Lou Gottlieb

                         The Folksinger  Who Hosted a Commune



The idea of communes "working," flourishing, succeeding is always brought up, but this is beside the point in the case of the communes now existing in America. What is essential is to expose ourselves to a life of voluntary poverty, or life for minimal cost, and a life of sharing...because this is what it is, alone, that makes the commune endeavor an important thing in America.


                                                                 Elia Katz, quoted by Lou Gottlieb


It's a lucky child that has a chance to be reared in an intentional community


                                                                Lou Gottlieb

 Lou Gottlieb was born to immigrant parents in 1923, Jewish name, Catholic upbringing. (During his second LSD experience, he huddled in a closet and chanted Luke 1:31, "Fear not, Mary," mantra-like in Latin.) He played piano, oboe, and bass fiddle, and started college at 16. During the War, the Army Band, stationed at the Army War College, was shipped overseas. The College still wanted a band, and Gottlieb played bass in the replacement band. After the War, Gottlieb finished his education, played in jazz bands and a folk group, the Gateway Singers. He received a PhD in musicology in 1958, transposing fifteenth century masses into modern notation for his dissertation.

Post-doc, Lou continued to gig, and made a serious attempt at stand-up comedy, becoming friends with Lenny Bruce and Don Adams. He arranged tunes for the Kingston Trio, and enlisted vocalists Alex Hasselev and Glenn Yarbrough to help record a demo of his arrangements. Gottlieb, Hasselev, and Yarbrough began to tour as the Limeliters, and formed the nucleus of the ABC television folk hour, Hootenanny, with Lou arranging, playing bass, and wisecracking with the audience.

In 1962, the Limeliters took a break after walking away from a plane crash. Lou bought thirty-two acres of meadow orchard and redwoods, a former chicken ranch just north of the San Francisco Bay, with the idea of subdividing it. At the same time he was investigating yoga, Indian religion, and psychedelics. Lou and friends, Ramon Sender and Stewart Brand would visit the property to horse around. Lou moved his piano into a converted chicken shed, meaning to commit a program of classical music to memory.

In 1966 the San Francisco Diggers, accepting the responsibility for feeding the tide of young visitors to Haight Street, asked Lou if they could tend the orchard and start a garden. Somebody put up a sign inviting hippies to visit the "Digger Farm," and Lou Gottlieb's Morningstar Ranch became ground zero for the hippie commune movement. Between then and 1972, something like fifteen hundred people passed through Morningstar, some for a day, some years. Lou attended seven hippie births, and thought he had been an obstetrician or midwife in a former life.

Lou came to see "open land" as a necessity and way of ameliorating the human condition. Social wealth and automation were making some people "technologically unemployable," and some people were simply "impossibles," people whose need for leisure is more demanding than their fear of starvation. There need to be places where anybody may go, outlaw places where the impossibles are free to take their chances being impossible. Late in life, Lou said -- only half facetiously -- that this is the idea for which he should receive a Nobel Prize.

Culture shock and, we must surmise, a certain hippie fecklessness alienated Morningstar's neighbors. Over the commune's half-dozen years, petitioners and Sonoma County officials angled to evict visitors. At one point, Lou deeded the property to God. He paid $15, 000 in fines and did fifteen days in jail for contempt. Finally the county bulldozed the hippie shacks, the Morningstar adventure having cost Lou something like seven hundred thousand 2011 dollars.

The Limeliters re-formed, and Lou continued to make periodic attempts at working up a classical performance. He also continued to propose that society set aside remote sites where anybody could squat.

Lou died in 1996, diabetes having masked a malignancy until two or three weeks before the end. He faced imminent death with grace and humor.

Wes Jackson

The Kansas Farm Boy Who's Breeding an Edible Prairie

Extractive economy simply means an economy based on depletion, deficit spending of the Earth's ecological capital.


