Inventing for the sustainable planet

Going for a bigger blog

2009-04-29T11:43:00.003+02:00

Regular readers may know that I have kept work on INVENTING separate from my consulting work with A Very Beautiful Place. Recently, realised that the two really do fit well together so I'm migrating my main blogging over to AVBP.net

I came to the realisation that peace and sustainable development go hand in hand. And that they are as much about realising who you are as knowing the benefits of e.g. urine separation.

Shall I post my imagestreams in future? I'm not sure. Your feedback is welcome!

WHY DON'T THEY GET IT?

2009-04-22T10:53:00.001+02:00

At the last meeting of our Oil Awareness group, one concern seemed to be shared by everyone present: ”why don’t they get it?”. What members are referring to is the feeling that colleagues, government, officers of authorities just don’t seem to ”get” the significance of
1) the vast amounts of energy we are using to sustain daily life
2) the sources of this energy are rapidly depleting
3) our current economic system is dependant on them

I know why they don’t get it. If you are interested in knowing bear with me. I need to tell you a few stories first.

When Christopher Columbus arrived in what is now America, natives standing on the shore did not see the ships approaching. The explanation is that they had never encountered anything like it in their life before, and their brain simply did not register it. A priest noticed strange wave patterns (the wake of the boats) and stared at them trying to make sense of them. Eventually he saw the ships, called others to him, and they stated to see the ships too.

The other story is of research I have read into perception. Researchers showed rather upper class middle aged women a series of pictures and words rapidly, and asked them to remember them. Interspersed with “ordinary” words were foul language expressions of the sort these ladies would never use. Interestingly when asked, these subjects remembered all the ordinary words but were certain they never saw the foul ones.

Obviously they “saw” the words, but in terms of perception, like the natives on the shores of America, they did not “register” them.

Countless other experiments and stories illustrate the same thing: that people do not always perceive what they are seeing. Sometimes because it is outside their experience, sometimes because to see it would change them in some way.

This is a powerful mechanism. People often do not perceive things in situations where their position in society, for example their job, would be threatened.

So why do our neighbours, politicians, not “get” the significance of the peaking of oil production and the consequences for life on Earth?

One reason is because it is not in their life experience to even contemplate a serious, long term global energy shortage. Another is that their jobs, position in society etc depend on it. You have to remember that we are flock animals. In our DNA, our wiring, is that exclusion means death.

For sustainable development fanatics this can have drastic consequences. Say, as a friend of the environment, you start to think how the bus lane over a narrow bridge into town could be used to promote lift –sharing. Say every car with three or more passengers would be allowed the fast route past the queues.

Good for the environment… so you think of proposing it. But, the unseen forces of flock pressure will work against you. Think about it…. That could be a third of the cars used, a third of the petrol, a third of the gas sales, a reduction in staff needed, a reduction in tax income.. and so on. What you are suggesting will impact economic growth, something the flock is committed to. That will make you an outsider. You will find many reasons why this suggestion should not go further. For example “ no one will listen to me anyway”.

So any good ideas that could come up get squashed by your internal monitoring machine that is wired to keep you OK with the flock.

There ARE ways around this machine. Something for my next post……

My darkest fears: faith in business as usual is being killed once and for all - intentionally

2009-03-16T09:16:00.005+01:00

(Thanks to Paul Heft and Dave Pollard for contributing sections of this article via e-mail conversations.)

The New Scientist magazine, I believe, is an indicator for how those of us with a scientific bent (I see myself as one of them, despite my sojourn in business the last few decades) are thinking:

The article "How the economy is killing the planet" is one of them http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20026786.000-special-report-how-our-economy-is-killing-the-earth.html

Earth may be entering climate change danger zone
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16729-earth-may-be-entering-climate-change-danger-zone.html

Sea level rise could bust IPCC estimates
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16732-sea-level-rise-could-bust-ipcc-estimate.html

Lastly, hacking the planet, the only solution left

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20126973.600-hacking-the-planet-the-only-climate-solution-left.html?full=true

These headings reflect the view of the science community: that climate change has gone into unacceptable risk, that the economic system is at the root of it, and that geoengineering is a serious option.

The schism between the scientific community and the economic one has gone so far that scientists, unable to communicate the risks, downsides and just plain nonsense of ”business as usual” are desperately turning to look at re-engineering the planet rather than adapting society to it.

I am scared of geoengineering, just as I am scared of genetic modification, nanotechnology, and nuclear energy. The unintended side effects could be huge. The book “the Black Swan” has demonstrated how events totally unforeseen can change whole endeavors for the worse.

Instead of helping business as usual and prolonging the inevitable, another path could be considered, It is just as risky but might be easier. Let the economy crash--since it's happening anyway. That might wipe out some of the parties interesting in maintaining our "non-negotiable" way of life. There's a chance that people will decide that the only way to continue forward is to drastically reorganize the economy (at a lower level), thus reducing greenhouse gas emissions. (Of course whether that's done along the lines of relocalization, fascism, or just chaos is a roll of the dice.)

But what does it mean that non-scientists are behaving in this way? (We biologists always look at behaviour nowadays after centuries of killing things and dissecting them)

Observed behavior: Despite evidence that end of oil means end of economic growth, despite evidence that the economic system is killing the planet, despite evidence that the market system of today is an abject failure at feeding the world, let alone providing a life in dignity, world leaders insist on taking measures to try to get it to work.

What follows are my darkest fears:

The OTHER explanation is that there is a master plan. Those whose job it is to “pretend” to fix the system have been promised jobs later, depending on how well they “perform” now.

Imagine the ”order from high”: Let the whole thing implode. Help it along with government loans, especially to failing and corrupt businesses. Prepare to release an abrupt about swing via the media that makes sure that people understand, once and for all;

1) economic growth is not possible in a finite world and that economists just simply got it wrong (let them go on spouting their theories so they give themselves enough rope to hang themselves with.)
2) corporations are NOT good for the common good. In good times they take all profits and in bad times they ask for handouts and use them for high salaries. They are basically ”taking the piss” as we Brits say. Make sure people feel bluffed by highlighting a trusted banker’s ponzi scheme.
3) the basic idea of national democracy is flawed. You cannot vote for a Prime Minister who says British jobs for British workers one moment and then spouts free trade and globalisation the other
4) the nationalistic approach will never get people to agree on emission targets as they are all jostling to get the best deal. Governments HAVE to, they have been voted in for that.

As the realization comes clear, the message will be given with a dose of ”we are all complicit” in this as we all "wanted a share of the cake”. Everyone should feel bluffed, lied to and guilty.

A new idea will emerge that people will clamour for, just as they clamoured for a central US bank. Remember that the master plan is to get people to clamour for what the plan intends. So much more effective than trying to convince anyone anything...

World Government. A world minimum wage, world emissions rules, world currency. It might start with three regions in harmony: EU Americas and Asia. It will sound so good that in some countries it will be the left that clamours the most, in other countries, the right. In some it will be the environmentalists, in other business as they like ”a level playing field”; in some the humanitarians. After all, one sixth are nigh on starving.

The ones who control the money are the ones who end up with true power in this scenario. We know already what a farce the world bank is so we can all see where this is headed.

The attempt at One World Government (lefty Peter Singer wrote the book on it), will never succeed, because ultimately, for better and for worse, no one is really in control.

As the cascading crises worsen, especially when the real impact of the End of Oil and Water kicks in, we're going to see more of the kind of alpha and non-alpha behaviours that Edward Hall describes in his work with rats in overcrowded situations in labs, specifically violent hoarding among the alphas and suicide and eating of the young among non-alphas. This is all hormonal chronic stress response stuff, what all creatures do when the normal short term responses to stress fail to alleviate the problem.

However, the real crisis is further off than we think, so for now we should be doing what we can and enjoying life and not worrying about what we can't change. The real crisis will befall our grandchildren in the second half of the century, and coping with it will not be our job.

Sustainable development and volunteerism

2009-03-14T14:44:00.002+01:00

It has been striking me more and more recently how the positive developments in sustainability are coming from a spirit of volunteering. ”Going along” is a central theme of my book, ”Inventing for the Sustainable Planet”. The book was imagestreamed and insights can take a long time to sink in. I see how I have emphasized the few technical solutions that came up rather than the social ones, even though these are the central thesis of the book.

Some signs: Firstly, the Transition Movement is picking up speed. There are now Transition Movements in every US state, and other initiatives like 1 Million gardens are gathering supporters.

Then there are the countless numbers of websites run by volunteers, with everything from Peak Oil to sustainable gardening.

I am getting a sense that the funnymoneyfest we have all been complicit in has brought a lot of people to their senses. The only business worth having as business as usual is the voluntary, or go along, business in a society that offers security. From the research in my book I’d suggest a number of reasons why this could be so.

One has to do with basic human nature and the need for security. If your security comes from the tribe, then you will gladly ”pay taxes” to the tribe, in the form of helping out, encouraging and teaching others.

For many years Sweden’s high rate of taxes was defended by citizens as actually giving good value for money in terms of social security and free schooling, low cost local transport, medical care, etc. Nowadays the level of service has been eroded, the burden is nearly as high, and there is much less a feeling of security. In fact, the tax authorities see it their role to ”make sure everyone does their bit” which sounds like extracting a pound of flesh with a modicum of threat.

Another reason might have to do with our genetic propensities. The reason you need to be in a group is because together the mixture of personalities, perspectives, feelings, inspiration of the moment, all combine to create an ideal pool from which to handle a situation.

In volunteering, the feeling comes from within each individual and whatever the person does is an expression of wanting to do something and feeling inspired to do it. Contrast this to the situation of work. Even work functions better when people can volunteer for jobs within their areas of responsibility.

I like the Transition Handbook's approach of mutual planning of what could be done or needs to be done, and then asking people to consider what they would LOVE to do, would feel UNCOMFORTABLE doing and what they would be GOOD at doing.

The prospect of Peak Oil, Peak money, Peak everything in a world that seems to be running on a delusion that economic growth is the only fix-it in town, seems daunting and cause for depression.

My advice is: look at what could be done, how you feel about it, and go out and volunteer for something you’d love to do. Who knows, it might just be the small effort that helped turn the tide.

Phosphorous: the key to sustainable agriculture

2009-02-21T23:40:00.003+01:00

Find more videos like this on TRANSITION UNITED STATES

We present a second version of a film on sustainable agriculture. Just for you.

Article from the future: community centres go sustainable

2009-02-18T19:56:00.002+01:00

In this edition, we meet a design for a community center that cleans water, creates carbon minus soil improvement, recycles nutrients, grows food, captures solar energy.... and you shower and go to the loo!

A MUST READ for all sustainability fanatics!

Click on the picture or here to read it!.

New series of Newsletters

2009-01-31T20:44:00.003+01:00

As readers may well have understood, I have been using the techniques of Imagestreaming to envision a sustainable future.

To make the inventions more accessible I am offering a series of newsletters that offer stories depicting the inventions.

Some recent inventions, from after the book was published are also available in newsletter form.

Real Asset-based finance: Units of Trust concept released

2009-01-30T17:47:00.007+01:00

As populations grow, and less and less oil is being found, the fossil fuel-dependent global supply chains and the banking system that supports them are becoming less functional. Relocalizing production and sales of daily needs reduces fuel dependence, waste, and increases local employment and community resilience. However, today’s financial system is more geared to large national and global corporations.

The lack of sustainability in the system is worrying. A sustainable solution would mean that sale and provision of basic goods and services would keep ecosystem and mineral resources intact, would reduce reliance on fossil fuel and create an investment that could be enjoyed by coming generations.

New thinking is required to make capital available to smaller, local businesses for this to be realized. One proposal is a savings bank scheme called Units of Trust (UOT). The scheme makes it possible for consumers to invest in local businesses and to receive goods and services at reduced price whilst their money is with the firm.

To create simplicity, transparency and stability, a support and coordination organization called UOTMC or UOT marketing company, could be set up, along with a fund scheme in a local bank. Unitization allows consumers to invest in a wide range of companies and spread their risk.

Other benefits include: providing local business with affordable capital and long term customers at the same time. Consumers get local produce and a long term secure supply of basic needs whilst investing in a green supply system that will withstand fossil energy shortfalls.

Read more about Units of Trust on the web (avbp.net/html/uot.html)

Or see the film

Updated my website

2009-01-30T09:50:00.002+01:00

Finally I understand what I need to do to help sustainable development.

It's is all about the stories we tell ourselves. We need to find, envision, invent our future and it starts inside us. What do we WANT, what IS our humanity, who we are...?

We start by envisioning our ideal future, and we do it by stepping aside from all the limitations we have learned from childhood. We do it to explore our humanity. And learn. Then we can start to invent and implement.

Envision. Explore. Study. Innovate. Implement.

So now I have started to redo my website. Join me!

Applications wanted: the Award for sustainable solutions for Water and Food for all

2009-01-23T08:50:00.005+01:00

Water and Food are Human Rights that nearly 900 million of our fellow human beings are not receiving. The Award for the Humanitarian Water and Food project that shows effectiveness, innovativeness and potential will be presented in Copenhagen, Denmark in August 2009.

If you know of any project that may qualify for the prize, please direct them to the web page of the Award.
http://Waterandfoodaward.org and to download the application documents from http://www.avbp.net/docs/HWAFA_applicationKit.pdf

Economists find solution to crisis

2009-01-14T10:31:00.002+01:00

Car industry solution to oil peak, climate and credit crisis

2009-01-09T10:55:00.004+01:00

Not your ordinary recession: a perspective from a visitor to the UK

2009-01-06T11:45:00.000+01:00

My last trip to England showed a country being hit by the effects of the peak of oil production. My visit over New Year shows a country nose-diving into a new kind of recession: one that has no end.

Some examples:

UK’s refinancing timebomb Sunday Times 4 Jan 2008 – Some £50 billion in loans expiring will need refinancing and the prospects are not good.

Number of business failures set to surge in 2009

As the reams of newspaper articles laying out dismal prospects for 2009 appear before us, there is an underlying belief in the recovery will come in a few or at most ten years, and 2008 will fade into memory as a year unremarkable. Not so from the perspective of Oil Peak. We are looking into the tangled guts of a system that has stopped working because the cheap and easy oil that feeds it has peaked.
We are looking over the precipice into the long decline, aptly called the long emergency by James Howard Kunstler.

The logic of this is almost too simple, but not anything you will find explained in the mainstream media.
The system we call business as usual is full of disconnects – think of it like a plumbing system with faulty joints and bends. Despite leakages, the system still delivers water to the end user. However, when pressure drops, the taps run dry and the installation is not only useless, it wastes valuable resources as well.
In this case, money is rather like water. You want to stuff money into the system and see more come out. At least you would want to know you can get basic services like food water, shelter etc. Any business needs a supply of capital and cash to start up and keep going. If you borrow money, you have to be able to pay it back at, say, 4% interest a year.

Standing in front of the bank manager or an inventor you have to convince her that you will be able to expand your business to be able to pay the loan and the interest off in a reasonable time. Multiply this by the number of businesses around and you will see that in order for any money to come in to the system you must be convinced everybody will make more money than they are already doing, to at least pay off the debt from the interest.
When it works, this way of doing things creates jobs, provides an endless array of services and goods and generates tax income to run the civil sector.
When it does not work, you put money and your own time into the system and get very little out.

This is where the connection to oil comes in: look into any business plan of any business and you will find a massive reliance directly or indirectly on fossil fuel. Electricity, the life blood of any office, comes increasingly in the UK from gas fired power stations.
Energy price hikes make everything more expensive, reducing profits and undermining the logic of the business plan and indeed the whole set-up.

From this perspective you can see how we got into the situation we are in. Peak production of cheap oil in late 2005 started a process of price hikes and started to knock holes in the wealth generation machinery. First hit were airlines and transport sector, creating job losses and credit defaults. From there the spiral downward continues. In this context a much larger number of businesses cannot make the business plan work. Trying to kick-start the economy now that oil is cheap will only result in a new wave of price rises as economic activity grows, oil demand increases, the production ceiling hits and the bidding goes up to push oil back up.
The current wave of low prices is merely the receding of the wave of the economic tsunami that will inevitably come back to hit us again.
The current low price of oil means stalled investments in new wells or increased productivity. With 60 of 80 oil producing countries past their peak we cannot expect any increase in economic activity to be long lasting.

What does all this mean for the oil aware denizen in 2009?
Don't be fooled by oil-unaware arguments. True, Woolworth’s demise is partly their own doing in trying to sell everything, but there is nothing to say that just because a business is working today, it will be able to continue as more and more job losses produce more and more unwilling or unable to buy their stuff. No, all business plans are energy reliant and I would say 99% are energy unaware.
You need to become familiar with other economic models. Interest-free banking and cooperatives are two I recommend.
Interest free banking at least shares rewards and risks and is more human.
Cooperatives, especially those involved with community supported agriculture, are designed to provide their owners with economic security and /or basic services at below market prices.

In fact, finding ways to ensure a supply of the basic necessities for all will be a major challenge in 2009. The leader in the Telegraph from Jan 2 expects there will be some people going hungry in the UK during 2009.
The system we live in already has major homelessness and poverty, in my opinion evidence of abject failure.
Oil aware people need to start to speak up outside the confines of discussion forums to send a clear message to politicians and civil servants: the fossil-fuel dependent way of life is on its last legs. Energy and food security for all need to become the top priority. And of course the good side of all this: this means there will be meaningful work for all, we expect to see a kinder, more generous UK, less stress and pollution, more local business and solidarity. The time to transition is now, 2009, while we still can.

Vote for WATER AND FOOD FOR ALL on Change.org

2008-12-19T16:48:00.001+01:00

You may know that I am engaged in the Water and Food situation in the world. Everyone should go to bed well fed, and at this time the number starving is just under 90 million or 13% of the world's population.

The idea of water and food for all, put forward by yours truly inspired by my work with the Humanitarian Water and Food Award, has attracted a large response on the competition "Ideas for Change in America" on Change.org. For the idea to come into the final three we need more votes. Please go and take a look at the site CHANGE.ORG and our idea. If you like it, please vote! The results will be announced just before the Presidential Announcement.

The Water and Food Award is registered on the Change.org site.

Expected reduction of oil production per capita will create global emergency

2008-12-18T09:17:00.001+01:00

I’m worried. I have just been to a presentation of world population trends by the eminently informative Swedish Professor Hans Rosling from Karolinska Institute. It seem that world population is expected to continue to expand. The good news is that the number of children per woman is reducing in developing countries and stable in developed countries. Still, we are looking at the world overstepping nine billion in 2045.

We currently need to do better to feed the poor and forgotten, who number 890 million, or 13%. So how will the world feed this 34% increase? Modern agriculture requires large inputs of fossil fuel and fossil-fuel based products. At the same time, oil production per capita is expected to fall.

On returning back to the office I started plotting world population trends against oil consumption I managed to (this is back of the envelop stuff) get oil consumption from the International Energy Agency site, and population figures from Wikipedia.

I also reflected on what the professor said: that as standards rose, and in the presence of peace, fewer children per woman were born. This isi the mechanism that will stabilize world population.

Up to 2007, oil consumption per capita has remained more or less stable even as consumption has risen.

To 2005 that is. If you then plot projected population rises against project oil production you get another picture:

This means that we are entering a new era, where each country has less oil per capita. Now, some countries are expanding their population faster than others. This leads to a few scenarios:
1) Those countries that expand their populations fast up to 2045 increase their share of oil and manage to retain or improve their living standards. For those industrialized countries it will mean a faster reduction in oil consumption per capita compared to the expanding countries.

2) ( See graph above.) Each country manages to keep the same proportion of consumption as now. The consequences will be that rapidly expanding countries will have less oil per capita and risk food shortages.
3) Some countries, possibly rich countries gain a larger proportion of the oil production and thereby fast growing countries will quickly face difficulties feeding the population.

From this “back of an envelope” analysis I see some rather stark conclusions:

Abandoning economic growth as a goal and concentrating on security of supply of basic needs is a priority.
Regardless of the stance taken towards countries with rising populations, all countries need to consider a Powering Down situation as they are looking at a reduction in the availability of fossil fuel in the next decade.
Helping the poor and forgotten to rise to a minimum standard that gives food security should be a priority globally.

Got my shop on Second Life

2008-11-29T23:58:00.001+01:00

As I blogged earlier, I believe SECOND LIFE (Secondlife.com) offers possibilities to model ideas of sustainability, both as 3D worlds showing sustainable technology, like the Island of Etopia, and to try out the social side of sustainable living in communities, like the Island of Perfect Paradise.
Second life maybe a good platform to spread ideas about sustainable living, and I have set up a bookstall to sell my books and to download extracts from the book as "Newsletters from the future"-The (in) times.

Visitors to the stall can click and come straight to the website to learn more about the book, or download the newsletters for free.

If you have not yet seen my book visit here.

I was in line with Keynes!

2008-11-19T16:09:00.000+01:00

I am flabbergasted to know that my Imagestreamed suggestion for handling a controlled reduction of carbon dioxide emissions, the set up of an international environmental fund (EMF, based on IMF) was very much like the original proposal from Keynes back in 1944 for a world stabilization fund.

Unfortunately, his ideas were not accepted and the IMF and World Bank were set up instead.

My idea was to tax countries who overshoot emissions targets. His idea was to charge interest on the amount the country was in trade imbalance.

The principle of countries' being taxed on target overshoots is a good one, and could be used for trade balance and carbon dioxide emissions.

It just goes to show the power of imagestreaming, this was an area I was completely green in!

Karl Popper and Climate Science

2008-11-05T13:50:00.000+01:00

(Thanks to Greenfyre's - I borrowed an idea or two)

Karl Popper’s thinking was that scientists should work hard to disprove theories. If they don't succeed then it is a working theory until disproved. It’s more rigorous that way.
An analogy might be comparing if you have 2 reports of an elephant. In one case it is a small group of reliable witnesses who swear they saw an elephant in the back garden.

Topo Gigo? Is that you?
In the second case you have thousands of unrelated people who variously have photographs, videos, sound recordings, foot casts, thermal imaging, dentition samples, x-rays, ultrasound images, radar and sonar images, samples of DNA , tissue, hair, saliva, stools etc. Further, all of of these data samples had been analysed multiple ways, all yielding the same result.
Then along comes someone with a handful of pictures of a mouse and claims that it proves there was no elephant in the garden. How likely is it that this evidence will prove conclusive in the first example? in the second? Possible of course, but not very likely.
Trying to prove something always courts discusssion.
The comparison with law is however misleading as in common terms we say ”it was proven he was guilty”. Scientists, to use the law analogy, are expert witnesses. Not prosecutors. Not judges or juries. For law to work you HAVE to make a judgement over causality in order for there to be consequences on negative actions. In the same way HAVE to act is incumbent on governments (ultimately all individuals) who by law represent the stewards of national resources.

Anyway, that's why scientists are sceptics and the media can rightly claim " most scientists sceptical to climate change".

In the case of climate change, take the theory "you can spew out as much CO2 as you like, it will not make a blind bit of difference to the climate system."

There is LITTLE evidence to support such theories. For example.... where has all the extra CO2 in the atmosphere come from? And there is no evidence to show it is all absorbed. On the contrary, experiments to DISPROVE the relation between increased CO2 and increased warming have not been able to rule out a greenhouse effect.

The next theory... Global warming is NOT a life threatening phenomena. Again, attempts to disprove this have not succeeded.

So ... and check the wording here as the double negative throws a lot of people ... it has not been disproved that man-made emissions can threaten life on Earth. We cannot disprove the theory that levels of CO2 over 350ppm create imbalances in climate system.

Now. How are the stewards of our environment - the people we elect - going to act on that? Because we are talking major risk.

Version 1. The voice of sense. Our government, acting on scientific evidence, is working to limit emissions as they may threaten existence.

Version 2. The voice of "science interpreted for ends". Although it has not been shown emissions are completely safe, we are going to continue until the negative consequences force us to react.

Back to your law comparison. That would be like the court, unable to convict the baddies, (no-one could really PROVE it was them!!!) would let them rule the city until people got so fed up with it, or it got so bad the community went under.

That is what we are looking at. It is going to get real bad before anyone does anything.

Poverty is telling you something: your turn is coming.

2008-10-14T14:49:00.001+02:00

For my part of Blog Action Day I would like to discuss poverty and sustainable development. We live in a world gone mad. By the hour, the ranks of the starving are swelling. Whilst we stare into an abyss of depleting mineral and ecological resources, pushed from behind by population pressures and the voracious needs of the economic machinery we call business as usual, all we can talk about is how to get more money into our system. Let’s just take a few seconds’ time out from this insanity to look at sustainable development. Is sustainable development a solution for poverty?

Let’s start by giving you my view of sustainable development - a simple subject really. Take a geographically defined territory and look at its ecosystem – how the energy from the sun is captured by plants and how the animals live and how water and nutrients cycle around. Next, look more closely at how the animal population is doing, maybe analyzing their behaviour and their interaction with its surroundings. These basic observations will give you some idea of how likely the population will fare as time goes on.

Nature tends to develop towards mature eco-systems. The main characteristics of mature eco-systems are:

* Retention of nutrients and water in the area
* Maximised energy capture from sunlight
* More or less stable populations
* Wide diversity of flora and fauna

Suppose we were to look at an area of forest and the apes living there.

Numbers. The population is breeding rapidly, numbers are rising exponentially.

Trees. Hmmm the forest is being depleted faster than it is managing to grow back.
The state of the population. The apes seem to be doing OK, or are they? Closer examination reveals 15% are in a bad way, they are starving. Even more, 17% or one sixth are frequently sick due to drinking infected water. An even greater percentage are overweight.

Nutrients. The area is leaking water, phosphorus and other essential minerals.

You don’t need to have a degree in advanced systems ecology to see the population of apes will soon start to die off. The forest they rely on is shrinking, and loosing nutrients; they already cannot feed themselves. With our sustainable development glasses on, we take a look at the behaviour of the population for some clues as to what is happening:

* The hungry ones breed more
* The well-fed ones destroy the trees when moving around
* They are incapable of distributing food so all are at a healthy weight

In some ways, this behaviour makes sense: a stressed, hungry population will breed more, perhaps sending its offspring away in the hope they will find a better place to survive in. And the well fed population destroying the very trees it lives off - if there are many, many trees and very few apes it probably would not make any difference. And it makes no sense, from a survival point of view, if they all starve.

Anyway, the outlook for the ape population does not look good. Unless there is some kind of intervention, a radical interruption to the growth they are undergoing, and a rapid behaviour change, we are likely to see a population crash. This would be typified by a rapid drop in numbers to a mere single digit percentage of the original population.

