A level III future

Last year I wrote a piece that I called “Ten probable futures.” At that time I wrote: “My reading of anthropology and history leads me to disbelieve in a teleological view of life on earth. We are not all headed toward a particular, universally positive goal. If we were then why are we are all so visibly running is so many different directions? The thrust of history, if we ignore for the moment most theology, does not take us to heaven on earth. Nor does it take us to hell. I believe that, a level ten disaster notwithstanding (a disaster completely out of our control such as being hit by an asteroid), we have the choice of whether or not to make our world a better place. The current tendency, however, is clearly toward self destruction, and as the evidence builds it becomes harder and harder to believe that that destruction will wait for a future generation…”
Although it was meant as an awareness raising piece and a critique of teleological thinking, it was not a completely gloomy picture. I still, nearly a year later, believe that it might not be too late for us to achieve what I termed a level III future, what David Korten and others have called the Great Turning and the transition town concept and our meetings have renewed that hope. Having recently been introduced to the idea of Transistion Towns I am now working to reframe my earlier work. So as a participant with this transition town effort I submit my vision of the future to the discussion. For me that means a level III.
This is how I described it a year ago: “A prosperous way down,” The title of the Odums’ book from 1999. Things deteriorate very slowly. Like a mild long term recession that we hardly notice, in this scenario the world makes a soft landing. Though we start to run out of resources, we realize it in time and embrace policies and behaviors that ensure a new world rises from the ashes of the old, though at a lower intensity and with necessary downshift in our standard of living.”

I think I can flesh that out a little now. Perhaps it raises more questions than answers. I tried to emphasize the soft landing and it required a leap of faith that things will turn out better than I currently think they will. But anything is possible and it provides something to work for. Anyway, it was fun to write. Here’s my “letter from the future”.

It’s been 40 years now since the great crash of 08, long enough that many people working on the farm here don’t remember it. We sit around at night regaling them with stories about how things used to be. We conserve light bulbs now because they are expensive, but bees wax candles are fairly ubiquitous so our evening entertainment is lighted, courtesy of the bees. Our own honey operation took off with great gusto once the supply of sugar from Central and South America became rationed. The producing countries that weren’t torn apart by civil war were busy turning their sugar cane into ethanol for their cars. It worked for a while giving them a tremendous economic advantage and avoiding war for a while longer, but as the land degraded and the yields went down most of those fields were abandoned. Domestic honey became increasingly valuable as a result. Consequently, the bees needed more things to pollinate, so the provisional Government of the new country of New Mexico commenced a seed and fruit tree distribution effort and outlawed a number of formerly destructive practices. Acreage devoted to mixed use orchards were increased and raising cattle was greatly reduced (and were required to practice rotational grazing). Horses were limited to those that were necessary for transportation or beasts of burden. A few had to be put down, and their owners were heart broken, but their husbandry skills were so badly needed that most of them reintegrated well enough. In any case we ended up with a net increase of horses, donkeys, goats, oxen and a decrease in cattle.

Yeah, the young people have a hard time believing some of the stories we tell them. They’ve always known a world where crime rates were low because people desperate enough to steal had a hard time getting around without get-away vehicles and no where to hide. School classrooms have always been small, food has always been natural, they have never seen a cheeto or a twinky, they all ride horses and burros and they all enjoy fresh air. I'm sure to tell them that this was no accident. If it hadn't been for those folks who started working in 2008 to make Santa Fe, Albuquerque and other places into Transition Towns, then we could have ended up like Phoenix or Philladelphia. They find the concept of air conditioning to be particularly fascinating. Why, they ask, did people need to spend so much of their energy back then to keep cool, even when the average temperature was about five degrees cooler? We try and explain that houses were made of artificial materials and were not designed to keep warm and cool on their own. This baffles them completely because there hasn’t been a building like that built in 25 years. Most of the old ones were torn down for their parts or fell down from lack of use. During the downturn no one could afford to live in a house that couldn’t heat and cool itself.

