How to Save the World

This Blog Has Moved

Tue, 22 Dec 2009 01:35:37 GMT

BLOG This Blog Has Moved!

After nearly 7 years at this site, How to Save the World moved on December 20, 2009 to a new WordPress-based site.

Please change your bookmarks/favourites to http://howtosavetheworld.ca/
First time you visit the new site you can resubscribe to How to Save the World's posts (RSS feed) in your aggregator and/or by e-mail, on the right sidebar.
My brilliant brother Alan has moved the entire archive of 2,500 posts, and 14,000 comments, to the new site, so everything can be accessed on the new site right back to the start of the blog in 2003.
In the transition, some font sizes came out a bit wonky (my old text editor used some old html conventions that are no longer supported) and there's a bit of clean-up to do, but if you notice anything terribly wrong, please let me know by e-mail.
Thanks for your patience during the reconstruction period, and for putting up with the old comments server -- the new one is much better.

Links of the Week/Month -- December 19, 2009

Sun, 20 Dec 2009 01:13:40 GMT

BLOG Links of the Week/Month -- December 19, 2009

I've been travelling, so my weekly update links have piled up for three weeks. There is some important reading here, and as usual the must reads are in the first section.

This is a first notice that, as of December 31, this blog will be moving to a Wordpress blog at http://howtosavetheworld.ca since Radio Userland, which has hosted this blog since its inception nearly seven years ago, is ceasing its collaborative operations with Salon. If you change your bookmarks to the new link now, it will take you back here until the official switchover. Thanks.

this hilarious bit of 'systems thinking' is from holytaco.com; thanks to fer_ananda (Fernanda Ibarra) and Amy Lenzo for the link

PREPARING FOR CIVILIZATION'S COLLAPSE: UNDERSTANDING WHO WE'VE BECOME

Are We Civilized Humans a Broken People?: Bruce Levine psychoanalyzes the despair and demoralization of Americans in the face of the horrific challenges facing us, but his analysis applies to everyone in our globalized civilization. Thanks to Paul Heft for the link.

Walking Away from Our Colonial Culture: Derrick Jensen explains that the first step in understanding and preparing ourselves to end the damage of civilization culture is to deprogram ourselves from the colonial cultural indoctrination that makes us afraid to bring it down, and reconnecting with all-life-on-Earth, starting with just doing something effective that we are particularly good at doing.

Nopenhagen: Sharon Astyk explains why the process currently underway in Copenhagen is hopeless:

Copenhagen is a trip to hell for those who truly and most sincerely grasp the scope of the problem. In Hell, whether your kids and grandkids have enough to eat, whether we have resource wars over the remaining water are treated as distant tertiary (if that) issues, over how much money we can get for not burning the last bits of rainforest. In Hell, politicians who view this as a purely political issue - they will be long out office before their constituents suffer much - puff themselves and their nation, making small commitments they probably won't keep, with no real grasp of what is needed, while the people who are already paying the price get hosed again. And good people, who actually really do give a shit and are watching their life's work be ignored in every meaningful respect get to describe future suffering, and watch people shrug and move on.

The Theory of Anyway: An old post, also from Sharon Astyk, which she calls her favourite, and which explains that the best argument for activism is that many of the things that caring, thoughtful people are doing to make the world a better place are things we should be doing anyway, for other, personal reasons such as looking after our own health:

My friend Pat Meadows, a very, very smart woman, has a wonderful idea she calls “The Theory of Anyway.” What it entails is this – she argues that 95% of what is needed to resolve the coming crisis in energy depletion, or climate change, or whatever is what we should do anyway, and when in doubt about how to change, we should change our lives to reflect what we should be doing “Anyway.” Living more simply, more frugally, using less, leaving reserves for others, reconnecting with our food and our community, these are things we should be doing because they are the right thing to do on many levels. That they also have the potential to save our lives is merely a side benefit.