And now to poverty. Poverty is typically defined as having two or less dollars a day to live on. But from a sustainability point of view, we define it as not having adequate shelter, clothing and food to have the capability to develop towards prosperity.

Now we turn our attention to the status of the population of the world. Of the 6,7 billion on the Earth, estimates say 880 million are undernourished (13%) and 1.4 billion (20%) are without adequate food supply. (1.1 million are overweight.)

Our own eco system is under pressure: we are losing forests, water supplies and fertile soil by the day, not to mention that carbon dioxide is accumulating in the atmosphere possibly destabilizing our climate system.

The mineral sources we rely on are also depleting. Some estimates say we have used half of all recoverable oil (the easy half at that) and more than a half of coal. Phosphorus, essential for fertilizers has 30 years left.

Behaviour: it seems man’s attention is turned elsewhere; to making money. While ecosystems and minerals deplete, money is growing.

(Strangely enough, although money is growing the poor are getting poorer.)

Faced with choices, we can either aim to preserve minerals and ecosystems or not. Based on our view of man we can aim to provide a standard of living for all or not. This gives us four basic aims. Sadly, current behaviour points to destroying ecosystems and not being able to feed everyone anyway.

Other things that are growing: number of economics prizes to honour the memory of Alfred Nobel , the number of trained economists, scientists, and the number of research papers on all topics including poverty. Interestingly enough, as more prizes in economics are awarded through the years, (39 so far, one was awarded yesterday) the higher the number of homeless grows in Stockholm city(3800, about one for ten) – a short distance from the site of the award ceremony. So poverty is telling you something: business as usual, with its celebrated and rewarded intellectual prowess, cannot be trusted to act as a responsible steward of eco systems. It can’t even feed and house all the people in developed countries.

As with our theoretical population of monkeys, the outlook is not good. There is nothing in our current behavior to give hope that poverty will alleviated and everyone will have food, water and shelter. Not only that, there is nothing in our behavior to show we have the capability to address the inevitable shortfalls due to population pressure on a finite planet. On the contrary, the current behavior is to concentrate on finding ways to increase the flow of money.

We may have already hit our first physical barrier: oil. Cheap oil supplies have peaked and been on a peak since 2005. But demand is continuing. In fact, without pumping large amounts of cheap energy into an economy, it cannot grow. There may be some small margin where efficiency gains compensate shortfalls, but how far can efficiency gains go? Increase in demand, scarcity of availability leads to increased prices, slowing down economic growth.

Population crash or rapid intervention? Try this for yourself, in either case you are probably looking at facing poverty in your life time. Look at where you are now and the way the world situation will affect you as population demands hit physical limits. Think. Where do you want to be? What might get in your way? What qualities and skills do you need to develop to be part of the change?

We need to put the brakes on and we need to do it soon. The monetary system has collapsed, the energy supply system is next, followed by food and water supply. What can you do today?

Blog action day

2008-10-14T11:01:00.000+02:00

latest slide show on sustainable development

2008-10-11T16:19:00.000+02:00

Understanding sustainable development

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: relocalization capital)

See the Movie of the Sustainable City

2008-10-11T09:32:00.000+02:00

An entry to the Google contest

2008-10-10T16:05:00.000+02:00

Google are running a contest on ideas to help humanity. This is my contribution below.

What one sentence best describes your idea? (maximum 150 characters)

Give charitable foundations who offer water, food and accommodation supply and systems, the possibility to use the unemployed (who get benefits and a bonus) to help.

Describe your idea in more depth. (maximum 300 words)

The idea is to adjust the status of approved charities to allow those providing housing, food etc, the basic necessities of security, to take on unemployed persons to help in their activities.
A basic agreement would be made between a government agency supervising the charity, and the charity, allowing the charity to utilize registered unemployed persons for 40 hours a week, allowing time for the unemployed person to pursue job seeking during working hours.
The charity would be required in turn to make available all or some basic services including food, water or accommodation to those in need and report on a regular basis to the authority.
For example, with extra people to help out, one charity offering meals might be able to set up a food growing project on local wasteland to increase the amount of food offered. Another might be able to offer more home repair services.
Unemployed people would be offered the normal benefit, plus some kind of bonus to assist with the extra costs involved in helping out (travel to work for example).
This is a very simple idea, using organizations already operational and set up to take on extra help. These organizations are also already registered and receiving state benefit in the form of tax relief, so all reporting structures are in place too.
The skills of creating food and accommodation systems increase the employability of the volunteers and also providing food and accommodation brings stability to areas of unrest.
.
What problem or issue does your idea address? (maximum 150 words)
.

Despite years of economic progress, food, water and accommodation are still not available to a large percentage of the world’s population and an embarrassingly large number of the inhabitants of rich countries.
The corporations set up to effectively provide these, need paying to make a profit and pay overheads and salaries. People needing these services the most are the ones least able to pay.
Although many believe in the power of market forces, the presence of the poor, hungry and homeless in any society creates an underlying feeling of insecurity and fear. Knowing you will, whatever situation you end up in, get a roof over your head and fed, gives the security people need to be creative and entrepreneurial, the true basis of prosperity. Insecurity breeds greed and crime.
The unemployed feel unable to contribute meaningfully to society.
Charities cannot attract helpers. Many are too busy with their work.

If your idea were to become a reality, who would benefit the most and how? (maximum 150 words)

Firstly, Hungry and homeless would be fed and accommodated. Getting in more helpers would leverage the effectiveness of existing charities, making donating to them more effective. For example, calculations show one good farmer can support 50 families a year with food.
Secondly, the unemployed would have a meaningful occupation.
Thirdly, society in general benefits as well fed and secure people are better able to manage their own situation and develop their entrepreneurship, so prosperity grows.
Skills learnt in e.g. urban gardening or local water treatment would be transferred to many, increasing the potential for new businesses to spring up.
Organizations which are strong in delivering this kind of security also bring the potential of peace, and could work alongside the military.

What are the initial steps required to get this idea off the ground? (maximum 150 words)

Initially, work on defining the requirements on a charity. Then, setting up the inspection, reporting and bonus system. Some pilot schemes should be tried with selective charities and local authorities.
The authority should try ways to encourage charities to cooperate. Using internet based tools to coordinate the work to quickly find volunteers, connect charities with new potential aid receivers, to aid reporting etc, would assist the speed of development.
Areas which solved local problems could be encouraged to find ways to export their services to other regions.

Describe the optimal outcome should your idea be selected and successfully implemented. How would you measure it? (maximum 150 words)

Once implemented, in a city for example, the scheme should reduce the number of hungry people to zero at the same time as the number unemployed without a meaningful place to go to dwindles.
The number of people involuntarily without registered accommodation should drop to zero in time.
Measures: increase/decrease % per month of people hungry. increase/decrease % per month of people homeless. : increase/decrease % per month of people unemployed and engaged in the scheme.

What do drinking water and the environment have to do with each other

2008-10-08T10:32:00.000+02:00

What gets me is that we are spending more and more money on cleaning up water to ready it for drinking. Medicines, herbicides etc, are slipping though the purification plants (which themselves require huge amounts of chemicals and energy).

The reason we are spending more and more is because we are polluting more and more. In most places you cannot even drink rainwater. It would make much greater sense if no business or other organisation were allowed to emit either directly or as a consequence of the use of their products, anything that could compromise drinking water sources.We are also seeing in parts of the world such a lack of water that severe restrictions are in place. Again, no business or other organisation should be allowed to use such quantities of water (or introduce technology that uses quantities of water) that the supply of drinking water is compromised.

On the face of it, it seems a simple task for governments to regulate. Ensuring drinking water would decrease health care costs and increase the supply of healthy workers. It would probably stimulate the development of cleantech at the same time it would be a good export earner.

There are a few other connections between water and the environment. Firstly, bottled water. The environmental burden that comes from transport, processing and the use of plastic containers has been well documented in other places.Tap water has less environmental impact. However, because it needs disinfecting, large amounts of chlorine are used to kill bacteria in the distribution network.

We have the choice between bottled water and its environmental burden, and piped water with its long term negative health impacts and sometimes outbreaks of bacterial contamination.The main health problems from tapwater come from chlorine, trihalomethanes and aluminum. Chlorine is a very efficient poison. In normal cases it kills all bacteria and virus in your tap water. In order to be on the safe side and in order to make the chlorine last until the end of the system, water utilities may sometimes add too much chlorine. That is not healthy.

Trihalomethanes: When chlorine breaks down bacteria, trihalomethanes, such as chloroform, trichloroethylene, bromoform, dibromochloromethane, and bromodichloromethane, result. The American authorities have set the limit of trihalomethanes to 100 micrograms per liter. In tap water, the amount of trihalomethanes is normally below 50 microgram per liter, but there are examples of tap water containing up to 1000 micrograms per liter. As long as the water purification plants continue to use chlorine in order to fight bacteria, there is going to be some trihalomethanes in the drinking water.

Aluminum: Scientific studies, in the USA, Guam, Norway and England, have shown a connection between an the amount of aluminum in drinking water and the number of neural disorders. One of these disorders is Alzheimer’s disease, a serious kind of senility which begins with loss of memory and confusion and ends with death. Aluminum is also suspected of increasing the number of “normal” senile dementia and Parkinson’s.

In my book "Inventing for the Sustainable Planet" I envisage a sustainable society living off naturally distilled water: rainwater.

The blog post on the subject is on this link.

Sustainable living is living wonderfully

2008-09-30T09:11:00.000+02:00

I created this MINDMOVIE as an affirmation to myself and others on what it would be like to live in a sustainable village like an ECO-UNIT. Affirmations are pro sustainability inventions.

Herd mentality astutely described on How to save the World

2008-09-16T21:03:00.001+02:00

Dave Pollards excellent blog asks why we are looking for leaders now that the counter-sustainable nature of the economic system is coming to light, and blame is being laid left to right.

One of Dave's points is that we don't have any leaders who have more of a clue than the rest of us. And any clue they have is used to make sure they are OK themselves.

Dave hit the nail on the head. With consumer's and taxpayer's money, an education system has been built up. Those with the best educations are those at the helm of banks, corporations, political parties and other bodies who are basically screwing us over.

The majority of people do not want war in Iraq, poverty, and DO want health care and social security. So why isn't it that way? Because we have abdicated to the very people whose education we paid for. And it is just these people who will not take the hit as the economies of the world go into downward spiral. The Latin Americans refused to have anything to do with the World Bank and the IMF and now they are asking ambassadors to leave. Do they know something we don't? Maybe they have been screwed over so many times by well educated Chicago boyz that they have learned something... I wonder...

As the world goes into economic turmoil, it is us ordinary folks who are at an extreme disadvantage. We are unprepared, we do not have robust contact networks, we do not own land or facilities and we are still hoping that someone, somewhere has a good plan. As you say, somewhere there is a LEADER who will, like Robin Hood, take charge. If you are reading this, thinking "naaah they will think of something" just remember that what they are thinking does not have your best interests in mind

The town without cars

2008-09-15T16:11:00.000+02:00

It comes up in the book "Inventing for the Sustainable Planet" - modern town without cars. But do they exist? Do they function well?

Of course they do. The Archipelago outside Stockholm, Sweden boasts the car-less town of Söderhamn. Its a great place to visit in the summer, full of life and a great day out. As you see, the houses are close together, you can walk around the town which has a nice, homely feel to it.

New version of Sustainable Development model released

2008-09-11T17:07:00.000+02:00

sustainable development model

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: strategy model)

I like 350

2008-09-11T17:03:00.000+02:00

The 350 group has taken it upon themselves to explain that Carbon Dioxide levels must go down to 387 part per million to minimise the risk of self-reinforced global warming and the Earth reaching a tipping point.
Here at Sustainable Planet we welcome such marketing initiatives. That kind of communication is a great innovative way for people to understand the issues.
Check out the video below....

Money counts? Really? Does it count anything useful?

2008-08-28T09:11:00.000+02:00

Max's approach in the book INVENTING FOR THE SUSTAINABLE PLANET, using money as a counting system, is praiseworthy. We have very few other methods of keeping stock and control of what is happening in the world. During the US depression I believe they counted box cars until the GNP method was developed. A sustainability index derived from CO2 emissions and GNP MIGHT be the way to go.

However, as pointed out in earlier chapters, the Porena people abandoned money and the more I read of this book the clearer it is becoming that money as we know it is a dead end.
A case in point: New calculations from the World Bank show the level of poverty in the world to be 400 million more than previously thought. Poverty means to live on less than 1,5 Dollars US a day.

Look: if you have a roof over your head, food to eat and are comfortable and safe in your community you have the possibility to a fulfilled life. If you have a few dollars in your pocket and still have none of that you do not have the basis of living a life in dignity. I'm with the people of Porena. Abandon money as a measure and medium!

Wrong thinking on water

2008-08-27T10:51:00.000+02:00

The idea of technical nutrients recycling through the technosphere (see my blog on Planet thoughts) brings me to think of the latest talk going on about water. There is a lot of ranting about for example Britain importing water via clothes and food (the water being "used" in the manufacturing process in other countries). This leads to talk about water footprint of a nation.

This is a little missleading as carbon footprint is understood as the carbon being emitted and untretreiveable. Not so for water.

Water COULD be recycled many times over. In fact the equation for a nation is easy.

(Water removed (i.e. left into the sea)= Water input from rain and rivers)/year

The number of times it is recycled depends on needs. Its an example of narrow understanding to think that water can only be "used" once. Dangerous thinking. It means it is acceptable to pollute water. It is THIS that is totally wrong. The 10,000 litres used to make jeans is nothing you need to feel guilty over IF it goes back to be used in other functions. If it is used for jeans and people go thirsty that's a crime against Human Rights. See more on water and footprint at PLANET THOUGHTS

Holiday in UK shows Peak Oil decline is well on its way

2008-08-09T23:50:00.000+02:00

Holidaying in Britain, the country of my birth from which I emigrated nearly 30 years ago, thoughts of sustainable planet were giving way to visits to the pub, fish and chips and long walks in the countryside. Not for long. Wherever I look I see Britain is about to enter a period of deep crisis the root of the problem soaring oil prices as production has peaked.

Maybe it’s because I have been writing about the crisis of sustainability for over five years, maybe it’s because I see this country of my birth with other eyes having lived away so long. But I am in a country sliding into the downturn of the industrial age. All the signs are plain to see. So plain, in fact that the newspaper reports over the space of three days are sufficient to chronicle the start of the inevitable slide into irrecoverable erosion of way of life for Brits and others around the planet.

THE TIMES Monday July 19 2008
Farmers ready to cash in on soaring land prices
The gist: Farm land prices have gone from Per hectare price of 6828 pounds per hectare in late 2005 to currently 12,965. farmers are more than willing to sell as they are feeling the squeeze from rising costs of fuel and fertiliser.
Also from the same newspaper:
]Hungry miners reap rich harvest from potash - the latest must have mineral
The gist: Potash, the potassium containing mineral, has risen from under 100 hundred usd in 1993 to nearly 700 USD/ton this year. Potassium is an essential component of fertiliser.

Cheap flights boom runs out of runway
The gist: the age of budget flights is coming to an end.
Developments are about to price more than five million Brits out of the budget holiday market fares going to go up and will do so for the foreseeable future.
Analysts expect some airlines to be pushed into bankruptcy or be bought by larger rivals.

THE TIMES Monday 25th July 2008
Energy Firms 'conspire to raise prices'
The gist: a report claims that minimum of competition has kept prices too high over the last few years, and that the re is in wholesale price of energy will result in millions of Brits unable to pay their energy bill.
Prices of energy paid by industry is above European levels already and is putting thousands of jobs in manufacturing at a risk.
Energy suppliers are signaling further price rises which is fuelling inflation and creating real concerns of the negative impact on the economy starting a vicious downward spiral in the economy.

THE TIMES Wednesday July 30 2008
Mortgage market paralysis will last for at least three years says Crosby.
The gist A report for the government by Sir James Crosby on the mortgage situation highlights how banks are unwilling to give mortgage loans for house purchase, and this is crippling the housing market as well as
The crunch in credit will give rise to defaults on repossessions.
The level of July is 70% lower than the equivalent period in the previous year.
Comment: TV commentators cite the report as evidence that the mortgage system is broken.

Retail sales slide at their worst rate for 25 years.
The gist; Sales during July are at their worst for 25 years. They believe consumers are reining in their spending in the face of seriously squeezed purchasing power.

THE TIMES Thursday July 31 20008 Millions face 100 pound a month fuel bills
The gist: coming hike of 35% on gas and 9% on electricity will put millions more into fuel poverty over 5 million.

THE TIMES Thursday July 31
[Work until you are 70.
The gist: 100 years after the introduction of state pensions, Britain is facing a crisis. With rising prices, longer lifespan and smaller percentage of the population working, the size of pension money is going to shrink, leaving many of the aged living in poverty and retirement age rising to 70.

THE TIMES Wednesday August 6 2008
Double decline in services and industry puts Britain on the brink of recession

The gist: Economists report the economy is grinding to a halt based on official figures showing manufacturing output fell for the fourth quarter in a row, and overall output fell in services for the third month in a row.

Other signs: wherever we go we see ”For Sale” signs outside houses. And my brother in law just came back form meeting an old friend, a building contractor. After 19 years he is forced to close the business down. There is just not the work for him or his employees.

So there it is, the whole drama of the counter-sustainable rut the nation is in, and the impending long emergency they all teeter on, is being played out, in news reports in the press and in front of me. There was even a TV drama ” Burn Up” about Peak Oil.

Unable to fuel the lifestyle that has grown up post-war with cheap energy, and with the money printing machine of home loans broken, the country is staring economic recession in the face.
This is not just a dip in a normal economic cycle, it is the signs that the country is in such serious difficulty that radical changes are called for before it gets worse.

Britain has enjoyed a long period of economic prosperity, partly endowed by the gift of North Sea oil and gas. Even during this period poverty, homelessness and were not addressed. Admittedly the Labour government addressed fairness issues, but if they were unable to succeed as government coffers were filed with tax income who can they be expected to succeed now. Now the situation is getting acute as millions face poverty.
They are now alone. I fear the same events are playing out in my new home, Sweden.
Except in Sweden such stories and drama tend to be downplayed by the media. Watch this space.

http://Stephenhinton.avbp.net Inventing for the Sustainable Planet

The Book of the blog is available NOW

2008-07-14T10:59:00.000+02:00

Friends!

It started in 1996 with me starting to envision what a sustainable world might look like. I have so many hours of recordings and inventions still not published, but the main insights are now in book form, to download as .pdf or to order as printed copy.
The whole book is a novel, rather like a science fiction novel, and is in the form of a road trip through the sustainable world. It's also a bit of an inner journey.

Some parts are original and never published here, others are edited and clarified, polished and illustrated.

If the blog intrigues you, go get the book!

Just joined Technorati!

2008-06-13T11:56:00.000+02:00

Technorati Profile

We are getting closer to the poverty line

2008-06-13T11:04:00.000+02:00

How far is the current oil price stimulated price hikes eroding life quality? It's going fast.
And it will probably get a lot worse as people take the easiest way out, like buying cheap cars.

Just chatting on Second Life yesterday an acquaintance from the US said that she is already eating canned and frozen food as fresh food is too expensive given the rise of gasoline prices and food in general. For a treat she had fresh chicken the other day. What a life! And she has a full time job! It looks to me as if this is all going faster than we could imagine.

Actually, there is a need for real innovation in how taxes are set up. Instead of imposing import restrictions, why not just reduce the corporate tax burden on a sliding scale depending on how many citizens you employ? I reckon you could waive sales tax and tax on profits for corporations and small companies that had one employee or more per $100,000 in annual turnover.

WORKERS OF THE WORLD RELAX

2008-06-11T14:57:00.000+02:00

Wonderful film following the theme of my book INVENTING FOR THE SUSTAINABLE PLANET how work should be eased off!
CLICK HERE.

My letter to Joe Bageant

2008-06-11T14:53:00.000+02:00

I publish below my letter to Joe Bageant. His latest book Dear Hunting with Jesus tells how the working person in USA ( 65% of the population) is kept enslaved and on the edge of bankrupcy. Even the media perpetuate the myth you gotta be poor and proud and it is your own fault!

Joe!

As a Brit living in Sweden, I am following your observations with interest, and with despair starting to see the same phenomena in Europe coming slowly.

However, that is not at the top of my mind just now; it's Die Hard 4 with Bruce Willis. We rented the DVD last night and I sat down to watch it at the request of the youngest member of our family.

At one point, the baddy looks up the personal details about the hero John McClane (played by Willis) on government computers. This New York cop of Irish origin, had no retirement plan, his personal economy was ruined, and he was divorced from his wife and estranged from his daughter.

But he had saved thousands of lives earlier, in Die Hard 1, 2 and 3. Earlier in the film, he says how heroes are not welcome and he talks about how people want don't to know about them. It obviously does not pay well, but our hero appears to accept it.

I thought about Die Hard when I read your blog! This film is pure indoctrination into just what you are talking about. You are white and of Scots-Irish origin, have to lay your life on the line, because you just happen to be there, and be the one that does something about the situation because you are the only one who can. You find a computer hacker with the same sentiment. You are tough and reckless and do a jig when the bad guy gets killed.

The upper echelons of the middle class, the lackies of the ruling class, are either real bad-ass people who are using the education they got subsidized by the taxpayer to screw virtually everybody and topple the economy, or incompetent jobsworth who put daily life at risk by creating infrastructure and systems that blatantly do not work or are intrinsically unsound.

Talk about art imitating life!

Keep up the good work and saying it like it is!

Steve
Stockholm, Sweden

Joe replies...

Steve,

It never ceases to amaze me on how many variations on the theme can be created. In the end the American working class will always come to see their defeat and consequent suffering as heroic.

I heard a version of this yesterday on the radio as I drove back home from the airport, after having been to the National Conference on Media Reform in Minneapolis. The radio program had a series of ordinary Americans -- people who had triumphed over their lack of health insurance or health care, through their own stubbornness, toil, ingenuity, individualism and sheer grit. Now implicit in this of course was acceptance of the complete lack of health protection whatsoever, and then overcoming that lack.

read the rest on....

http://www.joebageant.com/joe/2008/06/victims-suckers.html#more

The Book of the blog is close to being published!

2008-05-26T17:41:00.000+02:00

We are pleased to announce that the book of the Imagestreams and blogs will be available soon to purchase via the website stephenhinton.avbp.net.

Not only does the book explain the inventions with diagrams and links to websites for verifications, it also teaches the methods of Imagestreaming and discusses how to apply the insights to daily life.

Watch this space!

Connecting peace and sustainable development

2008-05-22T11:01:00.000+02:00

Sometimes I can’t get things out of my head. It may sound like a long shot, but as I stepped onto the plane to Berlin to attend a Words of Peace conference with Prem Rawat, I couldn’t help my intuition that peace and sustainable development were linked somehow and that maybe the journey and time with him was going to provide some insights.

Landing in Berlin for the first time in my life, old images of the war, the division of the two countries and its uniting cropped up. But there was no wall, no division. strained to work out if I was in the East or West, but no. Just people. This is the way it should be. No divisions. No wars.

War in itself is not sustainable; it destroys environmental, infrastructural and mineral assets for future generations. And just looking after your own nation is not sustainable either. If the planet goes so does your nation.

Already in the video sequences at the start of the event I started to realize the core of the issue. It is about understanding who you are, your own core. The better we know what we are here for the better we can arrange our life on Earth to fit.

In fact understanding who you are, what life is, is a central theme of his message. He contrasted his message with two other schools of thought. One where you are meant not to enjoy or appreciate your life here on Earth, but to follow a certain code in order not to suffer in a life which comes after death. Another says your life now is a result of actions in your previous life and you cannot change it. Prem Rawat’s message is simpler: life is a gift, every breath is a miracle and you not only want to enjoy every moment of your life, but it is perfectly possible.

He talked of those who promote democracy as a way to peace, but commented that in one democratic country most people did not want the Iraq war and they went to war anyway, and in that same country they have the highest percentage of people in jail.

A session the second day focused on the techniques of inner peace that he teaches. I was reminded by something he said earlier: that do not let the situation of the world get at you. The key to peace is inside you, focus on that, on enjoying what you have.

Having spent a very pleasant break in the Berlin sunshine with a sandwich, cappuccino and convivial company of acquaintances new and old, I went back to a questions and answer session having let go of that question that was initially burning in me.

To my surprise, the second or third question was about world peace. I started to form an understanding. When you understand the value of your own life you understand that you cannot abdicate responsibility to leaders. The result of this mass abdication we can see in that there are more educated people on the planet than there have ever been. And yet there are more wars and more people starving. Some of the best educated people are also those who are cheating the most.

A sustainable, world living in peace, dignity and prosperity will come from each individual realizing the value of life itself for themselves and taking back the responsibility abdicated to leadership.

As each individual sows seeds of acting with kindness and dignity, these seeds will grow to a greater world consciousness.

Because life is a gift, receiving the gift with appreciation and giving back in dignity through living with kindness with the people of the planet is the way to live. Ideas of ownership, taking what you want by force or deceit, from the very people who looked after you and made your education possible, is surely no recipe we would like to hand over to future generations.

Rather, the understanding that peace is possible for all, and with it will come prosperity and the opportunity to enjoy the gift of life to its fullest.

Swedish Eco-village veteran shares valuable advice for ICs

2008-05-16T09:01:00.000+02:00

Interview with Mia Torpe

Back in the 70s Mia and a few others decided to create an eco-village in a suburb of Stockholm. She still lives there, and is today environmental manger for a large housing organization. Her experience is invaluable for all would-be Intentional Community residents.

Here are some highlights of the advice she gave in a recent interview I did with her.

1) Get a queue and raise the stakes as you go along. Just by asking for USD 10 as a membership fee meant they lost a few people. Then they raised the fee to a monthly one and lost a few more. They required that queue members worked in the association a minimum number of hours, and they lost a few more. From gathering around 4000 names they still had difficulty selling 45 apartments.

2) Start with subject working groups from the beginning. For eco-building so much knowledge is needed if you are to be able to give good input to the building contractor. They had 4-5 groups. These later on organized study circles in which attendance was mandatory.

3) Three levels of purchase. They offered apartments as turn-key, finished shell requiring kitchen, plastering, finishing and simple empty shell.

4) The apartments were slightly smaller than average, focus being on creating more common areas.

5) You all need a common vision that needs formulating clearly.

6) Every project is unique.

7) There was a lot of “like to have” talk from members. In the end, because everything costs, they made a list and voted on the five most important factors to include in the project. This system was very effective for coming to agreement.

8) Mandatory working days are still in effect.

9) Decisions were made by consensus as far as possible. They were able to use the church to host large gatherings.