                                                                                          Wes Jackson

Wes Jackson was born in 1936 on a farm near Topeka, Kansas. He would have been learning long division and joining the 4H while WWII was rushing to its bloody close, receiving his BS in Biology while cars still had tail fins, his MS in Botany at the Cold War's suspenseful height, and a PhD in Genetics when American citizens were beginning to realize foreign policy could be mistaken. Jackson chaired one of America's first Environmental Studies programs, at California State University in Sacramento, then returned to Kansas to found the Land Institute.

Some plants, annuals, live for one season, others, perennials, for several. In nature perennials, in mixtures, dominate.  Agriculture has reversed this, and we grow acres of nothing but one or another annual (chiefly just four, rice, wheat, corn, and soy), sprawling beyond the horizon. The Land Institute is trying to get back to nature by breeding perennial versions of corn, sorghum, sunflower, and wheat, and growing them together. They are also  domesticating food-producing wild perennials. This strategy saves soil and energy, because plants growing deep roots over many seasons won't require tilling, and will have greater access to minerals and water, and because mixtures of plants will be less vulnerable to diseases and pests.

Jackson describes himself not as optimistic, but hopeful.

Buckminster Fuller

It was never my intention to design the geodesic dome. I wanted to discover the principles at work in our universe. I could have ended up with a pair of flying slippers.

                                                             Buckminster Fuller
 

Richrd Buckminster Fuller remains the most fascinating member of the World War I generation. A business failure and grieving father at 32, he prepared to drown himself. It came to him that he was the product of the things he learned from everyone he knew, and from a chain of people going back to humanity's beginning, so his life was not his own to throw away. Since he had been planning to die, Fuller -- or "Bucky" as he liked to be called -- decided to comit "egocide" instead, and live dedicated to the desires of the universe and the betterment of all people.

For Bucky, humanity was going through its final exam, pass-or-fail, utopia or oblivion. He decided that it would be easier to reform the environment than people, who -- mistakenly -- believe that the world holds too few resources to let us all survive peacefully. His career was one of invention, and he died holding twenty-eight patents for devices to house and serve us better than ever, using less material and energy. He also published over thirty books. Fuller's inventions include a new geometry, a high-mileage-for-its-time car which could turn 360 degrees inside its own radius, and the geodesic dome, a structure which can cover unlimited area without any internal columns or load-bearing walls.

Toward the end of a long, productive life, Buckminster Fuller called us "four billion billionaires who are entirely unaware of their good fortune."

Steven Leblanc

If we do not strive to understand what we have done in the past and why, it will only make it harder to get it right in the future.


                                                                            Steven LeBlanc

Archeologist Steven LeBlanc was born in 1943, the same year as Jim Morrison, romance and mystery novelist Janet Evanovich, and Newt Gingrich. He is the director of collections at the Peabody Museum of Archeology and Ethnology at Harvard University, and an expert on the Mimbres Culture of southwestern New Mexico.

In 2003's Constant Battles, LeBlanc and his wife and co-author Katherine Register make the case that ecological imbalance causes human warfare. People deforest or overgraze the places where we live, or breed beyond our environments' carrying capacities, then try to expand our territories by invasion. There has never been an Edenic time in which we were at peace with our environment or each other. LeBlanc's case for this includes the way ancient people sited their villages, ancient skeletons damaged by violence, anecdotes related to early European settlers by native Americans, and the behavior of other primates and remaining "stone age" farmers.

Betty Edwards

The left hemisphere has no patience with this detailed perception, and says, in effect, "It's a chair, I tell you. That's enough to know. In fact, don't bother to look at it, because I've got a ready-made symbol for you. Here it is; add a few details if you want, but don't bother me with this looking business."


                                                                          Betty Edwards

Art educator, Betty Edwards was born in 1926, roughly contemporary with Pop artists like Andy Warhol, not to mention cartoonist and Mad Magazine founder Harvey Kurtzman. She graduated from UCLA in 1947, and would have crossed paths there with the first vets returning to college from Europe and the Pacific on the GI Bill.

Edwards is the author of the standard drawing instruction book, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. Drawing's thesis is that, while language and analysis are functions of our brains' left hemispheres, good drawing is done by the right hemisphere. Our untrained impulse is to use symbols -- circles for eyes, upside-down sevens for noses -- to represent things, but to represent them well, we need to draw what we see, not what we "know" is there. Edwards provides exercises to train us to do just that.