Learning to Live in Now Time: Many biologists hypothesize that wild creatures, and perhaps some prehistoric human cultures, live/lived "outside of time" as we know it, the linear progression from past to future -- without the sense of time as a constraining dimension at all. In times of stress these creatures do suddenly snap into our linear "clock" time, but in times of leisure they lose that sense of time, and their joyful moments are essentially eternal. We apparently lost this capacity -- in part because our modern civilization's stress is ever-present, and in part because our brains form in response to what we are taught in infancy, and what we are taught is that clock time is "real". We can no longer think otherwise. This, I think, is what Presence is all about, and why it is so elusive to us. Two recent articles touch on this:

Joanna Macy writes about "Deep Time" and links to articles about it
Janene Smith writes about time as something utterly different from space

The 7 Principles of Improv: Michelle James suggests the 7 basic principles of Improv are also the 7 essential principles for effective collaboration in any complex environment or situation:

"Yes and..." (accept and add forward)
Make everyone else look good
Be changed by what is said and what happens (adapt and evolve)
Co-create a shared agenda (not consensus, co-creation is real time and ever-changing)
Mistakes are invitations (justify and grow from it)
Keep the energy going (move, make something up, don't stop to analyze)
Serve the good of the whole (how can you best serve this situation, with what you do best?)

The Faith and the Love and the Hope Are All in the Waiting: Melissa Holbrook Pierson talks about how we hope, beyond faith, and keep asking the important questions until we get the answer we already knew:

If I don’t like the answer the Magic Eight Ball gives, I turn it over and try again. Eventually, “It is certain” shows up in the inky window, and I know “Will I be able to write something good?” or “Am I to find love?” will have the outcome I desire. Surely one can trust the Eight Ball to know these things. I can sleep.

If I don’t like the way these cards tell my future, I’ll do it two more times. Isn’t this a best-of-three game?

I can reason my way around anything, even the opening “Caution about the present” card. Of course I am being cautious. Aren’t I? Well, yes, in my usual incautious manner of approaching anything. It is the last card that tells the truth, however. I do not need to shuffle the deck again, hurrah. “A good augury.” I will take it. I can live on auguries in the absence of proofs. It is all I need, along with all I already have.

Thinking Differently: Chris Corrigan is facilitating a First Nations strategizing event and is using three principles of the culture of the members to 'frame' the event: balance, respect and kindness. Can you even imagine our culture using these principles to underpin a 'problem-solving' event?

LIVING BETTER

What Matters Now? Generosity: Seth Godin's new free e-book with some of the best (unradical) ideas of the year. Thanks to Colleen Wainwright for the link.

The Story of Cap & Trade: From the makers of The Story of Stuff, an explanation of why cap-and-trade systems can't work. Thanks to Raffi Aftandelian for the link.

Democratizing and Conversationalizing TED: The TED talks are wonderful but terribly elitist, expensive to attend in person, and very much 1-to-n bums-on-chairs affairs. TEDx promises to change that. Thanks to Bee Dieu for the link.

Vegan Comfort Food: Prad points us to a list of thousands of vegetarian and vegan restaurants and markets, while Dave Smith gives us a recipe for vegan smoothies.

Combatting Death by PowerPoint: Chris Lott asks why, despite the immense dissatisfaction and time-waste of traditional conference 'presentations', they are still the standard we can't seem to break free from. "I’d often prefer a speaker simply pull up a chair and have a conversation with the group."

The Theory of Anyway, Continued: Ten reasons doing the right thing is also doing what's good for you. Thanks to my Second Life friend Rayah for the link.

POLITICS AND ECONOMICS AS USUAL

Unemployment's Emotional Toll: Heartbreaking data from interviews with America's soaring ranks of unemployed.

