Life Rules: Nature’s Blueprint for Surviving Economic and Environmental Collapse by Ellen LaConte, New Society Publishers, 366pp, $18.95.

Neoclassical economists, business gurus, the Republican Party and every high school teacher that ever gave C+ to a slacker sophomore would have us believe that human society cannot function successfully without competition among its members.

In life, we’re told, there are either winners or losers. There’s no other option.

So you better be smarter, work harder, get luckier and be born richer than the other guy or gal unless you want to wind up on the junk heap of history. Or even natural history, because, as Social Darwinists assure us, competition governs the natural world too.

I want to be a mushroom when I grow up

Ellen LaConte begs to differ. Her new book Life Rules: Nature’s Blueprint for Surviving Economic and Environmental Collapse argues that humanity today is hardly the natural and desirable climax of eons of evolution of life. Instead, industrial capitalism is more like an infection ravaging the natural order, a kind of AIDS for the Earth, to use her metaphor.

If you study nature, you’ll find that there’s much less competition than cooperation.

“The economic relationships between and among communities at the level of the biosphere are sympathetic and circumstantial,” LaConte writes.

By contrast, industrial capitalism has led to a perfect storm of problems — climate change, peak oil, overpopulation, species extinction heading the list — that LaConte has dubbed Critical Mass,

Critical Mass is the Earth’s equivalent of AIDS…Just as the diverse parts of the immune system are scattered throughout our bodies, Earth’s diverse natural communities and ecosystems have in the past worked together to provide the same sort of protective, defensive and healing services for Life as a whole that our immune systems provide for us….Life evolved its own version of an immune system. And our activities are threatening to undermine it.

Extending this human-society-as-AIDS image  is LaConte’s original contribution to the discussion of peak everything started by environmentalists like Bill McKibben and peak oilers like Richard Heinberg and James Howard Kunstler.

If AIDS is your issue, you may find that extending the autoimmune metaphor over three-hundred-odd pages is a fresh way to explain the unsustainability of industrial civilization. But you’ll need a high tolerance for medical references and word coinages like “Earthonomical” to make it through to LaConte’s conclusion.

Homepage slideshow photo: Gerry Dincher/Flickr.

– Erik Curren, Transition Voice

Autoimmune: The Cause and The Cure by Annesse Brockley and Kristin Urdiales, Nature Had it First LLC, 253pp, $27.95.

You’ll need a pretty high tolerance for research studies and medical lingo to get through Autoimmune: The Cause and The Cure. 

But then if you or someone you love is suffering from an autoimmune disease such as chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, lupus or even type 2 diabetes, then you’ve probably already learned to deal with jargon-filled medical research and advice.

And most of the advice, despite its complexity, can likely be boiled down to a simple choice, repeated in a hundred different ways but relentlessly predictable nonetheless: Take this drug . Or get this procedure. Or do both.

In many mainstream treatments for autoimmune diseases, changes in lifestyle or diet are lucky if they get mentioned as afterthoughts to drugs and surgery.

And that’s why many treatments fail, according to Autoimmune authors Annesse Brockley and Kristin Urdiales:

Every symptom of autoimmune disease can now be clearly explained and traced back to its origin. The evidence proves that these diseases share a common source, and that this source is nor viral, bacterial, or genetic, but originates with a fundamental lack of nutrients that are essential to the functioning of your body.

Brockley and Urdiales follow in the tradition of Weston A. Price, a pioneering dentist who traveled the globe before World War II seeking the answer to healthy teeth among the indigenous peoples of the world. What Price found was that good dental health was less about brushing, flossing and root canals and more about staying away from the harmful foods of modern society, from refined grains and sugar to pasteurized milk.

Price’s modern-day disciples such as Sally Fallon, author of the popular Nourishing Traditions cookbook, have gone on to finger the industrial diet as the primary culprit in hundreds of health conditions beyond the mouth, from acne to arthritis.

Typical of Price followers, authors Brockley and Urdiales may not be mainstream medical practitioners — lack of an obvious bio in the book for either author prevents the reader from knowing much about them at all — but they’re not slack in citing articles that sound pretty medical to an untrained eye like mine, adding credibility.

It’s mystifying that a book titled Autoimmune doesn’t seem to say much about the granddaddy of autoimmune conditions, AIDS. Also, the book would be more useful with an index.

