I am deeply concerned that there is not a national public outpouring of grief and anger over the Gulf Oil Spill. Where is the public wailing and gnashing of teeth, and where is the OUTRAGE? Where is the response of the poets, artists, and psychologists to help us admit and process our trauma? Or maybe the better question is why do they not appear on TV and in the national media right now.
For me, there is no difference between the spill and what happened on 9/11 in terms of the effect. There is a different culprit and a different sense of the victim that makes it complicated. I believe the US is partly to blame for what happened on 9/11 due to a long history of foreign intervention for short-term power and profit. Most people didn't see it that way and some would like to expunge me for that viewpoint. They held the "enemy" completely at fault for the evil act, while feeling no culpability for evil acts done toward other people by our government in our name.
In the Gulf we can't so easily separate the perpetrators from the victims. We use the oil that BP produces and profits from. The people who are suffering the most voted for the oil industry jobs and for deregulation of the industry to ease those jobs. We all get around in our oil-powered vehicles, heat our homes, and consume food and products produced using oil. We coated those sea turtles and birds in oil, partly, and we know it.
We know we need more oil. And so everyone is compromised. But I will argue that should not stop us from either grief or outrage. We are participants in this planet and its life. Just like the bird that eats the worm, we destroy to sustain ourselves. We can't change how we do that unless we fully feel the grief, despair, and sadness that comes from empathy with another animal, another part of life, that is dying a painful slow death from its liver shutting down. Or that's last breathe was smothered by oil. Or that experienced agonizing internal pain after eating a meal laced with petroleum.
How can we change if we don't feel? How can we change if we don't grieve? How can we change if we deny our pain?
Friday, July 9, 2010
Wednesday, June 2, 2010
How Work Isn't Working
I'm going to try and write more here about how this organization I work for is not working. It helps me to survive by turning this into at least a written reflection, because my power to change this circumstance is limited. Here are the three major problems I see at the level of our program director. There are difficult systemic problems that shape her behavior, although I don't believe they prevent her from addressing the following.
1) Top-heavy, egocentric control of the organization. I sometimes think of this person as the Supreme Leader. I believe this is her model for defining success and how she sees herself. It's unclear where or how she learned this model. She has an ivy league degree, but doesn't live a personal life of luxury or high class. The organization's very existence and identity is tied to her and she continually seeks to funnel as much of the decision-making through her as possible. She is a political appointee and her number one goal is to limit political liability to the program. Speaking the truth and advancing scientific fact are secondary. Over the long-term this approach is not working, but I don't think she sees or realizes the danger. She has made enough statements publically that dismiss complexity and scientific communications that the larger professional community knows what's happening with the political control. There are days when I just wonder at the degree to which I'm working in a political office versus for a professional conservation organization. She survives in this position partly because no one can imagine the program without her at the helm. That means if she fails the program fails. I have no idea personally why anyone would want to carry this much responsibility, except that it must take a lot of insecurity and fear to feed such strength of will and a heavy dose of arrogance. She has no time to gather the appropriate information to make a decision, and apparently believes that her intelligence alone is enough to make good decisions across a broad spectrum of topics. Or that the costs of this one leader approach don't outweigh the benefits to the political election campaign.
2) This consolidation of roles into one person deserves more attention. Unfortunately the Supreme Leader, who would be challenged even if the best of managers to make all of these decision wisely and in a timely fashion, is someone who can't manage their way out of a paper bag and has poor collaboration skills. Indeed she survives by making herself the program as described above, and by stubbornly bulldozing people until they accept their fate. Of course, this is empowered by the fact that she has much control over funding decisions and is the supervisor of most of the program staff. She is a terrible administrator due to not having organized thinking skills, nor much ability to use computers, and she is an even worse personnel manager. She dismisses concerns and implements a reward system based on pleasing her political goals over any other merit. You can be mediocre in every way and rise to the top, as long as you don't make waves.
3) The staff are treated like the hired help. You just can't do this and have an organization succeed. There's a book out describing in detail why it doesn't work called "The Way We're Working Isn't Working". Despite the program being chock full of fairly talented mid-career professionals, we're treated as if there to do what we're told like interns and assistants. A few are chosen to be the Supreme Leader's protogee's. The rest will labor in obscurity. We are trapped by this economy unless able to dispose of our houses and move out of state. Anyone who bought their house after 2001 or so is unable to dispose of it.