If You Think the Economy is Improving, or is Collapsing Slower Than Expected, You're Not Looking at the Data: Ilargi describe s our inability to distinguish short-term trends from long term trends and how this may lead us to make foolish decisions or come to foolish conclusions. We have seen this most obviously in the climate change debate -- the minute there is a short term negative anomaly in temperature, an outcry occurs that climate change is solved, or is a myth. We're also seeing it in the trends in the value of the US dollar, which in the long-term will be seen to be worthless, but in the short-term is rallying for some very substantive reasons. His partner Stoneleigh elaborates on this with some sound investment advice for those looking to buy gold as a hedge for the longer-term US dollar collapse:

Personally, I think it far more important for those who have surplus resources to put those resources into obtaining as much control as possible over the essentials of their own existence. There are many hard assets one could buy now that may not be available later - assets that you could use to feed yourself, keep yourself warm or provided clean water. This is a much more important use for your wealth than owning something you intend to bury in a hole in the ground and sit on.

Tar Sands Worse Than Feared: New research shows the amount of pollution and devastation created by the horrific Alberta Tar Sands is much worse than even environmental groups had estimated. Thanks to Paul Heft for the link.

FUN AND INSPIRATION

Yes Men and Accomplices Make Canadian Government Look Like Idiots: That's not hard, since our right-wing minority PM is a climate change denier, but the Yes Men outdid themselves with a triple-barrelled spoof of Canada's absurd climate change inaction: They faked a "change of heart" Canadian Government press announcement, then they faked the Canadian Government's response to their own fake announcement, and then they faked a third-world country's heartbroken response to learning the initial announcement was a fake. Absolutely brilliant.

The Amazing Intelligence of Crows: Like humans, crows and other corvids developed larger brains (and hence tools) because, if they hadn't they would not have survived. Look at some of the things they do. Thanks to CreatvEmergence (Michelle James) for the link.

THOUGHTS FOR THE WEEK

Chimonophile/Chimonophobe: Dave Bonta rhapsodizes about the joys of winter, which I am seeking soon to escape forever:

Light unmitigated by leaves can change in an instant.

This is what makes deserts both so alluring and so unforgiving — that lack of moderation. Sharp contrasts appeal to the eye as well as to the moral imagination

The condition of the snow can change by the hour: what held you up at dawn might crumble under your boots at ten. The only constant is the need to walk and walk and walk, for warmth more than exercise and for revelation more than warmth.

In a radically simplified landscape there are fewer places to hide, and things that had been hidden are selectively revealed, in strong light and with maximum contrast: that’s what I mean by revelation. Nothing mystical about it. And the extreme conditions should serve to remind us that revelations are not necessarily pleasant; a preference for pleasant news and comforting beliefs can be a real obstacle to an accurate perception of reality.

The desertedness of deserts is of course another big part of their appeal. You can be alone with your demons. The wintertime desert is barren, devoid of fertility — but as anyone who has chosen to remain child-free will tell you, this can be a gift, too. All sorts of things need open space to flourish. Biologically speaking, the extreme environments known as barrens in the eastern U.S., like the western deserts, often accommodate species found nowhere else.

So what seems barren to most might be for some the most fruitful country imaginable, the moment-by-moment mutability as welcome as the phases of an unpredictable moon.

What the Songs Say: From Melissa Holbrook Pierson, after visiting a dear friend in hospital:

He sits and looks at his feet, for a long time.

We revisit other memories. Then the male nurse comes in with two hypodermics. This is something he remembers how to do; like riding, it is in his muscle memory, not the shriveled synapses of some tiny portion of his brain that has taken away everything he is--his past.

So, while he's in the bathroom, I ask, with my eyes, cocking my head to one side, and the nurse knows what I want to know. "Oh, it's always this way. He'll get it back, don't worry."

So that he has something to do--he is a person whose worst fear is not moving, not having somewhere to go--I ask him to walk me to the elevators. Slowly, in his sock feet. The door opens; a quick hug, and I back in. The door closes.

On the dark highway I move forward into space. Random songs on the radio speak only to me, as they have been doing for a couple of years now. I wonder how it is they can be so specific, then I realize: they are only ever about two things, love, and loss. Both of which are behind me, down the hospital corridor, and ahead of me, in a place called home.