Yet, I’d still recommend the book to anyone who wants to consider options for treating an autoimmune disorder beyond what they may hear from most physicians.

Despite the book’s standard legal disclaimer that the authors aren’t offering medical advice, even your doctor would have to agree that there’s little risk in prescribing yourself the book’s recipes for sourdough pancakes or honey hot chocolate.

Slideshow image via CoquiTheChef/Flickr.

– Erik Curren, Transition Voice

The Moneyless Manifesto by Mark Boyle, Permanent Publications, 320 pp, about $16.

“Moneyless Man” Mark Boyle, living as he does in the UK, has an advantage over Yanks like me in that he can survive without an income but still enjoy free healthcare through the British National Health Service. Gotta love that socialism.

Yet, Boyle still argues against hospital-based high-tech medicine and for localized healthcare based on herbs and natural remedies because the results will be healthier for both our bodies and our spirits.

Wherever we live in the industrial world, we all groan under the rule of mammon and suffer from the spiritual disease of greed.

But trying to break up Wall Street banks or make the tax system more fair isn’t the answer according to Boyle’s latest book, The Moneyless Manifesto: Live Well, Live Rich, Live Free (also available for free download through Creative Commons license).

Building off three years of living with little or no money that he described in The Moneyless Man, Boyle is now ready to share his secrets for living better with less.

Boyle has accomplished something pretty extraordinary in living so long without money. I can barely go a couple hours without dropping a few bucks on coffee or parking, not to mention having to scrimp and save to pay the mortgage every month.

Yet, Boyle’s style is refreshingly casual and un-smug. And he’s not proprietary about his secrets of living über cheap but is generous with helpful hints to make daunting tasks, like assembling a bicycle from old parts you can find for free, seem do-able.

Boyle’s tone is light and he coats technical information with enough fun to make it go down easy. Just take his discussion on going off-grid, which includes advice for safely stuffing your stove from the 1930s in stanza form in “The Firewood Poem”:

Beechwood fires are bright and clear
If the logs are kept a year,
Chestnut’s only good they say
If for logs ’tis laid away.
Make a fire of Elder tree,
Death within your house will be;
But ash new or ash old,
Is fit for a queen with crown of gold.

Watch an interview with Boyle below or at YouTube.

– Erik Curren, Transition Voice

“The Power of Outrospection” argues that we can only save ourselves by becoming more aware of others and starting to care about their fate.

Socrates said that the best way to live a good life is to know yourself.

In the twentieth century, knowing yourself meant introspection, the practice of looking within popularized by Freudian psychoanalysis.

But introspection can easily lead to navel gazing, self love and egoism. Such narcissism is unlikely to help deal with the big problems that threaten human society today, from climate change to global poverty to war in the Middle East.

So perhaps what the world needs more than looking inside at ourselves is to look outside at others, what Roman Krznaric, a cultural theorist and founding faculty member of The School of Life in London calls “outrospection.”

Outrospection

In a new animated video, “The Power of Outrospection,” Krznaric explains his theory that empathy is not a wimpy quality best exercised in encounter groups in Northern California but may instead be humanity’s best hope for future survival.

“Empathy is about radical social change,” Krznaric says. “A lot of people think of empathy as sort of a nice, soft fluffy concept. I think it’s anything but that. I think it’s actually quite dangerous.”

Dangerous? For example, empathy can turn a physician, who’s angry that poor families can’t afford life-saving medical treatment for their children, into a revolutionary, as in the case of Che Guevara.

Today, empathy brings ordinary Arabs and Israelis who’ve lost family members in war together in a citizen peace initiative. In the past, empathy helped eighteenth-century abolitionists convert Britain, at the time the world’s greatest slave power, into a global force for emancipation.

Now, empathy is needed on climate change.

A gap, not in missiles, but in empathy

Krznaric finds an empathy gap across space — Third World nations like India are already suffering from climate crises worse than the rich countries whose emissions are mostly at fault. On climate, there’s also an empathy gap across time, as people alive today fail to realize our responsibility to protect future generations from climate chaos.

To fill that deficit of empathy, we’ll need to bring empathy into our lives. Krznaric offers one big idea to do that, an “empathy museum” where you can literally walk in the shoes of others. What does this museum experience look like? For example,”encountering” a former Vietnamese sweatshop worker who relays how to make a T-shirt in inhumane working conditions for pennies an hour.

