On Wed, 16 Dec 2009 17:13:06 -0500 Tony Del Plato <[email protected]> writes: > Well said Joel. Though I may have disagreements with George Franz and > Karl > North, we are fundamentally in agreement with the challenges we > face.
Ditto. The role of thinking about how to act, of which interminable strategy debates are an essential part, is not often appreciated until enough failed actions pile up to get us to take strategy seriously. I have become especially sensitive to what systems thinkers call "fixes that fail", an archetype (common dynamic) in which a solution appears to work for a while, but then the problem comes back, often worse than before, because our actions never got to the heart of the matter. I began to take (collective) thinking about action more seriously in reflecting on how much failure there was in the antiwar movement of the sixties. For all of our efforts, it was mostly the Vietnamese who ended the war. Toward the end, some old activists confronted us with a lesson out of the heritage of movements for change, one so venerable that it had been given a name. They said we needed praxis: the careful dialectic of thinking and practice. By dialectical meant an iterative spiral of cause and effect where actions and strategy (hopefully) learned from one another. Worse, most of the solutions to our problems sought by the movements of the sixties were "fixes that fail". For example, the same kind of war, for the same reasons is happening again: Iraq, Afganistan, Columbia, etc. So one of the kinds of thinking needed to inform action is a focus on historical patterns, followed by asking the question, What are the structural causes of those recurrent patterns? If we neglect this inquiry, "history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce". And eventually, movements burn themselves out. Note the near invisibility in the last 50 years of the US left, which I will define broadly (but rigorously) as any movement founded on a deep structural understanding of US society and its dynamics. I would like to see more of that kind of thinking in the sustainability movement. One of the reasons the environmental movement crashed after the seventies was the belief that the courts could be used to protect the legislative gains. The history of the justice system in the US reveals that to be a delusion. The historical pattern shows that the system rarely dispenses justice when the outcome conflicts with powerful interests. If they had sought a better understanding of the dynamics of "justice" in the US, the environmentalists might have discovered their naivete. To return briefly to the question of how to build a local movement toward a society that uses no gas or other fossil fuels, Simon may well be right that playing the morality card will have little political effect. Not because "fairness" has not worked well in the past, but because the size of the problem so complicates the search for effective actions. The first problem to overcome is the immense wall of denial about the immanent future we face, most notably developed countries, in particular the US. The outlook was summarized well recently on http://www.theoildrum.com/ : "We're a nation built on leverage -- oil leverages the distant past, capitalism leverages the resources of distant lands, and debt leverages the future. Unfortunately, we're set to de-leverage on all fronts." And, I would add, much of that deleverage will be permanent. So one of the tasks I see is to spread an understanding of the implications of that statement. Another, which Jon described as the present strategy of TCLocal, is to provide a way out of denial by presenting credible pathways out of the petroleum era, ones that could address many of our other fundamental issues of sustainability as well. My contribution to that effort so far is to envision an agricultural path. ____________________________________________________________ Diet Help Cheap Diet Help Tips. Click here. http://thirdpartyoffers.juno.com/TGL2141/c?cp=qYk6ZyyvTYrLwpCjKG823gAAJ1B3xrWZQZfhuPn7Zx_iV2uNAAYAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAADNAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAYQAAAAAA= _______________________________________________ For more information about sustainability in the Tompkins County area, please visit: http://www.sustainabletompkins.org/ RSS, archives, subscription & listserv information for: [email protected] http://lists.mutualaid.org/mailman/listinfo/sustainabletompkins Questions about the list? ask [email protected] free hosting by http://www.mutualaid.org