Probably, Then: From Christian Anton Gerard, in Orion:

If I lived in a forest and you lived somewhere else, maybe in the forest, maybe not, no difference, just somewhere else, with a different language, and you found me in my forest and we had to talk, had to find out if the other was dangerous, I would point at a waterfall and say, maybe, waterfall and you would say, la fin du monde. We’d stand there looking at each other as if we were talking about the thing or maybe what we wanted from the other. We’d probably point to a few more things. It would feel important. Like the end of the world or maybe like the world itself. Probably, then, we’d realize the world is big. Much bigger than either of us had anticipated, and one of us, without doubt, would walk away.

Veg-nettes

Wed, 09 Dec 2009 23:05:30 GMT

BLOG Vegnettes: More Love Stories

This is a continuation, as the year draws to a close, of a set of short vignettes I wrote as the year began.

IV

a couple with urgent, anxious looks in their eyes
enter a vegan cafe;
their basset hound companion lies down in front of the cafe
to wait, as if she were accustomed to this routine

the couple brings in a wheeled baby carriage
piled high with old, worn plastic bags full of what i guess to be used clothes

they sit, squeezed together, in one huge overstuffed chair by the door
and kiss, then order, carefully, from the menu;
he pulls out a newspaper with a bunch of ads circled
and they talk about them, pointing in various directions at the street
to show where, relative to the cafe, the addresses in the ads are located

the cafe worker who brings their food knows them
and they chat for a few moments;
he proudly puts his hand on his partner's stomach
and she smiles and blushes

he is wearing a pair of sad, threadbare gloves
as he counts out the coins for the bill
reaching twice into his pocket to ensure he has enough

as they leave, the worker congratulates them;
they feed the leftovers to the basset, who eats them enthusiastically
and then the woman takes the newspaper with the circled ads
and walks off in one direction
and the man takes the basset's leash
and walks off in the other

V

at a table near the back of the cafe
a young woman sits reading;
she is wearing a cap with cat ears, and a striped jacket with a cat's tail,
and a giant black felt hat with a slip marked "5 1/2" tucked in the band

at the next table a woman and her young daughter are eating vegan nachos
and the girl laughs and points at the cat-woman
and is shushed by her mother

the cat-woman smiles and winks at the little girl
and then signals her in mime -- a raised finger "wait"
and then the finger curls in and wags slowly "come over here"
as she pulls an ocarina out of her bag
and begins to play a haunting tune

and the little girl, delighted, begins to dance among the tables

VI

a man with a sad smile comes into the cafe
and sits, alone, at a table for two,
pulling out his laptop, logging in,
tapping the keys slowly, hesitantly

a kris delmhorst song comes on the cafe's music system
and he quietly sings along:

after all of these years, look at me here
with a love song stuck in my throat
got the weight of the world on my shoulders, i won't let it go

how can i dive right down in the deep blue sea
and still hope to find my way home
when i stumble on my way to the shore,
when all of the airplanes, all of the cars,
and all the miles in the world
are still not enough to quite reach your door

after all of these years, will you look at me here
with this love song stuck in my throat
got the weight of the world and there's not too much else i can hold

he's smiling broadly now, a giant grin from ear to ear
but if you look closely, you can see
his face is streaked with tears

Category: Poetry

Can We Choose Who We Love?

Tue, 08 Dec 2009 06:22:43 GMT

BLOG Can We Choose Who We Love?

Last evening I had an astonishing discussion with three of my colleagues in our Second Life community. The topic was love, and whether we have any control over who we love (whether it is at least in part a "rational" decision, or strictly a matter of chemistry). People in Second Life fall in love (very seriously, and sometimes traumatically) all the time, which would seem to suggest that there's a lot more to love than pheromones. But that doesn't mean that what we call "love" isn't still a construct of our body chemistry, informed by our intellectual and sensory perceptions about the object of our affections. Or so I thought.

