I HELP

When people ask me what they should do personally to prepare for the coming changes, I offer a simple (and I think, catchy) acronym: I HELP. Here’s what it stands for:

I: Involvement
H: Humanize
E: Economize
L: Localize
P: Produce

Here is how it works:

Involvement

Get involved in local environmental and social justice groups.  Find a cause (or more than one) that resonates with your values and will have some impact on your community, and join a local group that champions it.  This kind of involvement is especially powerful, as you will become part of an enormous, decentralized, global social movement.  Estimates of the worldwide number of such groups run as high as three million.  Each one has its own local concerns or issues, but all work toward the same general goal: to make the world a better place to live.

Although it is un-coordinated, grass-roots and leaderless, itt has been called “the biggest social movement the world has ever seen,” and “the second superpower.”  Because it is decentralized and the individual groups are largely unconnected with each other, it is extremely resilient and unstoppable.  Governments do not control the groups, and propaganda has little effect on their hundreds oif millions of volunteer members.  These groups exist in every nation on the face of the planet, and one or more exists in every city.  There are many near you, and they are easy to find when you start looking.

Joining such a group will allow you to contribute to important environmental and social efforts that make your community a better place to live.  These groups also give you access to networks of people and resources that will help you do the next thing on the list:

Humanize

Expand and strengthen your social networks.  Make new friends and strengthen ties with existing ones.  You can do this purely socially (organize a street BBQ, host an Amnesty International “Taste for Justice” dinner, start a babysitting circle,  or start a book review or discussion club for example), or you can do it by joining one of the many environmental or social justice groups I described above.

The key is that friendships add pleasure to good times, and security to bad times.  Friends will share your joys and help you in times of trouble.  You just can’t lose by making more and better friends.

Economize

Reduce the amount of “stuff” and energy you need to support your quality of life.

This is where most of the environmental “advice action” is these days.  We have all heard the advice: reduce, reuse and recycle; put in low-energy light bulbs; improve your home’s insulation;  turn down your heating and air conditioning a bit; switch to a more efficient car; walk, bike or bus instead of driving; join (or start) a carpool; eat less meat; reduce your airplane travel.  There are hundreds of web sites with lists of suggestions.

These actions will pay off in three ways.  First, they will reduce your daily living expenses, so you may have more money available for other activities.  Done carefully, they can even lower your expenses while improving your quality of life.  Second, they will provide you a measure of security by positioning you to weather any unexpected downturns in the economy.  Third, they will give you a feeling of great satisfaction and make you a guide for others in our common quest to walk more lightly on the planet.

Localize

Reduce the amount of travel required in your life.  This means reducing the amount of personal travelling you do as well as reducing the distance the things you need must cover to get to you.  You might be able to reduce personal travel by moving closer to work, or working from your home, for example.

Localizing your consumption is where the big payoff is, however.  Buy as many goods and services as you can from local manufacturers and providers.  Patronize local shops and local small and home businesses.  Avoid large multinational retail chains wherever possible.  The few extra dollars you might spend as a result will stay in your local area and benefit other local businesses.  Doing this also strengthens your human networks as you get to know more of the local businesspeople.

Above all, localize your food consumption.  The average calorie of food we eat contains 7 to 10 “ghost calories” from the fossil fuels used in the production and transportation of the food.  In order to minimize those ghost calories, buy local organic produce that used less fertilizer and pesticide in its production and didn’t have to travel so far to land on your plate.

To help in doing this you could adopt the “Hundred Mile Diet,” a diet that consists as much as possible of food grown within one hundred miles of your home.  If you have children (or are a child yourself), make a shopping game of finding out where foods come from  and picking those that come from closest to your home.

You could also join a CSA cooperative.  CSA stands for Community Supported Agriculture.  Community Supported Agriculture consists of a community of individuals who pledge support to a farm operation so that the farmland becomes, either legally or spiritually, the community’s farm, with the growers and consumers providing mutual support and sharing the risks and benefits of food production.

Typically, members or “share-holders” of the farm or garden pledge in advance to cover the anticipated costs of the farm operation and farmer’s salary. In return, they receive shares in the farm’s bounty throughout the growing season, as well as satisfaction gained from reconnecting to the land and participating directly in food production. Members also share in the risks of farming, including poor harvests due to unfavorable weather or pests. By direct sales to community members, who have provided the farmer with working capital in advance, growers receive better prices for their crops, gain some financial security, and are relieved of much of the burden of marketing.