The alternative to the above is to share decision-making through real collaboration and respect for expert opinion. Distribute duties according to abilities and by what inspires people to succeed and grow. To create intelligent distributed, decentralized decision-making and trust the collective wisdom of the result, or at least let the whole think sink or swim based on the collective outcome. It would require devesting of the Supreme Leader model for success and to not be so ego-identified with this one organization, but rather with letting communities form and grow. Everyone's health and growth would need to be supported for the collective effort to succeed.
In our regional culture, appearances matter the most. They do everywhere, but in places where real practical, getting-things-done skills are the cultural preference eventually the fakes are exposed and shuffled aside. These practical, usually conservative cultures also tend to shuffle the creatives to the side along with the fakes, they all look similarly weird. Where I live right now, the fakes just rise to the top and everyone else is left to struggle by. The cultural creatives if they can overcome the personal damage all this does to them, perhaps go on to write scathing critiques that eventually are published. Maybe others find homes in universities writing rational books and articles that have a nicer tone.
1) Top-heavy, egocentric control of the organization. I sometimes think of this person as the Supreme Leader. I believe this is her model for defining success and how she sees herself. It's unclear where or how she learned this model. She has an ivy league degree, but doesn't live a personal life of luxury or high class. The organization's very existence and identity is tied to her and she continually seeks to funnel as much of the decision-making through her as possible. She is a political appointee and her number one goal is to limit political liability to the program. Speaking the truth and advancing scientific fact are secondary. Over the long-term this approach is not working, but I don't think she sees or realizes the danger. She has made enough statements publically that dismiss complexity and scientific communications that the larger professional community knows what's happening with the political control. There are days when I just wonder at the degree to which I'm working in a political office versus for a professional conservation organization. She survives in this position partly because no one can imagine the program without her at the helm. That means if she fails the program fails. I have no idea personally why anyone would want to carry this much responsibility, except that it must take a lot of insecurity and fear to feed such strength of will and a heavy dose of arrogance. She has no time to gather the appropriate information to make a decision, and apparently believes that her intelligence alone is enough to make good decisions across a broad spectrum of topics. Or that the costs of this one leader approach don't outweigh the benefits to the political election campaign.
2) This consolidation of roles into one person deserves more attention. Unfortunately the Supreme Leader, who would be challenged even if the best of managers to make all of these decision wisely and in a timely fashion, is someone who can't manage their way out of a paper bag and has poor collaboration skills. Indeed she survives by making herself the program as described above, and by stubbornly bulldozing people until they accept their fate. Of course, this is empowered by the fact that she has much control over funding decisions and is the supervisor of most of the program staff. She is a terrible administrator due to not having organized thinking skills, nor much ability to use computers, and she is an even worse personnel manager. She dismisses concerns and implements a reward system based on pleasing her political goals over any other merit. You can be mediocre in every way and rise to the top, as long as you don't make waves.
3) The staff are treated like the hired help. You just can't do this and have an organization succeed. There's a book out describing in detail why it doesn't work called "The Way We're Working Isn't Working". Despite the program being chock full of fairly talented mid-career professionals, we're treated as if there to do what we're told like interns and assistants. A few are chosen to be the Supreme Leader's protogee's. The rest will labor in obscurity. We are trapped by this economy unless able to dispose of our houses and move out of state. Anyone who bought their house after 2001 or so is unable to dispose of it.
The alternative to the above is to share decision-making through real collaboration and respect for expert opinion. Distribute duties according to abilities and by what inspires people to succeed and grow. To create intelligent distributed, decentralized decision-making and trust the collective wisdom of the result, or at least let the whole think sink or swim based on the collective outcome. It would require devesting of the Supreme Leader model for success and to not be so ego-identified with this one organization, but rather with letting communities form and grow. Everyone's health and growth would need to be supported for the collective effort to succeed.
In our regional culture, appearances matter the most. They do everywhere, but in places where real practical, getting-things-done skills are the cultural preference eventually the fakes are exposed and shuffled aside. These practical, usually conservative cultures also tend to shuffle the creatives to the side along with the fakes, they all look similarly weird. Where I live right now, the fakes just rise to the top and everyone else is left to struggle by. The cultural creatives if they can overcome the personal damage all this does to them, perhaps go on to write scathing critiques that eventually are published. Maybe others find homes in universities writing rational books and articles that have a nicer tone.