My skepticism is rooted in a belief that we love who we imagine someone to be, not who they really are (we can never really know who another person really is). Our body chemistry's response is to this imagined persona, which may or may not be a close approximation of who that person "really" is. To that extent, Second Life avatars can either amplify or distort our perception of who the person we love "really" is, depending on a host of factors. Avatars are (in the opinion of most, anyway) usually "younger" and more "physically" attractive than the "real" people they represent, and surprisingly few Second Life people communicate with those they love in voice, rather than text. This would almost seem to imply that people feel the need for the artifice of the text interface (the opportunity to "compose" what they say and disguise their voice) to be more "lovable". Is this a form of dishonesty, or is it just play, and what is our responsibility when it gets serious?

This is not really new -- "pen pals" have often fallen in love with each other before they've met or even spoken in real time with each other, and, as with Second Life, some of these affairs make the transition to real-time, face-to-face relationships, and others don't.

What is it, then, that drives us to fall in love with someone, especially someone we have never physically "met"? This is, of course, a complex process, but my assumptions about this process were shaken to their roots by my colleagues last evening. I had always believed it was evolutionary -- that we are "programmed" to fall in love with those our body believes would be excellent biological and genetic mates. But what they told me is that what is often most important is security -- which has two components:

Physical/Financial Security: "Does this person bring to the relationship the skills and resources that complement my own, such that we will be significantly more comfortable together than separate?"
Emotional Security: "Will this person be here for me when I need them?"

As obvious as this is, I confess that, when my colleagues articulated it, it blew me away. I had never really thought of this as being a critical criterion in determining whether love blossoms, and lasts. This myopia is probably due to the fact that, having a large ego and never having had to worry about my own security, I was oblivious to how important it is to many people.

It never occurred to me that someone could "choose" not to fall in love with someone who did not offer them security (or actually made them less secure) ot "choose" to fall in love with someone who did offer them security, even if the "chemistry" was less than ideal. Initially I shrugged such "choices" off as cold-blooded or opportunistic, but then I realized how unfair this judgement really was.

The emotional (far from cold-blooded) desire for security in a loving relationship is every bit as evolutionary a development as pheromone chemistry. Falling in love with someone because they're strong, tall, healthy or beautiful is no more "instinctive" than falling in love with someone because they're financially independent, or a "good provider", or, most important of all, committed and caring -- willing and able to be there through thick and thin. These are all prescriptions for survival, and hence it is not surprising that the intuitive desire for such qualities in a lover has been selected for in our evolution since we appeared on the planet.

Sara told me last night, sometimes "silly men can't process their own feelings so they rationalize them to death instead." She's exactly right. That's why, once I acknowledged the importance of security in "deciding" who we love, it explained a whole raft of behaviours, needs and wants that I had always found inexplicable, "irrational", and even unseemly:

Why people put up with so much grief from relationships, as long as the person causing that grief clearly still loves them (or at least says they do).
Why young women hook up with men who one would think are too old for them, and who wouldn't seem to have anything in common with them -- provided those men are very secure and/or healthy, and genuinely and deeply care for these younger partners.
Why, all other things being equal (which they rarely are) women tend to love men slightly older and more secure than they are (they want them to be around for them when they get older -- so many women outlive their male partners)!
Why polyamory works (the security sought can be spread among several lovers, so if something happens to one there is still security from others); why it often doesn't (with no primary relationship, there are constant doubts about whether any of the people one loves will, when push comes to shove, be there for them); and why relationships between poly and monogamous people are so difficult (very different expectations and needs for security).
Why, for people secure in themselves, being in love is more important than being loved (it gives their lives purpose, and a good chemical buzz, while they don't need the security of being loved in return). And hence, why people who lack security in their lives need to be loved more than they need to be in love.
The possibility that people (like me) who are very secure in themselves in this terribly insecure, attention- and affection-starved world are just disconnected from their real feelings and needs -- and why we tend to find some other people distressingly "needy", while they find us cold, smug and distant.

To the extent we bring factors such as security into the "decision-making" on who we love and don't love, this would suggest that we do have some "choice" in the matter. But I'm not so sure this isn't all part of the involuntary instinctive and emotional assessment we make when we do, or don't, fall in love. I don't think we really "think" about it. It isn't "rational". Though it makes enormous evolutionary sense.