We do have to take special precautions on account of the heat most summers. Some of our crops have been hybridized to withstand it, but shade cloth is still a precious commodity. The good news, according to the latest report from the scientific counsel of the Confederated Nations of North America (formerly the Academy of Sciences, U.S.A), is that we might have turned the corner on the warming. Turns out the Greater Depression came along just in time. It was easy in those first 8 years for the Obama administration to capitalize on the reduction of use of fossil fuels. The hard part was keeping the nation together. When it became impossible for the representatives of the outlying states (ours being one of them) to travel to Washington several times a year, congress was abandoned and the Confederation was born.

That transition was a lot easier than anyone feared. There were few riots. By 2012 and Obama’s reelection, people had already downshifted their lifestyles considerably. Every other house in the city had a “hope garden.” Cars were still common but unfashionable and people looked at you askance if you took an unnecessary trip in one. So “local” had become practical out of necessity and when congress dissolved and the constitutional congresses of the new confederation took place simultaneously across the nation (sorry, still call it that sometimes) nobody was really surprised and everyone participated without complaint.

The confederation still maintains a defense force at great expense and with great controversy, mostly because the young people who make up the force are needed back at home to plant and harvest, but also because no major conflicts involving the confederation have broken out since its formation. There was a scandal in 2020 when aid was surreptitiously given to one side in the conflict in Guatelateca (formerly Guatemala). Some of the old guard hadn’t gotten used to the idea that the U.S.A. was no longer around, much less pursuing manifest destiny. As a result, the funding for the defense force was reduced to one twentieth its former peak (around 2010) as each of the Nations in the confederation simply withdrew their funding one by one.

But I didn’t sit down to write a history of the great turning. I really just wanted to reflect on how far we’ve come since we started our little farm serendipitously 45 years ago. My son and his wife run the place now. I’m the grumpy and quixotic father-in-law as I butt into their business. I end up telling them how I would have done things back in the day and somehow forgetting that there are not still enough fossil fuels to spare to do it the old ways. He’s right anyways. When I suggest that we use our last five gallons of biodiesel of the season to run the old tractor, I’m mostly just thinking about my arthritis and how I don’t want to dig that hole for a tree by hand. He reminds me that rubber parts for the tractors are in short supply this year so we’re better off using our muscles than using an irreplaceable tractor. I’m not trying to bring back the past, it’s just hard to leave it all behind. I mean, it was real to me, even if Bruce doesn’t remember watching non-stop TV until he was four.

We sure had it easy back then. It’s weird to think about it. It keeps me up at nights as I think about ways to try and explain to Juniper’s children (my grandkids) how sorry I am that their life is so hard. They just laugh at me because to them it’s not hard at all. They were born into it and to them it’s no big deal to be seven and to have to work four hours a day on planting or canning or fence mending, still make time for studies and not be able to “veg out” in front of the TV and one of my old DVDs. Sorry kids, our 5o year old solar panels didn’t eek out enough energy today. You’ll have to just read a book instead. Perhaps they are the lucky ones but I still feel guilty. I started my own turning sooner than most but I still wish I could have started sooner. Juniper tells me I’m being too hard on myself but I’m not sure she really understands how much of the earth’s endowment of energy, top soil and iron ore I personally wasted!

My second wife is the one who has perspective. Just the other night when we had a big party to celebrate our silver anniversary, and her heroic, cross country trip to meet me for the first time after the fall of Los Angeles. She caught me whining about this and she took me aside and gently reminded me of how bad things could have been. The children never starved, though they may have been hungry on occasion. The nation didn’t descend into chaos, it just broke up in an organic fashion, like so much decomposing leaf cover. Although there has been war in other countries, most of the world shifted to a lower level of intensity without much trouble. So many of them were living at lower levels anyway that much of what followed seemed like an improvement to them. In fact, it is really my privilege-the privilege I enjoyed by living at the center of the worlds greatest empire-that distorts my perspective. Our farm became one node in a network of similar efforts across the bioregion that provided education and sustenance for hundreds of former engineers and MBA holders who are now mostly great farmers. We set out to provide a safe place for our children to grow up and we got a place that was safer than we could have imagined. Our communities are loosely knitted together by the realization that we all depend deeply on one another’s success. Though we have our differences, they are at least different differences. No one begrudges another the purchase of any thing shiny and new because there are very few shiny new things to purchase; there is no keeping up with the Joneses. Instead we struggle to figure out ways to pay back the Joneses for their generosity. Besides, we still have the internet, though most of the miracles of technology failed to stand the test of time, my blog is still going strong. Happy new year everyone!

