Death rates over birth rates?

A visit this week from a good friend and colleague who is committed to consider population issues raised a delicate conversation here. My friend notes that population campaigners usually focus on finding means of reducing birth rates and that this focus often translates into attacks on people of the global majority (non-whites).

My friend proposes that the focus should therefore switch to death rates in the minority world (white/high consumption) as population pressures arise when the birth rate exceeds the death rate and, as far as he can see, there is no good reason not to think about how he might manage his own death with a view to minimizing his impact on the planet. Older people, he says, commonly soak up vast amounts of resource over a period of years in which they  may well suffer a poor quality of life (he is thinking about dementia) and he has no wish to be one of these.

It is a logic that I can follow especially after my recent reading of Sally Magnusson's compassionate book, When Memories Go - How Dementia Changes Everything. 

Anyhow, it is clear that this needs to be a personal decision (rather like signing a legal order that stipulates 'do not resusitate' before undergoing risky surgery) and it seems that my friend has made his choice.

It's a hot topic - the recent, self-directed death of Gill Pharoah has highlighted this. 

And, just this morning whilst driving in the wet, I heard a BBC news item on an expert report that wonders how we will cope with the so called food shocks caused by climate change (e.g. the massive shortage of world cereals due to the drought in Russia some years ago) given that population is set to increase by 60% by 2050 ... This seems relevant.

What do you think?

Selma

As an imigrant to the USA I am constantly (and delightedly) drawn to check out the history of this fantastic country. I have only the vaguest of details, the kind that slip across the Atlantic and appear in the popular mythology of "America" in the UK. Oh and then there is the understanding (in the UK at least) that the UK and the USA have a " special relationship" - I'll come back to that in a future post.

History in the USA* is complex, of course, and just like everywhere it depends who is telling it. For example the film Selma that is currently in the news seems to repeat the story line, Rosa Parks sat down, Martin Luther Jnr. stood up and then the white folks from the North came down South and sorted things out.

Hmm, I think I need to look a little deeper...

Thanks be then, that Common Dreams has this article posted today - Ten Things You Should Know About Selma Before You See the Film, By Emilye Crosby, professor of history at SUNY Geneseo and editor of Civil Rights History from the Ground Up

The article is also flagged by the Zinn Education Project, another source of deeper USA history that I use.

* I am using USA here, not America or the US as a) my Latin friends tell me that they briddle under the yoke of domination that is embedded in the habit US'ers have of defining themselves as the Americans as if no other Americans exist in the south or the north and b) Mexico is also a united states (Estados Unidos de Mexico) so using US is not specific enough.

Reconnecting with my blog

It's a couple of years since I worked in here and it's well past time to get going again. My motives are to find away around some kind of personal block that interferes with my capacity to get my thinking and the thinking of others whose approach I like (or whose approach stimulates some creative thinking for me) out into the world for comment and consideration.

I am sure other people get stuck with the same issue and, whilst there is a host of information out there on the web about 'how to blog' there is a gap when it comes to finding personal allies.

Anyway, I am dealing with one technical issue - learning to touch type. This skill has eluded me for the past several years even though I have attemtped to learn it several times. Now I am dedicating an hour a day, 5 days a week to practicing with a) Typing Club (the free version) which I like a lot and also with b) Duolingo as I also learn Spanish (another longe term goal.

That's a trip, deciding not to focus on posting content until my skills are up to it ...

In the informal time at a recent workshop about Collective Intelligence a co-attendee expressed the oft spoken view to me that 'most people will not make significant changes in their lives to meet the flood of effects from financial crisis, peak oil, climate change and the like until they are shocked into change by a crisis".

'Wow', I thought, "just how bad does it have to get before people notice that there is enough already!"

And, "What a skillful job we do at missing the evidence that is right in front of our eyes".

Two bits of evidence here: - 1. A billion go hungry and 2. Gaza water supply critical

I think my colleague was hoping that the crisis would be happening to the proprietors rather than the peasants. Maybe we need to make that happen.

Financial permaculture - Fairfax in view

Colleagues working up a Transition Town initiative for Fairfax, California are looking to the Hohenwald financial permaculture design course as a re-purposing opportunity. This means imagining a cohort of Gaia University associates arriving on the scene for 10 days or more ready to deliver a bunch of trainings (classic permaculture design, designing productive meetings and events, financial permaculture design and more ...) along with a capacity to facilitate local people in developing an auto-ethnograhpy of their town, run appreciative inquiry, do an open space conference, prepare a spiral dynamics profile and so on ..


The Fairfax team includes Alpha Lo and Patrick Troup ... Alpha has recently published an encyclopedia of open source collaboration methods that can be purchased from here.

Sounds like a fabulous and creative opportunity to me and I look forward to a design developing.

Financial permaculture

Some notes about an appropriate style for working up a portfolio of eco-social enterprise designs in Hohenwald, TN, USA this coming October.

It's a great opportunity to notice that there are probably no exact fits as regards up and running business in the USA and certainly not in the rural south. I'd be happy to be proved wrong in this and wish for folks with direct knowledge of rural southern US'ers who have successful micro enterprises up and running in the following fields make contact.

Here's the specification, wish list (which has arisen from local Hohenwald visioning sessions): -

Micro and small enterprises that meet the following descriptions: -

• Contractor Association / Green Design Business Directory
• Community Food Processing Kitchen & Plant
• Farmer/Artisan Markets and Co-ops
• Recycling Center & Transfer station
• Supply & Salvage Store

For sure there are folks with experience with these enterprises if we can search beyond the rural south of the USA - how about the rest of the world?

And I'd work from the place of understanding that we're dealing with an emergent situation here and thus we better off coming from a jazz style approach than attempting to play from a prepared score. There can (and should be) chord sequences, some known tunes, an arrangement or two.... Attempts to prescribe solutions ahead of time are likely to suffer from a lack of local adaptability.

A second issue is to do with the presence or not of the practical people who are going to pioneer these enterprises in Hohenwald/Lewis County. That's a big, big job and, whilst it seems we have heard from the good citizens of the town as regards what they would like to see emerge we have not heard from the likely do-ers. This is essential for me as, unless we get to know these brave folk, we won't know how we need to be in order to help them.

I can see that in the medium term there needs to be a franchising energy around all this. For example, if we could lift half a dozen eco-social franchise operations into the mix this would surely speed up the regeneration process, not just in Hohenwald but elsewhere too. That would be a great way to go and, meanwhile, Hohenwlad might like to think about what it already has in place and/or could soon develop that it would like to offer out as a franchise to the rest of the transition town/re-localization field. We could survey that when we are there in October as part of the Gaia University team.