10) Get books. Build a library of information.

11) If Mia were to do this again she would try to eliminate the need for heating all together and create a so-called passive heating system. She is worried energy prices will increase living costs dramatically.

12) Hold large information meetings. These attract members.

13) Create a communal area - even if it is rudimentary. They could just about afford an uninsulated "barn" to meet in, but they gathered there even when it was cold - drinking beer and socialising. It was well worth it.

Article from the future: Energy Descent

2008-04-10T08:52:00.000+02:00

Retford was slow in coming to the realization that ”business as usual” may not keep local citizens’ standard of living at an acceptable level. As they saw energy prices hike many were concerned the local economy was in danger of spiraling down out of control. Many others found it incomprehensible that energy security could be synonymous with economic security. Fortunately, the neighboring city of Porena had embarked upon a successful sustainable development process several years earlier. They turned to Porena city manager, Aaron Heathcliffe, for help. They have now managed to start activities rolling in eight major areas involving just about everyone in the area. Part of the reason for Retford’s success was getting people involved in a way that built a sense of urgency and importance.

But how serious and urgent was the situation? Says Jeff Small, coordinator for the Sustainable Development Office of Retford: “Our starting point was one of a need to understand the situation from the point of view of security of living standards. The national government had delegated responsibility for sustainable development down to the local level. We had received a list of goals to strive for.” Jeff continues, “How urgent was the situation? We had no idea. Some people were saying oil depletion would mean energy price hikes above the annual 4-5% we were seeing. Others were saying market mechanisms would prevail. Interestingly, very few actually knew how things worked in the local region. And even fewer could navigate the figures needed. We found ourselves comparing apples and pears. For instance; how much food do we need (often measured in calories), how much food do we grow (measured in tons) how much energy needed to grow food (measured in liters of diesel)”.

It was just this need to understand the situation that prompted Aaron Heathcliffe to use a data gathering and modeling approach. Based on the local council’s own GIS (geographic information system) he asked the office to set up a project group to find out how the living standard basics were provided. These included water, housing, food, jobs, transport etc. All figures and explanations were to be put into the GIS system so project members could “fly” through the area to gain an understanding of how these systems were working.

Jeff Small again; “The exercise was a real awakening; for example, we do not grow enough food in the area to feed all the population. There is massive commuting every day, and parts of the area are not served by public transport. The system was extremely useful. The group could ask the operator to, say, “show us the number of people living out of walking distance of public transport” – and we could see immediately the information in graphic form on the map”. It was the process of gathering the data that started to create both awareness and multilateral cooperation. For instance, it started to become apparent what was NOT known about water supply. People are just used to turning on taps, and very few had a view of the sewage treatment processes. The data gathering exercises produced very clear and comprehensive information, which the project published. Pictures from the studies helped create awareness for what was to come.

It was the next phase however, that really created the impetus for change. The project team started to bring in representatives of every stakeholder organization. Each basic element of living standard was mapped against the relevant stakeholder organization. The local business association, residents’ association and gardening club got very active early on.
The next step was to ask representatives to review the data, and to evaluate it. They got as the starting point the government goals and security of living standards. They were to come up with risks and priorities. A database related to the GIS system stored geographical positioning data, the issue description, risk and priority. All the data could be aggregated to give a general overview of the risk of potential of shortfall or excess for local residents. What was interesting was that from the point of view of each stakeholder organization’s purpose, as stated in their articles of association, the current situation was not really producing the sort of results they were after. Local businesses were struggling, resident’s associations complaining of falling standards, food quality was poor… Oil depletion risks were changing the situation from uncomfortable to downright disastrous.

Aaron Heathcliffe commented; “we never mentioned politics once. What was interesting was that no-one really disputed where the priorities lay. Maybe some had different ideas about how to solve them, but this fact-based method helped build a basis for consensus”. At this point, the stakeholder organizations were invited to send representatives to work out a plan of action. The plan would include commitments by each organization, so only representatives with enough mandate were sent to the action planning. The plans were based on the shortfall –excess evaluations. Excess would be a resource to use to mitigate shortfalls in other areas, by for example trading with other areas.

In the end, the groups had worked out about eight major areas to tackle and strategies for each. Commitments from the various stakeholder organizations were not enough, however, for real changes to be brought about. For instance, one scheme involved reducing commuting by job-swapping. Although the local business association had set the scheme up it needed employees to volunteer for the changes. To sweeten the deal, anyone who swapped their job would be given a free travel permit. Anyone who gave up their car would be prioritized for housing and so on.

So the next step was for each stakeholder organization to invite their members and members of the public to presentations. The office of sustainable development decided to stage a large exhibition in conjunction with the local May fair. Large displays took visitors through the analysis the project groups had gone through, and other displays asked for volunteers. Most of the key area booths took the form of displays with four sections. In the middle they showed how the area works today – what we have - the left pane showed - why we can’t go on – the right pane: what we need and the bottom pane – what we must do. The next set of displays talked about managing the transition, and the need for overall coordination of efforts. People would then drift to the display “get involved” just before the exit.

One group is planning to re-build some parts of the town to make easy walking access. And they are talking about a canal for energy efficient transport of heavy goods. One priority is diesel for the construction machines. They want to dig ditches and create the conditions for permaculture before the machines become useless. Jeff Small is excited; “from what looked to be a dark future we are hopeful we are headed for an easier, more social life, with a feeling of being closer to nature!”

This is an extract from the coming sequel to the book “Inventing for the Sustainable Planet” http://www.avbp.net/html/porena.html

Work isn't working revisited... fresh stats

2008-04-03T11:41:00.001+02:00

My recent post underlined my position on the state of the world: work isn't working. Very few readers have actually challenged the statistics.

Sad to say, they are getting worse by the minute. Click on the banner to go to the excellent site worldometers. They collect data from all over and publish it real time.

Fast set up of intentional communities

2008-03-26T22:57:00.001+01:00

AVBP accepted an assignment to invent a rapid process to set up intentional communities.

Background

An intentional community is a planned residential community designed to promote a much higher degree of social interaction than other communities. The members of an intentional community typically hold a common social, political or spiritual vision. They also share responsibilities and resources. Intentional communities include co-housing, residential land trusts, eco-villages, communes, kibbutzim, ashrams, and housing co-operatives.

Typically, new members of an intentional community are selected by the community's existing membership, rather than by real-estate agents or land owners (if the land is not owned by the community). Though intentional communities do not claim to be utopias in the sense of perfect places, many do attempt to live a different and better sort of society, and as such many draw on historical utopian experiments or ideas in utopian fiction.

Why now?

We are entering a new age. Although there have been many earlier warnings on the limits to our way of life, the signals are becoming more frequent and stronger. Within our lifetimes we are likely to see drastic effects of oil depletion, ecological deterioration and financial system collapse.

Where Business as Usual lets people down, the stronger the social cohesion, the better the chances of handling the crisis. We like to say that in the absence of financial capital, social capital will pull you through.

Yet the skills of creating social capital – being able to operate in a group as a group – are not common. The experience of intentional community start-ups is that members go through many personal development stages – joining a community is an exercise in personal growth.

So a platform is needed where individuals can come together to experiment in being part of an Intentional community.

In terms of rewarding relationships – the art of conversation and developing true loving relationships with others – we also recognise our culture of consuming popular entertainment and working alone have not provided us with the opportunity to develop deep, lasting, supportive relationships.

PREAMBLE

Two groups I am involved in to set up Intentional communities, one in Second Life and one in Real Life, have been going quite a while. The real life one has been going about a year. It is OK it’s taking time, we are learning, there is a lot of material to help that needs studying. However, we believe a lot of people get impatient with this, who would otherwise join an IC. There is a danger that the project simply runs out in the sand and there is no result.

Furthermore, as signs appear on the horizon to that we are entering a world changing for the worse, the sense of urgency will grow. It would be good to offer the possibility to people to join an IC fairly quickly.

First question: what is “quickly?” Well realistically, a study circle is ten meetings over ten weeks. We’ll take ten weeks as a maximum. Some courses, like weekend courses, stretch three weekends or six days of meetings. We can have that as a minimum. We are not looking to make it happen in an evening although I find that idea really appealing so I’d like to try that too.

The Quest: visit an advanced civilization that has methodologies in its culture for bringing people together to create IC. (Thinking about it, this skill seems to be missing or forgotten in our culture.) I want to come home with practical tools and ways to set up an IC rapidly – to achieve visible results to keep the initiative going.

Tapescript

I start in the departure area. I look up and admire the high glass roof. As soon as I sit down on a bench, the facilitator joins me. He wants a word

‘You finally understood this.’

‘Yes,’ I say, ‘this is a facilitation situation – a process that needs facilitation.’

‘Come on, lets take the train’ he says.

We go to the station and get a large cream coloured train with red stripes. We sit opposite each other.

‘Brief me’ I say,

‘It doesn’t work like that and you know it,’ he says.

‘Enjoy the journey, I’ll tell you when to get off.’

We enter a tunnel, come out the other side, and the train stops.

‘Come on, we are getting off,’ he says.

I recognize the place immediately; it’s the Center of Relocalization from earlier visits. The center is municipally- backed with the purpose to inform and assist inhabitants to switch to a more localized life style.

A meeting is going on. We enter and sit down. People are sitting in rows listening to a person up front giving a presentation.

I get the feeling they have been invited here because of Intentional Communities.

The presenter is asking people what they believe about the future and about the world situation. Of course, I personally believe communities need to relocalize. Someone is talking about the whys and wherefores of relocalization. And why you need to be a certain number of people.

This meeting is one of many that the Center of Relocalization holds regularly. I get the feeling that the center has simply put out an advertisement that they are holding the course, and had some explanatory texts on their web.

The presenter shows a diagram of the area and what needs to happen. People here seem to be on the same page. THAT something needs to happen is accepted. THAT it is better to do it with others is what is being discussed.

‘Is it right,’ I ask the facilitator, ‘that these people have been invited?’

‘This represents the first step for them – an information meeting. They will be asked to put their hand up if they want to go further.’ He says.

‘This guy is one of my best facilitators.’

The presentation ends. Seventy eight percent put their hands up and want to carry on. Each takes a card with contact details and instructions as to what to do next. They are walking away. The next step is to go to the pond. I stroll over with the facilitator – about 30 of us gather there. The rest leave. This is a chance for us to get to know each other. Coffee and sandwiches are served and we walk round introducing each other.

I mingle too. I notice a majority of guys – fewer women.

‘Hi,’ I say to one of the participants

‘How come you are here?’

‘Its obvious. I don’t want to be alone – so much happening in the world I want to be part of a group working on this problem.’

‘What do you do?’

‘I’m a panel beater. You?’

‘I work with facilitation - I’m with this facilitator.’

As I point out who I came with, the guy looks at the facilitator with some respect.

The facilitator is grabbing a megaphone and is in the process of taking charge.

‘We need to go to the next stage,’ he says. ‘We need to take the next step, which is talking about land - estate’. He walks over to a large billboard divided up into smaller squares.

He explains: ‘you have to buy it all – you each buy a share of the land – it is your share. You all work together to solve the situation’. And then the group allocates a house or plot of land for your use within the framework of rules.

The facilitator then points out that there are three areas ready for sale today in the municipality.

A representative then presents the land option in detail. They are really talk each one up; ‘this one is beautiful, this one has existing houses, this one is large….etc’

The facilitator explains: ‘If you DO want to form a group you have to choose one of these places’.

A discussion goes on – people walk around debating the alternatives. I ask the facilitator about the sequence here… why the group should acquire land early on in the process.

He replies that man is territorial – it is so much in the blood – we have to have a common object. It is difficult to form a group without a shared resource like a building or land.

They form “buzz” groups of three in each. I overhear ‘If we don’t have the houses already built we have to build everything from scratch. Another says, ‘I’d rather build the houses myself’. A third replies they could camp in the summer.

They switch groups, one remains, the two who move report from their previous groups. Then they switch again.

The general feeling is it doesn’t matter too much which of the areas are chosen - they trust the municipality – what is important is that they get started.

The facilitator stands everyone in a circle. He asks for a show of hands. It is between option one and two. He asks for people to present their thoughts on the advantages and disadvantages of each. A new round of voting takes place and they put their hand up but it is still fairly 50 -50.

One person comes with a suggestion: ‘Actually it doesn’t matter as long as we are agreement’. He proposes we go for number one and just do it. The facilitator asks is anyone is against the proposal. Two put their hands up and say why they are against it. But they are not swaying the rest so they are left with choosing to come anyway or leaving the group. One leaves, one stays.

The group has decided on the land, now they have to go and buy it.

I whisper to the facilitator, ‘surely this can’t be right – they can’t buy the land before they work out what they are going to do with it!’

‘Do shut up,’ says the facilitator in an unusually rude outburst, ‘this is OK!’

They go over to a table, the bank are offering a loan to them to buy their share.

I didn’t like it, but I see the group needs something concrete like land. They still have opt out clauses in the contracts and no money has changed hands so I suppose it doesn’t matter too much.

Now they are asked to go to the decision ring, which consists of a circle of stone stools. They are sitting in a circle.

The facilitator again.

‘Now you need to elect democratic representation. I will hand over the running of the group to you. ’

So what he is looking for is volunteers. The group needs a legal board to represent it. A chairman, a secretary, a treasurer and three or four others ...deputies.

‘Who would like to put themselves forward or who would you like to suggest?’

The committee can choose their own chairman if they want to. Someone has been treasurer before and are happy to do it, so they volunteer. Someone has been on committee before, they step forward.

The facilitator takes care of the group decision to elect the committee. He points our that the committee is only for the set up period and a new one can be chosen later when the community is established.

For each candidate he asks if anyone is against and for their reasons.

It all goes fairly smoothly.

‘So,’ he says, ‘we finally have a formal organization. The minutes and complete set of documents to register the organization have been prepared by the facilitator’s organization. They are ready to be sent off to the authorities.

‘Time for a break again,’ says the facilitator. Group members walk around, discussing the place.

‘Impressive work,’ I say to the facilitator. ‘You haven’t seen anything yet,’ he replies.

He ushers the group round a large circular sandy area that looks like it may be a circular car parking space. He gets a stick and draws a large circle, which he divides into several sections.

Each of these sections has to do with setting up the community. He draws a heading in each section; housing, farming, water, social development, energy and recycling. This reminds me of the five stresses of Porena. I think to myself that of course the five stresses are addressed. He describes each of the areas then asks people to walk around and think about which aspects they would like to be involved in. They are to volunteer with their feet. They should think about their first and second choices.

He puts a number in the sections for how many are needed. Housing needs fifteen. People shuffle around some go from first to second choice.

Very quickly, all the numbers are made up.

The facilitator: ‘make sure you get to know each other, and choose one representative for your group’.

They stand in circles to choose their representative.

We have a committee and five representatives from each of the areas that need to be worked on.

The facilitator calls on us to walk up the hill towards a beautiful pavilion.

We will sit here just for five minutes. The idea here is to be silent, to still our thoughts and let everything catch you up.

I notice what a lovely day it is. I feel the sun shining on my face, and the breeze blowing in my hair. We all sit and close our eyes.

Just calming down, taking a break. It’s difficult to be silent as there are so many questions. I sneak at peak at the others who seem to be struggling as well. However, I suddenly feel the power of the group in the silence, Because we are all quiet together, because we are coming together and all have one purpose we can feel it.

The facilitator says; ‘look, we can’t go any further today - if we go too fast we will lose you.

A lot is happening you need to reflect on. However, until next time in your groups you need to complete a task. You have to dimension – quantify, each area for how much do you need of what and when. The group is made of 30, and can grow to 50 families. Those of you here who have partners at home should talk it through with them. Then there is the loan application, the bank will be contacting you.

The organization is formed, the land is allocated but not turned over to the group, everyone needs to talk it though with their spouses. And we will see you back here next week for the weekend course.

I go and thank the facilitator for showing me all this.

He says there is some worked involved in working it all out and shows me a manual, a compendium of possibilities of calculations, general experience of working with these groups before. There is a database of experience the compendium is taken from. And they follow how each group is doing.

The bank is essential. In this case the local municipality, who understood the importance of relocalization and forming communities, have engaged the bank to help. The municipality assigned the land and gave the bank the task of liaising with the facilitator group and the Center of Localization.

I borrow the facilitators eyes. One thing is that the moving around the group does is to get members thinking about estate together. I t helps them visualize what it will be like on their own land. And providing some basics like eating together is symbolic. Then there is the sitting down to make formal decision. Being silent together is something very powerful. In the silence the purpose can be felt. This is not religious.

I leave the facilitator’s eyes.

‘I’ll see you next time,’ he says.

I leave and get back on the train.

Things that surprised me

It is so obvious that the group needs to be agreed on the “what” of the gravity and urgency of the situation. The possibility that community is the answer to “how” is what needs to be got over.

Both the sand circle and the moments of silence were quite profound solutions.

That the local municipality and the bank had got together with the center and its facilitator group.

The need to actually speed ahead with the land allocation – I had never realized how important that is to people.

Learnings that struck me as significant

The facilitation structure helped the group to come together – first sitting together listening, then social mingle, then group decision, voting, consensus and then creating a formal organization and finally volunteering.

If you have the land it’s a lot easier to create the group – something inbuilt in humans.

In the silence is the purpose.

The need to go fast but not too fast – humans have the need to reflect.

Deliverables encountered

File/Database of knowledge
Descriptions of land available
Large presentation
Sand circle
Circle of decision, formal meeting place
Contract to buy part of land
Ready-to-complete documents of incorporation

Things I could use today.

I think in forming the intentional community I am working with just now, I will encourage them to get land as soon as possible. But also to consider all the opt out possibilities along the way.

The moment of silence… could be used in all groups.

The volunteer circle could be used at meetings in all volunteer situations.

Other reflections

Of course I asked to see a culture where ICs were common, I did not specify any conditions like in our world today. Especially, today there is no perception of urgency or gravity. I also like the idea that land is already available. How this could be applied to our situation today is something I would like to come back to, after the next follow-up sessions.

The world of work: what are the options?

2008-03-21T06:10:00.001+01:00

In my last post I pointed out what must be obvious to many – that work is not working. Too much work is being done to create financial wealth, and too little is being done to secure a sustainable future for coming generations. If we have a world population of 6 billion, say a quarter of them are in work. The others are too old, young, sick or plain unemployed.

Let’s try to make it even clearer by considering the options. On one dimension the impact of work on ecological services provided by nature. Either it will decrease or maintain them. And then you have the dimension generating a standard of living, either work creates an acceptable standard or not.

That gives us four options. The absolute worst one is where work depletes the environment and we don’t create a standard of living worth having. Sadly to say, that is the position we are in today. The United Nations millennium report clearly shows the state of environmental degradation, and levels of Carbon Dioxide in the atmosphere are dangerously high already according to some scientists. We have a lot of people starving and a lot more in danger of starving.

Let’s look at this in more detail We’ll use rounded figures for convenience.

World population: 6 billion
Working population say, a half - 3 billion
Number of hours a day worked (average based on 1600 hours a year, 365 days a year) =13 billion hours a day
85 billion barrels of oil a day
14 million tons a day of coal
Ecological situation: footprint is 20% above the capacity of the Earth
Number of people undernourished: 887 million
Number without access to safe drinking water: 1,3 billion
Number on less that $2 a day 300 million

Starting from this situation we need to find a better option. Increasing protection of the environment is a GOOD thing. But in practice, if stricter regulations are introduced without the guarantee of living standards being provided, the end result would be even more hardship.

Concentrating on solving living standards for all without taking the environment into consideration will deplete the environment even faster.

The only sensible option to aim for is then securing a standard of living whilst preserving environmental services. That in my opinion requires rethinking work. But that is a very appealing challenge. My earlier envisioning looked at “the go along society”. We could do a whole lot worse.

Why work isn’t working

2008-03-18T10:23:00.001+01:00

Regular readers will remember that one of the major tenets of my book and this blog is that the sustainable city abandoned work as a way to generate a standard of living. In fact, it was one of the first of the old ideas to go.

Work as we know it was replaced by the voluntary ”go along” society. Food and housing were provided free and this meant there was no need to ”go to work” to earn pay to be able to buy these things.

Now more than ever it seems this insight rings true. Work is such a bad invention we need to drop it and replace it with something better. It has become such a counter sustainable phenomenon that it can’t be fixed. The downsides are so many ... let me list them

No-one is working towards sustainability

As no-one ( or very few) have it in their job description to ensure their organization makes every effort to reverse the counter sustainable trend, work ensures there is little being done to move in this direction. In fact, if you add up all the people and then their hours they work to put us in the irrevocable rut of counter sustainable development, you’ll see what a formidable force it is that is driving us. This force is taking us to what might be a climate system collapse and a near extinction event.

Environmental burden

All of these hours come with them the support of thousands of energy slaves in the form of fossil fuels. These fuels are used not only to transport large amounts of materials back and firth but also to extract resources from the Earth and to drive manufacturing processes that leave authorities and individuals to clean up the resulting externalized waste.

It is no fun

Let’s face it for most people most of the time it is no fun. Isn’t that a sign we are doing something wrong?

It is not meaningful

Because there is little in people’s job descriptions that describe how they are to work towards a sustainable development, there is little in the design of the job that offers anything with meaning. On the contrary, employees are expected to give bad (read cheap) service, not do more than the minimum expected for customers and preferably get the customers coming back paying more for less.

It is not generating standard of living

I often hear ”you have to go to work to pay the bills”. Sure. But look at how many HAVE work who cannot afford a standard of living anyway. From workers in the low cost factories making stuff, to the part time employed, young, shop assistants who sell you the stuff – there is a long chain of people who can’t actually support a family on their wages.

Not generating wealth

Even statistics for Sweden from Statistics Sweden reveal the rich are getting richer and the poor are owning less and less percentage of the wealth generated by the work they do. In fact, statistics show that productivity has risen faster than wages over the last decade.

Now is not the time

With energy prices and Carbon Dioxide restrictions set to upset the apple cart of ”Business as Usual” for ever, pulling the lever of ”more work” or ”work harder” is not going to work. Working harder to introduce – say – better engines, better houses, energy saving gadgets – is that really going to work when there is less and less money to invest, people have less to spend and are less interested in investing in alternatives.

We have to let go.

With all the researchers, with all the alternative organizations, with all our innovativeness and creativity and determination we must start now to replace this monster. There are several small steps we could start with.

Make labour free for all “do good” organizations.

All the non-profit organizations that are moving in a sustainable direction ( after approval) could be allowed to engage unemployed people at no cost. The unemployed person keeps their benefit, continues to look for work, but is engaged in the activities of the non-profit. By the same token, employees of this organization could be exempted from employers’ taxes etc.

Set an “enough to live on” level of income, and let people earn this before tax kicks in. People who wish to could work part time but be guaranteed at least a minimum.

Introduce a citizen’s wage whilst encouraging the spread of sustainable-oriented non-profits.

If you run a company you could consider doing what 1001 hal (danish) or the Mango group
both of these groups have a policy of flat wage .. the same for all, and only taking on projects that allign with their values. They value experience and fun over profit. And time with their children instead of endless overtime.

Second Life; Looking for land

2008-03-12T01:17:00.000+01:00

Looking for Land

Still thinking about the IC in Second Life. It is a common thing that groups looking to set up an Intentional Community start looking for land at an early stage. I don’t know why – maybe because they want to get going quickly – or maybe because they think if they find the right land the rest will fall into place.

My real life community did this. But we always found a reason why it was not right. We had not got the finance clear and we didn’t have an idea of what we really wanted to do – but we looked for land. We heard of a group of vegetarians who started looking for somewhere they could grow food together so they could live as vegetarians when they were pensioners – they were afraid the old folks’ home would not serve decent vegetarian food. That was way back in the 80s. According to my friend, they are still looking. They couldn’t find anything they liked. After a while we realized we should reevaluate – define what we were looking for and why. We should look into vision, finance and rules and criteria – and agree.

Second life is fun to search for land in – you can fly around and see it all from the air! So much you feel you would like to do – create a place of beauty.

Flying looking for land 003B

Anyway. This is my idea of the main elements of an intentional community in Second Life.

IC in SL

PUBLIC AREA A Very Beautiful Place

Just an area of natural beauty with a lake, a beach, forests, water falls etc to walk around in and chill out – maybe walk with a loved one or a friend to have a chat. An open air dance area and large area for public meetings.

COMMERCIAL MARKET PLACE

Stalls selling things to do with IC – like books, contacts to trainers, facilitators, courses etc.

INFO AREA

An exhibition on what IC is all about.

MEETING AND TRAINING FACILITY

The main function would be to run IC information and training. Could also be sued for large meetings of the IC. I envisage facilities like a DVD screen and screens for showing Powerpoints and performances.

MEETING CIRCLES

If they wanted to , ICs in formation could meet here in a circle to make important decisions.

FIELD OF DREAMS

Modelled on the RL FINDHORN communitiy. We portion off land so residents can build their own houses close to our activities.

Second Life experiment kicks off for Max Wahlter

2008-03-09T03:40:00.001+01:00

My sustainability blogger alter ego Max is now not just in the book "Inventing for the Sustainable Planet" but on SECOND LIFE, too. Here is his diary entry:

I am so happy that my Second Life friends Cal and Mia have asked me join them on their experiment in Intentional Communities in Second Life. They have graciously invited me to live on their wonderful tropical island paradise for a while during the first phase.

Learning to live together in communities is important if we are to come through the tail end of the industrial era which started with the peaking of oil production per capita already in 1979. Of course we enjoy the fruits of progress – the irony is not lost on me we are playing this out on state of the art computers and high speed Internet connections – but the downsides carry with them the very factors that will make negotiating post-peak ramifications so difficult.

We have become used to being able to live without fending for ourselves and growing our own food. We have become used to having others make decisions for us – both at work where “management” decide or in society where it is political. Those of us who have tried to voice our opinion know what a struggle it is to get through. The tools required for living in a community where you are dependant on the community for the basics of life – food, shelter, clothing, etc – decision making, prioritization, division of labor, handling conflicts and handling rule breaking – are not commonly known or practiced.

It is my hope we can use this fantastic platform to create somewhere where people can come to learn these skills in order for them to be able to contribute to the development of their own Intentional Communities in real life.

The island here is fantastic, a reminder of what a wonderful gift this Natural world is – and more, what a gift it is to be able to love, life, each other, to love living, to love just breathing. The love Cal and Mia have for each other, I know, has already inspired many to think in new directions. I hope our little community can continue to grow and inspire, to bring hope that we can make through not just surviving but leaving a wonderful, sustainable, peaceful legacy for coming generations.

X Max.

What can Second Life teach us about sustainability?

