Part VI: Back to the Conference

Attendance at the conference pulsed as people came and went. Some people could only stay for a day or two. This caused confusion and occasionally we were crowded in like sardines which was not a bad thing. The flux brought in new perspectives and ideas, new personalities and levels of experiences, and motivated us to think more about how well the conference served the needs of the community.

I wrote in my journal that the flux in attendance was reinforcing my earlier feelings that we were disorganized and "winging it." I felt that we needed an agenda and we needed to stick to it or else each person who entered in the middle of the conference side tracked us and took some of the momentum out of the discussion, or they clouded the discussion with their input. I felt that way because of my own need for control, more control over the process in general, because I was impatient with the way the intellectual process was focusing on globalization and sustainability.

We spent alot of time criticizing other people, cultures, countries, like the US, and not focusing on ourselves. The intellectuals' thrust to encapsulate the concept of globalization as if they're somehow divorced from, external and separate from it, created, for me, a strong sense that we were all in a state of denial.

The days went by slowly and the sun traveled around the room slowly before hunkering down in the corner reminding us that it was late.

For awhile it seemed that we were not really going to talk about sustainability in a practical way, that we would waste our time on definitions and name calling. I wanted desperately for people "to get it"; to find sustainability in themselves, to look at the way we all contribute to these seemingly opposing forces of destruction and conserving. I spoke passionately about being open to seeing things differently, to welcome new perspective on our own lives and responsibilities, to be courageous in attempting to change how we think and live.

The intellectual debate went on for some time, a kind of splitting of hairs, a competition almost, of who could come up with the best definition. Time was lost, the non-intellectual majority, the people who had come to get practical information about changing Nepals nominal course of economic development, of understanding what was the most productive way of changing the current situation, had to sit and wait while the others talked.

One of the women, Laljahiri Majhi, who I give a section of her own in this blog, when I first met her said, "I don't know much", but later contradicted by observing that "the men only talk. That's all they ever do is talk. They never really do anything." She was right but her experience didn't just come from the conference, it came from her life-long experience. I found myself agreeing with her. It applied to me as well, I mean as a man. When she told me that I quickly looked at myself and asked myself, "is that true about me?"

What is the truth behind all of this? What is that we were really looking for at the conference. It seemed to get lost, somehow, but that is also a stage in the group process, the getting lost and then finding oneself again. I think the truth is that something is wrong on our planet. We are heading towards a cliff, or something that has the potential to destroy us if we're not careful. There is an enormous amount of energy expended on trying to define how close we are to the edge and what's the velocity we are traveling towards it, rather than stopping and thinking about a new route. It's often said in the US that men won't stop and ask for directions when they know they're lost. I know that's true because I have done that, I mean I have refused to stop and ask for directions.

Splitting hairs about the form of government that needs to be created is a waste of intelligence. It's gone on long enough. There are people who are ultimately suited for that kind of visionary work but in reality it isn't the type of government that changes anything, it's the people and their level of education, motivation and commitment to change. Then there's the economic system. Much time was lost at the conference splitting hairs about which system is best. The intellectual men at the conference got lost precisely at this intersection in the road and they were focusing a lot of the discussion on the destructive power inherent in capitalism.

The discussion was often heated about how destructive economic development under capitalist regimes is in the global sense; how it fosters enormous waste, out-of-control-consumerism, frenetic impulsivity (the "I want, I want" mentality), and the lack of quality in products that, inevitably, are designed to fall apart quickly, etc. It is profitable for a few and costly for the majority. It destroys the environment. There was a long discussion about natural resources, wood, that is removed from places like Malyasia illegally putting billions of illegal dollars into the hands of a few rogue businessmen. There is in capitalism, it was said over and over at the conference, too high a level of aggression that often spills over into environmental violence. Some decried capitalism's successful destruction of "The Commons" in it's campaign to divorce and separate people from the environment.

The conference was never intended to be a long discussion about economic systems or politics. It's safe to say that, at least in the US, we're pretty much stuck with capitalism so if you're going to change the world the change has to occur by understanding and utilizing the strengths of capitalism as well as making capitalism more sustainable in the use and reuse of natural resources, making products of a significantly higher quality and with much higher efficiency resource-wise and with zero combustion of carbon based fuels and carbon based end products. Just as important, too, within capitalism, is the need for a significantly greater effort, a huge effort, to minimize poverty everywhere. Unfortunately capitalism needs poverty as much as it needs inexpensive oil. Capitalism relies on cheap labor and cheap resources no matter how environmentally destructive the reliance becomes.

Some members of the conference pointed out that capitalism has to be reshaped with a newer vision of peoples' needs and goals. Most importantly there has to be a rapid shift to new infrastructures in every area of energy use and production. We need to stop making everything out of plastic. We need to stop depending on plastic as it accounts for so much of the petroleum use. We need to localize food systems and stop, for instance, shipping specialty food items 12,000 miles by air from third world countries to the lucrative markets in the developed countries. The World Bank, it was said dozens of time, needs to stop forcing countries to change their agricultural systems to incorporate the exporting of food to the rich nations. There was cohesion among almost all of the conference members around the enormous urgency felt to make a radical shift to creation of sustainable infrastructures for economic development.

The message from the conference up to this point is old and mundane and it's simply this: something is terribly, terribly wrong. As resilient as the Earth is, as clever as we think we are, as intelligent and technologically advanced as we think we are, the damage we are doing to the planet's ecosystems is really, really close to being irreversible and we are not doing enough to stop it. No one wants to look foolish enough, like Chicken Little, to say the planet's doomed. No one wants to risk saying it's "out of control", but either one of those statements might be true. It may not be doomed but it is certainly out of control. And, if we were truly enlightened, if we are paying attention, we would immediately stop burning carbon fuels today. We'd ban manufacture of any new automobiles first thing tomorrow morning and, in the afternoon, we would all start planting millions and millions of deciduous trees. But of course nothing like that will happen. Democracy's role (and I 'm not objecting) will be to do "step-downs"; legislation, laws, limits, more efficiency, but that will take time and that part is about the money; not rocking the boat. Money is still everything. Money is power. And there is also the issue of militarism and who is going to let their defenses down first.

We confuse money with wealth but the Earth is our only real wealth: soil, sun, water, plants, biodiversity. We lie to ourselves, unable to admit how insane it is to keep burning billions of barrels of oil as if it is going to last forever. Are we anticipating a miracle? In the year 2008 in the US gasoline prices topped $4.00 a gallon and the country got a scary lesson in how dependent we are on oil for everything. On the other hand, do we believe that wind energy and photovoltaics will replace the oil and heat homes, schools, factories, hospitals, and power bigger and bigger tractor trailer trucks made from oil, that pull thousands of tons of merchandise made from oil, thousands of miles every day along millions of miles of highways made from oil, on tires made from oil? Will we end up killing each other over the last few barrels of oil?