All very interesting, and useful if drawing's your thing, but of no wider consequence. Except...in our moment of history we're encountering entirely novel challenges, with stakes never higher. And we're digging in to meet them, believing we already know all the answers. We get to make mistakes (I drew Edward's mouth more widely open than it is in the photograph, and with a fuller lower lip), but we have to try to draw what we see, not what we know is there.

Frances Moore Lappe

My whole mission in life is to help us find the power we lack to create the world we want.


                                                                          Frances Moore Lappe

Frances Moore Lappe was born early in 1944, when the Allies were beginning to organize the Normandy Invasion, and Allied troops were still bogged down at Anzio. She came to prominence in 1971 with the publication of her best selling book, Diet for a Small Planet, in which she made the case that livestock require many times the protein, in the form of legumes and grains, than they yield, and that it would be more economical for the world to consume the corn and beans directly. (Lappe included nutritional information to assure that readers who changed their diets would get enough protein, and recipes for the unfamiliar new ingredients.)

With co-author Joseph Collins, Lappe followed Diet with World Hunger (Ten Myths), then expanded Ten Myths into Food First, in which she and Collins posed and answered fifty questions which mostly represented misconceptions about hunger and how it might be conquered. The misconceptions include the notion that there are too little arable land and too many people. With copious references, Food First shows that landowning elites make hunger inevitable by planting luxury crops and commodities for export (sugar, coffee, cocoa, beef, corn for ethanol) instead of the crops that would feed local sharecroppers and farm laborers. The book finishes with recommendations for American readers concerned about world hunger:

Don't accept conventional wisdom, be empirical about hunger, and communicate your understanding; work for our own food self reliance; work for American land reform (for instance by changing tax laws so that heirs don't have to sell the farm to pay onerous taxes); eliminate American support for corporations and governments whose agricultural policies starve people.

Lappe has gone on to write and advocate for democracy and justice. She advocates for what she calls "living democracy" as opposed to "thin democracy." The difference is that  thin democracy is limited to elections and supporting candidates -- the democracy of consumers -- while living democracy is a way of behaving -- the democracy of doers. It happens in our culture and at work. Living democracy is an "enlivening culture in which the values of inclusion, fairness, and mutual, accountability show up in a wide range of human relationships."

Rachel Carson

We stand now where two roads diverge. But unlike the roads in Robert Frost's familiar poem, they are not equally fair. The road we have long been traveling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we progress at great speed, but at its end lies disaster. The other fork of the road -- the one less traveled by -- offers our last, our only chance to reach a destination that assures the preservation of the earth.


                                                                              Rachel Carson

Rachel Carson was born to a farming family in western Pennsylvania in 1907, and died in 1964. There was never an election in her adult life in which she was ineligible to vote, and she was old enough to have been glad when the United States ratified the Nineteenth Amendment. She was the smartest kid in her class, and enjoyed nature and literature. Her college graduated her with honors, but she delayed graduate school because of family financial difficulties. Carson did receive a master's degree in zoology from John Hopkins, but further financial difficulties, including her father's death kept her from continuing.

Carson went to work for the Bureau of Fisheries, and wrote and edited  Fisheries publications and radio broadcasts. She went on to write for newspapers and The Atlantic Monthly, and published a trilogy of books about the ocean, Under Sea and Wind, The Sea around Us, and The Edge of the Sea.

We remember Rachel Carson for her 1962 book, Silent Spring, which is one source for the environmental movement. Silent Spring documented pesticide -- particularly DDT -- damage to the environment. Bald eagles, which are fairly common now, were once threatened with extinction because pesticides, concentrating at the higher end of the food chain, made eagle eggs fragile. Carson took a lot of heat, particularly from the chemical industry,

The chief criticism of Carson and Silent Spring was that banning DDT would condemn people in the tropics to death from malaria, although Carson had argued for study and judicious use, rather than  abandonment. The criticism continues half a century later, although a lot of that time has been spent trying to understand relationships and context, the workings of systems. Carson should be remembered as a pioneer in systematic thinking about problems, in a time of pure purposiveness.