2008-03-05T10:17:00.001+01:00

Like Dave Pollard, writer of the excellent blog ”How to Save the World”, I too believe the on-line 3D phenomenon ”Second Life” (www.secondlife.com) can make a significant contribution to sustainable development. Here are a few first thoughts:

Simulation of technology. If you can think it you can make it Second life. And then walk around it, see it, see it in context, show to others. Second life could act as a showcase for all kinds of sustainable solutions – from sustainable towns through water cleaning systems to energy capture. These solutions could be presented in a compelling way – where you walk from insight to insight gathering new knowledge and perspective. There is already a sustainable Eco-village in SL called Etopia. They are doing some good things which I will come back later to.

My Avatar in SL, Max Wahlter tries out a bamboo bike in Etopia

The other area of interest in SL is the money system. It is interest-free, and works like many an ideal alternative currency. You simply pay for right of use. Just now about four USD will get you an account and 1000 Linden Dollars. You can earn money by selling your time or the things you make. All transactions are tax-free. SL is an ideal place to try out alternative currency approaches.

The same is true of social structures. In real life (RL) we can get into a bad tangle when our personal economies are involved with others, say when buying into an eco-village or starting a business with companions. In SL you can buy an island with your friends, build a shop and start from there. Should it fail you can always close the computer and walk away – and you will have participated in an experiment for just a few dollars that would otherwise threaten your entire economy. SL friends of mine, Mia and Cal are trying just this. See their blog on asecondlifediary.gaia.com. SL provides tools for collaborating like on-line chat, text and voice, group notifications and possibilities to show videos and powerpoints and distribute text and other material.

Maybe one of the least talked about sustainable aspects of SL is its ability to bring all kinds of pleasures without using one drop of fossil fuels. This is important because we are at a stage where our consumption levels clearly must drop radically. This is not going to be easy. We are used to so much material comfort and stimulation. We can experiment with weaning ourselves off material pleasures, going over to establishing rewarding relationships on-line with people from all over the world and playing on-line. Whatever your needs – be they paint ball, jazz, hang gliding or fetish sex – you can find all on-line in SL!

The simple choices we face

2008-03-04T13:43:00.000+01:00

One of the things you learn from working with innovation for the sustainable planet is to ask the right question from the outset. What is it we are trying to achieve? Well, no-one wants to work too much and everyone wants at least a simple standard of living. But what are our choices? The simple matrix below may help illustrate the issue. On one dimension the natural resources available to us should be available to future generations. If we have oil and coal now, we should plant not to deplete them all, but to arrange it so we can benefit from them without leaving future generations without them or a substitute for them.

The other dimension is achieving a standard of living for all. So there are the choices: Best case is where we achieve a standard without sacrificing natural resources. If we achieve a standard to the detriment of natural resources we put future generations at risk. This option is the quick fix solution of the untamed market economy. The third option is preserving resources and not achieving a living standard. This option subjugates standards to ecology, probably in some kind of dictatorship. Finally, the worse case option gives us depleted resources and still no standard of living.

Surprisingly perhaps, the current state of affairs in the world is firmly in the worse option. Despite rain forests being turned into agricultural land, phosphor being mined in several places and huge amounts of fossil fuel being put into agriculture, we still have hunger. And we still have poverty even in the richest countries. Both environmental degradation AND blatant failure to provide a standard of living are prevalent.

Changing the direction of humanity will take time. We need to start now.

Article from the future: Retford's transition

2008-03-02T20:38:00.000+01:00

But how serious and urgent was the situation? Says Jeff Small, coordinator for the Sustainable Development Office of Retford: “Our starting point was one of a need to understand the situation from the point of view of security of living standards. The national government had delegated responsibility for sustainable development down to the local level. We had received a list of goals to strive for.” Jeff continues, “how urgent was the situation? We had no idea. Some people were saying oil depletion would mean energy price hikes above the annual 4-5% we were seeing. Others were saying market mechanisms would prevail. Interestingly, very few actually knew how things worked in the local region. And even fewer could navigate the figures needed. We found ourselves comparing apples and pears. For instance; how much food do we need (often measured in calories), how much food do we grow (measured in tons) how much energy needed to grow food (measured in liters of diesel)”.

It was just this need to understand the situation that prompted Aaron Heathcliffe to use a data gathering and modeling approach. Based on the local council’s own GIS (geographic information system) he asked the office to set up a project group to find out how the living standard basics were provided. These included water, housing, food, jobs, transport etc. All figures and explanations were to be put into the GIS system so project members could “fly” through the area to gain an understanding of how these systems were working.

Jeff Small again; “The exercise was a real awakening; for example, we do not grow enough food in the area to feed all the population. There is massive commuting every day, and parts of the area are not served by public transport. The system was extremely useful. The group could ask the operator to, say, “show us the number of people living out of walking distance of public transport” – and we could see immediately the information in graphic form on the map”. It was the process of gathering the data that started to create both awareness and multilateral cooperation. For instance, it started to become apparent what was NOT known about water supply. People are just used to turning on taps, and very few had a view of the sewage treatment processes. The data gathering exercises produced very clear and comprehensive information, which the project published. Pictures from the studies helped create awareness for what was to come.

It was the next phase however, that really created the impetus for change. The project team started to bring in representatives of every stakeholder organization. Each basic element of living standard was mapped against the relevant stakeholder organization. The local business association, residents’ association and gardening club got very active early on.

The next step was to ask representatives to review the data, and to evaluate it. They got as the starting point the government goals and security of living standards. They were to come up with risks and priorities. A database related to the GIS system stored geographical positioning data, the issue description, risk and priority. All the data could be aggregated to give a general overview of the risk of potential of shortfall or excess for local residents. What was interesting was that from the point of view of each stakeholder organization’s purpose, as stated in their articles of association, the current situation was not really producing the sort of results they were after. Local businesses were struggling, resident’s associations complaining of falling standards, food quality was poor… Oil depletion risks were changing the situation from uncomfortable to downright disastrous.

Aaron Heathcliffe commented; “we never mentioned politics once. What was interesting was that no-one really disputed where the priorities lay. Maybe some had different ideas about how to solve them, but this fact-based method helped build a basis for consensus”. At this point, the stakeholder organizations were invited to send representatives to work out a plan of action. The plan would include commitments by each organization, so only representatives with enough mandate were sent to the action planning. The plans were based on the shortfall –excess evaluations. Excess would be a resource to use to mitigate shortfalls in other areas, by for example trading with other areas.

In the end, the groups had worked out about eight major areas to tackle and strategies for each. Commitments from the various stakeholder organizations were not enough, however, for real changes to be brought about. For instance, one scheme involved reducing commuting by job-swapping. Although the local business association had set the scheme up it needed employees to volunteer for the changes. To sweeten the deal, anyone who swapped their job would be given a free travel permit. Anyone who gave up their car would be prioritized for housing and so on.

So the next step was for each stakeholder organization to invite their members and members of the public to presentations. The office of sustainable development decided to stage a large exhibition in conjunction with the local May fair. Large displays took visitors through the analysis the project groups had gone through, and other displays asked for volunteers. Most of the key area booths took the form of displays with four sections. In the middle they showed how the area works today – what we have - the left pane showed - why we can’t go on – the right pane: what we need and the bottom pane – what we must do. The next set of displays talked about managing the transition, and the need for overall coordination of efforts. People would then drift to the display “get involved” just before the exit.

One group is planning to re-build some parts of the town to make easy walking access. And they are talking about a canal for energy efficient transport of heavy goods. One priority is diesel for the construction machines. They want to dig ditches and create the conditions for permaculture before the machines become useless. Jeff Small is excited; “from what looked to be a dark future we are hopeful we are headed for an easier, more social life, with a feeling of being closer to nature!”

This is an extract from the coming sequel to the book “Inventing for the Sustainable Planet” http://www.avbp.net/html/porena.html

Someone else visits PORENA

2008-02-27T10:32:00.000+01:00

I would like to re-publish this post from Lal, who imagestreamed his own visit to the sustainable city of Porena. Cool so many thanks for this Lal.

I made a visit to (Image-streamed) *Steve Hinton's Porena* and here are some
of the hilights of what I saw. I was most interested in how industrial
products would interface with a community that was "post-industrial"

. The street was unpaved, but not rutted or difficult.
First I visited a home. The visible part of the home was a low structure,
hobbit-like, constructed of field stone, small wood and straw-bales covered
in clay. This was used as a mud room and tool storage. Even the pitchfork
was hand made of wood and cloth binding it together. Most of the home was
underground. I went down a flight of wood and stone stairs. It was lit and
heated and the cooking was fueled by "focussed light" Cooking was "triple
focussed" light. Light was "lured" into the downstairs from outside by
shiny pipes, and the effect was bright but softly diffused and the sources
were hard to spot. Everything in the house was homemade or locally made with
available materials. Buckets were wooden with perhaps only a metal handle,
but the bands that held the wood straps together appeared to be some kind of
cloth. Some buckets were waterproof canvas. There was very little metal and
no plastic. The cooking pot was clay. The water supply came into the house
through a long chimney that filtered the water through stone, gravel and
sand and the water descended 25 to 30 ft, becoming available downstairs
through a spigot in the kitchen. This clean water was piped through the
house by the pressure from the height and was available again in the wash up
room through a spigot. The toilet was upstairs, outside, and I don't know
what arrangement, but possibly composting toilet or some such. I was
surprised by the computer in one small room.. it was a screen and it was
operated by placing the hands into and onto a sphere. ..a very Flintstone
feel in the room..hi-tech stone age. The rough wooden dining table was set
with wooden spoons, good knives and chopsticks. The plates were wooden or
clay, the glasses were silver, old glass or clay, The food was home grown
and locally grown veggie stew with a small bit of meat.
The man there was surprising modern looking... physically bright, healthy,
welcoming, friendly, silent.
I understood that the computer was only used to calculate ... how much of
what was needed where. The population was aware that much of our current
material concern was metaphoric in nature and they no longer needed a phone
to communicate at a distance or internet to communicate with a mass of
people. Mind to mind and minds to mind etc was all automatic function of
consciousness. Another feature was that animals were not used or enslaved or
domesticated in any way and the population was horrified by the very thought
of such disrespect to Life. Meat was acquired as a voluntary transaction
between certain types of animals who willingly traded their bodies for the
care and ease of domesticated life. Some animals wandered freely in the
town, but they were not "owned".
All the artifacts of daily life, especially clothing was handmade with great
care and enormous variety. Especially children were dressed wonderfully with
embroidered vests and little jackets with many colours.. every child wore a
different style fanciful little cap. They *all* looked like grandmothers
favourite child. The adults were also dressed in a great variety of softly
coloured clothing.. some as simple as a sack with hole for arms and head.
There were no harsh aniline colours anywhere. The town was full of people
leisurely going about their daily activities, a great deal of laughter from
the kids who could run and play safely everywhere. They could stop and pick
a fruit or veggie to snack on from everywhere.
I was left with some questions... how did the water get into the
purification chimney? How was the light stored so you could use at night?
This heat source did not combust anything. it was focussed and then
refocussed 3 times and this created heat enough to cook. I don't understand
that.
Great town Stephen!! I hope you don't mind having it imprinted by this old
hippie!
love
lal

Article from the Future: New York uses gift currency "LETS".

2008-02-25T09:54:00.001+01:00

As he swipes his LETS card at the candy store, English visitor John Oxley finds it hard to imagine his last visit to New York. Way back in 2007 the dollar was the only currency available. “People were spending most of their waking hours scrambling frantically for the Legal Tender,” he remembers. “It’s not the LETS introduction in itself, LETS is just a system” he says: “it’s the change in attitude – the way people look out for each other.” John is enthralled by the way LETS has spread. “Hey, I arrived here, got a LETS Card, a mobile terminal, entered my skills and terms, and within minutes I was getting offers to come and help out. I had fun washing up at the fast food counter one morning and then went and acted as adviser to a collaboration project the next day. I am practically one of you!”

For New Yorkers, the change began earlier than 2007, in the aftermath of the 9/11 attack. Says hot dog vendor Clark Smith; ”The way we stuck together, supported each other and pitched in made us realize that we had something special worth taking care of – a sense of belonging, and a sense of energy.”

As the first signs of what analysts started to call “Peak Oil” appeared – rising gas prices, rising unemployment – drops in consumer confidence and spending - a group of five visionaries started working on the LETS scheme and software. Says founder Kelly French; “We just wanted to increase the amount of good in the world and realized that Peak Oil was actually one of the greatest opportunities ever offered to Man – to, within the given timeframe of cheap oil running out, focus on what was important, and create the good life – not out of consuming but out of how we treat each other.”

The first application was extremely simple: LETS clearing. Enter a debit for yourself as taker and credit the giver. The debiting system needed access to a computer, or you could do it on paper and get someone to enter it for you.

However, it was not the system itself that spurred growth. Kelly credits the “one on one” marketing approach as the key. “It would work like this: I went to people I knew and told them I wanted to spread good in New York. Wholesome food started to be in short supply; I would grow vegetables on the balcony and bring them to my friends. I would explain what I was trying to do and get them to register in LETS and credit me for the vegetables.”

The important thing was not that it was LETS but it was Pay it Forward. The vegetables had not cost Kelly’s friend anything, and Kelly asked him to Pay it Forward by doing something similar for someone else. To finance the LETS system (and be able to credit LETS to someone else) the friend was required to pay a small monthly subscription.

The LETS exchange quickly followed, where you could advertise whatever it was you were offering or needed. This helped up the development of a more local economy. Transportation costs were rising, sending the cost of practically everything through the roof. All kinds of Local Sufficiency initiatives, including instructions and plans on the WIKI web site, and training courses at AFTER CARBON outpost centers, started using LETS partially to support their efforts.

LETS’ Marketing Manager and co-fonder Steven Tailor emphasizes that the LETS story is the story of the Play it Forward economy. “We simply told stories about Play it Forward, and LETS started to grow of itself.” The well known slogan DO GOOD BE GOOD FEEL GOOD appeared at that time. A lot of people wanted to “tell the story” so we arranged training in Pay it Forward and introduced the agent system. Agents went out helping people into the system and were rewarded with LETS.

Of course, you can always give someone something without involving the LETS system. But when you start on the LETS route you instantly get rewarded by seeing your LETS points rise. So the system contains a reinforcement for doing good. And that is exactly what we wanted to promote.

Says IT manager Kent Kerny: “The next stage in our IT development was to include the Agent bonus system. The more people you signed up and looked after, the more you got bonus on their transactions. These agents were key to the rapid spread of the system. Compensated in LETS bonus, they tirelessly went out spreading the message and getting people into the system.”

Kelly intervenes: “We concentrated on talking about FCASSH Food, Clothing, Accommodation, Security and Social belonging and Health. The ideas are as old as the hills – you can probably find them in Feng Shui, Malow’s hierarchy, religions even scouting handbooks etc but they had been suppressed during the Industrial Age’s “live for kicks” era. Quite simply, people want to feel secure - and as long as they feel they can get food, water, clothing, accommodation, health care and be part of society they can get on with the most important thing – enjoying being alive.

LETS transactions started to grow. People who were out of work started to see that as long as they kept participating in the system food, clothing housing etc could be solved for them. Now, you can only eat one meal at a time and wear one set of clothes. So people started using surplus LETS to support charities, and Charity Coordinators started to help these organizations use LETS with their charity takers. The voucher system appeared: print out a voucher with a unique number, give it to a needy charity taker. Charity takers took the voucher to their provider who processed the transaction.

The next two developments came fast: firstly, incorporating companies into the system. Around this time consumer sales were dropping, causing rising prices – and falling profits - everywhere. Abandoning the profit motive companies saw the opportunity to operate anyway and increase sales to charity takers and LETS users by crediting their suppliers in LETS.

Secondly, AMERICAN LETS introduced the now familiar terminals and created new Corporate Coordinators to help these organizations with their LETS development. Shortly afterwards, the mobile LETS terminal “One swipe and you’re in” card system appeared, the brainchild of Kent Kerny.

Says our English visitor “I always used to see New Yorkers as people with fast mouths and sharp elbows. I still do actually, but underneath it all there shines a heart of gold – or is it LETS?”

Read more articles from the future on http://avbp.net.

From an engineer who wants to "get on with it"

2008-02-19T21:16:00.002+01:00

World oil production per capita reached a peak in 1979. Net production is now plateau-ing, dashing all hopes of global economic expansion.
We've been chewing on this mess for some years, but with everyone’s vested interest in “business as usual”, (I’m not even going to give the name of the engineer who gave me this – he’s looking for a job), and disagreements about what to do, it may be getting too late unless engineers focus together.

First some background:

When reading about the engineers of the past, like Polhem (with the locks and watches), Stevenson (with the steam engine), John Ericsson (with the propeller) and the like, it's stunning how they found solutions with scarce resources. The engineers of today have been tricked into the playfield of the economists, and have been seduced to partly abandon the enlightened path of the engineer. It's a pity, since the heart and soul of a true engineer is all about finding solutions to technical problems, not economical problems. It's not the engineers of the world who strive for infinite growth on a limited planet, it's the economists who keep us ransom who do. Why not aim for a little engineering purity?

What's important? And not?

Some things in life are important, while other things merely look important because they are means to reach the important stuff.

It's important for me to live in a nice place and to have an interesting job, but it's not important for me to commute by car. The commute is kind of a necessary evil because it's difficult to find nice places to live close to workplaces. A recreational Sunday drive to take in the countryside could be important to keep my mood up though.

It's important for me to have a decent indoor temperature, artificial light during the winter, ability to keep myself clean, to cook and to have a decent internet connection. It's not one bit important to consume large amounts of energy to reach those goals.

If I want audiovisual entertainment, it's the image on my retina and the sound reaching my eardrums that are important, not the size of the display or the output power of the PA rig. A Virtual Retinal Display and a pair of earplugs consuming a couple of milliwatts will get the same job done as a wide screen plasma display and speaker systems consuming hundreds of Watt. While consuming (significantly) less resources to manufacture.

With proper architecture and landscaping, I would live comfortably with wife and two kids on 80 sqm and take the bicycle to work and shop. I could cut my use of energy to 1/3 or less of what I consume today, with all the comfort intact. It's just that those pesky economists and politicians have designed a system which can’t handle such savings.

Some people do get a kick out of living in a 400 sqm mansion, driving a posh new SUV and consume humongous amounts of energy in general, but those people are not target for this text. I simply leave them on their own to solve their own problems.

A modest proposal

Why not revert to being engineers? At least in our spare time? While on boss' time, we still have to charge after growth, but in our spare time, we could be true engineers and chase efficiency and quality-of-life issues. I suggest that we start using the Not-My-Problem (NMP) field when encountering economical and social problems and just kick the problem back at the economists and politicians.

We designed a more efficient house, making some power generation unnecessary, causing unemployment, and the economists and politicians blame us - what to do? A powerful "NMP" should do. Unemployment is a political problem, not a technical. "What kind of lousy politician are you to come whimpering to us engineers with a political problem? Eh?"

Massive savings by reduced need for cars would cause car manufacturers and banks to go bankrupt. As proud engineers we say "NMP!!". "What kind of lousy economist are you if you can't design a system that can handle gains in efficiency and savings? Don't come to me with your little problems - go away and design a resilient economic system instead."

The road ahead

I would love to have an enlightened discussion with other engineers and scientists about what is possible from a scientific and engineering standpoint, effectively ignoring the crowd of economists and politicians. We gave them railroads, cheap clothes, cheap food, cars, radio, TV, hip replacements and the Internet, but they are never satisfied and want us to solve the problems they created by sloppy thinking about politics and economy. Now don't come calling on us for electric cars when the real problem is lousy city planning!

--
This message is composed of 100% recycled electrons

Don't look for leadership or management

2008-02-13T10:49:00.000+01:00

Dave Pollard's excellant post on "We don't need leaders we need experimenters" got me thinking about my experiences from working as a management "cog" in the machinery of a rather large corporation. My role was to help the organisation with its new IT system and as such reported direct to the "leadership" - the management team. This sort of thing is huge in terms of numbers of people, locations, business risks, investment needed, and changes in behaviour required permanently. Perhaps you could say it mirrors the task at hand we all face: introducing major changes into an interconnected, technical and financial infrastructure, with widely accepted - rules of the game – that are outdated and inappropriate for the task in hand . If we didn't change the IT system the whole company risked going under. Again this mirrors the situation we are in on the planet.

In fact, strong leadership was required in a sense. It HAD to be done, there was no going back, everyone had to help out, it had to be done right, too. Being fascinated by the whole subject of leadership, I watched how the management team communicated this message, expecting to see what qualities in them had got them to top management. A little disappointed, it all came out a bit lame, in the category of "necessary evil" .

But there is more. The management side. The skills required to organize such a transformation. I'm talking project management, aligning deliverables, employees, competencies, training, processes, deadlines, work packaging - all that good stuff that you expect top managers to be fully conversant with.

Nope. Not that either. Uphill struggle for us to translate this "technical side" of the work into by them actionable items. In fact, the excellent knowledge and skills being amassed by the implementation team - in terms of managing change - were being lost into the hands of outside consultants. If you are interested in this sort of thing, it's all documented in a book “Running the Successful Hi-tech Project Office by Eduardo Miranda” (available Amazon).

Most of these management techniques – coming from the quality movement originally – stem back to rocket science. NASA has been one of the leaders in methodologies for bringing disparate organizations together to achieve a common “man on the moon” goal.

But, looking at it, this whole area has been rather ignored by many executive teams. The author of the book above (one of America’s experts) was fired from his job because the management team could not see any value add from his job.

So my own experience concurs – even the executive team were frozen in their development. The organization skills required to unravel this dysfunctional apparatus we call “business (sic) as usual” are available but elusive. Leadership is not going to happen. The apparatus is going to chug on until it grinds to a painful halt. Grass roots is all we have. That’s you and me. What can we do today?

Of whales and insects and Brave New World

2008-02-02T22:36:00.000+01:00

Bit of a different post today. I’ve been on holiday and had a real serendipity experience with a couple of books.

Part of the research for the blog involved looking at books which took a similar approach – that is to say envisioning a sustainable future in order to stimulate thought leadership. Imagine my surprise when I walked into a tiny village near the holiday cottage I was renting to see a book town library.

Why serendipity? Well book towns was an idea Book town founder Richard Booth got back in the 60s when he met a descendant of author of Utopia, Sir Thomas More. She ( I forget her name) turned up in a pony and trap. Booth's insight was that that second hand books are "a re-saleable economy with a product which has no sell-by date and is available in its billions".

Villages would concentrate on book binding, antique book shops, writers’ circles and so on. This particular book town housed a rather eccentric form of bookstore: the books were arranged by colour of binding. The blue room was especially overwhelming.

I found a book on Utopia, and Brave New World Revisited, by Aldous Huxley.

Brave New World was written in the 1930s, before the second world war and the explosion of population growth. I guess it is a book with a purpose similar to this blog to enable thought about the future by envisioning different outcomes.

In Brave new World revisited from 1950, Aldous Huxley talks about how his book tried to warn people of the threats of overpopulation and urbanization together with a desire for the GOOD ORDER. This urban pressure, bringing so many individuals together, would encourage the mindset that sees people more as insects. This in turn leads to dehumanizing of society, albeit the basic intention may have been good. He goes on to reflect how his predictions were coming true even faster than he thought possible.

Amazing power of foresight that man had: the world population passed 50% living in urban environments around 2005. And look at how so many sit of an evening alone in the blue light of the TV screen.

Let's consider insects as a societal model: every individual has a specific task to perform. If she does not perform it she is punished and evicted from the insect society by soldier individuals. Individuals in insect communities are born into their roles, which are not learned but genetic. That an insect community survives has much to do with how each individual performs their tasks exactly in conjunction with the others, where simple patterns of communication go on between each individual.

So you could say that insects’ culture is inherited and adapeted to their situation.

There’s more: a few days earlier I had sat transfixed in front of a ntarure programme on TV about killer whales.

These whales are the most widespread species of mammal after man. They are extremely adaptable. In some areas they eat small fish, in others larger ones. Some live on dolphins, others on seals. Each group of whales has developed their own patterns of behaviour which require complex communication (for hunting in packs) and teaching. Behaviour of one pack of whales in one situation, like the ones who live on seals, is completely different from the ones who, for example, live on small fish. And the behaviour and communication are learned.

The programme described how “playful” the whales are. They experiment. When radar and sonar techniques meant fishing boats could get to the fish before the whales researchers thought whales would starve. But before long, the whales had worked out that fishing boats were travelling toward the big shoals, so they went in that direction and got there before them. They didn’t starve.

So mammalian culture is learnt, developed and passed on to coming generations. Playfulness and experimentation is required for the group to adapt to its circumstances. And communication and learning are key.

So I learned a lot on my holiday – two books in the spirit of PORENA – and that any societal development towards forming human society in the pattern of insects is going against our nature.

And confirmation of my original observation: that it is through the development of our culture that we will survive, not through the promulgation of mechanistic solutions that see humans as insects.

We need to play, experiment, work together, communicate and pass on what we know that is appropriate to the next generation. How I don’t know. Only that we must,

Leonado daVinci imagestreamed!

2008-01-26T14:55:00.000+01:00

I saw an exhibition of Leonardo daVinci’s notebooks. His sketches looked very much like he was imagestreaming. They seem to just come from nowhere. A program on TV shows how they tried to take his drawings and build full scale models. One comment was that he often got things “the wrong way round” or “purposely put mistakes in” to confound people who would steal his secrets. For me, I believe they were more like “right brain copying errors”. When I review the process for Unit of Trust ,I see that I haven’t quite got the whole thing right. Parts of it do not “hang together”.

Thisis not to say that the insights are not deep:, they are. I met a standard methodology, based on what can be done today, using pre-committed resources, maximizing effect through cooperation – the whole thing seems to be extremely powerful. And definitely a good tool for communities who have decided to go down the energy reduction/sustainable development path.

What you need to do is to work hard on verification, and recreate every detail, then test it and try again. Just like they are doing with daVinci's models.

David Wong dicovers a new "sphere" - Monkeysphere

2008-01-13T11:38:00.000+01:00

One of the concepts to come out of the Inventing Process was the ideas of "spheres". A way of seeing groups of systems that interfaced other systems - and to understand that it was these interfaces that should be loosely monitored.

Blogger David Wong has come up with an insightful and - hilarious - angle on Monkeysphere. This is why we cannot handle more than 150 people in our acquaintance network.

The idea is that the brain needs large processing capability to handle all the subtle knowledge and monitoring needed to keep the relationships - and the community we live in - stable.

To put this into the technosphere picture of PORENA - we would need to live in a community of 150 people which had its own biotope and technotope.