Road Rage and Racism

A strange thing happened on my way to work yesterday. I was driving along minding my own business. I had just acquired a coffee from a bourgeois establishment, laboriously turned my three-quarter ton truck around on that narrow suburban street, and set off for my final destination when I peered in my rearview mirror to see a frenetic driver, gesturing wildly, swerving at least a little back and forth, and creeping closer to my bumper with his little car than I felt comfortable with. Just then I noticed that I was approaching a school zone. I slowed down. He crept closer. Now he was tailgating me and if there is one driving behavior I cannot abide it is tailgating. Most people, I think, completely underestimate the danger that it imposes on both vehicles. I don’t mind throwing my thee-quarter ton weight around in cases like this so naturally I slammed on the breaks to give my friend in the rear view mirror a little warning, “hey little guy, I’m bigger than you are and you don’t want to go there.”
I guess he didn’t quite get the message. He proceeded, almost as if he’d planned it—I mean he acted so fast I can only wonder what he was thinking; I conversely had no time to react—to pass me on the right by using the bike lane on this single lane road. As soon as he got in front of me he stopped. As soon as he stopped he got out of his car. As soon as he got out of his car I realized that he was not a little guy at all. OH, SHIT! Worse yet, he came right to my window, waving his arms and said, “Mother fucker, you don’t cut me off and then just slam on your breaks at me! You get out that car and I will kick your motherfuckin’ ASS!” I just stared at him through my window, which suddenly seemed remarkably thin with him on the other side only a few feet away. I grinned actually, kind of a staring match sort of half-grin, that said, “I’m not going to give in to your threat, I’m gonna pretend it doesn’t bother me (or perhaps pretend this isn’t happening, eeek!) and I’ll just grin until you make your next move, I mean, you wouldn’t actually DO anything with that crossing guard up there looking this way, would you?” And he didn’t. He paused for a moment (an impossibly long, frozen time moment), seemed to regain some of his composure and slowly returned to his car, sauntered I suppose. He drove on through, past the crossing guard, and immediately turned the corner, tailgating someone else onto an unsuspecting residential side street.
My heart was pounding hard enough to make my throat hurt, I was almost dizzy with blood rushing into my head and swirling around my eyeballs. I could almost feel the adrenaline charging up my fight or flight response system, exhilarating me, giving me an uncontrollable high, the grin still not wiped from my face. Then it hit me, the crash after the high, like sugar, caffeine, heroine. But the crash wasn’t lethargy. It was a sick feeling, not nausea exactly because I didn’t feel it in my stomach, more in my head and chest as the epinephrine and cortisol raked little troughs across the surfaces of my cells, accumulating into a mesh of microscopic lacerations that ran rivulets into a gash in my very soul. I felt like I was bleeding inside, bleeding pride, bleeding fear, bleeding confidence, safety, privilege.
I was bleeding privilege because my safe little world, supported by my class standing, my gender, my relative size, my big truck and my above-average job had been breached. A total stranger had suddenly and unexpectedly shattered my illusory bubble. Physical threats are not something that average white, middle class men have to put up with very often. I can only think of two other times in my adult life where I faced such mortal danger from another human. That’s probably more than most folks in my position. But for Black men, or women, the same can not be said. Oh, did I mention? My partner in road rage this day was Black? Yeah, a big, angry, able bodied, Black man. Why does it matter?
It matters because I am white. And as any good antiracist will tell you, that produces a series of interlocking dynamics triggered by the complex social landscape in which this altercation took place. If he had been white I still would have been scared, though not quite as much (unless he was one of those really scary white dudes with big muscles, tattoos, facial hair, you know the kind). I still wouldn’t have gotten out of the truck. But I also wouldn’t have been tempted after the fact to wonder what his race, or his perception of my race, might have had to do with his behavior. Moreover, in the alternate reality where I might have reacted differently, or if one of us had pushed it to an actual physical exchange of blows, the stakes would have been decidedly different and if that had happened and he were Black, in the aftermath (assuming I survived) all the cards would have been stacked in my favor.