Warming Up For Rachel Carson

I've heard and read artists and illustrators who can draw from life crowing about people who use photographic references. I'm here to tell you drawing from life and drawing from pictures are separate -- if related -- skills. My study of Rachel Carson for my Faces of Wisdom series, has given me fits. I just don't know how to draw from pictures. Picking up that skill is one point of the series.

There was an earlier study that I didn't include in this post. It used a different source photo, and was even further from being a likeness than the top drawing. The story of the drawings you see here is this:

Pencil underdrawing for the top study. It's interesting that I didn't realize how far from a likeness it was until I'd inked it. My hypothesis explaining that is that getting a likeness and recognizing one probably use different parts of the brain, parts that don't work at the same time. Okay, I said, if I'm not getting it, I'll use a crutch, and maybe learn something from the crutch. The crutch was a pair of compass dividers and a ruler. The grid or diagram you see below and to the right of the face is the measured layout for the final drawing, and you can see how I took the measurements on the source photo of Rachel Carson. Next you see me thinking out loud, below some quotes from Rob Hopkins. Next the measured layout for the final drawing. Then a quick try with a similar layout. Finally the pencil underdrawing for the finished product.

Tomorrow, Rachel Carson.

If you want to see some really great drawings from photographs, take a look at my friend Julie Rathmann's website.  http://www.julierathmann.com/

Hazel Henderson

What I have been trying to do for 20 years is to change the debate about development and move it outside of the box marked "economics."...Trying to run an economy using only such economic indicators as the gross national product is rather like trying to fly a Boeing 747 with a single oil pressure gauge. What we need to do is fill out the instrument panel.

Hazel Henderson (in a 1988 interview)

Hazel Henderson is a British-born (1933) American citizen who is concerned with how the technological changes of our time alter how we live. Some of the alterations are pernicious, but some are merely confusing. For instance, academia business and government are adapted to analysis and reductionism -- to things instead of relationships -- but our understanding of the world increasingly demands synthesis. Henderson is essentially conservative, but according to the perversity of our time, any "conservatives" who even know her name would know that she believes economics is subsumed by ecology, and think of her as as leftist.

Henderson believes that industrialism and free-market economics represent a brief anomaly in human history. She rejects the belief that human well being demands technological progress. Simultaneously experiencing a more global understanding of existence and the limits of industrialism shocks us and seems paradoxical. Increased technological complexity makes laissez-faire economics unworkable and makes democracy difficult, because none of the players -- you, me, Obama, the Tea Partiers, al Quaeda -- has enough information to make intelligent analyses. She sees alternative movements forming to replace the dominant economic model -- alternative publishing, cooperatives, renewable energy, etc.

Rob Hopkins

Change need not be a hair shirt exercise. It can be something which is exhilarating, has a feel of being a historic process, a collective call to adventure. What Transition is about is unlocking the collective genius of the community.


                                        Rob Hopkins


Without cheap oil you wouldn't be reading this book now.


                                        Rob Hopkins

Rob Hopkins was born in London in tumultuous 1968, the year of Prague Spring, the beginning of Ulster's "Troubles," and rioting assassination and abdication in the United States. He came of age with the collapse of the Soviet Empire. He is the author of the Transition movement, an effort to deal with the end of cheap fossil fuels by cultivating resilience in communities.

 The idea of the Transition Movement is that peak oil, global warming, and various other serious challenges will inevitably change the global economy, and that the best way to affect the nature of that change is locally, by strengthening communities. Specifics necessarily come from individual communities, but some strategies are:

* Community gardens;

* Learning skills that we have largely abandoned because of abundant high-quality fuel;

* 100% recycling;

* Obtaining supplies locally;

* Getting to know our neighbors;

* Local currencies.

Many in the movement believe that living post-peak will be more fulfilling and enjoyable than the alienation and stress of the consumer economy.

