us that requires considerable personal skills and smarts of a kind that aren't taught in schools and that are not usually talked about in fact To really believe in something different from consensus reality is stressful for everyone – it's no failing to fall into it. It's natural because the skill of thinking differently from the tribe isn't part of our evolutionary heritage. That's because most of that has been lived in tribal situations in which conformity to the group's trumped individualization. That was appropriate then. Unfortunately, the end of growth, material growth, means that we've got to grow ourselves and make room for what we know to be true. Deep agreement, in other words, of the broad notion that smaller and more local is coming and coming to us. I don't believe it's possible or necessary to know the details of when specific changes are going to happen. The essential point is that we ignore the end of growth at our peril.

Imagine a Future you want

Deep Agreement is the least risky of the three steps in my map. The next, and the next riskiest is to Imagine a Future we want., Really, how would you like it to be? Not what do you fear (there's a place for that but it's not here), but what do you want? It's an act of courage to imagine what we want, to imagine it in color and drama, with all the excitement that we save for our vacation. To allow ourselves to invest in that future imaginatively is to take a powerful step toward its accomplishment. That's part of what makes it risky.

The method that works for me, is really no method. I get out paper and coloured pens and start to draw and create a map with words and arrows and super-rough sketches. I just put in all the parts I want, things that actually please me that reflect a down-sized life, things that have some juice for me, not just things that I think would be good for me. As someone with a strong altruistic streak I have to watch my tendency to do “good” rather than what actually turns my crank.

Whether it's just with pencil or pen, with colourjled markers, with big scrapbook paper or printer paper, I get something down that's got some juice for me. Some people have never given themselves the gift of allowing the dream to get out there in front of them, on a piece of paper. It's not hard and it's fun.

Create

The third component is Creation, to actually start doing something toward accomplishing some part of the picture. I take something small or big and get on it. I don't worry about whether what I want is realistic at this stage, because I know I often sell reality short on this one. This is a time of change and things that might have been impossible no longer are. In a time of endings there's extra room for new beginnings. Creating something just because you like it is a radical act that, in my experience, has unpredicable consequences. It creates more stuff.

In some way or another it helps to keep track of the progress I'm making. For example, if it's write 1000 words every day for a month, then I might make a little pie chart up with the days of the month on it, and color them in each day. Noticing change creates more change..

Are my three steps too simple? Probably, but they are a start, they will get things moving in the direction that supports your thriving at the end of growth. Other skills will become evident too, just one of which I'll mention now.

It's a big help to have local support, a person or persons who share the view that change is coming and will hear your progress or at least be in tune with it, witnesses to it. You can give them the same “love”. A small group would be the best thing because it effectively becomes a mini-culture for the change you want.

There are other skills and vast learnings along the way, for sure. But the important thing is to make some movement. It's not easy but actually easier than doing nothing. And fun!

Do all in fun, comrade!

What's worth knowing?

What's worth knowing now? How much do we have to read about what's happening in the world?

How much do we have to know about the future before we can start to be part of it?

Very little.


We were all trained in school to have a view of education that consisted (yes, I'm generalizing) of scattered bits of info about the world out there. Scattered because the learning was in different subject areas. A smattering of "larning" from that time remains with me, but the odd hodge-podge of factoids and tidbits that I remember have litte to do with subjects that were taught in the order that they were. What I remember were details that I'd "incorporated", taken into my own body of knowldge for some reason that, while not conscious, was uniquely my own.

I mention this because I'm wondering how much what we read daily, whether in the relatively enlightend world of the information web, or absorb from mainstream media, really comes out of the same model of learning that informed (or misinformed as the case may be) our school years. Thoughts that "meander like a restless wind inside a letter box," as John Lennon had it.

What's it for, in other words, what I'm learning about? A case in point for me, is the continuing boondoggle in the European financial markets. Quite a while ago I understood that they're going down, that there'll be multiple defaults, sooner or later, and that the contagion will spread. I know this for myself now. Why study the day to day procrastinations and fumbling pretense that it's just a bad case of hiccups? I do read about them, and track them on the radio, but I've not learned much new doing so in quite a while. I remain sure as I can be that the reality check is on the way, in the mail as it were. I didn't know the timing back then and I don't it now.

