I just finished watching Chris Martenson’s “Crash Course” for the second time. I have known or intuited, most of the facts he presents for some time. Between the video, the news, and the cost estimates I have been working on for the inert fill home, I am hard pressed to see a way I can contribute to the development of community and the well being of my fellow man. On the other hand when I refocus on the tasks at hand, caring for my father, catching up on my own affairs, and working out the details of inert fill construction; I have my work cut out for me for the winter. Revisiting the vision.

Inert FillTM - The Vision
This is a process rather than a product. The resulting home should be able to conform to the local environment. This includes urban multistory situations.
• The shell should use a maximum of local, abundant, surplus or recycled materials.
• The shell should go up in a matter of weeks.
• Without supplemental energy it should neither freeze nor overheat.
• It should be habitable for 500 years.
• It should be fire proof.
• It should only rarely need supplemental energy or water.
• It should include a tempered food storage area and tempered fresh air.
• It should be habitable with minimum amenities.
• It should be easy to add domestic hot water, refrigeration, electricity and other amenities.
• All wiring should be in conduit and plumbing in chases so as to be easily maintained.
• It should be easy to beautify.

September first I quit driving truck and moved to the ranch, where I grew up, in South Dakota to care for my aging father.
After a month preparing for winter; gardening, restoring greenhouse glass, repairing the car, a bit of canning and freezing, and planting a bed of greens in the greenhouse, “sustainability” has a new feel. The big items of “getting tucked in for the winter” have been taken care of. And there is still a “to do” list for any Indian summer days that come along. I suspect my daily inspection of the tender little greens that I am trying to nurture for my winter nutrition has a lot to do with the shifting perception of “sustainability”. Over my years away from the farm, 34, and garden, 6, I have slowly forgotten the emotional impact of seeing my future salad being consumed by insects. Still, I made an outdoor hot bed on the south side of the greenhouse to give me a jump start in the spring. A farmer just keeps planting. Yes, it may be in vain, the bugs may win, but, if he doesn’t plant, there will definitely not be a crop. Obama is getting the Nobel Peace Prize for planting.
Another aspect of “sustainability” is shifting as well. As I listen to my father I notice my inherited tendencies and have the opportunity to reflect on my own attitudes and behaviors. How easy it is to blame others or the system for what is, rather than taking responsibility for what I may or may not be making of the circumstances in which I find myself. How easy it is to tear down rather than build up. Yes, we need to create an opening for the new. However, we create this opening by stopping, reflecting, contemplating, meditating, praying; rather than by tearing down. As I worked on the car I would get stymied, stumped, or couldn’t get something apart or together. About the time I was ready to try to force it, or take a sledge hammer to it, I would stop and do something else for a while, or just take a break, and when I came back to that task it would be easy. Of course, at times it took multiple tries.

So, as I tackle (nice cozy indoor tasks for cold nasty winter days) long neglected website maintenance, bookkeeping, and file clearing I am mindful that each task move me toward the construction of an experimental inert fill structure in a sustainable community. I need to be careful to not get the cart before the horse or to bite off more than I can chew. In other words, to set SMART goals: S- specific, M- measurable, A- achievable, R- realistic, T- timely. In the process regular blog entries will help keep me on track.

Signs of the times.
Ervin Laszlo refers to the chaos point we are at in terms of a full term pregnancy. Humanity needs to birth a new way of being. We are filling the womb, earth, to the bursting. We are using up all her resources and beginning to toxify our environment. Our existing systems can no longer meet our needs. Peak oil, global climate change, poverty, disease, marginalization of billions of people while plying them with advertisements showing them what they should have all add to the toxicity. In other terms we could say that the industrial age has run its course and the information age can’t get a breath yet. We are like two year olds fighting over real dump trucks. Our social, psychological, emotional maturity has fallen way behind our technological capacity. We need to move to a post-consumer economy but don’t know what that looks like yet.

Economies.
None of the economic systems of the past are going to serve us in this future. But just as Clare Graves concluded that each of the psychological systems he studied had part of the truth and formed these into what is now called Spiral Dynamics we must find the various parts of this puzzle that we can use. It will not serve us to revert to an old system. We must find the new pattern, in harmony with nature, in harmony with our inner natures and our planetary possibility, study it and support it.