In 2005 Transition came out of a class project in 2005 when Hopkins was a permaculture instructor at the Kinsale Further Education College in Kinsale, Ireland. He went on to co-found Transition Town Totnes in Totnes, Devon, England, and to publish The Transition Handbook. He gardens in Totnes and blogs at http://transitionculture.org.

M. King Hubbert

In terms of human history, the episode of fossil fuels is a very brief epoch.

                                                                       M. King Hubbert

Marion King Hubbert was a geologist whose life spanned from the year the Wright Brothers first flew at Kitty Hawk to the collapse of the Soviet Union. A native Texan, Hubbert received his BS, MS, and PhD from the University of Chicago, and worked for Shell Oil from 1943 until 1964, was a research geophysicist for the US Geological Survey, and taught at Columbia University, Stanford, and UC Berkeley.

In 1956, Hubbert ssuggested that production in a geographic area -- ranging from a single oil field to the planet -- will follow a bell curve, and predicted that production in the United States would peak around 1970, which proved to be the case. Later he predicted a global peak around 1995, a little earlier than what happend, but close. The so-called Hubbert Curve is based on historical trends rather than estimates of reserves and consumption. Subsequent researchers have found similar curves in fisheries.

Hubbert also showed that rock in the Earth's crust is plastic -- it changes shape under pressure -- and formulated the correct statement for Darcy's Law, which describes the relationship between the rate flow of a fluid through a permeable medium and permeability, area, pressure drop, viscosity, and length.

He was a Technocrat, a founder of a Depression-era movement that advocated that scientists and engineers, not politicians, coordinate the economy. Hubbert believed in an economy in which goods and services were priced according to the energy consumed in their production.

Drawing Method

I'm trying, with intermittent success, to make a concentrated effort with my drawing. I'm working on a series of forty or so portraits of people who have been sources for the ideas that make up my worldview, the "Faces of Wisdom Series" ten or so of which I've already published.

Above: three scans to demonstrate my method, a photograph of geologist M. King Hubbert, a pencil copy of the photo, and the beginning lines of the ink rendering. Besides the chance to personify ideas I wish were more common in society, what I get from this series is practice at catching proportions, a skill I need to work on, and practice making clean and meaningful lines with a fairly shaky hand. And, I'm learning a lot about the relief of the human face by making the lines I shade with wrap around the forms.

The real surprise is that drawing from photos is harder for me than drawing from life. I never make pencil under-drawings when I draw from life. I've used snapshots of subjects for my newspaper profiles, to spare my subjects the tiresome chore of sitting still for half an hour or more, but it takes a lot longer for me to get things right. Hubbert's head, for instance, started out about the length of his hair longer, and it still looks a little tall.

Dorothy Day

First of all, let it be remembered that I speak as an ex-Communist and one who has not testified before Congressional Committees, nor written works on the Communist conspiracy.

                                                   Dorothy Day

Knitting is very conducive to thought. It is nice to knit a while, put down the needles, write a while, then take up the sock again. 


                                                  Dorothy Day

I believe that we must reach our brother, never toning down our fundamental oppositions, but meeting him when he asks to be met, with a reason for the faith that is in us, as well as with a loving sympathy for them as brothers.  

                                                 Dorothy Day

The greatest challenge of the day is: how to bring about a revolution of the heart, a revolution which has to start with each one of us? 

                                                 Dorothy Day 

We believe in loving our brothers regardless of race, color or creed and we believe in showing this love by working for better conditions immediately and the ultimate owning by the workers of their means of production. 

                                                 Dorothy Day

Dorothy Day was born in 1897, and lived until 1980. She was an atheist and a Communist who converted to Catholicism in 1927, and who founded the Catholic Worker movement. The Catholic Workers are pacifist servants of the poor, self-reliant, and adamant opponents of big government and big business. Day was a (Federal) tax protester, and was arrested repeatedly for ignoring nuclear air raid drills in New York City. She opposed all the American wars of her lifetime. She was a distributist, a believer in a "third way" -- between capitalism and socialism -- in which land and machinery are owned by those who use them, as opposed to business or state ownership and largesse.