Saturday, May 22, 2010
Sustainability
A nice video presentation by Elinor Ostrom on the Tragedy of the Commons with ideas that link to possible solutions. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ByXM47Ri1Kc
In the presentation she is going to suggest that humans have achieved sustainability through multi-tiered management systems operating at multiple scales (like an ecosystem). These humans must be acting with a rich place-based knowledge of the larger ecosystem.
She says people can determine how much to use, and in what seasons to use if they are familiar with the resource. They argue out, discuss, and adapt their rules over time. They come to trust one another. That if we enhance ways for people to develop rules that match the systems they are living within and studying, sustainable management is possible.
The kinds of institutions she discusses relate to my previous post about how top-down political control within natural resource agencies limits the overall intelligence and adaptability of the agency.
But my question here is how do we build these institutions within communities of people that are currently disconnected from their local places by modern lifestyles, attitudes, and industrial production? For example, if you're not a producer of food, fiber, or medicine it's easy to be unaware of intimate ecological connection. And there are plenty of people who produce food, fiber, and medicine in this culture that behave in ways that lead to tragedy of the commons. We modern inheritors of empire are different kinds of human beings who do not define ourselves in relation to the non-human. We have a retarded sense of being in the larger self-system.
How to get from here to there? It won't all be through rational information sharing. It necessarily will be through the senses, the lived bodily experience within a context that allows tenderness and openness toward the other. It can't be through imposed knowledge (like mandatory trainings) unless we want to breed resistance. Although when a community organizes itself a certain way it doesn't feel imposed, but more like common sense. It has to be through observation and feeling that is gained at the ground level while in relationship. I assume this knowledge can't be just a luxury to be consumed by the upper middle class, for where will the motivation come from to keep progressing?
But then, how do we get from here to there without the collapse of separating survival systems happening first? How do we prevent collapse? It sounds so flaky, but the answer that comes to mind is biophilia or in other words, love. We all have survival needs even if not dire at present. We're depressed when our needs aren't met. People seek solutions.
The solutions could be the ones that truly restore health rather than band-aids or distractions. The solutions must involve reconnection with a larger sense of self and purpose in relation to the non-human. It's now a matter of planetary survival.
In the presentation she is going to suggest that humans have achieved sustainability through multi-tiered management systems operating at multiple scales (like an ecosystem). These humans must be acting with a rich place-based knowledge of the larger ecosystem.
She says people can determine how much to use, and in what seasons to use if they are familiar with the resource. They argue out, discuss, and adapt their rules over time. They come to trust one another. That if we enhance ways for people to develop rules that match the systems they are living within and studying, sustainable management is possible.
The kinds of institutions she discusses relate to my previous post about how top-down political control within natural resource agencies limits the overall intelligence and adaptability of the agency.
But my question here is how do we build these institutions within communities of people that are currently disconnected from their local places by modern lifestyles, attitudes, and industrial production? For example, if you're not a producer of food, fiber, or medicine it's easy to be unaware of intimate ecological connection. And there are plenty of people who produce food, fiber, and medicine in this culture that behave in ways that lead to tragedy of the commons. We modern inheritors of empire are different kinds of human beings who do not define ourselves in relation to the non-human. We have a retarded sense of being in the larger self-system.
How to get from here to there? It won't all be through rational information sharing. It necessarily will be through the senses, the lived bodily experience within a context that allows tenderness and openness toward the other. It can't be through imposed knowledge (like mandatory trainings) unless we want to breed resistance. Although when a community organizes itself a certain way it doesn't feel imposed, but more like common sense. It has to be through observation and feeling that is gained at the ground level while in relationship. I assume this knowledge can't be just a luxury to be consumed by the upper middle class, for where will the motivation come from to keep progressing?
But then, how do we get from here to there without the collapse of separating survival systems happening first? How do we prevent collapse? It sounds so flaky, but the answer that comes to mind is biophilia or in other words, love. We all have survival needs even if not dire at present. We're depressed when our needs aren't met. People seek solutions.
The solutions could be the ones that truly restore health rather than band-aids or distractions. The solutions must involve reconnection with a larger sense of self and purpose in relation to the non-human. It's now a matter of planetary survival.