In the twenty-first century, Krznaric argues that Socrates’s injunction to know yourself must go beyond introspection into an outward gaze that helps us all identify better with others.

After a few years of weird weather around the world and distressing climate news culminating in Superstorm Sandy, you’d think trying to save our own skins would be motive enough to start taking climate seriously. But appealing to self-interest, even the enlightened kind, hasn’t seem to have accomplished much.

Starting to worry about others for a change couldn’t do any worse. Watch the video here.

– Erik Curren, Transition Voice

In 1899, no booty shorts. Even the immigrant poor on New York’s Mulberry Street looked more dignified than today’s average middle-class American.

It’s no accident that the 1960 film adaptation of The Time Machine opens with host HG Wells welcoming four friends to a dinner party in London on January 5, 1900 to recount events that had occurred since he last met them, on New Year’s Eve, 1899.

What year could be more symbolic of the end of an era, for good or ill, than 1899?

Since Americans worship at the altar of progress, we hardly need to be reminded that plenty of things in the 1890s were certainly much worse than they are today.

Women couldn’t vote. Separate but Equal was the law of the land. Railroads and banks beggared farmers. Police and federal troops helped bosses of factories and coal mines crush labor unions. And all this while robber barons sipped champagne in Newport, RI and packed their daughters off to Europe to collect Rembrandts and aristocrat-husbands, both at bargain-basement prices.

At the same time, as a guy who lives in a small city with lots of historic architecture, I can’t help but be reminded that plenty of other things were great in 1899.

1. Food. There’s a good reason why food guru Michael Pollan says not to eat anything your grandmother wouldn’t have recognized as food. Back in 1899, most food was whole and it was grown organically by local farmers. Today, it’s hard to avoid processed foods. And nearly all of them contain newfangled ingredients that, if they won’t kill you quickly, will certainly kill you slowly: high fructose corn syrup, MSG, soy. With hybrids and GMOs, even whole foods like corn and wheat are now suspect. It’s a scandal that the Bible’s staff of life and America’s amber waves of grain was degraded in the 1960s and 70s into “dwarf wheat,” a high-yield hybrid that cannot be properly digested by humans. Sadly, this pseudo-wheat is probably what’s in that loaf of peasant bread you just got at Whole Foods. Yuck.
2. Local Economies. Back in 1899, about the only thing besides opium that came from China was tea and, well, China. Imports from other countries were mostly luxuries like the aforementioned champagne. Today, I don’t know if you can even buy an American-made microwave oven. But in 1899, people in my town could buy a rock solid cast-iron stove forged locally by the WJ Loth Stove Company. Indeed, nearly everything Americans needed everyday was made in the USA, from trousers to tables to tallow candles to horse-drawn carriages. And like the hay to fuel the horse that pulls the carriage — whether barouche, fiacre, hackney or landau — both our food and our energy in 1899 were not just domestic, but they were also overwhelmingly local.
3. Streets and Buildings. Speaking of transportation, when you have automobiles, you get today’s landscapes built for cars, with monster expressways, six-lane highways running past cul-de-sac subdivisions and cities covered in parking lots. Back in 1899, horse buggies and mule carts and the occasional streetcar didn’t overwhelm streets built at a human scale, so all cities were walkable. And I dare you to compare any building of 1899 against the mid- and late-century concrete boxes found in every city and town today. Italianate and Queen Anne Victorian or Planet of the Apes modernism? It’s no contest.
4. Clothing. Call me an old fogy, but I have to agree with your grandmother that the flashing basketball sneakers, sweatpants, sweatshirts and baseball caps worn by both sexes on the streets of any big city today — a look that James Howard Kunstler has aptly described as “clownish” — are no improvement on the dignified and gender-specific clothing that people wore in public in the 1890s. Give me a woman in an A-line skirt and leg o’ mutton sleeves and a man wearing a gray coat with covered buttons and matching waistcoat, dark trousers, short turnover shirt collar, and floppy bow tie any day. When our fellow citizens look intelligent and confident and move with grace, we respect them more and our whole society acts with more seriousness.

This exercise in time travel is not just about nostalgia or even mourning what we’ve lost, which is so, so much. It’s about trying to preserve what’s left, as folks have done pretty well in my city and in hundreds of other historic areas nationwide from Savannah, GA to Brooklyn, NY.