The Vatican has allowed the Archdiocese of New York to open Dorothy Day's case for canonization. My understanding of canonization is that in declaring a person a saint the church recognizes the force of God's grace in her. It's easy to believe that the integrity of Day's Christian life was too strong for religious bureaucrats ever to acknowledge. (In fact, people called Day a saint during her life. She said she didn't want to be dismissed so easily.)

This non-believer recognizes something that we might call sainthood in Day, though. She has become for me the focus for an unresolved personal controversy: As near as we are to the limits of Earth's carrying capacity, can we afford to meet in loving sympathy with sincere wrongdoers and call them brothers? Steven LeBlanc and Garrett Hardin make my case for force.

Donella Meadows

Your paradigm is so intrinsic to your mental process that you are hardly aware of its existence, until you try to communicate with someone with a different paradigm.

Donella Meadows

Donella Meadows lived from 1941 until 2001. She studied Chemistry as an undergraduate at Carleton College, and received a doctorate in Biophysics from Harvard. She went as a researcher to MIT, and worked there with Jay Forrester, the inventor of magnetic data storage, in the early days of computer modeling.

In 1972, Meadows published the book The Limits to Growth with her husband, Dennis Meadows, as well as Jorgen Randers and William Behrens. The book was a report to a private group, the Club of Rome, that is interested in challenges facing all of humanity. Limits modeled the consequences of a rapidly growing world population using finite resources, and predicted economic behavior.

Limits' conclusions indicated that humanity's situation is perilous. It has been criticized by commentators of widely ranging sincerity and understanding, and twenty- and thirty-year updates have been published.

The thing to take away from Limits and from Donella Meadows, though, is a way of thinking. For instance, predicting how long a resource, say oil, will last takes more than just dividing known reserves by barrels per year. Modelers need to predict discoveries of new reserves, relative difficulty of getting existing and predicted reserves, increases in population and industrialization, and changes in consumption due to new technologies. Good citizenship may not require fluency with modeling these variables, but it does demand that we know they are there and how they interact.

Meadows' Places to Intervene in a System is probably her best know paper (about two thousand words). It is available as a PDF at http://www.sustainer.org/?page_id=106,

As html at http://www.developerdotstar.com/mag/articles/places_intervene_system.html,

in the Winter, 1997 Whole Earth Review, in her posthumous book Thinking in Systems: A Primer, and outlined at Wikipedia. She wrote a syndicated column, Voice of a Global Citizen, which is archived at http://www.sustainer.org/dhm_archive/.

John C. Calhoun

I hold that in the present state of civilization, where two races of different origin, and distinguished by color, and other physical differences, as well as intellectual, are brought together, the relation now existing in the slaveholding States between the two, is, instead of an evil, a good—a positive good.

I hold then, that there never has yet existed a wealthy and civilized society in which one portion of the community did not, in point of fact, live on the labor of the other.

                                                John C. Calhoun 




I wanted to begin this post with something like "John Caldwell Calhoun is my favorite villain from American history, villain because he believed that slavery was a positive good, favorite because he understood, unlike most of his contemporaries and ours, that the wealthy always live on the labor of others." Calhoun was deeper than a simple-minded cracker insisting on racial prerogatives.



Calhoun lived from 1782 until 1850. (Delegates to the Continental Congress signed the Declaration of Independence in 1776, and Cornwallis surrendered in 1781, but British troops remained in America until late in 1783. The War between the States began in 1861.) He represented South Carolina's 6th District in Congress from 1811 until 1817, served as Monroe's Secretary of War, Vice President for Presidents John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson, and as Senator from South Carolina from 1832 until 1843, and then from 1845 until his death. He was also John Tyler's Secretary of State, was eager for the War of 1812, and founded the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

Although he was only born late in the Revolution, we can see Calhoun as one of the founders. He began as a nationalist and advocated for public works like roads, canals, harbors, and for a national bank, and for tariffs to pay for improvements, and to protect the nation's infant economy. As the country grew, he came to see these same institutions enriching the northern states at the expense of the South. His mature positions -- nullification, concurrent majority, and expansion -- come from a need to defend his home. In the same 1837 speech I've quoted, Calhoun says apparently without irony, "...encroachments must be met at the beginning, and that those who act on the opposite principle are prepared to become slaves." He's speaking specifically about abolition -- although the hypothetical slaves mentioned would be southern planters. But abolition is a just a special case of federal policy designed to favor the North.