Scale.
Back in 1809 Charles Fourier proposed Associations of 10,000 acres and 1800 people as the scale needed to create the human dynamics for successful living. Our present world scale economy seems a bit shakey, but that could be the influence of capitalism. Co-housing developments need about so many people to work well. Peak oil could help us discover appropriate economic scales. By postponing the real cost of transportation (global climate change) cheap oil has distorted economic boundaries. We need to find out how much of what we need to live fully we should be producing locally. This will establish the local economic unit. Then we need to discover what this local unit can produce for sale so it can buy those things it needs but cannot produce.

Community.
As I looked over intentional communities in SW WI and SE MN I noticed that most did not propose an economy. How will the community make money? Most leave that to the individual. I would suggest that a community enterprise may be essential. The resulting synergistics, creativity, purpose, mission, teamwork, and interactions will enliven both the individuals and the community while providing a cash flow.
Begin with an asset inventory, natural resources, human resources, spiritual resources, shared values and vision. How can we serve the world and get paid to do so? How can we grow this? How will it grow us?
An example: In a Permaculture oriented community trees are very important. Grow and sell Christmas trees and firewood. Nut and fruit trees and the honey from the bees needed to pollinate them could make a great line of original, healthy, candies and cookies for the holiday season. These would provide a variety of year round jobs and could be expanded in many ways.
The community economy satisfies human needs first and economic needs secondarily. The necessities of daily life are produced and consumed locally. Several communities could work together to man an industrial plant to produce a product for the world market. It is essential that the communities own the business so that its purpose continues to be to satisfy the human needs of the communities.

Why Community?
Learning to live and work together is essential to the evolution of the next phase of our global economy. Unless we devote energy and resources to this learning process we will push ourselves past the chaos point and into decline.

5/25/09
Forward from Tom Atlee of the Co-Intelligence Institute:
U.S. President Obama issued a Memorandum on Transparency and Open Government, calling for an unprecedented level of openness in government. In the memorandum, the President outlined three principles for promoting a more open government: transparency, participation, and collaboration. Now, Obama is calling on U.S. citizens to help shape how that commitment is fulfilled.
The Administration has set up a website at http://opengov.ideascale.com to gather ideas from the field, get them commented on and voted up or down, and then to discuss the leading proposals and weave them into a program.
The brainstorming, commenting, and voting stage of this process is open to the public until Thursday, May 28, 2009. So if you want to join this effort, please do so now.

My thoughts upon reading the article: “Why Capitalism Shouldn’t Be Saved” by John Sanbonmatsu in the May/June Tikkun magazine at http://www.tikkun.org/article.php/may_jun_09_sanbonmatsu

Three Quotes that stick with me: “Steinbrück, a leading light of the conservative Christian Democratic Union party, stunned his interviewer by invoking the spirit of Marxism to explain what was occurring in the international markets. “Overall,” he said, “we have to conclude that certain elements of Marxist theory are not all that incorrect.”

“If capitalism is indeed beginning to consume itself, the same way it devoured the minds, bodies, and labor of countless human and nonhuman beings over the course of centuries, then for the first time in generations, perhaps ever, we may have a brief opening, a caesura in the long, breathless tale of capitalism and its violence, in which to imagine and to set the terms for a new way of organizing human society and economy.”

“But where are the demonstrations today against the bailout of the banks and brokerage firms, let alone against the capitalist system that is ruining our planet? Who is out there trying to build a vibrant, broad-based socialist movement? Ironically, the unfolding crisis directly or indirectly encompasses every conceivable social movement issue the Left could ever care about-war and peace, individual liberties, feminism, ecology, labor, and animal rights. Yet the Left as such is dead-or might as well be.”

We are still not talking about a post-consumer, post-industrial, economy. What will the post capitalist, post socialist economy look like? With the advent of consumer goods we rejected the ancient communitarian economies. We have been crying about the shortcomings of everything since. We need to have a human, a planetary conversation about how we want to function economically. What are our priorities? Are we ready to really commit to the millennium development goals? I do think that when we take peak oil and global climate change into account we will be talking about both local and global economies that place human development at the top of the list of priorities.

