www.wherethehellismatt.com

After even a cursory examination of peak oil and climate change one thing becomes very obvious - a lot of change is coming whether we like it or not and a lot of change is required to minimize the pain of the transition.

Change is happening in our society but it is painfully slow - our politicians play it safe, our businesses are far to often focused on the short term and the general population is more concerned with rugby and reality tv than the future their children will inherit.

So how do we increase the rate of change in our society?

One idea I am exploring is to focus on a specific campaign that is related to the fundamental issues of our times but is easily achievable and accessible to the majority of the population. By engaging as many people as possible in this campaign the aim is to increase our capability to tackle the next one, by taking small easy steps we can build our strength to take the large challenging ones.

The issue I chose was a nationwide campaign to say NO to plastic bags (www.noplasticbags.org.nz) - now I know what you’re thinking, isn’t that worrying about the cinder on the carpet when the house is on fire? It would be if it was an end in itself but it isn’t, it is a means to an end. A campaign against plastic bag has many things going for it;

Achievable : there are many national and international precedents, the trend away from plastic is clearly established

Accessible : everyone in the country uses plastic bags on a daily basis and it is an excellent opportunity to create public dialogue around sustainability issues

Fixed end point : the campaign to reduce emissions will go on for decades, plastic bags have a clear exit point when we can move on to the next campaign.

Win-Win : plastic bags are running on pure inertia and everybody wins when we get rid of them.

Photogenic : there are many compelling images that this campaign can use to engage the public.

The other idea I am exploring is how we can get a large amount of people to contribute small amounts of time to power the campaign. To take some of the models from social networking, open source software and online collaboration (wikipedia etc.) and apply them to a specific campaign for social change. So the heart of the campaign is a social network at noplasticbags.ning.com which is open to anyone who is interested and is very much an exploration in online collaboration that will be evolving over time.

I think the combination of these two ideas (small easy steps to build strength and many people contributing small amounts of time) have the potential to turn all this ’sustainability stuff’ into a truly mass movement. What do you think?

Devastating video, there has to be something wrong with the way scientific findings are disseminated throughout our society if research like this can be ignored for so long. Sort of like, I don’t know, Climate Change research perhaps.

Now this is starting to get surreal - nearly a month ago the two Greenpeace activists who exposed the stolen whale meat scandal were arrested. Outraged greenpeace protestors took to the streets world wide. Now they have a video.

Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s ludicrous these guys were arrested (go on sign the petition, you know you want to) but the Tokyo Two?? It’s not like they’re being accused of blowing up a pub.

I have a theory, Greenpeace have infiltrated the Japanese Police Force and conspired to throw the book at the activists. After all any publicity is good publicity and persecuting people for doing the right thing is nearly as galvanizing to the public as slaughtering majestic animals. I’m sure there is a mastermind living in a forest some where planning the whole thing. With a laptop. If the Japanese parliament announces legislation proposing capital punishment for petty larceny then you will have confirmation that the mastermind’s reach is indeed great.

One thing is for sure the funniest thing has to be the comments on youtube - this should really be a soap opera.

It’s been a few weeks in the making (hence the recent lack of posts) but I’ve finally finished a first draft of the www.noplasticbags.org.nz website.

The plan is to use the ning campaign centre as a focal point to organise a nationwide campaign to restrict plastic bag usage.

Any feedback is welcome.

This manifesto from www.changethis.com had some absolute gems of insight - it’s been a long time since I have read something with interesting ideas so densely packed together. The general thrust is that learning should be a lifelong pursuit and our schools should teach us how, not what, to learn.

Most classes, curricula, and schools are currently organized around disciplines… Problems do not fall into disciplines… Nevertheless, those that identify a problem generally try to solve it by manipulating the variables
with which their discipline is familiar.

This is something I can relate to a lot, coming from a background of programming computers I definitely approach a whole host of non computer related problems as if they were pieces of software. It’s always a constant challenge to approach existing problems from a different perspective

Reality consists of sets of interacting problems—messes. Students are seldom taught or learn how to deal with messes. Instead, they are given exercises to “solve.”