One could say I should be willing to consider I might be wrong, keep an open mind. But an open mind can be a made up mind. The world really is more like round than flat. People who've made up their minds don't change them because of reevaluations of complex data. They skim complex data to prove they're right or they study it in detail to prove they're right. People making up their minds can explore data with some rigor and some do.

For me, I read "disaster porn" for titillation and entertainment only, like junk food. I'm weaning myself off it though. It's part of my world but a diminishing part. The big picture is enough, is better.

The real nutrition comes from another direction entirely than stuffing more current affairs into the maw. Current affairs in the case of the mainstream media highlights this case: discussions don't consider the central issues except tangentially, never head on. The fact that real issues are mentioned at all gives the mainstream media credibility and keeps us buying in. It's like the inclusion of occasional dissenters to give the sense of hipness and relevance. Long as they don't take a hard look at the structure of media, rather than bathe in its content. Leftish media doesn't see the structure of media either, but that's another post.

No, the real nutrition comes from exploring and developing and creating something that's new for you, really new. Something alive and burning. Poet David Whyte said (or quoted someone, I'm not sure) that the poet is somone who overhears something he doesn't want to know. We all overhear that something.  If we're willing to bring it forward, it's something that comes out of your the place where your heart's imagination meets the world's imagination, something that's emerging and powerful and necessary for you. That thing, whatever it is, brings life and power to the world and to you. It saves you. If it stays hidden it festers and becomes anxiety. It goes off like sour yoghurt. It goes off but part of its nature is that whenever you find your way back to it, it's there, whole and entire, not a mark on it. And it's sweet.

To know that thing that is your small part of the whole body of knowledge, is what's worth knowing. Your working on it and finding a way to bring it forward gives life and contributes to the whole, however long it takes, however hard it is.

The story now, in the world and in us, is a story of change. It's evolution in real time. I don't know how it's going to work out in the details, not at all. But I do know the big direction of the outer change: it's toward more local resource use and more local community.

But everyone who finds their way into the story of change will discover, I think, as I do, that the change is really about them, about a change they need to make for themselves, something that connects their imagination to the larger imagination. We can do this.

Transition and Occupy are like two legs

The Transition movement (to a sustainable lower-fossil-fuel economy, that is)and Occupy are like two legs. Together they'll carry us further and more stably than we can hop alone. In a nutshell, Transition has a stronger, more developed analysis and Occupy has greater energy and imagination.

Personally I've had much more experience with Transition but the conversation there hasn't grabbed hold of people like Occupy has. It hasn't got them into the streets; it hasn`t challenged the power structure directly with talk of direct democracy. Occupy provides a visible problem - gross wealth disparity in a time of widespread monetary pain - that a lot of people, even if not quite 99%, relate too. Many feel the financial pain now, or are worried that they are going to feel it soon. When someone stood up and spoke to Transition at an Occupy meeting in the rural area I live in, she was greeted with respectful nods and assent, but it didn't seem to me that Ttransition was where people were living and breathing.

Transition's analysis speaks to our need, as individuals and as a collective, to reduce consumption to sustainable levels and build local economies that can survive the limited external energy inputs we'll have in the future. Most people can't relate powerfully to that yet; though it might seem true, it seems abstract and far away. Even though resource depletion, ratcheting oil prices and falling supply are hidden stories behind our daily news events, they lurk in the shadow. The inevitability of our needing to live within our means hasn't struck home. But for many Occupy does strike home. And it makes friends every day by its continually open come-as-you-are policy to newcomers.

But Occupy's numbers and enthusiasm provide a perfect growing medium for the ideas that Transtion's bringing forward so clearly. Transition needs Occupy's energy; Occupy benefits from Transition's smarts. Personally I see the need for both in my future, and I imagine that the two are going to walk a long way together, to their mutual benefit.