Have a look at the earlier article on technosphere here.

Five stresses theory revisited

2007-12-26T00:30:00.000+01:00

Readers may recall that the sustainable society PORENA regards the management of the five stresses as a foundation of sustainable living. These factors, if applied too much or two little for too long were detrimental to the long term functioning of the human organism.

Here they are again
1) Nutrition
2) Shelter
3) Mechanical
4) Societal, communal
5) Toxic

The first one I have some interesting input on. I thought originally that if you got too much food you became overweight - and that was the main stress. It appears researchers on population and sustainability are finding if you get too much food the population grows possibly to outgrow carrying capacity. For example if fossil fuels are used to temporarily increase food production, population numbers will rise naturally. This will raise population above natural carrying capacity. Only a lack of food will bring population growth rate down,

Read more on the website. Panearth.org.

See the film the story of stuff!

2007-12-07T17:15:00.000+01:00

Water Purification

2007-11-28T22:11:00.000+01:00

Tapescript – Drinking water

PREAMBLE

I am in my tenth year of image streaming. In the earliest sessions I was requesting to closely study a settlement with ecological and sustainable living arrangements. I started concentrating on the social organization rather than the technological infrastructure. After having completing a few writing assignments in the water industry I realized that in none of my streams did I understand how good, clean, healthy drinking water was supplied.

This is a bit of an oversight on my part – I got transport, manufacturing, organization of work, energy – most of the essentials. I need to go and look at water.

REQUEST

To visit a place, PORENA or similar, that in the framework of a sustainable way of living, provides good quality drinking water for residents.

On the bench in the departure area. Everything is so familiar I notice many of the lifts, trains and other departure possibilities from earlier streams.

I wander up to a train station. A fast train attracts my attention; it is aerodynamically formed, pointed at both ends and painted in white with red stripes. A large wide door opens, I get in and sit down. The door closes and we are off.

It's a train to Porena. It shakes and rattles as we go over the points, picking its way out over the multitude of tracks that lead from the station. Next it travels over a river bridge and into an old fashioned tunnel.

We start to pick up speed and are quickly into the countryside. I see the unmistakable white walls of Porena and we glide into the tunnel that goes under the city. The train stops at the underground station.

I walk up the stairs and into the corridor of the work section of the central building. The sign Water Board on the door beckons me in. As I enter I see several people busily working at their desks. One looks up and comes over to me.

‘Hi - you are here to visit us?’

‘Yes,’ I say. 'I need to know about drinking water'.

He takes me over to a tap and pours out a glass of water.

‘Taste it!’

It tastes good, and I detect no trace of chlorine.

‘How do you do it?’

I start to pick up key words. Rain - Sand – Collector.

They have a big sand bed, the rain falls on it and it runs through the sand and is collected into one pipe, by gravity. Questions pop up rapidly. How deep is the sand? And how wide is the bed? How many people use it?

The system supplies one million residents. The beds are separated and localized to provide the immediate neighbourhood. They show me a picture of how the sand beds are spread around the city, between the houses.

‘Not surface water?’ I ask.

‘No, rain water,’ they reply.

They collect the rainfall. And as they never pollute it, the rain is always a good source. Furthermore, they explained that theirs was not a universal solution. It depends on climate. Their climate is temperate and enough falls as rain for their needs. They do not seem to collect water off the roofs so much, just that which falls onto the sand bed.

‘Can I see one,’ I ask?

They show me on the map where the sand beds are, between the housing areas. You are not allowed to walk on them, or dirty them in any way. We decide to go and look at the ones in the central area.

We walk out through the back and down some steps. We arrive in the park area, and quite close we see the circular sand bed, about 20m in diameter – 2 or 4 meters of sand deep. I get a rush of disbelief but I shall carry on anyway.

This one is inside the circle in the clean area, the park. It's as high as me – higher almost. A set of steps lead up to the edge so you can look over the bed.

I climb up and look over. I ask if I can touch the sand - they say no but I can look at it. The sand looks fairly clean except for some small plants growing on top of it. They rake these off now and again. This makes it look like a Zen garden – with rake marks in various patterns over the whole surface. I can imagine raking these beds can be a bit of a meditative exercise. The rain water drains through the sand and runs into a collector at its base.

Because it is rainwater there are no organic pollutants in it. Other particles are removed as it drains though the sand....

I ask; ‘How did you get the sand here?

‘We went and got it. It took a lot of work but it was worth it. This is a - build once use forever - system.’

‘How do you clean it?’

‘We’ll tell you later.’

We go back up to the Water Board offices. I get to see a model – there is a drain at the bottom, a plastic tray, like a leaf. It is UV resistant, light and trough shaped. The water drains though to the bottom where it runs into a collecting point, an underground well or storage tank.

It was built cut and cover. They dug out a pit. In the base they built the tank with watertight bricks. Then they laid the collector plates and over that they filled the bed with sand. A pump pumps water up to a tank in the roof. From the tank the water runs under gravity to feed the taps in the household.

They show me a diagram. A pressurized submerged pump is controlled from a pump-house. They also show me how there are two systems: white water for drinking and grey water for other uses.

I comment: ‘This seems fairly clear. What about cleaning?’

‘You just drink it.’

They are saying it's clean there is never any bacteria that can get into it as long as the network is kept clean. I ask about samples and stuff.

'They take regular samples. There is no point of use cleaning.’

All seems very simple. One of my guides is an expert. I ask to borrow his eyes.

I get the feeling of a water reservoir –

I will ask questions first.

Q. How is it taken from the artificial well to the roof tanks?

A. A pump in the pump house pumps it round and keeps it under pressure.

Q. How many of these beds are in use and where are they situated?

A. They are situated in the green area, between the houses around the outer part of PORENA city. They get some roof run-off from the roof it seems out here. In the central park area they just collected rainfall.

I explore the way they clean the top of the sand. The rake needs to be long enough to reach the centre from both sides of the bed wall. Depending on where it is situated and how much run off is diverted through it, one bed can supply 20 to 100 people with 10 to 20 litres a day.

I ask to visit the residential area. We leave the office and start off towards the canal. We walk through rather charming narrow cobbled streets. Between the rows of houses there are growing areas. The housing is quite dense and full of variety.

‘We like variety,’ my guide says.

The placement of the beds has something to do with the train. They locate the sand beds at the furthest points from the train. Two beds are located together, and they do not allow trees to grow around them. They look like swimming pools.

I walk around to inspect these installations. I see they get some water from the roof which is led via a gutter through the air. I ask about the history of these installations. They must have put a lot of effort into making them.

I gather that after work was abolished, sustainable drinking water was among their top priorities. They came up with the sand bed ideas and started to try it out. They came up with the ideas of building the well in waterproof brick.

To ensure no contamination, the beds were located between the stations, and an integral part of radiality thinking. I glean that the sand bed in the centre of the park is a fountain as well – a combined fountain water feature and water purification installation.

My next question: what about cleaning the sand?

The top layer is taken away and it is replenished now and again. Rain brings with it particles and bacteria. This aerial plankton and stuff only gets in the top layer.

‘We rake it off the water board looks after it with volunteers. The sand is taken away for compost. We get the sand from the sand pit – there are plenty of places to get it.’

My guides start winding up: ‘Have you seen everything – any last questions?’

I ask about grey water.

‘Grey water is another story – come back to see how we do that connected to biogas and etc. A whole new ballgame.’

I understand from my hosts that the important thing is to stop polluting the air. Then rainwater becomes the best water solution. If you are going to have a city with people living close together you need on work on creating infrastructure. This is needed from the beginning and planned from the beginning. You need to work out the areas rainfall etc. Once you decide on the mathematics and the planning constraints it’s easy to do.

They welcome me back with other questions. I take my leave back to the station and the train which is already waiting.

Facilitators still trying to do it by yourself?

Clue for you? Facilitation that is needed.

What surprised me

I was surprised by the simplicity in just filtering through sand. I would be thinking they need to disinfect or use UV light or all kinds of industry standard solutions.

I was also surprised I missed it earlier visits – you can really see here you get what you ask for.

The attitude that each area has its own micro climate and its own conditions to work under should not have surprised me. A one size fits all solution does not work when you are re-localising.

Verifications.

Internet search of Water purification methods show that sand beds are common and well known –but not for rain.

http://www.oasisdesign.net/water/treatment/slowsandfilter.htm

A few rainwater purifying experiments turn up on search.

http://www.uoregon.edu/~hof/S01havestingrain/index.html

I can ask industry experts if this could work. Otherwise a simple model could be built

What could you use TODAY and what could be done TODAY?

This exercise has made it painfully obvious that NO EMISSIONS should be permitted into the air that can pollute rainwater. Lobbying for stricter regulations is one thing to do.

Remaining questions.

Grey water purification hangs together with this but how?

888 symbol of union struggle

2007-10-13T21:52:00.000+02:00

Photo from Melbourne, Australia: food for thought as the guide said "we wish!" about this monument. It is to commemorate the union struggle for the 40 hour week. Eight hours work, eight hours leisure, eight hours sleep.

In the sustainable world of PORENA, people in the go-along society probably not even need this.

The other interesting thing about this in the maths is to work out how many hours a year this would make and how many days work a year.

I make it 200 days gives 1600 hours a year and
225 gives 1800.

Anyway, taking the higher figure of 1800 hours of work a year, that means you get 365-225 = 140 hours of weekends and bank holidays
16* 140 = 2,240
plus
225 *8 = 1,800

TOTAL = 4040 hours of lesiure a year

Reflections

Why the go-along society uses less hours is that it REQUIRES LESS WORK as it is focussed on direct provision of the living services needed by citizens, instead of the round about tooing and froing of information and goods and large amounts of materials required to run our present set-up.

Even today, if you want to work for sustainability reckon you could take, say an eigth of that for working in say, a voluntary currency scheme or even in the eco-unit.

But why does it not feel like we have 124% more lesiure time than worktime?

1) we spend a lot of time in cars
2) we spend a lot of time travelling to work
3) we are tired after work and it is harder to appreciate it
4) we never really got into the perspective we have lots of time we have the attitude we don't have enough time and then we feel we don't.
5) another reason I can't think of

Anyway, my conclusion is

Reduce commuting time
Reduce travelling time
Work on the attitude
Get in schemes that produce living services directly without the need for round-about.

Curing addiction to temporary happiness hits

2007-05-25T22:45:00.000+02:00

Preamble: Neil Crofts (http://www.authenticbusiness.co.uk/) does not mix words. He says the modern person is working in indentured slavery and/or is addicted to temporary hits of happiness. “Happiness seems like the end of the rainbow.”

…the happiness we feel is usually fleeting and attached to events or things. In this way we develop and understanding that happiness is external and comes from the outside.
This then leads to a constant search for happiness in external events or things.
In fact like any addiction it turns into the spiral of diminishing returns.

Recently, people have been talking about a world addicted to oil. A lot of our “comfortable” life style comes from using fossil fuels. Some call oil “slave replacements”. And yet we are probably not happier for all the oil generated comfort.

Now, my quest is visit a place that provides an excellent service for people who have, perhapsthough through lack of self confidence, got into addiction to hits of happiness and are feeling theneed to break away from it. This place provides therapies and or treatments and a way to helppeople deal with and get off the addiction.

Tapescript: Journey to the cure part one.
I am in the departure lounge, sitting on a nice redwood polished bench. I look around for a lift. I seem to be recalling many past visits from this point. Behind me is a grey lift, one I haven’t tried. I get a feeling of hospital. A cream coloured lift is next to it.
I hesitate but take the cream one.
“Happiness hits addiction” is written on the sign near the button.
The lift goes up just one flight. It opens onto what looks like a hospital corridor. Beds on either side. Should I be here? I walk along this huge corridor that at last opens onto a shopping mall, lots of busy shops on two floors.
I wonder if you can get rid of this addiction by buying something.
Can you buy your way out? Sick if you can! But I realize it is not true. Shopping gives a temporary relief to this feeling but it never lasts.

If you are really sensitive you can go into a shop and feel all that excitement from all the thingsthere, and how they will make you feel if you own them. But it is all about how you will fell aboutyourself. I mean, why do people not feel good about themselves anyway?

I enter into a waiting room on the right, and go in and ask for an appointment.
“Someone will be available shortly,” says the woman behind the desk.
It looks like a beauty parlor to me here, staff are walking around in white coats. I park my self in the waiting room and ask a person sitting next to me about money and costs.

“That is the last thing you should worry about” came the reply.
“Mr. Wahlter!” Someone invites me to their office.
I meet a man in his 50s, dressed in a dark suit. “How can I help you?”
“The addiction to happiness and all that follows from it. I would like to do something about it. A course of treatments, or a way of dealing with it. Can you tell me what you offer?” I ask.
It seems they offer retreats, physiological tests, treatments etc.
I get a self-test diagnostic on paper.

Tick if the following apply to you
√ Can’t sleep
√ Generally bad self confidence
√ Shopping doesn' t makes you happy or work for you any more
√ Nothing makes you happy
√ Slight depression
√ Stomach problems
√ Generally lack of self-care on basic levels, heath hygiene nutrition and living space
√ Love life affected
√ Working life functioning poorly

I tick yes to all. Looks like I am suffering.
“What can you do for me- to help me get myself together?”
“Life Planning and retreats,” comes the reply.
Life planning is when you review your life.
Then we offer a series of treatments to help you relax and get in touch with yourself and a new eating regime and exercise regimen.
And something to do with water …spa.
They have everything it seems
“Well, we ARE a centre of well-being,” comes the reply and I link back to earlier quests.
I wonder; ”is there any special treatment just for the addiction like a step program or something?”
“We can’t do a step program. Human beings are so delicate and deep and sensitive, so in need of good experience. They are such incredible creatures; multi-faceted and complex emotionally. You cannot just apply any one solution.”
I ask the guy about his job.
“My job is to front the people who come here and help them make choices about the way forward.”
And about me?
“You are obviously suffering from the effects of happiness addiction - you can’t buy your way out. “
I go into borrowed genius mode. Looking through his eyes I see it is a clinic; they have everything- fitness and personal trainers.
I see the possibility for a doctor’s consultation.
Leaving the borrowed genius I ask for an appointment. A doctor is available immediately. I enter the examination room lie on the examination table. He connects a machine up to me to measure stress levels. Alpha and beta wave patterns can show extreme signs of stress, which appear when the body goes too far into addiction and stays outside the comfort zone.
far Borrowing his genius I see the comfort zone concept includes all the factors mentioned before, your home, food exercise, relationships, work, etc. There is a zone to get into. When you get too out of the zone it gets you showing effects.

“You are showing effects,” he says.
“You have to get yourself back into the zone. Life planning is one way, an exercise regime is part of that. Life planning is to get you into the zone. It’s about the addiction. When you get outsidethe zone it is as if you are stuck outside the fence and cannot get back in.”

Humans I see posters on the wall explaining how it works. Addiction is in fact the result of a naturalreaction that some how goes too far .. or you go “outside the zone”. You should be bounced back into the zone when you come to the edge. It’s natural you bounce back into the comfort zone.are steered by the need for strong experience and feelings. But if you get outside thezone you can get stuck outside and can’t get back. You have to pull yourself back consciously.You have to learn to pull yourself back. And it needs a lot of effort.

The life planning exercises help you identify the boundaries of the comfort zones to createcomfort. I see that comfort zones are not really about comfort as we might see it. These zones are aboutremaining within levels of stress. Maybe I need another term for it.
If you are in the comfort zone you will still feel a thirst inside to be really happy. The need to be really happy is there and it is a good need as it will guide you onto your next steps ofdevelopment. You should feel it. But not let it force you outside the zone.

If you are in the comfort zone you can take the next step. If your life is always outside the comfort zone you do not have the opportunity as long as you are being knocked around like a ping pong ball in the wrong place.
Their suggestion is to go on a life planning course, organize one and come back.
As I take my leave he tells me to work on my weight.
I say goodbye to the man on the desk. And thank him for his help.
I take the brochure for life planning. I’ll come back and go on a course.
A weekend full of treatment and exercises to get you going.
End Tapescript 1 Journey to the cure.

Verifications
Alpha and Beta waves probably referred to EEG waves. According to the Web, Alpha are more like relaxed. Aware and creative waves, Beta are associated with doing things. A stressed person shows reduction in Alpha waves.
Alcoholics have successfully been treated with biofeedback where they learned to increase their Alpha waves, so the link between stress and addiction and brain waves seems viable.
An article in Newsweek talks about the latest research. Addicts shown pictures of people, for example taking cocaine show stimulation of the frontal parts of the brain. This stimulation is not demonstrated when they look at people in other activities. The theory is then that addiction is partly at least a kind of learnt reflex. Where the mind anticipates pleasure.

Other experiments point to how alcoholics who were given a new drug to suppress this reaction in the brain stopped their addiction, even being able to drink moderately – something no other treatment has been able to demonstrate.
Perhaps the most surprising result was that the alcoholics also starting eating less and stopped smoking. So maybe there is a drug to bring the whole of western civilization out of its addictive state.
People talk about mid life crises. Maybe that is when the addiction stops working as you require more and more “hits.”
Someone says that Feng Shui is about the same thing. I’ll look it up.
End of verifications for The Cure.
*************
Tapescript 2 search for the cure for happiness addiction

Yesterday I wrote up the notes above for the first trip. There might be something there or not. My task today is to experience how life planning helps individuals address the problems of living a life affected by addiction to short hits of happiness.

I sit on the redwood bench and immediately see the facilitator saying “I have had enough of you!”
He turns to walk away.

I run after him saying; “don’t get upset, I need you!”

“You need me like a hole in your head!” he replies.

I run after and ask what he is trying to tell me. “You run and have fun but you need to deal with community action it needs to be spread and needs more work. What you are doing is not going to lead anywhere.”

Now I feel really enthusiastic about the quest – not.

A woman comes up and says “Are you ready for your treatment?”

“Err sure,” I say.
Follow me.
She goes over to the grey lift and I follow. She is rather “nurse-like” in her manner and dress.

Anyway “OK,” nylon smock says, “I am going to take you to the place, just follow me”.

We walk into quite a nice place, like a Japanese bath house, we pass a swimming pool, where people are relaxing.

She shows me a chalet; “this is your room. Get undressed and put a robe on with swimming trunks underneath.”

It’s a normal hotel room, quite pleasant, some green tea available. A nice and peaceful place. A bell sounds, we are all meant to go into a little meeting room. NO furniture, just a polished wooden floor. We sit down in a circle. Another bell sounds. The vibrations of these bells seem important for getting us in the right mood.

The bell goes off - bong bong bong-.

We sit in a circle, the leader speaks;”we are all here to address life planning”.

“Any questions or anyone want to share anything?”

“No no no “, everyone mutters in low voiced.

So, what we are going to do uses a large circle drawn on the floor of the room. This is our task: the segments of the circle represent different aspects of the lives we lead. While the bell is sounding we have to walk around the different sections of the circle. As we walk around we have to feel. Fell which aspects of our lives tense us, or make us feel good or just how we feel. And we have to feel how much of our energy we give daily to that aspect. High, medium or low.

I think we can stand in the circle or out of the circle depending on the strength of the feeling.

I go to work: love life, eating, free time, exercise, self image, level of control, personal development, relationship family/kids,

I walk round feeling like I would be at a low level with relationships with family, low with work but feel stressed, uncomfortable with money, love life - low energy but comfortable.

Personal development low and uncomfortable, living uncomfortable, use of living space, low energy.

I could go round many times. As I go round I get more and more understanding how I feel about that area. You can walk inwards and outwards to see how you feel about the levels of energy you are giving to these different areas.

Everyone walks around the room.

We sit down. We sit quiet for a few moments to let the experience catch up on us. We felt a lot during the exercise; it was confrontational – but necessary. You have to face all of this. These feelings act as a compass and guide.

I realize you can make up your own circle categories - these here are just a start. The next stage is to get a bit of paper with the circle on it and you put in the sections that are valid to you. You can even divide the circle section up into sub sections.

In the inner circle you put a dot to show level of discomfort. And the outer circle shows if you have a high or low level of activity in it.

We sit round again in a circle and have the diagram in front of us.

“What do we do now - any ideas?” The leader asks.
“Obviously you should address the areas of discomfort – and if you have too many you could be in trouble.”

“Yes!”

Areas of discomfort are both ones where we are putting in a lot of energy and feeling stressed, or one where we are putting in little energy and feeling stressed.

But how would you address them?

I ask: “If I give low how do I know it is actually low? I could think I am low but I am high compared to the average Joe. How do I evaluate what does that means to me?”

The leader explains that I need to understand what I need to do to get into the comfort zone.
The best way is to talk to some one who knows about this particular area.

We are now invited to break up into groups to get expert help for the areas.

Home space planning is what I choose.

Who is helping out with that? We form groups as more than one chose that area.

The leader has a file, containing what is comfortable practice, high and low. And you have to work out what you do and don’t do compared to normal practice, best practice and mistakes to avoid. You work out where you are missing out.

He reads out what is regarded as best practice:
• A place for everything and everything in its place
• Clean regularly
• Tidy as you go

So I do not really do any of those. But I have to. You have to make a conscious effort to do it - and the longer you leave it the worse it gets. YOU HAVE TO if you want to get yourself back to stability and life enjoyment.

I realize that this has to do with the earlier impression about going over natural limits. If you do, then it is only conscious effort that will bring you over that line again.

You have to prioritize to get yourself back. But first you have to understand the negative effects - how they make you feel and affect your life.

We get given a new worksheet. We list negative effect, and priorities for reducing them.
Then we make a plan for each of the best practices we decide to implement.

I now have a plan.

That was that little session. We get a binder to take with us, with more notes, and to put our worksheets in.

We return to the group. I got some sort of insight from this exercise - a place for everything and a time for everything and everything in its time.

The next exercise is to set the day up. You have to do that properly too.

We are now asked to walk through the day and do the same exercise with the day.

Another circle now, the 24 hr clock.

Sections are marked out for the night, morning and breakfast and the lunch and the afternoon etc. I am asked to reflect on the different energy levels and what we do and how we do it.

YOU have to set YOUR day up. I walk through mine seeing it is a bit of a mess.

I do not settle down in the evening and that ruins the next day.

We walk through the day and back, using the same approach as before.
Where am I stressed?
Where do I put most/least energy?

The evening is my priority. We are reminded we should also look at what we are good at. At least I get things done, I see. Even if the execution is not so organized.

Addiction upsets your life as you and not doing in your time what you CAN do. Being satisfied with what you have got though is also important. If you have got a poor self image you are always tying to do more than you can.

So some people need to reduce their activity or stress for activity, and review and realign their standards to what is reasonable.

Actually it seems like a Japanese is leading this group. I might be able to borrow his genius – but it is not quite time for that. I am still walking up and down my day.

We sit down around the day circle.

The leader asks us what we can do about stressed parts of the day.
There are little theories about calming down. Generally coming down to another level and you’ve got music, candle light smells, aroma therapy - all that sort of thing.

I shall need a time to do that. OK - if my space organization is up the spout maybe my day rhythm is also up the spout. The day rhythm does not compare to my discomfort levels.

I have a suggestion about how to handle the day

Match day and levels to see they get the attention they need.

Before I can take the suggestion further we break for lunch. And for relaxation in the hot bath.

After lunch we will reconvene and carry on.

End of Journey to the Cure 2 tapescript.

***********************************
Tapescript three
PREAMBLE
The front lobes of an addict’s brain shows a high level of stimulation while looking at a picture of or thinking of the situation (substance, use of substance or circumstances) in which they experience the “high” compared to looking at something they are not addicted to, according to Newsweek. For example, cocaine addicts show frontal lob stimulation just looking at someone snorting coke. It is as if the brain gets wired to expect the buzz. So addiction is in the brain in part at least. Chemical addiction has something to do with that and how the brain is working.

I have been reading up on addiction - how humans are built for pleasure and in some environments that can get us into trouble. The radar system we have inbuilt does not always guide us right, especially in the modern context.

Just been taking Bach drops against exhaustion: oak and pine for sense of guilt. Guilt drives addiction I am sure, this started to come clear during the earlier sessions.

This is the third image stream. First I had some tests and booked into a life planning. The second was to experience a life planning sessions.

It is not about happiness it is about creating a comfort level - reducing stress and addictive behaviour - to be able to pursue happiness. What came out of the previous sessions for me was the need to take control of the day. It was how you can apply elements of best practice learnt from others.

Back on the bench in the departure lounge my nurse is waiting for me. “Lunch break’s over.”

I have missed something it looks like.

“Can you get me in?” I plead.

Following her to the grey lift it seems as if she is angry with me for missing a session orsomething. She turns and says, “continuity is important”.

The lift opens onto a hospital corridor I follow her through the shopping mall and into the centre. My room is still there. She gets me into a group’s afternoon session.

The room reminds me of a Yasugari room. There is a glass object made up of many vertical tubes. I get the idea you hit it and it will stimulate Alpha waves and relaxation.

The group appears, I put my robe on.

You are meant to go to lunch with the group. Being in the group helps you.

To surprise myself (prepare for answers) I shut my eyes. When I open them I shall be prepared for the course.

A Japanese guy is running the whole thing; everyone is sitting around in the circle.

Silence and contemplative atmosphere is important. I look at the others kneeling down. Quiet.

You need your quiet time every day.

To tackle addiction. You can’t always be chasing the next thing. Quietness is one of the tools to handle addiction.

Quieting the mind and stilling the body, something about Alpha waves. That is what this session is about.

End of session.

***********************************

Tapescript: The workbook.

Looking for a cure for addiction to short term hits of happiness. An addiction-fostering environment means that there is no “natural” way for you to handle the addiction once you have started to exhibit additive behaviour. You simply have to consciously bring yourself out of it.

In this series of Imagestreams I am in a program of treatments.

In the departure hall the leaves of the rubber plant appear behind my bench in the waiting area.

I go to the grey lift, the nurse catches me up. “Wait for me”

Getting in the lift I press “3” I don’t know why.

As the lift ascends I check her uniform out – fairly standard.

“You are nearly finished with the sessions,” she says.

The lift opens and she takes me to my room where I get changed. I walk past the swimming pool and enter the room where the others were before. We wait for the leader. She takes her leave.

In the corner stands the Alpha wave sculpture, filled with water to a certain point. I wonder what you strike it with. Metal?

I pick up a metal hammer and give it the lightest tap - and get a chunky sound.

The guy enters saying he’ll show us the sculpture later and asks us to sit in the ring.

“Have you been practicing finding a quiet time? The quietness is your anchor in the story of this modern life,” he says.

Adrenaline exhaustion is what I have probably; I am living close to burning myself out.

He asks: “What shall we do now do you think?”