The biggest difference I have found between academic learning and the real world is in school and university the questions were given to me - in the real world I have to find the question first. Getting the question right is the hard part because if you ask the wrong question then you can never get the right answer.

Almost all of the prevailing social problems in our society consist of trying to do the wrong things better.

Talk about an epitaph of our times.

The authors advocate leading children rather than managing them, how many of today’s corporate leaders treat their employees as if they were school children?

To manage others is to direct them in the pursuit of objectives using means which the manager
selects. To lead others is to guide them in the pursuit of objectives by the use of means the followers
as well as the leader select.

To minimize chances of being held responsible for errors of commission - where errors of omission are not recorded—the best strategy is to do nothing. This is the source of the conservatism and risk aversion that permeates the current educational system and society.

Given the freedom to fail without censure, students will often challenge themselves to work hardest on their weaknesses.

I know many people (and count myself among them) who have had to work hard on giving themselves the freedom to fail. The permission to actually feel good about having a go and doing their best, to feel really good about it not just paying lip service to the ideal. It’s still so far away.

For the first time I actually have a glimmer of hope that their will be a half decent education system by the time I have kids of schoolable age. It’s interesting that the authors credit technology as giving power to the movement for challenging the status quo - when there is less overhead in the transmission of ideas it’s easier for the best ones to bubble to the surface

This interview is slightly dated (seems to be just after the stern report) but has some well thought out ideas on Climate Change.

On the causes of climate change

It is beyond my powers of description to tell you what a world of nine billion people in net food deficit would look like… It makes all previous human crises; wars, acts of genocide, famines, plagues look like side shows in the circus of human suffering

In Relation to the media

The problem begins with the media and the media is censored as heavily as the media was censored in the Sovet Union… It is not censored by the state … It is censored by money

On the Stern Report

This isn’t an economic issue, this is a moral issue… The real costs are measured in human lives and ecosystems: immeasurable

On Solutions

This really is a matter of the people versus the oil companies. There are a lot more of us than there are of them but they have a great deal of power, particularly over the politcal process.

Yesterday was World Environment Day and 200 people froze in New Zealand’s capital of Wellington to show support for the campaign to stop climate change.

When was the last time you stopped to think about the environment?

Everyone I’ve spoken to had heaps of fun and the looks on the faces of the people walking by was priceless - congratulations to Nick and the crew at intersect for pulling it together.

I recently saw Amazing Grace, it was about the abolition of slavery in the UK. Like Amistad it left me feeling sick in the stomach. How could people profit from such misery? How could generation after generation be complicit in such an abhorrent institution? How is it possible that when La Amistad reached US soil it took years of legal battles to determine that the 53 souls aboard could not be claimed as salvage? The very concept seems alien and incomprehensible to me.

Or how about the Spanish inquisition - let’s torture people until they confess to their crimes and then burn them at the stake to save their eternal souls. Strange world view those folks had back then.

The abolition of the inquisition and slavery were some of the significant milestones in the development of our civilization. Signs that our species was coming of age - like giving women the right to vote and allowing people to choose their own religion. I wonder what other milestones are awaiting us before we can call ourselves all grown up? Here are a few suggestions

End War
End Poverty
End Pollution
Stable Human Population
100% Renewable Energy
100% Cradle to Cradle Industry

If any of these goals seem unrealistic or impossible then I challenge you to change your thinking. They only seem unreachable because we have never experienced them. For a second just imagine what such a world will look like, what it will feel like. How incomprehensible will our society look to people living then?

There is absolutely no reason that these sorts of goals are unreachable. None. Sure they are hard - they are harder than anything we have done before, but we are more capable than we ever have been before.

The minute we accept any of these goals as infeasible, impractical or just too damn big to tackle we have lost. As individuals we can only focus on fixing small parts of these problems, but we should never ever lose sight of where we want to be.

Have you ever had the feeling that future generations won’t look kindly upon us? That they’ll be ever so slightly resentful? Wonder if any of them already are?

And this was in 1992, can’t help but think we’ve gone backwards since then.