Produce

The last key to I HELP is to produce as much as you can of your own food and energy.  This could involve starting your own back yard garden.  My partner and I practice “edible landscaping” around our little urban bungalow.  This involves using nothing but edible plants (herbs, fruits, vegetables and flowers) as both food and decoration. Purely ornamental plants have been displaced by more utilitarian species.  It goes without saying that compost provides the fertilizer, no pesticides are used and collected rain water is used for irrigation.

Producing some of your personal energy is a bit more difficult for those of us who live in the city.  The well-publicized technologies of solar panels and wind turbines are still too expensive and may run afoul of city bylaws.  You could install a solar water heater, though, and use it to pre-heat the water in your hot water tank to cut down the energy needed for hot showers and dishes.

You can also sign up with a “green electricity” company.  These companies invest in green electricity production on your behalf, and feed it into the grid.  You continue to draw your power from the grid normally.  While such an arrangement doesn’t protect you from grid crashes, it does give you the satisfaction of knowing that your bit of electricity in the grid did not release any greenhouse gases in its production.  For an example, look at the company I use, Bullfrog Power.

For something a little more exotic, you could try brewing your own biodiesel to use in the diesel car you bought when you were economizing.  Many people are doing it, and it’s a very useful skill to have.

Conclusion

There are many ways we can prepare ourselves for the coming effects of Peak Oil, Global Warming, rising food and energy costs and the social instability that may follow in their wake.  The things we each choose to do will be governed by our individual circumstances and preferences.  But when someone asks us what we do to prepare ourselves and those we love for the changes on the horizon, we must all be able to say:

“I HELP”

© Copyright 2007, Paul Chefurka

This article came from: I HELP at Simple Living, Sustainable Living.

I think that we are already in 2012, that it is an era of drastic change. Climate change, economic chaos — we don’t need to wait for those. They are very much here. Spiritual awakenings of all sorts too.

Here’s an interesting article I came across, with permission to reprint it. You can read The 2012 Meme at the original site if you prefer.

A lot of people are starting to feel portents of doom centering around the mysterious goings-on in the Mayan calendar on December 21, 2012. Both positive and negative beliefs about the significance of the date are spreading very rapidly through our globalized culture.  Positive beliefs include the New Age interpretation that our planet and its people may experience a physical or spiritual transformation, and that 2012 may mark the beginning of a new era. On the negative side, some believe that the 2012 date marks the beginning of an apocalypse. Both camps are spreading their ideas through numerous books, TV documentaries, websites and discussion groups.

There is now even a feature film about the topic.  Much has also been written about what the apperance of these beliefs says about the vulnerabilites of the human psyche.

While I don’t have any particular attachment to the number or year 2012, I’m still fascinated by the symbolic power it has acquired.  What follows is my psychological assessment of what’s going on.

“End of the World” or millenarian ideas usually have two components: a real underlying issue (that may or may not be consciously recognized) and a focusing symbol of some kind. The millenarian meme reaches full power when there is a threat that is real but only dimly perceived by most, and a symbol that has both logical and supernatural aspects. The logical aspect makes the symbol acceptable to our rational minds, and a religious or spiritual context always amplifies the power of symbols.

There have been two recent examples of “doomsday fever” that can help illuminate what’s going on with 2012.

The nuclear holocaust fears around the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis were founded on the real fear of a first strike triggering a global thermonuclear war. The focusing symbol was Communism, a quasi-religious system that was poorly understood in the west and was imbued with a Manichean aspect of pure evil.

The Y2K panic was founded on a real fear of widespread computer malfunctions in critical systems. The symbol was of course the year “00″, which had both a logical component (we were all told how you couldn’t get 4 numbers into a computer memory designed to hold only two), amplified by a deeply non-rational belief in the power of numbers, i.e. numerology.

The thing that prevented either of these psychic outbreaks from reaching full potential was the lack of an overt religious or spiritual connection to their driving symbols. Their power in the unconscious mind was mainly secular.