Calhoun seems to have believed, with evidence, that humans will seek their individual survival and advantage, at each others costs, and that our duty is to protect ourselves. Defense requires security and resources seized from other hands.

Paul Hawken

We cannot turn back the clock or return to any prior state on the planet, but we will never know ourselves until we know where we are on the land. There is no reason we cannot build an exquisitely designed economy that matches biology in its diversity and integrates complexity rather than extinguishing it.


                                                                     Paul Hawken

Paul Hawken was born in California in 1946, and attended UC Berkely  and San Francisco State without taking a degree. He was active in the civil rights movement of the 1960s, and was Martin Luther King's press coordinator for the Selma march, and staff photographer for the Congress of Racial Equality in Louisiana.

Hawken turned a Boston health food store into a national natural foods brand, Erewhon Foods, and co-founded Smith & Hawken, manufacturer of quality garden tools. These days he heads One Sun LLC, an energy company that works with biomimicry, and Highwater Global, an equity fund that invests in companies working to solve environmental challenges. He is the author of a number of books, including The Next Economy, which came out of essays about economics written in the mid-eighties for CoEvolution Quarterly and interviews with Stewart Brand. Other titles include Natural Capitalism, How to Grow a Business, and The Ecology of Commerce. He has collaborated with Amory and Hunter Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute.

Paul Hawken's current book is Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Social Movement in History is Restoring Grace, Justice, and Beauty to the World. Blessed Unrest describes a movement made of thousands or millions of non-profits acting for the environment, the rights of indigenous peoples, and social justice. It describes this movement as a worldwide social immune system.

http://naturalcapital.org/

http://wiseearth.org/

James Lovelock

I realized it was life that looked after the climate and the atmosphere.


                                                                         James Lovelock

James Lovelock was born in 1919 in the English county of Hertfordshire. He was a conscientious objector at the beginning of World War II, but Nazi atrocities convinced him to enlist. The military turned him down because he was engaged in medical research. He is the inventor of the electron capture detector, which can detect CFCs or pesticides in quantities as low a one part per trillion.

In the 1960s Lovelock was working for NASA, developing ways to detect life on other planets. He reasoned that chemical reactions would have stopped in the atmospheres of planets without life. This is the case on Mars and Venus, planets NASA thought might have life. Earth has lots of reactions in the atmosphere. For instance, methane and oxygen are constantly reacting in the air. But the composition of our atmosphere remains constant.

This was the beginning of Lovelock's "Gaia Hypothesis." (Say Guy-uh) Gases like oxygen and methane come from living things, so living things must be regulating their relative amounts. Beyond this, the Gaia Hypothesis says that life actively controls the temperature and composition of the Earth's atmosphere, and other parts of the Earth's surface. If the temperature or the atmospheric composition is disturbed, life will correct it by changes in the ecosystem. The climate, the air, the rocks, the ocean, and life are a single system.

Lynn Margulis

I never believed what they told me, I believed what I saw myself.


                                                                                          Lynn Margulis

Lynn Margulis was born in 1938. She is a biologist and teaches in the Department of Geosciences at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

Margulis is interested in how the cells that we're made of came to have parts called "organelles." She believes that complex cells, called "eukaryotes," are the descendants of simpler cells. The ancient, simpler cells tried to eat each other. Instead they began working relationships. They became parts of something new. Margulis says a cell isn't like a bacterium. It's "a microbial community."

 When Margulis first published these ideas, scientists didn't believe them. Now they are accepted by most biologists.

She believes that new species happen when existing species take on genes from other species. The traditional theory says that genes mutate, and if the mutations help, the new species survive. Margulis also helped originate the Gaia Hypothesis. The Gaia Hypothesis says that life works to keep the world's oxygen and other elements at the levels that life needs.