Thursday, May 13, 2010
Fouling the Human-Nature
A creative counselor that I still see asked me several years ago why I work for an organization that is managed using the same principles that are destroying life on Earth. I'm paraphrasing, that's what I heard her say and what I ask myself. I work with an environmental program. The program is run in a top-down hierarchical fashion where the vision of one person, or a small politically oriented cadre, dominates. The hierarchy, obedience, and control are enforced in varying ways that amount to bullying. The creative landscape is "harvested" for ideas that are eaten by the relative few with little acknowledgement of the collective source, which is assumed to be inexhaustible and open for use and exploitation to serve the vision set by the people at the top. The ideas they choose don't stray far from the ones they formed back in the 1970s. We are the human resources. I don't actually think this organization will ever be highly effective by measures that really matter (i.e., preventing ecological and cultural collapse) and it's not sustainable.
With such a negative view of the whole thing, why do I still work there? How could I be more useful to the world? I do my job the best I can and try to make things better. We pay our bills. But I'm in contradiction with myself and it lowers my authenticity in the world. This denial feels like a compromise that wrongs my uniqueness and the value of diversity. My discontent is predictably not welcome. Everyone would like a surface experience of congeniality at least. Some I suspect want to keep their own feelings of discomfort at bay, others to deal with them in a less direct way than open discussion of what's wrong about program management and how to improve it. I know from private discussions that they view things similar to myself; it's not that I'm alone in my opinions. It's more that no one wants the conflict and stress that looking publicly and openly into the shadow can bring. It helps me to remember that while "negative" in our culture implies a dark, emotional destructive force, it can also be the result of calm, courageous, and accurate observation.
With such a negative view of the whole thing, why do I still work there? How could I be more useful to the world? I do my job the best I can and try to make things better. We pay our bills. But I'm in contradiction with myself and it lowers my authenticity in the world. This denial feels like a compromise that wrongs my uniqueness and the value of diversity. My discontent is predictably not welcome. Everyone would like a surface experience of congeniality at least. Some I suspect want to keep their own feelings of discomfort at bay, others to deal with them in a less direct way than open discussion of what's wrong about program management and how to improve it. I know from private discussions that they view things similar to myself; it's not that I'm alone in my opinions. It's more that no one wants the conflict and stress that looking publicly and openly into the shadow can bring. It helps me to remember that while "negative" in our culture implies a dark, emotional destructive force, it can also be the result of calm, courageous, and accurate observation.
Monday, May 3, 2010
Almost Home
Yesterday driving from a long trip away, we were almost home and passing a large wetland. A small turtle was at the edge of the road. Both myself and the car in front of me managed to miss the turtle. I was able to immediately turn around and pull over to move the turtle off the road. As we watched two cars sped past and the second car ran over the turtle. My partner put its bleeding shattered body in the grass beside the road. We stood together in shock and then left. As we passed the spot, a homeowner ran his lawnmower over the turtle.
My partner quietly cried the rest of the way home, but I couldn't feel that much in the moment. Only later when its image flashed into my mind, the small head seeking the direction it wanted to go right before the cars came, was I able to necessarily grieve. I saw this individual being. For a moment my consciousness knew this turtle and it became my kin, a part of my life and valued. It became a part of me. I know that upturned face seeking to taste the sun.
This is what happens when we drive our bodies around in heavy machines of power. Instead of one being facing another breathing each other's air and entering each others senses, we become insensitive pieces of rigid metal ego.
My partner quietly cried the rest of the way home, but I couldn't feel that much in the moment. Only later when its image flashed into my mind, the small head seeking the direction it wanted to go right before the cars came, was I able to necessarily grieve. I saw this individual being. For a moment my consciousness knew this turtle and it became my kin, a part of my life and valued. It became a part of me. I know that upturned face seeking to taste the sun.
This is what happens when we drive our bodies around in heavy machines of power. Instead of one being facing another breathing each other's air and entering each others senses, we become insensitive pieces of rigid metal ego.
Sunday, April 11, 2010
The Invitation
The Invitation
- Oriah Mountain Dreamer
It doesn't interest me what you do for a living.
I want to know what you ache for, and if you dare to dream of meeting your heart's longing.
It doesn't interest me where or what or with whom you have studied. I want to know what sustains you, from the inside, when all else falls away.
I dreamt last night I was at a palatial home, the White House maybe. It was after hours, and after an event. The young aides were angry with me. I just looked at them, they were upset about something that didn't really matter, except in their circumscribed world. I left free, but alone by myself into the night with sweeping surfaces of the large building lit next to the empty drive and garden, and the lights of the city below me.