Then, it’s about planning for the future. That will mean building an America resilient enough to withstand the shocks of climate change, peak oil and permanent economic downturn.

That America should be a place where citizens of a free society can enjoy enough prosperity and robust good health while living with dignity. And beauty. If we need a time machine to get there, then let’s build one together with our words. Regaining our collective memory may be crucial to envisioning the future we want.

– Erik Curren, Transition Voice

Insourcing American jobs was a theme of the Obama campaign. Peak oilers have predicted it for years. Now it may actually be happening. Photo: Pro President Obama Blog.

In The Campaign, last year’s hilarious, potty-mouthed political romp with Will Ferrell and Zach Galifianakis, the Motch brothers (modeled of course on the Koch brothers) shovel piles of cash onto the campaign of Galifianakis’s character Marty. Why? They want to build factories in his North Carolina congressional district, where they will employ Chinese workers at Chinese wages.

They call it “insourcing.”

The term might sound silly, but in real life insourcing is no joke. For decades, labor unions and other Buy American fans have been advocating higher tariffs and a return to protectionism to bring factories and jobs back from China to the U.S.

Meanwhile, peak oilers have predicted that rising oil prices will make it too expensive to keep shipping stuff from Asia to consumers in Europe and America. James Howard Kunstler, one peak oiler who isn’t afraid to keep predicting the collapse of the global economy year after year, has just forecast that 2013 will be the year when China’s export markets dry up.

“Worldwide economic entropy cancels out China’s putative advantages in cash reserves, stockpiles of ‘stuff,’ and government that can do what it pleases without a loyal opposition tossing sand in its gears,” writes Kunstler in his “Forecast 2013.”

Doomerism going mainstream

It’s not news when peak oilers see the beginning of the end for globalization. But it is news when the mainstream media start to agree with guys like Kunstler. Take the Washington Post for instance.

“For decades, growing volumes of cross-border trade and money flows have fueled strong economic growth,” columnist Robert Samuelson wrote at the end of December. “But something remarkable is happening; trade and international money flows are slowing and, in some cases, declining.”

Examples abound in the manufacturing world. Apple has started making some of its computers in the U.S. instead of China. General Electric is producing water heaters, refrigerators and other appliances in Kentucky instead of China and Mexico. Otis has moved some elevator production from Mexico to South Carolina. Even Wham-O is molding Frisbees in California instead of China.

Why? A combination of rising wages in Asia and rising transportation costs (mainstream media code for peak oil) have made it cheaper to make stuff closer to where it will be sold.

Of course, Samuelson doesn’t say the words “peak oil.” He also isn’t sure whether more insourcing will lead to a new era of domestic prosperity or kill the goose that laid the golden egg of economic growth under globalization.

But people who care about local economies know that most of the benefits of global trade have gone to the rich and the big corporations they own, with very little benefit to ordinary Americans, who lost good jobs and saw their communities hollowed out.

And anyone who remembers that we live on a finite planet knows that economic growth will have to end someday. When that day comes, we’ll need to find a new way to be prosperous.

Let’s hope that 2013 will be the year it happens.

Meanwhile, just for fun, watch the trailer for The Campaign:

– Erik Curren, Transition Voice

Ever since the advent of social media turned the Web from a one-way medium with website owners talking to passive audiences into a truly interactive, two-way conservation where audiences can talk back, the demands for higher quality internet content, especially writing, have increased.

Don’t sell me; talk to me

In the past, customers and other web visitors would settle for straight up pitches, advertising hype and other poor quality communication because, well, that’s all there was online.

But now, having gotten used to more soft-sell commercial communications where a pitch must be embedded in interesting or helpful information, audiences now expect to be treated with more and more respect.

According to Copyblogger, which has pronounced 2013 “The Year of the Online Writer,” content marketing is not a fad that’s going to pass. Instead, online marketers must get used to offering their audiences intelligent content or else risk falling behind.

And who creates this intelligent content? It’s not the engineering department, it’s not your salespeople and it’s not even the vice president for marketing.

It’s talented writers.

Talent in demand

Recent updates to Google’s search methodology have elevated the status of high quality content and also started to rank writers by influence. And that’s not all, says Copyblogger:

Now who creates the content, and who does the linking out matters – which is why Google wants to know who you are via your Google+ authorship profile. What’s been dubbed Author Rank has the potential to be the biggest algorithmic signal for SEO since the hyperlink itself.