I think I tend to fall in love with women (plural) who:

are unusually intelligent, imaginative, creative and articulate,
are emotionally strong and emotionally sensitive (not an oxymoron),
are physically attractive, and
know themselves -- self-knowledge is not the same as intelligence or emotional strength, and it is, I'm finding to my dismay, relatively rare (most people just don't have the time/inclination for it).

I'm always candid about my belief in polyamory -- as soon as I meet anyone that there is even a chance of me having a relationship with. I don't look for (and rarely find) physical/financial or emotional security in those I love.

This creates a bit of a paradox for me. While I'm physically attracted to younger women, I'm emotionally attracted to self-assured, self-knowledgeable women, and intellectually attracted to dangerous women who walk the line between genius and madness. These rarely come in the same, er, package. And while being polyamorous allows me to seek all of these things in different, simultaneous, partners, I'm not sure that I am able to offer what women with each of these qualities would be looking for from me.

The younger woman I want a physical relationship with most likely wants security and commitment from me. The smart, self-knowing woman (or man) I want an emotional relationship with most likely wants time and attention and emotional sensitivity from me. The mad artist/genius I want an intellectual relationship with most likely wants -- what, grounding? -- from me. I have no idea.

I'm not sure I can, or necessarily even want to, provide what each of these people would want from me in an enduring, loving relationship. And, if I attempt to give them each what they want from me, will I run out of both security and time by spreading both too thin, and lose everything by trying to have everything? And worse, will I hurt them, let them down, in the process? That's a prospect I cannot bear.

This has, of course, been covered a million times in the movies and romance fiction. It's just taken me, the perpetual slow learner, a while to pick up on it.

Well, I guess this silly man has analyzed and rationalized the unanalyzable and irrational to death. Time for me to shut up, turn off my brain, and trust my instincts and emotions, and those of the women I'm attracted to, to tell us what to do, and not to do, and whether we're meant to love each other or not.

No choice involved in the matter, really.

Category: Human Nature

2200: A Travelogue

Sun, 06 Dec 2009 16:50:22 GMT

BLOG 2200: A Travelogue

image from the 1992 documentary film "Baraka"

For over five years I have been working on a novel tentatively called The Only Life We Know. The novel is set in the year 2200, a century or more after the crash of our civilization. It presumes that in 2009 we are at or near "peak everything", and that all of the activities that have accelerated up an every-increasing curve since 1800 (or in some cases before) -- consumption of land and natural resources, human population, pollution emissions, and production of more and more stuff, most of which ends up in landfills or worse -- will soon follow a similar sharp drop down the other side of the normal curve, such that in 2200 we will be back to pre-industrial levels, 90% below today's. So in my setting in 2200 there are only 500 million people left on the planet, a population that continues to drop gradually. The economy is subsistence and local, since there is no cheap oil to enable significant long-range transportation of goods or people.

But it is the opposite of the popular, violent "Mad Max" scenario of post-civilization collapse. A study of history indicates that, unlike inter-civilizational wars, post-civilizational collapses are generally quite peaceful, although they do entail in their early-collapse stages a lot of death (mostly from starvation and disease), suffering and turmoil. Most civilizational collapses (read Jared Diamond or Ronald Wright) have been mass exoduses, as people flee fragile, unsustainable centralized locations in search of land, food and water to make a new, community-based beginning. They are, on a mass scale, a "walking away" from complicated systems that simply no longer work.

My novel presumes that, as a decreasing number of humans fan out into the countryside, they find much of it degraded, but (especially in more Northern areas) they discover plentiful unused land suitable for small collaborative settlements, with solar power and permaculture providing a new sustainable way of life (I am hoping these recently-rediscovered technologies will not be lost along with our civilization's soon-to-be useless oil-dependent technologies).

And, as the buffers between communities get larger (with diminishing population) and transportation and other social interaction between communities become rarer, I sense that what will happen by 2200 is what we discover in most isolated gatherer-hunter societies: A staggering degree of cultural diversity, with a de-homogenization of language, adornment and behaviour, to the point that adjacent communities may be so different as to be nearly unrecognizable to each other.