“We need to consciously work out how to get ourselves back- how we can pull ourselves away from the addiction side of the line,” I venture.

“Yes!” He says. “Now you know what best practice is, and you know what worst practice is as you are doing it so you need to draw the line between them.”

Everyone is in a ring around the circle on the floor.

When then is the formula?

He explains: “When that happens then I do this…that is drawing the line. That is the line you need to focus on to bring you back.”

We break up into groups I go into the handling personal living space group, which is my chosen problem area.

When I pick something up and don’t have a place to put it what do I do then?

I put it in a place …the place for things with no place.

Then they will pile up

When they Pile up THEN I will organize a place for them.

The others have a go.

“WHEN my house looks dirty THEN I will immediately decide a time when I will do the cleaning.”

“When I see something lying around THEN I will go and put it back immediately.”

(“I’ll be at it all day,” I object in my thoughts but then realize if I did this regularly I would not be at it all day)

“Is it this easy?” I ask.

“Yes, if the situation is draining your energy.”

Questions?

“How long do you do it for?”
“All the time till it becomes automatic.”

Then you do it for the other areas as well.

You start with what is your situation..

A workbook is good, to have everything available and to draw the sections out and your priorities.

In the zone you will feel what you want to do and naturally get back.

The thing in the corner does not work - it is probably just a joke I think.

“If you run your finger round the rim you will get a sound. It is meant to stimulate alpha waves.” The leader says.

I think I understand, I must fill my form in for the when then bottom line. What it is and how it makes you feel. For each area, describe the situation - how bad does it make you feel, how do you want to fell. What is best practice and what is your strategy application of best practice. And then what are you going to do to keep yourself in the zone. And then everything will happen naturally. Your deeper desires will come to you and you will get the chance to adjust more naturally. With quiet time you will attune yourself more to yourself.

Look at your file everyday to keep yourself on track everyday.

To keep inspired to keep on track put a letter to yourself in the front of the file.

Follow up this treatment to write

• Why you care what your situation was
• How you were feeling
• What you found out
• What you decided to do about it, what you hope for so you can go back and see where you came from and see your own progress.
• What you decided
• Your request to yourself to help keep you on track.

The final part is the planning. Then there are other treatments you can do to help with relaxation, the physical side, the physical regime of exercise to help you.

You can go now on your way and good luck.

I ask the nurse if that is it, what I do next. She thinks I should do the treatment. Construct the workbook for myself and go through it. Then maybe use that to work out what is best for what I should do.

I thank everyone and return back to the exit hearing the facilitator say he needs me to keep to program development up and not let it slide.

“We have given you the answer how to sell it, you have to try.”
“OK,” I say.

Keep coming with the questions,.

Concern for the safety of correspondent Alan Johnston who was abducted in Gaza on 12 March.

2007-05-12T22:52:00.000+02:00

How to debrief Imagestreams

2007-05-03T00:05:00.000+02:00

I have found debriefing to be extremely valuable. Imagestreaming produces such a rich flow of insights and ideas that things continue to fall into place sometimes years after an imagestream. These notes are my suggestions based on experience. Take what works for you and leave the rest. I encourage everyone to work out their own methodology as they go along. And then break it – you don’t want to get into a rut!

It is good to keep an archive of your imagestreams. I recommend after trying several methods, that you always record your streams, even if you do them with a live partner. The best format is a digital voice recorder, and transfer them over to your computer. Always back-up on CD regularly.

Type up the notes, adding as much as you remember to make the meaning clear. A good idea is to succinctly write down the

· background to why you are doing just this imagestream

· purpose and goal

One reason for doing this framing is that you always get what you ask for. In your attempt to formulate your quest you may ask inadvertently for things that you are not exactly after. This is especially true of restrictions. Say you want to go to a place that has solved a certain problem, if you did not specify that the place should have the same societal structure as the one we are living in you may find they have something completely different. If you were looking for a solution that will work in your context you should specify that.

I then like to clean the notes up and publish them on my website. This is not necessary, but the discipline of writing for others forces you to take their standpoint and be clearer in your communication. In this context we extend the idea of “live listener” to a much wider audience.

Keep both the notes and the sound recording. Sometimes I need to read the notes a few times to "get" what the insight is. Re-reading tapescripts often raises questions of what exactly was going on during the session. You can get insights you do not manage to describe – or they come as fleeting impressions. You can always go back to the tapescript to help re-capture the moment. (You can always go back and do a new imagestream as well.)

But that it just the beginning.

If you are just going to imagestream and not interact with the world in new ways, you are missing out on what imagestreaming can give you. However, the gap between insight and action is often very wide. You will need to take small steps towards implementation.

Here is my list of questions I ask myself after having done the first typing up. It is good practice to ask these methodically, and keep them in your notebook for future
reference.

1) List everything that surprised you.
2) Draw diagrams and write descriptions of inventions you found.
3) Try to sketch "realia" e.g. information posters, signs,
powerpoints - make models maybe. I have never tried it with children but I would love to teach imagestreaming, then do a beachhead session and then point them to craft materials to get them to sketch and make models of their inventions.
4) List what is to be verified and go do it. Internet works just fine. Do not just use search engines, there are encyclopedias like Wikipedia and Encyclopedia of the Earth.
5) What could you use TODAY and what could be done TODAY? This is a fantastic way to start bringing insights into practice. You can often find small actions that are fun and easy to do. My experience is that insights from imagestreams often work surprisingly well.
6) What questions remain- List these as targets for future image streams.
7) Notes about the methodology itself - if I can improve it for
next time, what I learned.

9) Other ways to describe the insights: write an article from the future, a research paper, a power point presentation, do a documentary or build a model.
8) Other musings, sidebands etc.

Remember too that the answer you get is right and WILL work in the appropriate context. However, you may not understand WHY it is right. To convince others you will need to approach the insight again, this time as a salesman learning a new product to sell. So don’t be surprised if you explain your insight and get funny looks, and not be able to answer people’s objections. Listen to them and address them. They will help you sell your idea later on.

My last imagestream experiment was to find a way to use conventional
money to promote sustainable development. It became "units of trust"

http://porena.blogspot.com/2006/12/units-of-trust.html

debriefing imagestreams

2007-03-19T08:25:00.001+01:00

I have found debriefing to be extremely valuable. And insights continue to fall into place sometimes years after an imagestream.

I always like to tape the session on my digital recorder (mp3 player) and then type up the notes.

I then like to clean the notes up and publish on my website.

Sometimes I need to read them a few times to “get” what the insight is.

But that it just the beginning.

Here is my list of questions I ask myself. And it is good practice to ask these methodically, and keep them in your notebook for future reference.

1) List everything that surprised you

2) Draw diagrams and write descriptions of inventions you found

3) Try to sketch “realia” e.g. information posters, signs, powerpoints – make models maybe

4) List what is to be verified and go do it.

5) What could you use TODAY

6) What questions remain

7) Notes about the methodology itself – if I can improve it for next time, what I learned.

8) Other musings, sidebands etc.

My last imagestream experiment was to find a way to use conventional money to promote sustainable development. It became “units of trust”.

Our inappropriate culture

2007-03-17T18:55:00.000+01:00

There is a whole debate about individualism. About how we give up parts of ourselves to fit in to the group.

See Dave Pollards Blog

This thing about adapting to the group is of course about survival - the group needs to function as a whole to survive. The best example in the mammal world are killer whales. they have developed "cultures" to be able to live where they do eg some living off seals, some eating small fishes, some hunting tuna. In these cases - playfulness adn experimentation, communication and group learning are all at the base of this culture development. so you could say that the difference, the play, the experimentation is important to learn new things - like when whales learned to follow fishing boats (equipped with sonar and after their food) and get there first. On the other hand learnign to act like a group is essential for survival.

In Brave new world and Brave new world revisited Aldous Huxley says the development of man moving to cities, being surrounded by a vast interconnecting system of technical infrastructure, was driving a development, albeit coming from the good purpose of ORDER, to turn people into insects Insects all act in exactly the same way and if they do not they get killed by the others. He sees civilisation as a giant termite stack of unhappy people.

So I agree with you Dave, it IS an important subject - it is not oil peaking or community gardens that will see manking through the next decade but development of a culture appropriate to

the earth we live on
our bodies in terms of organisms
the reason we are here

Think out of the box my fanny

2007-01-25T11:46:00.000+01:00

I saw this advert ”think outside of the box”. This company were selling a car.
As a champion of sustainability my first reaction was ”If that is the best they can do when they think out of the box – come up with a CAR- god help us all” and ”If that is what they want consumers to do, if thinking out of the box is buying a CAR there really is no hope for this oil addicted society”

Think outside of the box – buy a CAR – Jesus - I am on the wrong planet.

O yeah and while I’m railing off – SAABs adverts in Stockholm ”If Saab had built this escalator is would do 200 km/hr. ” Jesus H Christ that would mean very few could afford it, it would kill quite a few a year and be responsible for a large amount of global warming. And the ad was place by the stairs.

Where is sustainable planet thinking? Is this a last desperate attempt by the oil based industries to get us to part with our money so they can carry on their conservative ways?

See Garden_Girl on Google video

2006-12-25T15:19:00.000+01:00


A combination of well-kown technologies with a recent invention of sustainable, urban self sufficiency with permaculture. These videos are highly instructive and inspiring. Go garden Girl!

UNITS OF TRUST

2006-12-07T22:41:00.000+01:00

UNIT OF TRUST: SECTION #1 THE EXHIBITION
In this imagestream I wish to address the dichotomy between industrial thinking and sustainable thinking. Many have been brought up in the industrialized world and find it hard to imagine alternatives. And yet alternatives are needed; industrialization cannot go on forever. In industrialized thinking you are a worker, you own a house maybe, shares or funds. You are a citizen and can vote. To maintain your lifestyle you have to consume.

If someone wanted to use their money to invest in an organization or opportunity that would give them a sustainable return on investment what would be available to them?

I imagine this particular investment would be in real assets, generate energy, housing and food or transport in a sustainable way. Possibly, their value increases over time compared to fossil fuel powered alternatives or your investment would give a dividend in the form of these services.

Anyway, investing in these organizations, instruments would give you food, housing or transport (energy) as well as an asset that increased in value over time.

After investigating possibilities through imagestreaming I would like to make a proposal to several organizations about cooperation with AVBP to create eco-units.

THE QUEST is to visit a place where these kinds of opportunities, instruments and schemes are used successfully to offer individuals, though individual investment, the opportunity to sustainably generate their living standards and constitute an investment for their kids and the future. These investments themselves have monetary value that should increase over time.

TAPESCRIPT I am in the arrival hall, looking for a lift. I’m attracted to a dark red exhibition stand. A exhibition booth. A sign over the entrance says “Investing in the Future”.

I go in, a man is standing at a table, he hands me a brochure.

“Are you interested in investing in the future?” he asks.
“I certainly am” I say. He chuckles a bit, which makes me feel uneasy.

The brochure contains pictures of wind power, water power etc. He invites me to proceed further into the stand. A few people are milling around with drinks and snacks. Screens are showing pictures of sustainable ventures.

I get a cheese on a stick to nibble and a glass of non-alcoholic cider.
It’s all very informal - it seems the idea is to entice passers-by into the stand.
Investment in the future – a dvd playing talks about oil, its depletion and the effects on everyone’s economy, about population pressure on the planet etc.

… However, there IS a way using renewable solutions, but we must construct them now while there is still time, for your children’s sake. Before it is too late
…We already have this place going and more examples. You are being invited to join, if you like.

I feel a sense of mistrust …maybe it’s too good to be true ….or the way the guy laughed. An oxymoron to invest in the future isn’t it – what about now?

Still, it seems to be well grounded. A paper talks about number of working hours, your work, how you use your time, what you can get from this use of time, with many tables and graphs. In fact, it looks rather like an investment brief.

I browse though it, looking at graphs of future price of oil contra renewables. ( I know from experience that trying to read documents in an image stream is rather difficult so I concentrate on the pictures) Another shows the number of hours you have to work to get your daily bread and the role oil plays in that. The higher oil prices rise, the less you can buy with your hour. And then it asks you what sort of life you want, and looks at the available choices.

I suppose this is a chance to browse the material and look at the videos showing places already functioning along these lines.

You can just simply sign up. I look at a paper, which says you can buy a unit or a number of units. The accompanying application form asks for your name, address and other details, and your signed request to purchase. That is all you need to get in the system.

I wonder what I would do with my unit when I have purchased it. Someone takes me aside to explain.

“What will I get for my money?” I ask.
“You become a unit holder, sir. The stands in the next part of the exhibition explain what unit holders get back from their investment.”

This stand extends into a larger, white exhibition space behind the red one. I take the investment brief and the form and move on. Each exhibitor has a table and exhibition space behind them, arranged around the outside and in the centre of the area.

People are milling around handing out brochures for various things.

At the first table someone is planning an eco unit. Depending on the number of units you have invested you can do different things in the eco unit. (Editor’s note see link to explain what an eco-unit is – an ecological village self sufficient in food.) You buy a unit for a certain amount of money. From there on there is no counting in money. You can always compare to monetary value, though. In this case, to put myself in the queue to live on an eco-unit I have to have a certain number of units saved.

This queue is not yet full, they are building a total of 80 houses. One of these trust units would give me a certain number of points which I could redeem for a share in their excess food produce for example. However, it is not enough to have purchased a trust unit. I must have it placed with this organization.

Depending on how many units I place, I get points back which I can redeem against holiday, produce and way in to buy and own a house on the eco-unit. I could also save points to contribute towards retiring to an eco-unit.

The next one is a sailing boat, a big beautiful boat. To join the scheme you place one unit with this organization. Its main purpose is to carry freight sustainably. This scheme is already going- The boat is long, wind powered, and if you invest in it you can join the crew. You can have a holiday on her or help out for good, physical, fun, If you crew you get points. These can be redeemed for produce from other organizations. A video is showing the boat … come on board… it’s beautiful … wonderful investment … just have a holiday … travel …crew .. we all need boats.

Continuing though the exhibition I am drawn to a table behind me about growing food.
A person on the stand explains the scheme provides a system for growing vegetables close to your home. Place in this scheme and you get a whole kit of pots and stuff.

If you invest in this scheme you get utilitas – that is to say, you do not own the equipment but you get the right to use it. (I have difficulty snapping up the phrase is it utitas or ulitas?) If you invest in the organisation you get the opportunity to enjoy some of the capital.

Over the other side of the hall, a wind farm catches my attention. You place your unit in the wind farm and get the right to have a wind turbine. You do not own the turbine but you have a right to use it.

I am picking up a principle here that seems to apply throughout the examples I have seen so far– one of not actually owning anything but having a right to use things.

In this case with the wind turbines, I will earn points by putting energy back to the grid. They install the machine in your house, on your property. The energy goes back to the grid for points.

The system is simple: a wind turbine and solar panels on your roof produce electricity. The electricity you do not use feeds into the grid to earn you points.

I start to grasp the significance of the whole unit trust set-up. One unit costs about 10,000 SEK (say 900 Euros). That is quite a bit of money, but many pay that for a TV so it is affordable. It is not as if you pay once and the money is gone. This is a very secure way of investing. Because if you remove your unit from the organization then they remove the things from your house, but you can still place the unit elsewhere.

That brings me to muse about the food bit, how home growing works. I notice a stand presenting “Local Food Schemes” and walk over to it.

The stand looks like a market stall and demonstrates how the points system works across local organizations. If you invest in a Local Food Scheme, as a grower, you can sell your produce for points in the market. If a Local Food Scheme is effective and produces a lot of food, many points will accumulate. These can be swapped with the Local Housing Scheme. I start to see that although the Unit Trust organization is national, it is the local network of organizations that must “join up the dots”.

A Local Housing Scheme (LHS) can buy an apartment block, and instead of paying rent you redeem points. The reason for this is, in the future you may not have the money to pay rent or energy bills.

Or if you all own flats in an apartment block you can place units in the LHS and they will help to convert the block to low energy and take over everyday running, maintenance and upgrades.

Some advisors are walking around, I ask one:

“So can I check I have this right? I buy units, and then I have to choose where I place them. Placing my units gives me back sustainable goods and services.”

“That is correct,” she replies.

“But I never ever loose my unit. I can take it out and put it in another one?”

She smiles: ¨Where you place units depends on your state of life. You can buy units with points or use the points for consumption.”

I ask about tax but she thinks I should come back another time for that one.

She adds: “It is the unit trust (as she calls it), this organization, that puts on these events.”

“So you market yourselves this way in these exhibitions?”

She explains that they put on these exhibitions and market via traditional channels. They talk to existing organizations, cooperatives or companies and explain the benefits to them of joining. They these organisations join the scheme by purchasing units in the unit trust.

I ask for an idea of how my organization would go about joining.

She explains: “You get a number of points related to the number of people who want to invest in you. The unit trust does not invest in your company. Your organization gets a chance to meet a number of investors via us. You invest in us, and keep your unit placed with us.
Our role then is one of matchmaker.”

She explains that organizations come away from an exhibition with a local contact person, address to the website, and already an idea of how to place their unit.
I thank her and leave.

REFLECTIONS UNIT OF TRUST SECTION #1 THE EXHIBITION

Review
Things that surprised me
• The simplicity of structure of the funds
• The need for marketing – to have a good story to tell individuals about how peak oil will affect them and what they can do about it.

APPLICATIONS UNIT OF TRUST SECTION #1 THE EXHIBITION
Things I could use immediately
• Marketing – the argument for sustainable investing is rather clear and compelling.
• DVD films and brochures could work well.
• Important that working examples really exist.

VERIFICATIONS UNIT OF TRUST SECTION #1 THE EXHIBITION

Things to verify
UTILITAS There must be a concept of Utilitas somewhere. It sounds like Latin. Maybe something to do with law.
UNIT TRUST I have heard this before, sounds like something like a British building society.

SIDEBANDS UNIT OF TRUST SECTION #1 THE EXHIBITION

Sidebands
The “story” – how to explain the investment potential of renewables. The points counting I suspect I have a kind of economics going on here, but based on what people need rather than money or other units. Things that might make up the system include number of hours in a year as working hours, food requirements, shelter and security.
QUESTIONS UNIT OF TRUST SECTION #1 THE EXHIBITION

Further questions
• How an organization can use the unit placements
• Taxation
• Legal structure
• Relationship to legal tender – if I want to sell units
• Understanding the arguments deeper – for example number of hours worked to be able to purchase living accommodation
• Point counting administration
•
RESEARCH RESULTS UNIT OF TRUST SECTION #1 THE EXHIBITION

Research

Utilitas.
From Wikipeadia: In economics, utility is a measure of the happiness or satisfaction gained consuming goods and services.

util (plural utils)
1. (economics) a hypothetical unit measuring satisfaction
Dominum utile is the right to use something, often used in connection with feudal law in which the King held dominum directum over the land and granted this right to the lords or vassals.

I found an expression similar called USUFRUCT - The right of enjoying a thing, the property of which is vested in another, and to draw from the same all the profit, utility and advantage which it may produce, provided it be without altering the substance of the thing.

The obligation of not altering the substance of the thing, however, takes place only in the case of a complete usufruct.

Usufructs are of two kinds; perfect and imperfect. Perfect usufruct, which is of things which the usufructuary can enjoy without altering their substance, though their substance may be diminished or deteriorated naturally by time or by the use to which they are applied; as a house, a piece of land, animals, furniture and other movable effects. Imperfect or quasi usufruct, which is of things which would be useless to the usufructuary if be did not consume and expend them, or change the substance of them, as money, grain, liquors.
USUFRUCTUARY - One who has the right and enjoyment of an usufruct.

The duties of the usufructuary are, 1. To make an inventory of the things subject to the usu-fruct, in the presence of those having an interest in them. 2. To give secur-ity for their restitution; when the usufruct shall be at an end. 3. To take good care of the things subject to the usufruct. 4. To pay all taxes, and claims which arise while the thing is in his possession, as a ground-rent. 5. To keep the thing in repair at his own expense.

From Wikipedia

A unit trust is form of collective investment constituted under a trust deed.
Found in the UK, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand and British Isles offshore jurisdictions, unit trusts offer access to wide range of securities for all types of investors.
Unit trusts are open-ended investments; therefore the underlying value of the assets is always directly represented by the total number of units issued multiplied by the unit price. Each fund has a specified investment objective to determine the management aims and limitations.

UNIT OF TRUST SECTION #2 MEETING THE MANAGEMENT

PREAMBLE .
The background to these sessions is my interest in investing in sustainability. In earlier sessions I visited one place that has been successful using a system called Unit Trusts. These can be placed in organizations providing for a standard of living in a sustainable way.
By sustainable investment, I mean putting money into activities and organizations that create and operate infrastructure that produces living standard. After construction they should require very little input of fossil fuel.

Last time, I met the system and the scheme in an introduction exhibition stand and acquainted myself with the trust organization and the organizations it supported.

Questions raised from that include:
How is an organization that has something to offer supported by the Unit trust scheme?

THE QUEST: To revisit the place to find out more about how an organization with a sustainable concept can be supported by the fund.

TAPESCRIPT On a bench in the departure lounge, I watch people dropping into the stand. A young man in a grey suit comes out and offers to tell me more.
I accept and follow him out of the waiting area up an escalator to their offices in a skyscraper similar to the LETS building in an earlier stream.

The lift takes us to the fourth floor.
He shows me into a rather ornate wood paneled conference room,
He offers me a mineral water.

I explain I have an organisation that fits their profile but I need the finance, could he tell me what the trust provides?

One main activity is the yearly marketing system, where they go out and raise money by selling units. This increases the total number of units. Directly after this activity they have a higher proportion of unplaced units.

Unplaced units create a demand for sustainable products and services. Every unit that is purchased removes demand from counter sustainable operations and
switches to sustainable investment.

The unit trust organizes these exhibitions and different kinds of activities which participating organizations get the right to use . That is, they can attend as exhibitors.

Interested organizations can sign up on the trust's website.
Some rules:
• You must be a registered company or cooperative.
• Energy intensive organisations are not allowed.

He also explains you must make your own profile of what you are offering.
I see graphs with investment, maintenance costs etc. and professionally written descriptive texts.

So how do I learn all that?

“Maybe I should get your help.” I ask
“Once you have placed with us. you can go on courses,“ he replies.
I feel anxious about understanding the point system too, which does not seem accessible.
“It is part of the course.“ he reassures me,

How can you start up with the same number of units you end up with? It is as if the money is used and not used. Or are there systems with points. 10,000 points or 1000 points?

(I feel agitated trying to get everything at the same time)
I calm down and ask;“Perhaps you could explain to me the benefits of joining the trust scheme.“
His reply contains two unarguable essentials.
1) Capital
2) Customers

The scheme plugs entrepreneurs into the system and it only requires one unit to get going.

Furthermore, if it does not work out I can move the unit over to the sustainable development section.

I remark.: “It seems like a good idea. I get my marketing done, get my customers and get my capital.“

“Exactly! You have to provide the activities and set the infrastructure and organization up. Along these lines.“

I just commit to a unit and at any time I can take it back.
About the prices of units; Nominal value is 10,000 Swedish crowns.

This can go up and down. depending on the economic climate in general.
But that is not to do with what you get from you investment. Everything is relative to units and points. Even if the value of units go down, they still generate the same services. This is essentially how the scheme decouples production of living standard from economic climate.
If you buy a house and house prices go up then you can get more for your house. then you have made money. If you sell your unit placed in housing when prices have fallen then you will get less for it. But through the rise and fall of the economy you get the same housing service.

“So how do you work the unit price out?”
“We make an aggregate that follows the consumer price index “

The cost of units goes up and down with the economy.*
“Can I buy more units? “ I ask.

More units give more exposure in more local areas.

One unit is enough to get a small organisation started.

I wonder: “Can a company earn points?“

“Yes if it does activities that earn points with other companies in the scheme. Otherwise they can’t.“

“It seems organizations can take this at different speeds. Once I have placed a unit with the trust I can go on courses and be developing for ever, can’t I?”

“That’s true.” Some things take time. Some things go fast. Business plans and stuff are required, you need to describe what you will do in terms of what your organization is going to give unit holders. Then you get a team of people who will help you create a sustainable business plan.

My question then is - what’s the best way to start so I can use the Trust's services most effectively.
He explains. If you just got an idea, then you need to describe it in terms of contribution to sustainable development and use the same description methods they use. This is so people can understand what it is they are going to invest in.

He senses I am very wary of this sort of thing. I explain I lost some money in investments before.

He says I can let it take its own time, in small steps. He points out that 10,000 is a small investment risk.

I ask if I can get stuck in the scheme and then can’t get out of it.

“You already are.“ he says. You are always in a scheme. You need to choose which one. “We are giving you a chance to choose.“

I agree.

.I sigh “I need to do all that work – not so appealing.“
“Look. It’s fun once you get into it.“

I sort of feel uncomfortable and ask for the next step.

He suggests I attend an exhibition of the point system and go through the materials explaining how it all works.

REFLECTIONS UNIT OF TRUST SECTION #2 MEETING MANAGEMENT

Reflections

I was doing Internet research into how Unit Trusts advertise their investment opportunities. I was struck by how far away the organizations that benefit from my money are from me. I just get barely a piece of paper from the bank or building society advisor. In the Unit Trust scheme I met in the image stream you get to be close to the organization and get together personally with them. And it was useful stuff. Much better and more human!

UNIT OF TRUST SECTION #3 FIRST DAY ON COURSE- BASICS

Third visit –day 1 of course

PREAMBLE

This is the third investigation into Unit of Trust. The first one visited an exhibition of the organization and the organizations offering placement opportunities. These visits raised several questions in me, including how a 10,000 SEK investment would provide anything useful, as 4% gives 400 SEK (what you might get as yearly dividend from conventional placements) equivalent to one carrier bag of food. Not much per year.

On the other hand, 10,000 SEK is the equivalent of the quarter of your food bill for one year. You would want to see a reasonable result for your money. Of course, if you were to eat up the 10,000 SEK we are talking of a food bill for 3-4 months!

This goes to show I cannot get my head around economics. It seems to be a system that allows you to compare apples and pears with each other.

In contrast however, Units of Trust are dealing with realities – the number of days in a year, hours you can work, calories you need to eat, etc. I can’t see how systems that aren’t anchored in simple realities like that can be useful.

From an investor’s point of view you come close to the organizations, you make a commitment. They get capital and customers - an incredible benefit for them.

QUEST: My quest is to understand how an involved organization is expected to serve its customers and investors in the scheme. I need to be clearer about how it all works.

My quest, then, is to visit such an organization again to learn how they teach starting up organizations to use their facilities best. To join in the training, or process, or see the process where these organization that join, how they are trained and developed, as well as what units of trust offer.

