Tennis Anyone?

It's perhaps strange but I'm going to try and tie a tennis match to what's going on in the world. Today Rafael Nadal beat the most amazing tennis player I've had the pleasure of watching at Wimbledon. And I've been watching for as long as I can remember, my father being a tennis nut of sorts. I can still recall a friend at probably age twelve complaining that all my dad and I did was watch tennis. If only I'd been playing all that time.

Anyway for the past few years Roger Federer has won it all. He was unstoppable. He was a machine. Serve, volley, backhand, forehand. He never broke a sweat but you can believe all his opponents did. He cruised. I went to see him in Toronto once, such was his legend. We had to see him in the flesh if from the upper decks.

But now there's a new champion, another machine. Federer has been displaced. Nadal is even better it seems, though I haven't seen as many of his matches to judge.

So what's happening? Obviously it seems that Federer has peaked. He has lost to one or two other players before today at Wimbledon. So there is a temptation to view this as the end of his reign. But he's only 26. What has happened, I surmise, is that another player of even more complexity than Federer has come along. Up and up the level of complexity in men's tennis rises.

And it's the same for the world. We become more and more complex every day and with every new degree and qualification and technology to do the smallest task. Each of us accepts a role in society that makes complete sense and contributes to the whole. However we have boxed ourselves into a corner. With increasing complexity comes a decline in resiliency.

Resiliency is essential to the survival of all beings. As humans, we cannot expect that complexity will continue to grow infinitely. Eventually complex systems, both natural and human (which are arguably natural as well) collapse thanks to their complexity. They are unable to cope when the status quo changes. Humans, above all animals, have both the potential to mitigate this threat but also to reach staggering heights of complexity.

Do we have the strength to increase our own resiliency against the powerful desire to increase complexity?

Stone Age Anarchism

A friend of mine once remarked: "We're either going to walk to the Stone Age or be catapulted to the Stone Age".

Most of us would view a return to the Stone Age with suspicious eyes. No television, no McDonald's some might lament. Others, more wisely, would look to vaccinations, stable food supplies and, to quote George W. Bush, "living in caves" when questioning a return to the Stone Age.

The Stone Age was a tough life with lots of suffering but strong people using sharp minds survived and thrived in an abundant world. In their observation and study of the natural world they inhabited, they were our intellectual equals. In Guns, Germs and Steel, Jared Diamond lauds a hunter-gatherer friend in Papua New Guinea as being just as intelligent as himself, a Western academic. It's just a different kind of intelligence based on different life ways. Don't be quick to judge people as not as intelligent as you just because they don't have a high IQ; after all if you invented the test you're going to do well at it.

At the start of the 21st century, many of us think humans have never been higher, never been more developed. Thanks to oil, we barely have to use our muscles anymore. We can eat what we want because if we make ourselves sick our doctors will have a cure or at least a long-term remedy. We all get cancer and other environmental diseases and consider it normal. We stare at screens all day and all night. Does putting a person on the moon make these truths moot?

Life is beautiful but it is also sad and full of suffering wherever you live. This has never changed. Even the very rich, hiding away from the world, are victims. Every time they squeeze that trigger on the Febreeze bottle, they can't escape cancer and the chemical soup soon to flow through their veins. Why me, I can hear them cry.

But the worst part about today is that we are taking down the rest of the species of the world with us. A third of amphibians are endangered and many are going extinct. The polar bear is about to join them. If you listen carefully you can hear rainforests felled in Africa, South America and Southeast Asia. How many more species that we never knew (and never should have known) are silently departing at our hands. And very worst, we are pushing the earth's climate to levels unseen for millions of years. All because our greed is never satiated. All because the only way we know is up. Many voices warn against this ecocide but they are ignored unless they say we can buy our way out of climate change and mass extinctions.

Now realistically few people are going to choose the Stone Age over this rampant civilization. The advertising is just too good, think about all those car ads versus public transit; public transit always loses. It's too scary to actually have to take control of our lives. So we hand our power over to governments and corporations who are extremely happy to have it. They'll tell you that you can be sustainable and responsible as long as you pick up this new miracle product.