The days of lame anonymous content are over. Even better, rock star writers with demonstrated success and strong social followings will command the highest compensation and equity positions.

This means that skilled web writers won’t be cheap in the future. And what that means for your business is that, if you need to rank well in Google searches, then it may be your best investment to engage an experienced web writer now, while you can still afford their rates.

Yes, if you know how to type, you can write your web copy yourself, meanwhile spending hundreds or thousands of dollars a month on Yellow Pages listings, newspaper ads and other old fashioned marketing strategies that may not be delivering results in today’s marketplace.

For that same budget, you could get yourself a writer who can help your website rise to page one in Google results, bringing you more web visitors and ultimately, more customers.

Skyscrapers and business parks are popping up all over India. Photo: Shayon Ghosh.

If I were asked under what sky the human mind has most fully developed some of its choicest gifts, has most deeply pondered over the greatest problems of life, and has found solutions of some of them which well deserve the attention even of those who have studied Plato and Kant, I should point to India.

- Max Mueller

Returning to the world’s second-biggest nation after seven years away, it’s clear to me that the two distinctive features of modern India, overpopulation and globalization, are proceeding apace, without any apparent concern about the global recession becoming the new normal in a world beyond peak oil.

And in talking to Indians about economic growth and development, they don’t seem any more eager for lectures from rich countries about sustainability than they were the last time I was here, which came before Hurricane Sandy and the crazy weather worldwide that has given climate action a new urgency.

Nothing new — Indians are less concerned about ecology than about equity.

Because, for the last two or three centuries, the countries of the global North used up most of the oil and other resources while also producing most of the Earth’s pollution, Indians think it’s only fair that places like Europe and the U.S. should be cutting back so that developing countries like India can get their fair share and catch up.

And when it comes to climate or peak oil, Indians seem to worry about planning for a livable future about as much as we do — that is, hardly at all.

Give us Gucci not Gandhi

Today, the future that Indians envision for their population of 1.2 billion and growing features an abundance of iPads and cheap short-haul air travel.

Indian politicians and NGOs make the obligatory noises about slowing their population growth. But the actions of government and ordinary citizens alike, which speak much more loudly, show that Indians seem to think they can support all their people today plus more in the future if only their country can just get rich enough fast enough — to create a “bigger middle class.”

And most Indians act as if they think their country will get rich through globalization.

So, while continuing to train armies of workers in technology, India has rolled out the red carpet for corporate investment.

In the capital New Delhi alone, the infrastructure is impressive. The new Indira Gandhi International Airport makes many North American terminals look dated by comparison, while numerous global chain hotels, office parks and convention centers offer shiny glass facades that gleam in the bright South Asian sun. New Delhi even built a whole new suburb, Gurgaon, devoted to corporate office parks and luxury apartments.

Well stocked shopping malls with international luxury brands are also a new development, as are high-rise condos for rich retirees, just two offerings in a booming economy serving upscale Indian consumers.

Meanwhile, as infrastructure for ordinary Indians continues to get little love, India becomes more and more a two-tier country. First World comfort for the rich and Third World chaos for everyone else.

Money for schools and public services disappears into India’s infamous kleptocracy. Garbage still rots on potholed streets in many areas of the capital city while the New Delhi train station looks like it hasn’t gotten a paint job since the days of Gandhi and Nehru.

Speaking of Nehru, India wasn’t always so hospitable to global corporations. During the Cold War, as India’s first prime minister after independence, Nehru guided India towards industrialization but with a strong protectionist wall against outside corporations.

And though Nehru also encouraged handicrafts in the countryside, he was nothing to Gandhi when it came to trying to save the traditional Indian village economy:

I would say that if the village perishes India will perish too. India will be no more India. Her own mission in the world will get lost. The revival of the village is possible only when it is no more exploited. Industrialization on a mass scale will necessarily lead to passive or active exploitation of the villagers as the problems of competition and marketing come in. Therefore we have to concentrate on the village being self-contained, manufacturing mainly for use.

Not always growing

While more and more of us in rich countries have started to see the wisdom of Gandhi’s economics and have started to call for less, not more, globalization, most of Gandhi’s compatriots seem to be over all that small-is-beautiful stuff.