You could say the American dream is to both “make a living” and “have a life”. Definitions first. To “make a living” is to work at something that yields enough income to provide for our needs and some savings. Notice I didn’t say wants. This would include food, clothes, shelter, utilities, health care, dental & eye care, enough to replace things that wear out and enough to save for a rainy day and old age. To “have a life” is to do what we love, have family and friends, community, social involvement, enough resources to cover necessities and have some flexibility. I would guess that more than half of Americans do not have both. Further I would guess that at least a quarter of us have neither. How many of us have given up having a life to make a living just to have the great job disappear. How many have refused to sacrifice their life to make a living only to have their health fail and have neither. I have neither. I spend 27 or so days a month on the road working 60 hours a week and don’t make enough to get dental or health care much less replace my dying car. We need a safety net to decrease the number of hazards to our financial viability. We need a carbon tax to raise the money to finance the safety net. I would actually go for a resource depletion tax. Those using up the commons would be paying to support those who are disenfranchised by its loss.

The financial system as we know it is based on the saving and lending of money. Before the 80’s thrifty citizens deposited their money in a financial institution with an expectation that the interest they received, compounded, would at least keep up with inflation. The institution in turn lent the money with the expectation that the interest they could charge would pay the depositor and pay them for their trouble and risk. Savings would earn 4 – 6% and you could borrow for 8 – 12%. Eighties inflation discouraged both savers and borrowers by removing their profit motive.
Ever since, the interest rates for savings have gone down and interest rates on loans have increased. The system has tried to squeeze an ever larger profit from a dwindling supply thus effectively killing the market. Now savings earn 1% and credit cards cost 29% with ever increasing default rates. Someone got greedy.
National usury laws would help resolve the problem, making lending for more than a 10% annual interest rate illegal.
CD’s with their return pegged to the cost of living index would assure that savings would keep up with the inflation that the usury laws would discourage.

It is spring, as I drive this truck, adding to planetary unsustainability, I see eroded fields, with small plumes of silt in the ditches and stream beds, muddy streams all over (except a couple in KY TN) and silt covered banks of the larger rivers. Our national wealth, top soil, going out to sea. Some of it the result of producing corn ethanol that requires 8 gallons of petroleum for every gallon of ethanol produced. I read the NY Times article on Transition Towns http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/19/magazine/19town-t.html and my impotence hit me in the face once again. At the same time I’m reading “The Power of Sustainable Thinking” by Bob Doppelt. “When will we ever learn?” So I rewrote my resume – how many people have both plowed a field with a horse and written XHTML for a webpage with 20 years of solar construction between? Maybe I can get a Transition Town to adopt me. Now to integrate the principles of those two sources.

I received the following message today. 1) The original date on it is Feb 7, why so slow to get out? 2) The petition site does not contain this wording. 3) I would like to see a direct reference to our need to care for each other. I signed the petition anyway.

The Evolutionary Leaders Counsel is a group of spiritual and thought
leaders called together by Deepak Chopra. They have been meeting in
person and by phone to address the needs of the planet and how best to
facilitate change of consciousness on the planet. Below is their
response to a request by the Obama administration. Their petition
addresses many of the concerns in the NSP Spiritual Covenant with
America. It is thrilling to see our current administration reaching
out to spiritual leaders and showing an interest in consciousness.