The principal driver for this will be de-urbanization, a hollowing out and abandonment of cities (also very common in civilizational collapses), since cities are inherently dependent on outside resources and hence are inherently unsustainable. We won't go back to the Wild West or slavery or feudalism, though; instead we'll go forward to a world that combines ancient indigenous wisdom with today's and tomorrow's (to the extent they can be tweaked to be sustainable) innovations -- gliders, hot-air balloons, grafting of plants, straw-bale construction, human- and solar-powered looms, cameras, recordings, and other creative, artistic and scientific devices.

The original plan was to bring this out in a series of short stories within the novel, each about one such culture, narrated by a young nomad travelling between them, and interspersed with a gradually-revealed story about the civilizational collapse that preceded this new beginning. I envision a proliferation of new local languages by 2200, completely different forms of art, wildly divergent spiritual beliefs etc., in each community, and I had intended to present these in the novel through conversations between the travelling nomad and the citizens of each community, and her observations and reflections about these communities.

But I recently started thinking about another way to do this, that would get around the challenges of trying to depict such completely alien cultures and languages using written text in our very limited and culturally constrained 21st century languages. What if, instead of presenting this future in a novel, I presented it in a film? And what if, instead of writing a screenplay with dialogue that has the same problems of language as a novel, the screenplay had no words? What if, in other words, it were presented as a kind of two-centuries-later update of the cultural documentary Baraka (a Sufi word meaning "the weaving of life together")?

For those not familiar with this film, or with the films that inspired it -- Koyaanisqatsi (Life Out of Balance) and Powaqqatsi (Life in Transformation) -- Baraka is a set of twenty sequential visual vignettes, of about five minutes duration each, set in places around the world, depicting different aspects of the human condition. It has no plot, no actors, no script (in the conventional sense) and no dialogue.

The picture above from this film is of a girl from the Kayapo tribe in the Brasilian rainforest. It could easily, I think, also be in my film set in the year 2200.

I have been working with a cinematographer friend, Danielle Seville, to scope out how we could make this film. What I envision is starting with a set of premises about life in 2200 -- mainly, that it would be peaceful, joyful, sustainable, and diverse, a world where (like humans did before the invention of tools and technologies) we scavenge much of what we need -- except that in 2200, we will scavenge largely from the abandoned relics of the "civilized" world. It will be a world of sufficiency but also one of great comfort and spiritual rediscovery, as we will have re-learned how to live in the natural world, in concert and in balance with the rest of life on Earth.

image of post-civilization world from afterculture

To try to imagine such a diverse future world is, I think, beyond the capacity of any one person (I've certainly tried, as hundreds of pages of discarded text from my novel attest). So instead, what I intend to do is to bring together a group of very imaginative people in a Creation Event and have us work collaboratively to develop the imagery, future cultures, music and sound the film would capture. I envision having artists and anthropologists and students of indigenous cultures past and present among the collaborators. I can see us sketching out and improvisationally acting out the scenes in real time, wordlessly, in Open Space. We'd have make-up artists and henna artists and tattoo artists and body-painters and animators and photoshoppers developing models of what we would look like and how we'd behave, using the participants as their canvasses. The Creation Event would itself be filmed.

And then it would be my job, working with Danielle and her team, to craft a screenplay with "scenes from the future" that captures all of these ideas, and then to assemble a team of improvisors (not actors, really) to wordlessly act out these brief scenes.

Part of the challenge will be to capture the reconnection of the human species with all-life-on-Earth, with scenes (like the image above from Baraka) that position us in the context of a rediscovered natural world, one that envelopes and welcomes and towers over us (rather than one we try to control), and offers us food, shelter, water, meaning, love -- everything we ever needed. Much of the film, then, will not portray humans at all, but rather the natural places where we will then live, and the creatures we will share those places with, in sacred balance.

That's the idea so far, anyway.

Category: Creative Works