The New India is all about rapid economic growth. And that will bring still more population growth.

Despite the durability of overpopulation as a topic in international forums, India wasn’t always adding so many new people so quickly. From about 300 B.C. until about the year 1600, India’s population was stationary at around one hundred million. Then, just when European countries like Portugal, France and of course Britain started to establish colonies and grab their own pieces of India, South Asia’s population began to grow.

Perhaps, as in many places, better public hygiene slowed the infant mortality rate. Or, perhaps Indian civilization — which vied for centuries with China for hosting the world’s most developed economy, selling silks and spices to the world while Medieval Europeans clad in coarse homespun huddled in huts and scratched the soil for tubers — had simply reached the optimum equilibrium with its environment.

So, it may be possible that, without globalization (whether of the colonial or the corporate type) bringing in resources from the outside, especially fossil fuels, the land of India is only able to comfortably support about a hundred million people.

If true, that could be bad news for Indians on a finite planet. How will Mother India be able to support up to a billion and a half people if peak oil transforms today’s global recession into a Long Emergency that slows and then stops global investment in developing nations?

Just another future scenario not on the radar of Young India. Like American young people of the 1990s boom, young Indians today seem to find no greater role models than fast-moving entrepreneurs, like Jeh Wadia who started GoAir and was profiled in the documentary The Age of Stupid.

But given the looming realities of life on a finite planet, perhaps India’s next generation would be better served by looking back at India’s greatest generation — Gandhi especially — and at their civilization’s durable past.

Leapfrogging the city for the land

As in other developing countries, Indians often talk about “leapfrogging” over established technologies used by today’s rich countries to the latest technologies. So, though many Indians still don’t have phones, they shouldn’t get landlines; they should go straight to mobile phones.

But maybe a smarter kind of leapfrogging for this crowded nation with little water and few domestic sources of fossil fuels beyond some coal would be to skip corporate globalization altogether and go straight to a revitalized village economy. With more than half of Indians still dependent on agriculture, India still has an advantage over rich countries that may have less than 10% of their population in farming.

I know little about what movements India might have on now to protect and even promote village life. But,  while visiting Bodh Gaya, home to the Bodhi Tree and the top pilgrimage site for Buddhists from around the world, I had the rare pleasure to discover the so-called Sujata Village located across the Naranja River.

The Sujata Village in Bihar, India.

If this endearing village of 5,000 souls housed in brightly painted, cozy brick houses on narrow lanes that exclude all motor vehicles is any indication of the quality of Indian village life, then sign me up. I’m eager to see if India has other villages like this, with friendly kids eager to show off their happy family members working in the fields stacking hay in neat piles or shucking rice by hand using only a woven mat and family skill.

These folks seemed to have all the prosperity they needed, and unless I’m romanticizing it, I can’t imagine that anything but the false lures of big city excitement could entice a son or daughter of Sujata Village to leave such a delightful life for one of the terrifying slums in and around every major Indian city.

India wants and deserves to take its role as a leader among nations. Leading the Transition back to a nation of farmers could set a powerful example for other nations of the global South and perhaps keep them from making the same mistake that Western countries did — selling out to consumerism. And at the worst possible time too, right at the end of the party, just when the fossil fuels needed to support an industrial economy are running out.

Given peak oil and climate change, leading the world back to human-scale values may be the only worthy role for a civilization that gave the world Gandhi, not to mention the Taj Mahal, the Bhagavad Gita and a taste for tandoori only matched by a thirst for enlightenment.

– Erik Curren, Transition Voice

If alive today, conservative saint Edmund Burke would surely be skeptical of such innovations as factory farms, nuclear power and hydrofracking.

“Don’t eat anything your grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food,” advises Michael Pollan, author of foodie blockbuster The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Who knows what hidden dangers newfangled and untested foods like margarine, energy drinks or Tofurkey might pose to our health?

Now, that’s conservative.

And I don’t mean conservative like the GOP leadership in Congress or the Koch Brothers or people who don’t like gay marriage or abortion and blame the Bible for it. I mean conservative in the old sense of wanting to preserve what existed in the past on the assumption that, just like that old time religion, if it was good enough for our mothers, it’s good enough for me.

If we follow Pollan’s advice and go back to the way our grandmothers did things, that’s even more conservative.