Marie Curie's Beauty Tips Department: Margulis was married to the late astronomer and television personality Carl Sagan, and is the mother of five.

Julian Assange And Marshall McLuhan

Marshall McLuhan was a Canadian scholar, born in 1911, died 1980, author of the books The Mechanical Bride, Gutenberg Galaxy, and Understanding Media among others. He is the author also of the statement "the medium is the message," and the phrase "global village." In fact another of his books is titled The Medium is the Massage, its idea being that media are extensions of our senses, whose use condition our nervous systems differently from each other. In other words, a television watcher will be have different, but no less real strengths than readers. McLuhan claimed that electronic media condition people in this culture to behave more like pre-literate villagers than like our great grandparents.


Julian Assange is an Australian-born activist and journalist, the editor of Wikileaks, the publisher of government and corporate files submitted by whistleblowers. Assange is currently in England battling extradition to Sweden to face charges of multiple sexual assaults. He asserts that he is resisting extradition because Sweden would be more likely than the UK to extradite him in turn to the United 
States. PayPal and various credit cards have stopped handling donations to Wikileaks, Wikileak apps are verbotten on the iPhone, and Wikileaks' Swiss bank has frozen its accounts. My take on it is that Wikileaks is the first of a phenomenon -- along with Stuxnet, improvised explosive devices, and extraordinary rendition, part of war as the planet now wages it -- and that whatever happens to it, the idea of an internet platform for whistleblowers to publish documents from the vaults of transgressing governments and companies is established and will co-evolve with efforts to defend against it.



There is a systematic tendency on the part of human beings to avoid accountability for their own decisions. That's why there are so many missing feedback loops -- and why this kind of leverage point is so often popular with the masses and unpopular with the powers that be, and effective, if you can get the powers that be to permit it to happen or go around them and make it happen anyway.

                                  Donella Meadows, "Places to Intervene in a System"

In 1986, the US government required that every factory releasing hazardous air pollutants report these emissions publicly. Suddenly everyone could find out what was coming out of the smokestacks in town. There was no law against these emissions, no fines,no determination of "safe" levels, just information. But by 1990 emissions dropped by 40 percent. One chemical company that found itself on the Top Ten Polluters list reduced its emissions by 90 percent just to "get off that list."

                                  Donella Meadows, "Places to Intervene in a System"

Missing feedback is a common cause of system malfunction. Adding or rerouting information can be a powerful intervention, usually easier and cheaper than rebuilding physical structure.

                                  Donella Meadows, "Places to Intervene in a System"

Real total war has become information war. It is being fought by subtle electric informational media -- under cold conditions, and constantly.

                                  Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage

A new form of politics is emerging and in ways we haven't yet noticed. The living room has become a voting booth. Participation via television in Freedom Marches, in war, revolution, pollution, and other events is changing everything.

                                  Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage

The instantaneous world of electric informational media involves all of us, all at once. No detachment or frame is possible.

                                   Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage

The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village.

                                   Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage

(Wikileaks defends itself against litigation)  by using every trick in the book that multinational companies use to route money through tax havens, Instead we route information.

                                   Julian Assange

Garrett Hardin

The laws of our society follow the pattern of ancient ethics, and therefore are poorly suited to governing a complex, crowded, changeable world.

                                                                      Garrett Hardin

Garrett Hardin was a Texas ecologist (b. 1915, d. 2003), whose most widely read work is called The Tragedy of the Commons. In it, he discusses population, and lets population stand for any human choice that affects the environment's carrying capacity for humans.

His metaphor is a pasture (a "common") upon which a community of herdsmen feed their families' flocks. Each herdsman, as a rational being, will try to maximize the common's benefit to him by increasing the number of animals he runs. Any one of these pastoralists would be responsible for only marginal wear and tear on the pasture, but together, the community overgrazes it, and reduces the number of animals it can support, ultimately wrecking it.

This is parallel to human overpopulation, and to various other issues in which the interests of communities, or humanity as a whole, are different from those of individual, rational, economic beings. Hardin urged us to arrive at and regulate a consensus to regulate population, and those other issues.