But more and more people are rejecting these false dreams and are taking their power back. They are turning away and powering themselves down. They are building communities and using the fading power of civilization to prepare for the low energy world to come. They are rejecting the state and only using their own two hands and their sharp minds to create what they need to create to survive. This means no destructive mines sucking minerals out of the earth to be sent to a factory in China to make a product that to purchase you must sell your labour and become a slave.

Humans can make homes without civilization. They can make tools without civilization. They can hunt and grow food without civilization. They can most definitely be healthy without civilization. Most importantly they can live in balance with the rest of the natural world and not threaten all life and leave their children and other beings with a diminished world.

These are the lessons of the Stone Age.

Civilization will never be sustainable not with 7 billion grasping hands and hungry mouths crying out for more, more. There is no plan. Civilized humans have no goal, no finish line. We have nothing to live for. If we are here for our children then why do we threaten their future? If we are here to "fix" nature then we have it coming and deserve our fate. Is it to know everything in the universe, to become gods? The only thing that makes sense, to me, is that we are here for ourselves, for this moment and we don't care about the future.

Turning away is finally a meaningful goal. Living as just another creature on this earth is a happy choice and one that I, and my friend and many more people are starting to make. Maybe the Stone Age is too far for you. Turning away is a start. The lights are much too bright the way we are all currently headed.

Next Crisis Please

Pile another log on the fire. Today Gordon Brown, the gutless British Prime Minister (just when you thought no one would be worse than Tony Blair) warned that soaring oil prices represented: "the most worrying situation in the world". They are just touching $140 a barrel.

Ha! What about the food crisis or is that too last week? What about climate change? Hail just destroyed much of the greens on the organic farm I'm working on over the weekend, not to mention all the flooding on the Prairies. What about the resurgent Taliban breaking out their comrades from an Afghan jail? Aren't terrorists the biggest threat we face?

Unfortunately our "leaders" and states can't handle complexity. They like neat little packages and one dimensional issues. News flash, nothing is one dimensional about human society or the earth. And you can bet your bottom dollar that out leaders and their bureaucrats aren't going to learn how to handle these threats any time soon.

And really what is there to handle and control? This is all our fault. We being civilized humans. We thought we were being so smart. Didn't we realize that oil was not an infinite resource? And didn't we realize that burning all that fuel would fuck up the planet and mess up climates from pole to pole? Were we not paying attention to the fact that industrial agriculture uses more calories to grow food than you get out (not the case with small, non-industrial farms by the way)? And surely we must all recognize that we ignore injustice and starvation around the world while our waistlines expand ever outward. And we think there's no justification for "terrorists" and make ridiculous statements like "they can't stand freedom".

You reap what you sow.

We are entering a very dangerous time. Civilization is about to go down hard because it's been built on such dodgy and shortsighted foundations. The only salvation is to learn as much as you can so you're actually a useful person and would be indispensable in a future small community. No one will care pretty soon whether you can type fast, cook with saffron or research a species of tree frog in the Congo. Be useful at any cost (love, employment, family) dear reader; surely you can see the writing on the walls as clearly as anyone else? If others can't listen what else can you do but walk away?

Yet just this morning I heard a man arranging for an education fund for his young child. Hate to ruin your day but . . .

Signs of the Times

Collapse. It's a concept that a lot more people are pondering these days. And with good reason. Higher energy prices, higher food prices, higher resource prices, less to go around. These trends all portend an end to the "good times". Yet are we paying attention?

Only the most thoughtful and resilient human societies avoid collapse. They either take the steps necessary to power down their societies, going through small pains now to avoid larger ones later or they embrace the maxim: business as usual. If they go with the latter, collapse is assured. If they go with the former, collapse might still happen but at least you have a better chance.

Every human society stands on the foundation of all its members. We all rely on one another; this is ecological thinking. In human societies, some members are higher and have more power, though, than others. So it's easy for the powerful to ignore the warning signs rotting the foundation of their enterprises. When the poor and marginal suffer you either stare it in the eyes or you gaze rapt into the neon lights of your warm, protective bubble.

This disconnect between members is I think the strongest guarantee of human collapse. We've done such a good job building walls and fences that I think we won't be able to see the warning signs before it is too late.

As an aware individual there's only two things you can do: open your eyes to what's happening and build your resiliency. At a system level, collapse is actually creative. It removes, or at least reduces, unsuccessful species and behaviours and leads to new spaces for new, more thoughtful members.

Better late than never.