Used is better than new

For a real conservative, then whatever’s old gets the benefit of the doubt. Whatever’s new is guilty until proven innocent.

For my part, I think that many of the innovations of the fossil-fuel era may ultimately bring more danger than benefit, whether it’s personal cars, coal-fired electricity or the whole chemical industry. This view is making me pretty conservative.

Indeed, I’ve gotten so conservative that I can’t help from applying Pollan’s rule to nearly any story in the news:

• GMO foods? Guilty until proven safe to eat and safe to grow for today and future generations.
• Political campaign Super PACs? Guilty until proven not to corrupt our democracy.
• Hydrofracking for natural gas? Guilty until proven not to contaminate water supplies.

This approach basically turns upside down the usual American love of novelty. For the real conservative, what’s New is probably not Improved.

As Edmund Burke, one of the founders of conservatism, said: “A spirit of innovation is generally the result of a selfish temper and confined views. People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors.”

If your first reaction to any kind of new whiz-bang technology is “Gee, that sounds cool!” then you’re certainly no conservative.

Smart phones? Gene therapy? Robots on the battlefield, on an assembly line or vacuuming your living room?

For the real conservative, they’re all suspect from the outset.

Thanks, but we’re all progressives here

Now, most of the people I respect and admire who are fighting climate change, re-localizing their economies and standing up for conservation and clean energy, wouldn’t want to call themselves conservative. They seem to prefer “progressive,” which sounds like the opposite of conservative.

No wonder. In the nineteenth century, conservative was a term of derision for royalists, High Churchmen, Hapsburg-admirers and other reactionaries of the ancien regime. In Bad Old Europe, conservatives were aristocrats, archbishops and members of Parliament who resisted change on principle to preserve the last vestiges of feudalism. So in the capitalist-hustling America of the Gilded Age, if you were open-minded and cared about the future, Progressive was what you wanted to be.

But these days, is progressive really such a good way to talk about people who really just want to save what we already have or bring back what we used to have?

If you want to protect clean air and water, unadulterated food grown by family farmers and walkable towns and cities, then you’re not looking for progress. You’re looking to conserve.

It’s the guy with the robots who’s pushing progress.

Of course, there are progressives who use their own terminology. For example, environmentalists urge us to follow “the precautionary principle” or do “permaculture” or even live in an “Earthological” way.

Certainly, not even the most committed progressive could think that wonky terms like those will ever trip off the average citizen’s tongue.

But conservative is another story. It’s simple. It’s common. And it has a track record.

Everybody knows how the term “liberal” used to refer to free-market types who pushed to open up undeveloped countries to big global corporations, still the term’s meaning in Latin America.

For me, applying Pollan’s advice about following the example of our grandmothers to whatever I see, I can’t help being conservative. But with a twist. I’ve developed a new respect for the past while remaining open to necessary innovations.

Abolishing slavery, votes for women, public education for all — necessary innovations.

Computerized single-serve coffee makers — maybe not.

– Erik Curren, Transition Voice

To get new visitors, you need to do well in search engines, ideally coming up on the first page of any search related to your targeted search terms. And to do that, you need to give search engines what they want above all — new content.

But attracting new visitors is only half the web traffic story. Then, perhaps more importantly, you need to entice your visitors to return with new content on your website.

So, you can see why you need to start blogging and do it on a regular basis, say, once every week or two, minimum. But you’re busy running your business and don’t have time to come up with blog post ideas, research them and then write them up.

No worries. There are plenty of skilled web writers out there who would be happy to do your blog posts for you. You can search the web for freelancers or hire a small agency like the Curren Group which offers blogging, ghostwriting and blog coaching. Either way, you can engage a writer to create blog posts on topics that would interest your audience, building your company or organization’s reputation as a  helpful expert in your field.

And all without breaking the bank — whether your writer charges hourly, by the blog post or for a package of posts, you’ll probably spend less on blogging per month than the cost of one ad in your local paper.

How to find the right blogger for you? Connie Sung Moyle at the email marketing company Vertical Response offers a few tips:

• Ask around among your friends, family and business contacts — word-of-mouth will give you the best references
• Go to online talent directories Elance.com and ODesk.com, but use them with caution
• Reach out to local colleges for students looking to flex their writing muscles
• Avoid “content farms” where the articles may be poor quality and not suited to your needs
• Don’t hire on resume alone