Before I go on I should detail some more of my fear-based thought process that ran its ugly course through the darker corners of my mind while my adrenal cortex was still pumping like a windmill in a hurricane. Before I go there I should mention that I have lived most of my life as an untested pacifist, no military training, no bar fights, and few opportunities to find out just how situational pacifism really is. So in my hour of (or hours, cause this thought process actually went on all day) of hormonal hemorrhaging, I came up with no shortage of fantasy scenarios with my erstwhile opponent where I knifed, shot, dirked and vehicular-homicided my way out of the situation. The fight part of my evolutionary safety system was a blaze with pictures of my enemy’s ultimate destruction, his bleeding, humbled body, crumpled on the pavement while I muttered something cheeky, cool, collected. Yeah, right. I could have peed my pants is more like it. But the bottom line is, if the situation had ended differently, if I had even had enough calm, collected cool to take down his license plate (perhaps THAT is why he turned the corner?) things would have, statistically speaking, ended decidedly in my favor.
I don’t feel good about that, by the way. On the contrary my white guilt is showing when I review the following underlying construction of my privilege. If I had his license number I could have called the cops. I could have told them in my unmistakably authoritative white voice that a large black man in a tiny car just threatened my life. Actually he only threatened my ass, not my whole life, but a slight exaggeration on my part would have improved my case before the judge. It's likely (statistically speaking, not based on his behavior necessarily) that as a Black man in America where one in five or better has met with some part of the business end of the penal system, he would have at least one prior whereas I, with my lily-white suburban background have none. When he and I stood before the judge, the judge would, in all statistical likelihood, and being aware of his priors, and being subconsciously influenced by a mass media that portrays Blacks as prone to violence, take more pity on innocent ol’ me (especially since I had not broken any laws and he had broken at least three). Even if he had not broken laws, as I plied the linguistic skills that got me through graduate school and slipped my silvery tongue over the judge’s ear, she most likely would cave to my story and throw the book at the big "mean" Black guy over there, who by this time had already given up hope that he would ever get a fair trial, because he’d been through this so many times before, and he’d seen his friends go through this, and he’d known so many when he did time up at state that had the same, sorry, story to tell, so many in fact that not all of them could possibly be lying. And by this time he would have reached the unavoidable conclusion that he along with one fifth of the Black men in America were damned if they do and damned if they don’t. Which, by the way, was the reason he was so pissed in the first place, when this cowboy-hat-wearing white boy in his big-ass truck cut him off and made him late for work.
Even more scary, being aware of these dynamics (though not in possession of the elusive license number) actually made me plot, for a few moments, my fantasy revenge. Whoa! I thought I was an anti-racist! Yeah, and I’m a pacifist too, right up until someone threatens me, then I’m a raging, knife wielding, racist mad man, willing to use my privilege to leap large Black men in a single bound, leaving them bleeding, broke, incarcerated, divided from family, deprived of livelihood, pride or even a reason to live, much less a reason to resist a not so subtly but all the same, subconsciously racist culture. Only now, upon writing this some 36 hours later am I able to see clearly through the adrenaline to the compassion of my ideals and wish—though I never want to see him again—that this big, scary Black man receive no harm, and to think that he is just as good of a person as I, and though I judged him harshly in my moment of fear, to imagine that he had likely judged me from a similar place of fear, fear that life was once again about to become critically un-fair, that white people are always throwing their three-quarter ton weight around, and it is always landing on him, and that he would not stand for this one more time, for if he did, he would break and the gash in his soul would cut too deep and he could not face another day being Black in America.