With this in mind, here’s how I see the 2012 fever:

The real underlying threat driving this outbreak is the accelerating pace of ecological breakdown and climate change, the increasing instability of the world’s economic system, rising cultural/religious tensions and the predictions of imminent Peak Oil and its potential impact on modern civilization. Most of the dire predictions of a near term peak in the global oil supply seem to cluster around 2012, the global economic collapse seems set to happen over the same time frame, predictions of global disruptions due to climate change are getting worse and the timing of their effects is drawing closer with every new report. Whether or not any of these effects actually manifest in the next two or three years, they all appear to have that potential and to be converging on that point in time. In the game of social frenzy, appearances are everything.

So those are the “real” factors contributing to our sense of unease. In the face of that, it’s easy to see why the year 2012 has acquired such symbolic power. The timing is exactly right, there is a logical component to the symbol (the Mayan calendar is real) and it has a deep spiritual aspect as well. The end of the time cycle that is apparently tracked by the real calendar resonates deeply with ideas of “transformation through crisis” that are at the core of all mystical traditions.

These ideas are now entering the collective consciousness through various media, so even if people try to deny the accelerating physical changes in the world they are being subliminally shifted towards this awareness. The “2012 meme” fits into this situation perfectly, since it’s in the right time frame and speaks to a great turning into a new, utterly unpredictable state. It has enormous psychic power as a result. Even if one discounted the spiritual dimension of the 2012 idea, it was inevitable that it would become an archetypal vision in this time of upheaval.

One other thing that’s happening is that more and more people who recognize the possibility of an imminent collapse of modern civilization are responding with a turn to the spiritual. If hope cannot be found in physical or psychological materialism, it is always available in the spiritual dimension. We simply re-frame the problem so that a solution can be found. With its inherent spiritual component, the vision of a “2012 shift” is a natural component of this response.

It’s going to be fascinating to watch this psychic fever build. I suspect it’s going to be a lot more powerful than anything in recent history

Bodhisantra

This article came from: What’s Coming in 2012? Is It Already Here? at Simple Living, Sustainable Living.

It painted a very bleak picture of the future of the planet worldwide, and no doubt much of what was covered is possible. I hadn’t heard about the potential for plagues of locusts from Africa to cross the Mediterranean and strip bare southern Europe around 2025, but that’s the sort of thing that was presented.

My husband and I talked about the future after we gave up on the show. We thought of our god-daughter, now 4, and the other kids we know in that age group. She’s the little girl in the logo for this site.What will they have to deal with as adults? It sure seems likely to be far more erratic than what we have had to deal with ourselves so far. We talked about how much our love of these children and all their cohorts fuels what we do now.

Kelly’s emphasis is on earthbag building and since the recent earthquake in Haiti, he has been very busy with many emails about how this method could be used. The earthbag building blog that he writes with a friend has an entry on the topic. I am sure that the versatility of  earthbag construction, along with its low cost and minimal use of materials, will make it an important part of how people deal with disasters in the future as well.

My piece of the puzzle isn’t so much about natural building. I’m still trying to puzzle it out. This blog is part of it all. As we all learn to live more simply, we are learning about a kind of versatility that is valuable in itself.

This article came from: Disasters, Sensationalism, and Our Future at Simple Living, Sustainable Living.

They weighed the wet garbage, and they came up with 320 pounds of it over the 90 days.

They ended up with some 83 bags full of garbage.The 90 days included Halloween and Christmas. Some

They gradually did make some efforts to diminish their garbage use, and by the end of the film they had plans to conserve more. (But the text at the end of the film did comment that they had a fourth child.)

Interviews with a number of specialists in recycling made the film quite interesting, if not exactly cheerful. Consumerism is making a mess of things, no doubt about it.

Go to the Garbage Revolution to watch the first 20 minutes of the film and see what effect it has had around the world.

This article came from: The Garbage Revolution at Simple Living, Sustainable Living.

I have just added an orange box to the side of this website. It takes you to a donation page for Partners in Health, an organization founded by Paul Farmer, an American doctor who began working in Haiti when he was in med school.

I had read a book by Tracy Kidder about Paul Farmer and his activities, Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World (Random House Reader’s Circle) and I had become a huge fan of the health care work that he and others have been doing in a part of Haiti some distance from where the earthquake struck.

So when some friends mentioned that they had donated to this organization, my husband and I did too. And I invite you to also.

In any case, you can see what is going on at their blog, with instant updates, on this site of theirs:

http://www.standwithhaiti.org/haiti

Here is a link to Building Back Better, an article Paul Farmer wrote yesterday, less than a week after the big quake.