TAPESCRIPT: UNIT OF TRUST SECTION #3 FIRST DAY ON COURSE- BASICS

I am walking over the cobblestones of the square I visited earlier, towards the small town hall where I met the facilitator group. I get the feeling this group is heavily involved.

A sign on the door invites you into the “Introduction to Units of Trust -entrepreneurs’ day.”

People are sitting at round tables in groups of four or so.

I sit down, collect a notepad, pencil and file.

One person welcomes us.
"This is the start of your journey towards providing sustainable services as an entrepreneur. I congratulate you on your choice, you are doing a good thing for society and lot of people are counting on you, and waiting to invest in your offering."

“This is not like anything else. Many really want to support you and see it works well because they want what you have to offer. The purpose of these first sessions is to explain the principles behind how this can work. So that was my introduction. Any questions?”

“I know nothing about business.”
-“No problems we’ll help you with that.”
“I am not sure what I want to do, just something.”
- “OK. You can still go on the course. You are welcome, something will come up while you are on the process.”

The first exercise to do he calls the Basic Frameworks of Life.

What we have to do is write down what we think they are. On a square, the group have to put everything around that framework.

I am in a group of four. We get started.
“Human life?” someone asks.
- “Yes.”

We start to list what we consider are essentials:
• Shelter
• Food
• Social security
• Health care
• Education
• Transport
• Culture
• Clothing
• Household goods

Then we are asked to identify a maximum, minimum and a reasonable standard.

For water, I venture 50 litres a day, but do we need 2 litres a day – or hour – I realize I am unsure.

Maximum is 70000 litres a year, equivalent to the average US citizen or household.

We note these down on the square.

Shelter.
Minimum square meters 13 square meters.
Largest = say 50 per person.
Reasonable, lower quartile.

Food
4000 KWh per year for a family
(If you go over what is reasonable you get fat!)
(We must be able to find minimum and reasonable standards of vitamins and minerals etc which are needed.)

Clothes
Minimum
Not being cold – a minimum wardrobe – one pair of shoes.
Five changes of underwear if you wash once a week

square of life worksheet

The whole group is getting into it, quantifying and qualifying. We quickly realise too much or too little is a burden. There is a comfort range that needs identifying..

In terms of security

Minimum
• Always know you can get the minimum
Maximum
• Never want for anything……

This exercise certainly makes you think. We carry on discussing details.

I wander around the other groups; they are identifying units and then evaluating max and min. Most have never thought of this before

Indoor temperature 21 constant
Minimum 17c Not too hot, not too cold.

The facilitator asks how much disagreement there is

”Not a lot so far.”
“Where was the difficulty – in quantifying and qualifying?”

The facilitator draws the point out that you know standards when you see them.

“If you were going to invest in an organisation what level of services would you want it to be offering?”

We did not agree about what was reasonable – in fact, we had difficulty quantifying a lot of the dimensions.

Someone comments they find this strange as we have done research for so many years so why is it not available?

(“And what has this got to do with investment?” Someone wonders sceptically)

"We’ll come to that. Let’s have a break.”

Coffee and biscuits are available, and we mill around chatting.
One guy is into aviation. I tell him of my exploits into trying to invent a flying saucer

I also meet a farmer; he is into corn and wheat growing for bread making.

People seem to be engaged in what they are doing, mostly one man or mom and pop operations.

A guy from a large bank is present. I ask what he is doing here. "We need to change,” he says “'that is why we are on the course.”

We are called back to our groups.

I sit at the same table, the banker is with us.

Time for a DVD. A film of points. The point of points. Numbers flash on the screen

The presenter is walking through a field.

”Here I am in this field, what is behind all this? How many hectares is it? How long did it take to plant? How many people will it feed? How many hours do I need to work?”

He continues as he starts to walk across the field. “It’s a very simple equation. That is the basis of all human activity. How can we achieve what is reasonable for everyone with what we have?”

He presents a numerical framework for us. A hectare is an area of land, there are 1 600 working hours in one year and 365 days.

We have 1.2 or 1.5 hectares of agricultural land per person and a certain number of hectares of forest and other land to include water and stuff.

It is very simple.

He reminds me of David Attenborough.

The film continues. Lorry driving. Machines have similar limits. Based on fuel, man-hours to manufacture, and the lifetime of the machine and maintenance hours, and the fuel to drive them, related to amount of work that has to go into make the fuel plus the agricultural land or land needed. Back to hectares/ or calories and working hours.

And for an organization. On this simple basis, this way of accounting and counting, we can describe how we create a standard of living. And also to equate the standard with the areas of land involved.

Then you know how many hours and hectares and the machine and organization. You always come back to the same measurements and units.

The DVD shows pictures of ships and boats carrying freight.
The Presenter: “each boat has a capacity to carry in terms of volume and tonnes. And there is an effort in terms of man-hours and fuel required to carry the freight to another area. Easy to work out if you include the speed of transport. All these simple things are the basis of points system. But what does this have to do with organizations?”

The facilitator asks if we understood the film…

“I still don’t get what a point is, just what the basis is,” says someone.

“True, but let’s not jump the gun.”

We are given a new exercise; a pyramid.

You have to put things in order. You have to choose one of the things from the square like 4000 calories of food. Then you have to break the service down into the things that are needed make up these basics.

See if you can identify different levels but at the bottom you have to come down to the basics - to man hours, land area and water etc.

My group discusses – and decides to choose - the apartment example, 13 m2 for all. Someone else means it is difficult but agrees anyway.

We get sticky labels and start to discuss levels.

At the bottom is the land the building is on. Then there is the required to produce energy.
Then the materials. How much land do you need for that?
We park that question.

Then there are man-hours to build and then maintenance, upgrades etc.

There is metal for pipes etc. That has a man-hour component.

For materials there are the man-hours required to get materials out of the earth. The only thing that is not clear about this is the minerals taking from the land. You need land to take it from. Non-productive land, I had not thought of that.

We seem to have identified a lot of layers to work on.
• The actual delivery of the service is at the top.
• Operation and maintenance.
• Then there is the set-up.
• Underneath that, basic materials at the bottom in two sections Land to produce bio material and land where we extract materials from the crust

So the group concludes we have three separate levels under this particular service.
"Are we getting there?” The facilitator asks. I wonder, but the facilitator seems pleased anyway.

The facilitator: “What have we learnt from this?”

I venture: “This about minerals …it is not land area but it is in tonnes.”

“Yes, it explains the boat bit,” he replies.

“You have tonnes of minerals, not originating from the biosphere.”

“Are we agreed it is working?” He asks. “We identify that all services originate from fields, water and minerals. There are three basic levels: extraction, construction and maintenance and running.”

Every group has identified the same levels, we just have not thought of it before like that.

So, we have come to a juncture. Homework is to take the service we are thinking of offering and to break it down into the pyramid. Thinking of what is required in the context of maximum, minimum and reasonable.

Obviously, the time-frames for construction and running are different, as construction effort would be divided over time, so the different levels need to be treated differently. We are just required to map them out. The facilitator closes the session for today.

Everyone starts to pack up, I go over to chat to the facilitator.

I was expecting more open space type exercises. He replies it is not always useful for training. We must start up with the basics.

You are seeing the point now of developing the facilitator group. I like the ideas of the facilitation team. I realize I could set up a separate facilitation organization myself.

He leaves me I continue wandering around, not much is going on. I think it is time to go. As I leave I see a lemonade stall. I find this amusing as business courses always use lemonade stalls as examples.

I take the lift back to the departure hall; I see the exhibition stand is still there. I sit next to a woman on the bench I started from.

She says:” I’m wondering if I should invest in unit trusts.”
“I recommend it,” I say.

Farmyard – geese – ducks - this is what I associate with her.
I ask her about her impression from visiting the stand.
She feels it is a good idea, almost too good to be true, she always mistrusts things like that!

FOLLOW-UP: UNIT OF TRUST SECTION #3 FIRST DAY ON COURSE- BASICS

Reflections
I feel we are living off the work done by our forefathers to create systems and structures. Today we are using metal, machines, materials put together by those who came before us. Yet we are using them in a non-sustainable way. You could say we are not working in the same way.

I am also surprised that the figures for what is reasonable living standard are hard to find. And that to work out from a systems perspective how much materials are needed by us – I believe society is looking the wrong way somehow. Suppose a train is coming from the other direction?

Questions
None just yet – I would like to understand points better.

Immediate uses

I like the DVD idea. Maybe I’ll try it if I can borrow a camera – and write the script.

I think the comparisons I learned about could be used immediately to show the way forward for various systems or collection of systems. The diagram below shows the difference between different operations that require different inputs for construction and operation. A double Hi is an operation that should be replaced (Road transport system) a Hi on construction and Lo on running should be kept (Rail network). Lo on construction and hi on running costs should be replaced. And Lo on construction and lo on running costs (basket making) should be kept.

TAPESCRIPT: UNIT OF TRUST SECTION #4 SECOND DAY ON COURSE DESCRIBING INFRASTRUCTURE

My quest is to return to take part in the next part of the training to understand how an organization interested in providing a sustainable service can benefit by working with the Unit of Trust organization.

I start in the departure hall as a few people are taking the Trust exhibition down.
“It went well, we are getting a lot of interest,” they comment.

After getting directions from them, I stride over to the tower and up to the fourth floor where the course is taking place.

Some of my old group buddies invite me over to join them again.

The facilitator: ”Welcome everybody. This is for organizations who place capital in and join our organization. Last time we saw the pyramid and the framework of life.”
“Let’s start with a DVD.”
Our presenter is standing in the field: ” Last time we asked the question how much. Hopefully, you have had chance to quantify and qualify what is needed to support the framework of life and break it down into layers of activities materials, biomass and man-hours. You are probably wondering why it was so difficult to break it down into figures. It is difficult, because no-one has been keeping track.”

He walks away and stands in front of a barn.
“This is an essential part of being able to look after crops. We need to be able to think of infrastructure like buildings in terms of their technical function.”

“This infrastructure with technical function can be quantified in square meters and other measures. We need to add this to the model of what is required to produce the service you are interested in. Your next task is to identify all technical infrastructure needed.”

The DVD stops. In addition, the facilitator asks us to consider the other side of the pyramid with technical infrastructure. We put a yellow post-it to represent each piece of technical infrastructure. For our apartment block we have construction machinery, heating system water heating water supply, electricity production, this needs generators,

Sawmill, wood, timber yard, timber mill, factory for pipes and things and mine. Glass, building firm.

The facilitator: ”Are you all wondering where points come in? Be patient we will get there.”

We take a break. I ask the bank person for reflections over a cup of tea.
“Not really, it’s complicated; I thought we might eventually see the simple in the complicated”

The facilitator: “Any reflections so far?
“We are still confused how points come in.”
“We are starting to see what is needed to provide a service - it involves sooo much!”
Another participant: “If we can provide a service which is less involved, with less steps involved it will be more robust.
“The exercise helps you see the simplicity in what is going on,” replied another.
The facilitator brings reflections to an end with: “Let’s do the maths”.

Each technical unit is quantified with man-hours and material (kgs and volume).

“What abut money?” Someone asks, “can money be used to quantify? Surely what is being produced can always be quantified in terms of money. An open market thing – market value.”

“Glad you asked that,” says the facilitator.

We go back to the film
Back in the field Presenter asks:” how do you value all of this?” If you have nothing to eat, it is invaluable. Yet, if you have sandwiches with you or there is restaurant down the road, a field is uninteresting. The evaluation of any production facility is subjective.

What we need to find is a way then, to relate a Unit of Trust to this production facility that is not based on money and with a minimum of subjectivity.

People can understand this field from the point of view of its role in their essential life support system, rather than from the point of view of any one crop.

They can understand it better as part of the pyramid. To set a service up – as described in the pyramid model – gives you safety and security. This is where Units of Trust come in. Each technical unit can be owned and run by an organization that you own part of. A number organizations can run several different services.
The facilitator stops the DVD. “Are we making sense? Good. Go back to your exercises and the third side. Put down the organizations that could be part of the chain.”
Someone in our group suggests we continue on the service housing.

Under that comes units for administration, operation and maintenance.
Housing administration includes janitor services.
The third level comprises of building firms and main contractors for construction using components from suppliers.
“Banking?” someone asks
“And Electricity and stuff.”
That means organizations that supply water, energy and heat production

We are happy with the pyramid.

The facilitator gives us pieces of card and plastic strips that the card slot into so we can build our pyramid like a house of cards.
The facilitator summarizes: “we have identified each organization each with its own an ownership. Each has a physical input and output. This is a transparent way of describing the operations.”

.
The facilitator puts “100” on the board.
“Can we apply a mathematical model to describe this particular phenomenon in a simple way. Without linking it to money?”

“Think about it,” he says.

In groups again. We take an example of the building supplies manufacturer.

We put hectares of land on the bottom.
Working hours at top. Input of wood and energy. Output is the number of pieces of wood

Someone suggests we equate the number of pieces of wood as 100, as in 100% of output.

Someone else suggests we add working hours up.

I call the facilitator over:” We’re having difficulty here.”

The facilitator says “I see you’re all having difficulty thinking your way around this.”

“Put 100 in the centre. This represents the total sum of your value added. Think about iteration: how many times is the service iterated in a year.”

Our group still struggles - service iteration? Buildings iterate 365 days a year.

Building timber suppliers iterate maybe 20 times an hour!

Car transport. A taxi iterates a service for every passenger, say 12-20 times a day.

We ask about the denominator – yearly is easier, as we get one crop a year.
The boat iterates a freight carriage 3-4 weeks, or a few days. 100 times a year, maybe.

“Now we are getting a concept of service cycles in time. We need to go back to the video,” says the facilitator.

The DVD starts. The presenter is in the farm again – we get one crop a year.

“Look at this barn, built by a team that can build 10 a year.

Now see this diagram, like a flag, it shows the input hours, infrastructure of materials and service and output described in terms of capacity and output iterations. Each organization can do this.

Each organization can be 100. Think about it. “
The film stops. Homework is to work out for your particular organization, describe it in these ways with these figures to include the infrastructure.

“That’s enough for today, Thanks!”

Verifications

The New Scientist has an article showing how much material is needed to run London.
(Population 7.5 million)
Input
WATER 1,000 million tonnes

FOOD 2.4million tonnes

FUEL 20 million tonnes

TIMBER 1.2million tonnes

PLASTICS 2.1 million tonnes
.
METALS 1.2 million tonnes

GLASS 0.36 million tonnes

CEMENT 2 million tonnes

BRICKS; BLOCKS;SAND;TARMAC
36 million tonnes

OXYGEN 40 million tonnes

PAPER 2.2 million tonnes

Output

CO2 60 million tonnes

household waste
4 million tonnes

INDUSTRIAL WASTE
11.4 million tonnes

SO2 0.4 million tonnes

NOX 0.28 million tonnes

SEWAGE 7.5 million tonnes

I visited a historical spa organization and presented the idea of raising capital and giving right of use in return. We calculated that raising $100,000 dollars, with $1,000 from 100 people would be possible, if we offered right of use of holiday apartments at a rate equivalent to cost of production of the service, which was at roughly $100 a week. Several other conversations with people leads me to change my earlier scepticism. As long as the “unit holder” uses the right to use and pays the production costs, it is a good, non taxable deal all round.

TAPESCRIPT: UNIT OF TRUST SECTION #5 COURSE DAY THREE MATHEMATICAL SYSTEMS-

15th June 2006

Background: I asked about the connection between sustainable development and individual investment. To visit somewhere where individual investment actually promotes sustainable development instead of the investment I am familiar with which increases material out-take and need for waste disposal. It furthermore creates a dependency on a fossil –fueled infrastructure.

A recent visit took me to a place where they were having an exhibition showing how units could be bought and placed in certain organizations.

When you buy a unit it is already placed in some general organization. You can move it to another organization from which your unit would give you something back. It would also be a long term investment.

I had some questions about describing the organization in terms of sustainable development. This description is essential, to show the investors what they are getting, to explain why the Unit Trust organization should get involved, and how to get involved, and to clarify the difference in general between this sort of origination and a normal business.

They were mentioned in the second visit with a representative for Units of Trust, who explained how organizations come to get finance and customers by joining the organization.

Then we did a part of the course that started to talk about the underlying principles and how to describe your organization. We saw a couple of models of organizational activity. The second course took us further, to show how an organization was made up of separate functional units. Each of these units had an input in terms of working hours, but also biological inputs and mineral inputs. The unit utilized a technical infrastructure. One could map an organisation as a pyramid like this and use cards to show how these units interact to provide the service, how materials flow through the system and how man-hours are used.

REFLECTIONS:

A pyramid model fits well with sustainable thinking. Creating infrastructure that generates living standard without requiring massive fossil fuel input must be desirable. Especially something that could be handed on to the next generation.

My quest is to visit the same place, to go on the part of the training that follows from the one I went on before.

THE TAPESCRIPT

From a bench in the departure hall someone grabs me and rushes me up the escalator and over to the finance building to join the course.
I sit down with the group I had met earlier. After the usual welcoming, the instructor asked for reflections so far. What people found difficult was the mathematics, but we also reflected that there probably was a mathematical system there that was useful, based on 700 hours to years to produce the basics.

They ask us to go over to the group tables. Each are provided with several worksheets I cannot make them out exactly but they contain circles and squares.

We are then given some wooden blocks. These are to be used in an allocation task.

A large worksheet has several squares on it. One square represents housing, one is clothes, one is food.

We are being asked to allocate working hours to these different areas. We have blocks with different numbers on them - we have to allocate 700 hours to these activities over five years, that's 3,500 units of hours to allocate. The blocks are in 10s and 20s etc. They are wooden, about 1cm square. We have to allocate for two levels for each service; set up and operation.

The discussion flows on. How long would it take to make agricultural land work? Taking land that is fallow, ditching, draining, fertilizing, and the permaculture. We put 1/3 set up 2/3 operation.
Clothes: they last three years, say. To make clothes it needs looms, etc and machinery. We set the ratio set-up to operation 50-50. Buildings: most work is in construction: set up to operation ratio 90 -10.

Now we have to divide them up again in terms of hours.
Food takes 90% of the time? One group member suggests 60%.
That leaves 10 for clothes and 30 for buildings.

'Now you have a system to work out allocations of hours,' says the facilitator,
People comment that it would be good to organize work like this generally.

We are asked to leave the table and return to the classroom section.

The instructor: “that was the principle of points. You now have the basics.”

You have to connect an organization to the living standard service it provides.

We have already worked out what and in what proportions are needed, so now we need to describe what proportion of the work the organization is going to do.
Over a five year period an organisation would provide a certain amount of service equivalent to a number of hours needed, of the 700. This would give you the number of points.

The performance of the organization or equivalent performance would be in providing a service which is part of what is needed.

So let’s take construction. 30% of 700X5

The maintenance is 10% of that will give you hours equivalence.

This is smart someone says.

We now need to connect it with investment.

The Unit of Trust organization explains to its members the 700 hours thing. They set the standard etc. So if you invest in one unit it will give you back something of that. One unit is the lowest you can get. You can show standard way of explaining the organization in terms of points. One point is one hour of work done to produce 1/700 of the service needed.

If I worked in an organization I would get the points “back” for my work.

If I owned part of it on the other hand, I could get the equivalent of that value.

I could also be expected to take part in the activities.

Take for example an apartment block. I would have to work in an affiliated organization. Put in 700 to get 700 back. I need to put in 700 a year at least, then.

If I put nothing in, but own part of the organistion. Then I take out part of the profits. I can join in the activities, social and sharing the excess.

I ask the facilitator how to begin to create a portfolio of organizations which work together, where each describes what they will do they when they acquire ordinary money.

“Next time is for ordinary money, let’s call it a day, “he replies.

I thank my group mates and take my leave.

Reflections
What can be done in the context of 700 hours will vary in different places. Everything will depend on local conditions. This will crate the basis for trade between areas, where difficult to realize things and services are swapped for easy to realize ones. Heating will be important on Sweden, whereas cooling will be important in Africa.

I also realize that a lot of services today rely on the work of yesteryear, mines, roads, bridges, inventions etc.

However, modern inventions are reliant on energy intensive infrastructure. These will be a burden rather than a useful legacy for coming generations. This is not reflected in today’s monetary based valuations.

TAPESCRIPT: UNIT OF TRUST SECTION #6 COURSE DAY FOUR - MONEY

Preamble:

The original quest was to visit somewhere that uses personal investment to drive sustainable development

I learn how to analyze life support services ( the essential ones) from the point of view of basics, rather than money.
The system is based on working hours of 700 a year.

Reflections: Why 700? The ordinary working year is 1600.

I also wonder how to connect this to ordinary money. They sell at SEK 10, 000 per unit so far, and place it in the organization providing the services.

As an owner or participating investor, there are some principles on how I get return on investment. One is “right to use” of infrastructure. ( I feel this needs developing.) Use of services at cost is also a principle.

THE QUEST
My quest is to continue on the course, and to understand how to connect the 10,000 SEK to the finances of the organizations that receive the investment.

As I arrive in the departure hall I see they are putting up the exhibition again. “we exhibit about once a month they say as they see me looking on .
I ask about the course;”go on up you know the way”.

Over the walkway, I look down on what was once roads now given over to growing vegetables.

In the reception they direct me to unit 4 on the fifth floor.

I have been there earlier, I recognise the oval window at the back.

The room is nicely set up for training course. There’s juice on the side, a lecture area and separate group work section.

They start with a DVD.

INVESTMENT FOR THE FUTURE
INVESTING IN SUSTAINABILITY

Your investment will bring sustain….

The DVD flashes back to the 1950s, with people harvesting apples. They show the Tractor, it is black and white footage from the archives.

They talk about the harvesting farmers enjoying bumper crops thanks to insecticides.
Voice over…
“How little we knew.”

Back to the orchard, now in present time. The trees are left overgrown and abandoned.
The orchard was hit by insect plague, the balance of nature was upset by the insecticide and the farm went bust
And what happened to the farmer’s son who was to take over the hard-earned investment of his father? He went on to be a lawyer, living in the city.

So the investment of the father did not affect future generation. The apples were not important; the son got a job anyway

But in a sustainable world we need to grow food locally. We cannot use large amounts of fossil fuel to transport food. The bulk of food should be grown locally.

How can we invest locally?
The DVD shows on a diagram that we are at a point before the peak of oil. World economic growth is continuing but it will slow down as oil becomes scarce.

World growth of 2% is predicted. It does not sound a lot, but it will soon mean a doubling. The oil is just not there to supply it.
The voice over asks:
“How are we going to invest in a way to bring us through the peak?”

“Or to provide an alternative?”
“Or about what your money is worth – what it can buy?”
“How much energy does one dollar buy?”
“How much is one gallon of fuel or how long do you have to work to get it?”
“It is about the number of hours you have to work to get life supported that is interesting here”

700 is a figure to base the system on.
Money should be based on this too. You should be able to earn the basics of living by working 700 hours, and he work should be freely available.

If you work and still don’t earn that money to live then the situation is horrible.
If you work and can earn it easily, and even more – that is OK.

Consider now future generations.
Suppose you work and can get it enough and even buy a lot more but it entails a high material outtake from the biosphere and geosphere. This material will not be available to future generations. The environment is therefore worth less to future generations, and they have to spend more effort to create the basics of living.

The presenter demonstrates this at a roundabout. At a roundabout you have choices. If you do not have any choice, and have to be involved in a society that operates a high material outtake and throughput, and you have to work many hours to get just the basic then you’re a lot worse off.

And you are not helping future generations. The legacy of high material turnover and destruction with low standard is the worst possible combination and the least sustainable of the three alternatives.

A society with low material outtake and low standard, requiting many hours work and still the basics not covered is more sustainable. However, it is close to slavery.

At least it does not wear down resources.

The DVD makes the point that the combination HITECH HI ENERGY LO STANDARD is the least sustainable. And that is the situation we are in today.

With increasing energy prices, there will be increase in inflation and decrease in real wages, this will be the start of the divorce between continuous economic growth and living standards improvement.

So what to do about it?

The answer is to concentrate on achieving standards in the most sustainable way to consume resources at such a rate they are available (by recycling e.g.) for future generations.

That is the challenge for the system.

However, it does have one thing on its side:

The DVD goes over to outside number 10 Downing street and then outside the Houses of Parliament in the UK.

The idea has . … political popularity. It is a very appealing idea to work less to for more real value. Reduce your work time and at the same time increase life quality and security.

Because it is a politically appealing message, the political party that takes it on will be at an advantage.

However, they will need help from you in crafting the way it would work.

Good Luck.

The film stops.

I look around at the rest of the group, the last sequence was quite moving. They sit quite still.

The facilitator comes out. “We need to talk about how we can apply money to this. Any ideas?”

“Normally put your money in a savings account which will give a percentage, but inflation eats its value up.

“If cost of living is rising at the same time you get even less out. Therefore, money will buy much less.”

“If you bought something which is sustainable it would carry on giving you goods, requiring only maintenance costs. So you want to use your money to create continuous return, like by a windmill or lay a garden out, this will give you produce and something to hand on to future generations. We need to own these things, that is where Unit of Trusts come in you own something which will give you lifetime dividend, not in money but in living standard. “

The participant finishes:”So how can you own part of an organization. “

“Ideas anyone?” Says the facilitator.

“You can own a share of a cooperative or a share in a company, or own part of a farm or field”

That is good you can get together with others and own part of a farm. Then you have a right to use it and to be there. And you have a right to a share in the surplus.

Now we have the principle how can we translate that kind of ownership into practical terms?

One suggestion comes from the floor “You can own something and lend it to someone else.”
“Lets discuss that.”

“Well,” says the woman” I lend it to someone, in return I get some vegetables.
They get the right to use, I get a few vegetables”.
“Can anyone relate that to points?”
Someone tries – “we know that, say, a half a hectare gives enough food for one person a year so 700 points 400 which is the food, say, 800 points per hectare”.

“Good we are getting the idea.”

“You have to explore possibilities for an individual organization. The exercise is to list up the possibilities between ownership and dividend directly, and work them out. Choose one example.”

We group up. I wander over to a table, with four chairs. I am joined by the aircraft guy, the bank guy and someone with some land. We choose a threshing machine as a concrete example, you would own a share in the threshing machine, if it broke you would be in trouble., if you owned part of the land and it got flooded. If you owned whatever and it did not work, your whole basic life support would be compromised,

On the other hand, the risk is not so large. If you owned the land there is not much of a risk if the machine broke you would get it mended. But we need to spread the risk.
You need a way to own something and yet not be suck with the risk but to share the risk.

We go back and sit down you need to spread the risk, to share the risk. It is difficult to create individual ownership.