By the Evolutionary Leaders
The human family is in the midst of the most significant
transformation of consciousness since its emergence in Africa over one
hundred thousand years ago. Consciousness has been evolving for
billions of years from the first cell to us. We are becoming aware
that through our own consciousness the universe can know itself. This
awareness reveals incredible new potential for our individual and
collective humanity.
Simultaneously, we are the first species on this Earth aware that we
can destroy ourselves by our own action. This may be the greatest
wake-up call to the evolution of consciousness since the origin of
Homo sapiens.
We now realize that we are affecting our own evolution by everything
we do. This knowledge awakens in us the aspiration to become more
conscious through subjective practices including meditation,
reflection, prayer, intuition, creativity, and conscious choice making
that accelerate our evolution in the direction of unity consciousness
and inspire us to deeply align our collective vision.
THE CHALLENGE
At this juncture in human history, urgent global crises challenge us
to learn to live sustainably, in harmony and gratitude with one
another and with the living universe. The changes required of humanity
are broad, deep, and far reaching. Only by acting swiftly and
creatively can we birth a planetary culture that will bring well-being
to every form of life in the Earth community.
The good news is that a compelling new story of our potential as a
whole human species is emerging-a story of collaboration, citizen
action, dialogue and new understandings propelled by unprecedented
levels of democratic freedom, multicultural exchange, and access to
communication technologies. It is nothing less than the story of our
collective evolution.
OPPORTUNITIES FOR ACTION
We recognize that the inner and outer aspects of life evolve together.
A dramatic awakening in consciousness will involve an equally dramatic
shift in outward aspects of our lives. In particular, we see the
following as vital opportunities for our conscious evolution, both
personally and collectively:
Cultivating a Paradigm of Aliveness: We regard the universe as deeply
alive and conscious by nature. In a living universe, our sense of
subtle connection and participation with life around us is the basis
for a compassionate and cooperative approach to living.
Educating for an Evolving Consciousness: Awakening consciousness is
the foundation for all the change we seek to see in the world. We can
work to elevate our capacity for conscious reflection and creative
action in our personal lives as well as our collective lives as
communities. We must support research and educational strategies that
optimize human capacities and explore the nature of consciousness.
Restoring Ecological Balance: The balance of planetary ecosystems is
fundamental to our survival. We must reverse the pollution of our
global commons-the water, air and soil that nourish all life. We must
encourage the proliferation of clean, renewable energy sources and
expend all necessary resources toward mitigating the effects of
climate change.
Encouraging Conscious Media: We must find innovative ways to use the
new electronic media as the mirror of our positive evolutionary story,
investing in their capacity to reach across differences of generation,
culture, religion, wealth, and gender to build a working consensus
about our collective future.
Engaging in Social and Political Transformation: More sustainable ways
of living will require the support of a more conscious democracy and
vibrant civil society from which more enlightened leaders will emerge.
All individuals should be encouraged to use their gifts to create
participatory, responsible and compassionate models of governance.
Working for Integrity in Commerce: Conscious businesses that are aware
of the scope, depth, and long-range impacts of their actions are key
to achieving sustainability. Business must become an ethical steward
of the Earth’s ecology and consciously establish an economic basis for
a future of equitably shared abundance.
Promoting Health and Healing: The science of mind-body-spirit health
has demonstrated the profound connection between the health of a whole
person and the health of the system in which he or she lives. Whole
systems healing, respecting both traditional knowledge and modern
sciences, must be supported in physical, social, and spiritual domains.
Building Global Community: The new story is about all of us who share
this planet. Together, we can create a culture of peace that
eliminates the need for armed conflict, respecting and appreciating
the glorious diversity of our human family.
YOUR PARTICIPATION IS VITAL
Our group has done its best to articulate possibilities for the
evolution of consciousness at this crucial moment in time. Please
reflect on this document, feel what resonates in your being and calls
forth a response on your part. We invite you to discuss it with
others, continuing this global conversation by adding to it the wisdom
that is uniquely your own.
Together, let us co-create a new narrative of conscious evolution that
is a call to individual and collective action, birthing the most
significant transformation of consciousness in history. Join in the
Call to Conscious Evolution by signing the pledge now.
FOUNDING SIGNATORIES
Chopra Center , Carlsbad , California , July 26, 2008
Michael Beckwith, Joan Borysenko, Gregg Braden, Rinaldo Brutoco,
Thomas Callanan, Deepak Chopra, Mallika Chopra, Dale Colton, Gordon
Dveirin, Duane Elgin , Leslie Elkus, Barbara Fields, Debbie Ford, Ashok
Gangadean, Kathleen Gardarian, Tom Gegax, Charles Gibbs, Kathy Hearn,
Jean Houston, Barbara Marx Hubbard, Bruce Lipton, Judy Martin, Rod
McGrew, Steve McIntosh, Lynne McTaggart, Deborah Moldow, James O’Dea,
Carter Phipps, Wendy Craig-Purcell, Carolyn Rangel, Rustum Roy, Peter
Russell, Gerard Senehi, Emily Squires, Brian Swimme, Diane Williams,
Marianne Williamson, Tom Zender.
See what others are saying, sign petition and write your comments:
http://www.thepetitionsite.com/takeaction/248704259

Truth in vending: There should be heavy penalties for advertising and publicity that creates a false impression. Like “clean coal” when the technology isn’t developed “organic” that is 90%, “healthy snacks” that are just a little bit less unhealthy than the alternative. To maintain our democracy, read - national security, we need an informed public not a misinformed one. It may be that for our national security we cannot afford to presume that a member of the general public will do the research necessary to uncover the thinly veiled falsehood.