I'm an aide at work and I spend my week worrying about things that don't really matter in the big picture. I really don't need the anger and frustration that come with the big performance.
What matters here is the beauty of the beckoning night and the freedom I feel with it stretched out before me.
- Oriah Mountain Dreamer
It doesn't interest me what you do for a living.
I want to know what you ache for, and if you dare to dream of meeting your heart's longing.
It doesn't interest me where or what or with whom you have studied. I want to know what sustains you, from the inside, when all else falls away.
I dreamt last night I was at a palatial home, the White House maybe. It was after hours, and after an event. The young aides were angry with me. I just looked at them, they were upset about something that didn't really matter, except in their circumscribed world. I left free, but alone by myself into the night with sweeping surfaces of the large building lit next to the empty drive and garden, and the lights of the city below me.
I'm an aide at work and I spend my week worrying about things that don't really matter in the big picture. I really don't need the anger and frustration that come with the big performance.
What matters here is the beauty of the beckoning night and the freedom I feel with it stretched out before me.
Journaling April 5
I know the texture of this soil, dark and deep black matter in furrows lying in their valleys. Having brought up what was buried and hidden with no intention, it was simply over-turned. For me a sadness has surfaced, come over with the turning like a blackened statue of the goddess, her meaning partly in the past. The farmer knows this is treasure.
My hands are rough and strong like those of my grandfathers and grandmothers. But next to me there stands a bird, a crane or heron and I know my place is not theirs here tilling this soil. The bird that lifted me off the grass, up with it in a pull of energy. I'm to follow it now. What does this mean here now? - not just the lift-off of youth, but also the sadness of what's been forgotten, hidden away, and lost.
And now this one white bird, and there is something in that white and strong, powerful wings with oiled feathers perfectly in place. Voyager. Bringer of something new. Vision is a powerful thing.
In the moment. My right foot down in mud and water. Down on firmness. And up and just above there is a different perspective. Gathering a view and dropping back down. It's hard to show the imagination in the midst of a busy square full of voices and happenings.
I'm not comfortable. It's awkward. I swallow, so easy to say silent at the margins, except it becomes painful after a while. And it keeps my feet on the ground and then I fly farther away. This is not freedom. It's being tethered with a long leash. Better to live in service and be free to leave.
This flight is the above mirroring the below. It's an illusion - going up is going below, and that's why everyone is keeping so busy flat on the ground. Change is not coming, change is here. There is no seeing above, or below, far into the future to plan for. There is seeing into now and realizing what it means for each of us. I know I feel alone and over-whelmed. I'm probably not alone in that.
The flight is into what we know that we don't remember. She resurfaces. The farmer knows his life has changed. It doesn't matter what she used to mean now the dark valleys are open to being known. He makes new meaning, one felt in his bones. He knows what he must do and he doesn't know how. The same for each of us. I need to look.
My hands are rough and strong like those of my grandfathers and grandmothers. But next to me there stands a bird, a crane or heron and I know my place is not theirs here tilling this soil. The bird that lifted me off the grass, up with it in a pull of energy. I'm to follow it now. What does this mean here now? - not just the lift-off of youth, but also the sadness of what's been forgotten, hidden away, and lost.
And now this one white bird, and there is something in that white and strong, powerful wings with oiled feathers perfectly in place. Voyager. Bringer of something new. Vision is a powerful thing.
In the moment. My right foot down in mud and water. Down on firmness. And up and just above there is a different perspective. Gathering a view and dropping back down. It's hard to show the imagination in the midst of a busy square full of voices and happenings.
I'm not comfortable. It's awkward. I swallow, so easy to say silent at the margins, except it becomes painful after a while. And it keeps my feet on the ground and then I fly farther away. This is not freedom. It's being tethered with a long leash. Better to live in service and be free to leave.
This flight is the above mirroring the below. It's an illusion - going up is going below, and that's why everyone is keeping so busy flat on the ground. Change is not coming, change is here. There is no seeing above, or below, far into the future to plan for. There is seeing into now and realizing what it means for each of us. I know I feel alone and over-whelmed. I'm probably not alone in that.
The flight is into what we know that we don't remember. She resurfaces. The farmer knows his life has changed. It doesn't matter what she used to mean now the dark valleys are open to being known. He makes new meaning, one felt in his bones. He knows what he must do and he doesn't know how. The same for each of us. I need to look.
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