That is the downside of owning something. So you want to owned the equivalent of 700 points in order to spread the risk.

If you owned something that generated 700 points you would never have to work again
You would get the basics. And you could choose to carry on or take it no.

This is a very open system. Renewable life style is interesting. You still have a management responsibility and ownership responsibility even with 700 points generation. But you would get rid of the stress or hard graft.

The facilitator asks someone to summarize.

We agree ownership is good if you own part of a good that brings provides life support services. You can own land and machines, parts of organizations that provide this, only with the input of man-hours. And you get the points out. So what we are saying here is the principle, a part of an organization produces a certain number of points and you can work in that organization with time and money input gives you a right to but it needs to be spread that is the next bit.
How to spread the risk.
A high level of guarantee.

If you put your money in to own at today’s prices. Something say a green house which produces lettuces. I would get out food or points. I could get points out of it and use them to get an equivalent good. Get the points back. And I could be guaranteed the points. For example. If the greenhouse is going well food is sent in a package to me as I own part of it.

Just owning does not give me so much. The passive ownership does not work.
Suppose I own it and put time in and then get the greenfly. Can I still get the points because I would be insured through the scheme? Communal risk sharing would be a good idea.

People don’t like communal things, but where there is a risk they want everyone to help them.

We need a system whereby I put some money in, work out the investment, which buys infrastructure which together with hours will give me (I’m getting it now) the whole point comes clear to me – you have to look at it a …….

“Let me explain “ - I stand up “Go back to the diagram of the unit I put 5 hours in I want to get 5 hours out it is that simple. If you say food was 400 hours a year. If you have an organization where I put in 400 then I would get the equivalent out in food.“

Good place to pause.

Verifications

From Wikipedia
Classical economics
Real price refers to how much labor a good costs. This is in contrast to nominal price which refers to how much money a good costs. This terminology is used by Adam Smith. In inflation, the nominal price of a good would increase with the real price remaining the same. However, the real price of money would decrease as it is not able to purchase as much labor.

The time value of money (TVM) or the discounted present value is one of the basic concepts of finance.

Backward bending supply curve of labour
This is also a basic concept in economics, but seldom talked about. Briefly, a disinterest in working more will be met when, for example, wages are high and people are satisfied, or there is nothing for their wages to buy. The demand for work will be therefore reduced, hence the term backward bending supply.

In this context, it is rather interesting. If a standard of life is achieved, and people want improvement, they will have to work more. There will come a point where enough is enough, and people will elect to keep a lower standard instead of working more.

List of “realia” met. These things I saw that were useful in the context of Units of Trust.

• DVDs explaining principles
• Exhibition
• “Investment briefs”
• Points system
• Good examples
• Connection to politics

Paper and Pulp industry leaves Sweden blaming energy prices

2006-08-31T22:58:00.000+02:00

Sweden, although at the forefront of the drive to oil independence, sits powerless when industry finds national energy prices a little too high. The Swedish daily Svenska Dagbladet reports on Thursday the 31 August 2006 that Rottneros, one of the world’s five largest makers of paper pulp, is closing its plant in Utansjö, in Northern Sweden. The plant will be dismantled and shipped to a country offering lower electricity prices. The move demonstrates the energy vulnerability of many industries, and how a permanent hike in energy prices, stimulated e.g by scarcity of oil, is likely to affect developed countries at least while there are countries offering cheaper energy. Capital and industry simple leave, while whole communities remain behind, unemployed.

The mechanical process used by Rottneros is energy intensive, and uses twice as much energy as the alternative chemical process. On the other hand, less raw timber is used and the process has environmental benefits. The plant is one of the most modern in the group, and can be easily moved and set up elsewhere.

The Utansjö community, which has hosted the paper and pulp industry since 1897, will be absorbing 150 jobless.

Other paper and pulp producers like SCA and the Swedish-Finish StoraEnso may soon follow suit. Both state to the newspaper that they have no plans to invest any further in Sweden. ITPS, the Swedish Institute for Growth Policy Studies - the Swedish Government's agency for understanding growth and for evaluating government policies - estimates 2-4 thousand jobs will disappear every year.

This is at a time when national supplies are unable to meet industry demand. Wood is in short supply, and Sweden is importing 10 of the 90 million m3 of forest it uses.

The move demonstrates that we cannot rely on industry to come up with a solution in the short term to higher energy costs. As managing director, you are bound by the terms of your contract to find a cheaper solution in the first place, not to apply all ingenuity to rework business processes and technology to find a less energy intensive or less environmentally challenging solution. And Government is not allowed to interfere according to EU competition rules. It also shows how any approach to a sustainable use of timber supplies is far off. If consumers demand paper products to a level where forests are depleted, the global force of industry is willing to supply it – without taking any responsibility for future generations ability to use the infrastructure and local natural resources.

Of those countries offering cheaper energy, we can only speculate as to the environmental risks associated with this “cheap” energy. Consumers get no say in the matter as they are left unaware of the environmental and social costs of the paper they are holding in their hands, as little as they are informed of the situation of thousands of workers in the oil industry in the long supply chain from the desert to their local petrol filling station.
-

Hats of f to Dave Pollard's work on cultures

2006-08-08T15:46:00.000+02:00

Dave Pollard has ploughed thorugh anthropologist Hugh Brody's far-reaching and scholarly personal memoir based on extensive study of indigenous cultures, The Other Side of Eden, written six years ago.

Dave has crystallised out the essentials of a culture that is in harmony with the environment around it. These essentials are what we need to aim for if we (industrialied, petroleum people) are to be able to hand over a decent life to those who come after us.

I reproduce them here, I hope Dave has no objections:

Here, then, is the catalogue of my learnings and discoveries from this book. I think it takes us one step closer to an overall framework or theory for dealing with complex problems:

* indigenous peoples are almost never authoritarian with their children; children learn by doing, by making mistakes, and by hearing guidance and candid comments on their behaviour, not by being 'told what to do and not to do'
* knowledge is absolutely critical to survival in indigenous communities; exchange of knowledge is expected, automatic, urgent and completely candid, and deceit and hoarding knowledge is extremely disreputable behaviour (because it can expose others to danger) -- these are cultures of collaboration and detailed, exhaustive knowledge-sharing, not of competition for 'knowledge advantage'
* there is an expression "the land is made perfect by knowledge" that stresses that what is valued in these communities is knowledge and understanding of the environment, not control or ownership of it
* indigenous communications are generally extremely honest and forthright; the words that accompany greetings are those of great joy, not politeness
* words are as precise as they need to be, so there are completely separate words used to describe fish and other prey, and snow, and attributes of the land, not taxonomically but by need (e.g. there is a need for a separate word to describe snow suitable for the construction of temporary snow shelters, so there is such a word) -- this is not poetry or obsession, it's extremely practical, and word differentiation is a matter of necessity, familiar observability and, sometimes, valuable analogy
* part of the learning of indigenous languages is learning when to speak, when and how to listen, and even when and how to tease -- in oral cultures there is much more to language than just vocabulary, grammar and syntax
* stories are essential, detailed, and allowed to take as much time as they need to take to be told; interruption is considered extremely rude, though it is often acceptable to leave if you do not find the story of interest
* indigenous languages generally have no swear words (anger is considered 'childish' behaviour and scrupulously suppressed), and they also have no 'status' words (e.g. there is no concept of or words for rank or hierarchy or, in anything close to our sense of the term, ownership, in Inuktitut)
* these languages have evolved to facilitate analogy, as an essential tool of learning and imagination -- drawing analogies and use of inductive reasoning are not as 'forced' or deliberate a process as they seem to be in Indo-European languages
* from necessity, indigenous people have developed prodigious memories and mental maps of detail, and can often recall routes and places that they have seen only a few times many decades earlier -- in the process every landmark is given a name to help entrench its later memory, and great attention is paid to orienting and placing these landmarks in context
* these cultures have an overarching respect for all life, and again this seems more practical and adaptive than spiritual (others may disagree with me on this) -- caching extra food, wasting nothing, not hunting just 'for fun', not disturbing animals except for hunting, not spoiling the land, paying attention to the animals that are being hunted -- all these behaviours are oriented to encouraging prey to 'make themselves available' for the hunter as a matter of reciprocal respect (their self-sacrifice meets the hunter's real need for sustenance)
* indigenous peoples are part of the environment, and do not see the environment as something apart from them; they see themselves as co-stewards of the land along with other creatures (and in some cases, with the spirits)
* by definition, then, the place the people live in is ideal, has become so through millennia of evolution and adaptation, and any change made to that place is therefore necessarily for the worse
* the concept of gatherer-hunters as 'nomadic' and civilization cultures as 'settled' is precisely backwards -- it is the civilization cultures that despoil or exhaust the land and expand, move on, seek new frontiers, while gatherer-hunter cultures live in balance within large but mostly-fixed territories for millennia; the stories of indigenous peoples of how they 'arrived' where they now live are in total conflict with our history of them (e.g. that they crossed the land-bridge from Asia during ice age retreat) -- their stories are that the people emerged where they are now, rather than traveled to them
* they have a profound respect for individual decisions; after sharing of knowledge, if there is no consensus on action each individual is trusted to do what he or she thinks is right and responsible, and there are no recriminations for not conforming to what others (or some designated or self-styled 'leader') think is appropriate
* advice is rendered by the telling of stories and the answering of questions when asked, not by proffering instruction or unsolicited opinions -- this is a consultative process, not a hierarchical one (elders, chiefs, shamans are respected, but they do not have or seek power or authority over others the way the 'leaders' in our culture do)
* because of the vast amount of detailed information that is needed to thrive in a complex environment, people in these cultures do not depend entirely on the conscious mind to process that information -- they appreciate how the subconscious, dreams, and instincts play into and enrich our understanding, and allow these elements to play an important part in their decision-making process
* generosity (both with knowledge and material possessions) and egalitarianism are essential elements of these cultures, and produces an environment of great reciprocality and trust
* much of the activity of these cultures enables the building of great self-confidence, freedom from anxiety (fear of the unknown), freedom from depression, and high self-esteem: the acquired respect and trust of others, the respect for individual decisions, the granting of individual responsibility, the learning and practice and recognition of finely-honed skills, a culture of collaboration and consultation -- contrast this with our culture where so much activity has the effect of battering self-confidence and self-esteem, and stressing helplessness and dependence
* in many cases, these cultures carefully space the birth of children at least three years apart, in part for practical reasons but also in part to allow parents and adults to spend enough time and attention on each child to equip them with the important capacities and learnings they need to succeed; in some cases infanticide has historically been practiced when necessary to ensure this space and opportunity for each child, and in that case can be seen as an embracing rather than an abrogation of responsibility
* these cultures show profound respect for women as full equals, with roles determined by strength, stamina, skill and capacity rather than assigned automatically by gender, and many roles shared and alternating; the prevalence of men as hunters and of women as gatherers reflects only the biological fact of greater strength of most males and greater stamina of most females, and roles are changeable without shame for those whose biological qualities are exceptional
* there is a deliberate attention to uncertainty, unpredictability, qualification and imprecision in indigenous languages, with any declaration of absolute certainty seen as evidence of oversimplification, arrogance, or poor judgement; likewise, there is much less propensity in these languages to raise and dwell on dichotomies, the simplistic black-or-white contrasts that leave no room for subtlety, imprecision, nuance, change and uncertainty

Oil independence to be won through grants to vehicle R&D - Dissappointing Swedish News.

2006-07-19T23:37:00.000+02:00

Once again Sweden, the first nation to proclaim its intention to become oil independent, acts disappointingly in a way far removed from what many believed were its true intentions. As reported in the Swedish daily newspapers on the 24th July, the Swedish State are to finance a research and development program to produce better environmentally suited vehicular technology. It is hoped Swedish vehicle industry suppliers as well as other companies will participate in the program to increase the competitiveness of Swedish vehicle industry. The total budget is 800 million kronor, 282 million (35 percent) coming from the State, the rest from the industry.

Says Thomas Ostros, the minister responsible for trade and economy, “the aim of this three-year initiative is to improve the environment, reduce oil dependency and increase competitiveness.”

They hope to produce technology that industry will apply to offer more energy efficient vehicles, new engines, increased use of renewable fuels and modern hybrids.

Hardly inspiring confidence in what could be achieved, Volvo boss Fredrik Arp pointed out that bringing a new engine to market costs 5 billion. Later he said Volvo Cars needed to produce more with fewer employees and announced a cut of 1,000 jobs this autumn.

Clearly, the Swedish State are stuck between a rock and a hard place without showing they have the slightest clue of how to get out. On the one hand, Sweden is the European country most dependent on the vehicle industry for jobs. On the other having declared the intention of oil independence by 2020, they are sitting with the Oil Commissions report in their laps that suggests biofuels are the answer.

What the State and the Oil Commission have not even begun to face up to is that:

Modern road transport is a burdensome invention. Over 40% of the space in cities is dedicated to it, prime agricultural land is sacrificed to it, and the costs of much of it are externalised to an extent it is hard to see when present damage can be rectified, let alone the damage from the predicted 14% increase in volume predicted for 2020. Most of the energy used to construct, maintain and run the system actually goes into the system itself. Precious little of the energy is actually used to move goods or people.

• In the instructions to its Department of Road Transport, the government use the term ”transport system” synonymous with the road network. The wider implications of this are that more environmental alternatives like water or rail are not in their brief, but left to other (less well financed?) departments further cementing the dependence on road (and fossil fuel) transport.

• Without the energy-dense oil that 99% of all transport runs on, the energy intensity of society must be radically reduced if it is to provide a standard of living anything like today’s. No technology or biofuel can solve this equation.

• Social inventions and demand –killing technology like urban planning, relocalisation, local food systems etc, are off the agenda thanks to the short-sightedness of the Oil Commission.

• Economic growth, stimulated by all the so-called new technology that can be invented on an 800 million budget, is a mirage and a very risky strategy. Too risky just to be accepted blindly as the way forward. The underlying assumptions, however politically explosive, need to be examined out of respect for the Swedish people who place their faith in their Government and authorities. As oil prices spiral, regardless of how much biofuel you can wring out of rubbish and forestry waste, the economy will likely shrink. If Sweden has not worked out how living standards can be kept they will be wishing they put their money into something else than an old-fashioned, doomed, transport concept.

Swedish news: Daily newspaper slags off oil commission.

2006-07-12T22:12:00.000+02:00

Comments on the oil commission’s report have been very few in the Swedish media. Perhaps because it was released during the holiday period or because the issue is so complex, that in criticising the report you show how much you do not know. SvD, the right wing Swedish national daily newspaper, however, takes the Oil Commission to task for “giving us a vision of wood-burning”.

In its editorial from 11 July, former Editor-in-chief Hans Bergström denounces the Oil Commissions six months of work as failing to deliver to a standard of what would normally be expected of a government report.
In short he says the report fails to address: - financial dimensions including budgets, investments, subsidies etc.
- the present increase in transport Sweden is experiencing.
- how research budgets will be prioritised – by for example reducing medical research.
- the disadvantages and benefits of investing in bio-fuel alternatives against for example, stimulating exports.

Perhaps the most scathing criticism comes as he rails against the idea that Swedish crops and forestry products should be converted to fuel. As he puts it, these raw materials should be processed (at least into food) and turned into value-added products, not just burnt.

The criticism, however correct, itself begs the question of how an energy intensive society is going to get its energy to do all that value adding and exporting activity when oil supply shortfall drives energy prices sky-high. But then the commission did not address that either.

Mood picture

2006-07-11T20:44:00.000+02:00

I attend the course in Units of Trust

2006-07-08T21:54:00.000+02:00

Reflections

I was doing Internet research into how Unit Trusts (see earlier post) advertise their investment opportunities. I was struck by how far away the organizations that benefit from my money are from me. I just get barely a piece of paper from the bank or building society advisor. In the Unit Trust scheme I met in the image stream you get to be close to the organization and get together personally with them. And it was useful stuff. Much better and more human!

PREAMBLE

This is the third investigation into Unit Trusts. The first one visited an exhibition of the organization and the organizations offering placement opportunities. These visits have raised several questions, including how a 10,000 SEK investment would provide anything useful, as 4% gives 400 SEK (what you might get as yearly dividend from conventional placements) equivalent to one carrier bag of food. Not much per year.

On the other hand, 10,000 SEK is the equivalent of the quarter of your food bill for one year. You would want to see a reasonable result for your money. Of course, if you were to eat up the 10,000 SEK we are talking of a food bill for 3-4 months!

This goes to show I cannot get my head around economics. It seems to be a system that allows you to compare apples and pears with each other.

In contrast. Units of Trust are dealing with realities – the number of days in a year, hours you can work, calories you need to eat, etc. I can’t see how systems that aren’t anchored in simple realities like that can be useful.

From an investor’s point of view you come close to the organizations, you make a commitment. They get capital and customers - an incredible benefit for them.

QUEST: My quest is to understand how an involved organization is expected to serve its customers and investors in the scheme. I need to be clearer about how it all works.

My quest, then, is to visit such an organization again to learn how they teach starting up organizations to use their facilities best. To join in the training, or process, or see the process where these organization that join, how they are trained and developed, as well as what is offered by unit trusts.

TAPESCRIPT

I am walking over the cobblestones of the square I visited earlier, towards the small town hall where I earlier met the facilitator group. I get the feeling this group is heavily involved.

A sign on the door invites you into the introduction to Units of Trust entrepreneurs’ day.

People are sitting at round tables in groups of four or so.

I sit down, collect a notepad, pencil and file.

One person welcomes us.
"This is the start of your journey towards providing sustainable services as an entrepreneur. I congratulate you on your choice, you are doing a good thing for society and lot of people are counting on you, and waiting to invest in your offering."

“This is not like anything else. Many really want to support you and see it works well because they want what you have to offer. The purpose of these first sessions is to explain the principles behind how this can work. So that was my introduction. Any questions?”

“I know nothing about business.”
-“No problems we’ll help you with that.”
“I am not sure what I want to do, just something.”
- “OK. You can still go on the course. You are welcome, something will come up while you are on the process.”

The first exercise to do he calls the Basic Frameworks of Life.

What we have to do is write down what we think they are. On a square, the group have to put everything around that framework.

I am in a group of four. We get started.
“Human life?” someone asks.
- “Yes.”

We start to list what we consider are essentials:
• Shelter
• Food
• Social security
• Health care
• Education
• Transport
• Culture
• Clothing
• Household goods

Then we are asked to identify a maximum, minimum and a reasonable standard.

For water, I venture 50 liters a day, but do we need 2 liters a day – or hour – I realize I am unsure.

Maximum is 7000 liters, equivalent to the average US citizen or household.

We note these down on the square.

Shelter.
Minimum spare meters 13 square meters
Largest = say 50 per person.
Reasonable, lower quartile.

Food
4000 KWh per year for a family
(If you go over what is reasonable you get fat!)
(We must be able to find minimum and reasonable standards of vitamins and minerals etc which are needed.)

Clothes
Minimum
Not being cold – a minimum wardrobe – one pair of shoes.
Five changes of underwear if you wash once a week

The whole group is getting into it, quantifying and qualifying. We quickly realise too much or too little is a burden. There is a comfort range that needs identifying..

In terms of security

Minimum
Always know you can get the minimum
Maximum
Never want for anything……

This exercise certainly makes you think. We carry on discussing details.

I wander around the other groups, they are identifying units and then evaluating max and min. Most have never thought of this before

Indoor temperature 21 constant
Minimum 17c Not too hot, not too cold.

The facilitator asks how much disagreement there is

”Not a lot so far.”
“Where was the difficulty – in quantifying and qualifying?”

The facilitator draws the point out that you know standards when you see them.

“If you were going to invest in an organisation what level and services would it be offering?”

We were not in agreement about what was reasonable – in fact we had difficulty quantifying a lot of the dimensions.

Someone comments they find this strange as we have done research for so many years so why is it not available?

(“And what has this got to do with investment? Someone wonders skeptically)

"We’ll come to that. Let’s have a break.'

Coffee and biscuits are available, and we mill around chatting.
One guy is into aviation. I tell him of my exploits into trying to invent a flying saucer

I also meet a farmer, he is into corn and wheat growing for bread making.

People seem to be engaged in what they are doing, mostly one man or mom and pop operations.

A guy from a large bank is present. I ask what he is doing here. "We need to change,' he says 'that is why we are on the course.'

We are called back to our groups.

I sit at the same table, the banker is with us.

Time for a DVD. A film of points. The point of points. Numbers flash on the screen

The presenter is walking through a field.

”Here I am in this field, what is behind all this? How many hectares is it? How long did it take to plant? How many people will it feed? How many hours do I need to work?”

He continues as he starts to walk across the field. “It’s a very simple equation. That is the basis of all human activity. How can we achieve what is reasonable for everyone with what we have?”

He presents a numerical framework for us. A hectare is an area of land, there are 1 600 working hours in one year and 365 days.

We have 1.2 or 1.5 hectares of agricultural land per person and a certain number of hectares of forest and other land to include water and stuff.

It is very simple.

He reminds me of David Attenborough.

The film continues. Lorry driving. Machines have similar limits. Based on fuel, man-hours to manufacture, and the lifetime of the machine and maintenance hours, and the fuel to drive them, related to amount of work that has to go into make the fuel plus the agricultural land or land needed. Back to hectares/ or calories and working hours.

And for an organization. On this simple basis, this way of accounting and counting, we can describe how we create a standard of living. And also to equate the standard with the areas of land involved.

Then you know how many hours and hectares and the machine and organization. You always come back to the same measurements and units.

The DVD shows pictures of ships and boats carrying freight.
The Presenter: “each boat has a capacity to carry in terms of volume and tonnes. And there is an effort in terms of man-hours and fuel required to carry the freight to another area. Easy to work out if you include the speed of transport. All these simple things are the basis of points system. But what does this have to do with organizations?”

The facilitator asks if we understood the film…

“I still don’t get what a point is, just what the basis is,” says someone.

“True, but let’s not jump the gun.”

We are given a new exercise; a pyramid.

You have to put things in order. You have to choose one of the things from the square like 4000 calories of food. You have to break them down into things that make up the basics.

See if you can identify different levels but at the bottom you have to come down to the basics - to man hours, land area and water etc.

My group discusses – and decides to choose - the flat example, 13 m2 for all. Someone else means it is difficult but agrees anyway.

We get sticky labels and start to discuss levels.

At the bottom is the land the building is on. Then there is the required to produce energy.
Then the materials. How much land do you need for that?
We park that question.

Then there are man-hours to build and then maintenance, upgrades etc.

There is metal for pipes etc. That has a man-hour component.

For materials there are the man-hours required to get materials out of the earth. The only thing that is not clear about this is the minerals taking from the land. You need land to take it from. Non-productive land, I had not thought of that.

We seem to have identified a lot of layers to work on.
• The actual delivery of the service is at the top.
• Running
• Then there is the set up.
• Underneath that, basic materials at the bottom in two sections Land to produce bio material and land where we extract materials from the crust

So the group concludes we have three separate levels under this particular service.
"Are we getting there?” The facilitator asks. I wonder, but the facilitator seems pleased anyway.

The facilitator: “What have we learnt from this?”

I venture: “This about minerals …it is not land area but it is in tonnes.”

“Yes, it explains the boat bit,“ he replies.

You have tonnes of minerals, not originating from the biosphere.

“Are we agreed it is working?” He asks. “We identify that all services originate from fields, water and minerals. There are three basic levels: extraction, construction and maintenance and running.”

Every group has identified the same levels, we just have not thought of it before like that.

So, we have come to a juncture. Homework is to take the service we are thinking of offering and to break it down into the pyramid. Thinking of what is required in the context of maximum, minimum and reasonable.

Obviously, the time frames for construction and running are different, as construction effort would be divided over time, so the different levels need to be treated differently. We are just required to map them out. The facilitator closes the session for today.

Everyone starts to pack up, I go over to chat to the facilitator.

I was expecting more open space type exercises. He replies it is not always useful for training. We must start up with the basics.

You are seeing the point now of developing the facilitator group. I like the ideas of the facilitation team. I realize I could set up a separate facilitation organization myself.

He leaves me I continue wandering around, not much is going on. I think it is time to go. As I leave I see a lemonade stall. I find this amusing as business courses always use lemonade stalls as examples.

I take the lift back to the departure hall; I see the exhibition stand is still there. I sit next to a woman on the bench I started from.

She says:” I’m wondering if I should invest in unit trusts.”
“I recommend it,” I say.

Farmyard – geese – ducks - this is what I associate with her.
I ask her about her impression from visiting the stand.
She feels it is a good idea, almost too good to be true, she always mistrusts things like that!

Reflections
I feel we are living off the work done by our forefathers to create systems and structures. Today we are using metal, machines, materials put together by those who came before us. Yet we are using them in a non-sustainable way. You could say we are not working in the same way.

I am also surprised that the figures for what is reasonable living standard are hard to find. And that to work out from a systems perspective how much materials are needed by us – I believe society is looking the wrong way somehow. Suppose a train is coming from the other direction?

Questions
None just yet – I would like to understand points better.

Immediate uses

I like the DVD idea. Maybe I’ll try it if I can borrow a camera – and write the script.

I think the comparisons I learned about could be used immediately to show the way forward for various systems or collection of systems. The diagram below shows the difference between different operations that require different inputs for construction and operation. A double Hi is an operation that should be replaced (Road transport system) a Hi on construction and Lo on running should be kept (Rail network). Lo on construction and hi on running costs should be replaced.

Verifications

The New Scientist has an article showing how much material is needed to run London. (Population 7.5 million)
Input
WATER 1,000 million tonnes

FOOD 2.4 million tonnes

FUEL 20 million tonnes

TIMBER 1.2 million tonnes

PLASTICS 2.1 million tonnes
.
METALS 1.2 million tonnes

GLASS 0.36 million tonnes

CEMENT 2 million tonnes

BRICKS; BLOCKS;SAND;TARMAC 36 million tonnes

OXYGEN 40 million tonnes

PAPER 2.2 million tonnes

output

c02 60 million tonnes

household waste 4 million tonnes

INDUSTRAIL WASTE 11.4 million tonnes

SO2 0.4 million tonnes

NOX 0.28 million tonnes

SEWAGE 7.5 million tonnes

I visited a historical spa organization and presented the idea of raising capital and giving right of use in return. We calculated that raising $100,000 dollars, with $1,000 from 100 people would be possible, if we offered right of use of holiday apartments at a rate equivalent to cost of production of the service, which was at roughly $100 a week. Several other conversation with people leads me to change my earlier skepticism. As long as the “unit holder” uses the right to use and pays the production costs, it is a good, non taxable deal all round.