And here is a snippet from their website, about what they do:

PIH has been working on the ground in Haiti for over 20 years. We urgently need your support to help those affected by the recent earthquake.

Partners In Health (PIH) works to bring modern medical care to poor communities in nine countries around the world. The work of PIH has three goals: to care for our patients, to alleviate the root causes of disease in their communities, and to share lessons learned around the world.

Based in Boston, PIH employs more than 11,000 people worldwide, including doctors, nurses and community health workers. The vast majority of PIH staff are local nationals based in the communities we serve.

Let’s help our Haitian brothers and sisters simply live. I will leave the orange box there for a long time. The need isn’t going away soon.

This article came from: Let’s Help Haiti at Simple Living, Sustainable Living.

So I had this in mind to blog about, and just now I wandered over to my husband’s desk and said, “Whatcha doing?” He was reading a really good commencement address by Paul Hawken, given earlier this month at the University of Portland. You Are Brilliant, and the Earth is Hiring is the title of his talk, on the organicconsumers.org website, which is well worth a browse, or many browses.

Here’s a bit of it:

When asked if I am pessimistic or optimistic about the future, my answer is always the same: If you look at the science about what is happening on earth and aren’t pessimistic, you don’t understand data. But if you meet the people who are working to restore this earth and the lives of the poor, and you aren’t optimistic, you haven’t got a pulse. What I see everywhere in the world are ordinary people willing to confront despair, power, and incalculable odds in order to restore some semblance of grace, justice, and beauty to this world.

You join a multitude of caring people. No one knows how many groups and organizations are working on the most salient issues of our day: climate change, poverty, deforestation, peace, water, hunger, conservation, human rights, and more. This is the largest movement the world has ever seen.

Rather than control, it seeks connection…

This article came from: Two Commencement Talks at Simple Living, Sustainable Living.

Chances are you have never heard of Cordwainer Smith. He was a science fiction writer who died over 40 years ago. He had a bizarre and visionary way of writing which has influenced the direction of science fiction in several ways. He was also my father.

Cordwainer Smith

That’s me with him in the old photo. Last summer, I spent several weeks re-doing the website I created about his science fiction and other writings: it’s at www.cordwainer-smith.com, and I have a blog there too. I am not actually a science fiction fan – that is, I read very little of it – but I do find that re-reading my father’s stories now and then helps stretch me outside of the reality I live in.

Some of his stories can be read online at no cost: here’s one of my favorites, The Dead Lady of Clown Town, his retelling of the Joan of Arc story. It’s not cheery but to me it’s a haunting and profound tale of the power of love. If you don’t like reading it online, you could print it out, or the site has links to his books.

I also sometimes gain some peace by reflecting on the writings of another relatively obscure writer, Olaf Stapledon. We have created an annual award, the Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award, which was first given in 2001 to a writer deserving of rediscovery. Judges John Clute, Scott Edelman, Gardner Dozois, and Robert Silverberg chose Stapledon to be the first recipient of the award, Here is a snippet of something my father wrote as a young man, about Stapledon:

The cast of characters includes all men from the present time to the death of man; and the time covered is two thousand million years. . . .

This romance is well worth reading if only for the sheer novelty of it. The grandeur of its conception, whether successfully fulfilled and expressed or not, is not exceeded by any other modern writing I have seen.

The theme of the book is man’s search for purpose. All the species and races of men are haunted by the purposelessness of being; and the battle of two billion years is only half-won when men die.

So you can see why reading Olaf Stapledon also stretches my mind. Two billion years… That link goes to my page about him.

Prehistory

My husband Kelly has become fascinated with the earliest history of humanity and spends some time first thing every morning sitting and reading with his mug of tea. He’s read quite a few books in the years that he’s been doing this, and it certainly gives him a perspective on the contemporary global climate change, not to mention on how many civilizations have disappeared after not adapting to drought or other changing conditions. (That isn’t exactly uplifting at this point in our history, but it’s interesting.)

How Do You Cope with the Stress of Global Warming?

We are all coping in a variety of ways, intermittent denial being one of them! Readers, your comments are very welcome on what you do.

This article came from: Global Warming, Cordwainer Smith, and Prehistory at Simple Living, Sustainable Living.