Despite sitting on rich deposits of coltan, zinc and gold the village of Kanyola, Congo suffers mass impoverishment and disease which fuels tribal disputes.

JP was determined to find ways to bring people together, and for him that was with education and finding people new sources of income - making best use of his UNICEF training. But he and his group of seven were seen as a threat and were kidnapped by the rebel army. Blindfolded and put on the back of motorcycles they were taken to a remote forest and were beaten and tortured over a week, one young woman was killed, another forcibly taken as a wife.

JP, whose leadership skills were well known, was told his parents had been informed that unless they paid $4000 he’d be killed. They were poor farmers and did not have the means to raise the money and he resigned himself to his death, saying to his captors, ‘I’ve seen too much blood. I don’t want to be here anymore,’ but implored them to release the girls. They did not.

That night a woman approached the group and freed them, telling JP the rebels were coming in the morning to kill them. For three days they’d had no food or water and were too weak to flee. Their rescuer brought them water and donuts. They fled, a few were able to pay for bus tickets. Some found their way to South Africa, Nigeria and another went to America, but JP had no resources.

Eventually church members helped smuggle him out of Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and to the relative safety of neighbouring Uganda and to life in Nakivale Refugee Center with 200,000 other families.
‘I was given a sheet of plastic, two blankets, two sauce pans, a cup, two plates, a mat, a hoe, a machete and a 15 X 15 metre area to grow food.’ He laughs, ‘I am a farmer! It is not enough!’

How do you start again, on your own, at seventeen after so much trauma? This is a story of tragedy, but it is also the story of overcoming it. JP already knew how to grow food, he’d been growing tomatoes, cabbages, bananas, maize, beans, cassava, soya beans, peas and groundnuts, and had kept pigs, hens, ducks, goats, cows, and pigeons on his family farm in DCR. He’d learnt permaculture from his older brother who’d studied it in university.

After arriving in Nakivale in 2016, JP took the training provided by UNHCR’s Hunger Fighters, travelled for additional training in Fort Portal City as well as learning from environmental activist and permaculturalist, Muzaliwa Paulinho.

Permaculture enabled JP to sell crops to pay school fees and English tuition as well as build the small house he and his wife now live in and to buy a phone that he hopes to one day trade in for a laptop, but for now he runs everything from it.

He worked for three years teaching with a local organisation until he discovered the money meant for the centre was being diverted into private pockets. He resigned and legally founded his own organisation, Unity for Sustainable Development Center (USDC). At that time he was still living in a makeshift tent and with little more than a broken phone to organise. But he’s 100% dedicated himself to working with vulnerable people living at Nakivale. JP calls them, ‘The vulnerables.'

Now twenty-eight he’s been using his farming background and permaculture training to set up community gardens assisting people to augment their month allowance, which was once a ration of maize, beans and oil from the World Food Program, but due to the increased need to support refugees around the world, is now a $3 monthly payment, which is insufficient to feed people.

He was able to access more land to grow food in conjunction with other refugees. He sends photos of the people he works with. Many of them have not been able to navigate the horrors that bought them there and it shows. But Jean Peter’s tireless.

There are 128 people suffering from albinism at the Settlement. Many Africans believe they’re not human and their body parts are used by witch doctors for medicine. They are hunted. As a result of their condition they have poor eyesight. Jean Peter started a campaign to raise money for sunglasses. (donations of sunglasses are welcome).

He has plans for an orphanage to support the 175 orphans and 68 street children. He’s started a school, which is makeshift, taking place in a dark shack with few resources beyond the donation of a blank school book and a pencil for each of the students.

He’s raising chickens with black soldier flies and meat rabbits and hopes to grow the enterprises to support more people. He’s trained 150 women on entrepreneurship and English as a second language. He taught them how to grow mushrooms, but the cost of hiring the hall ended the project. He’s working to raise funds for a computer hub to increase the communities skills and enable them to earn an income. He’s been able to access funding to put in a well, advises people how to grow food and has plans for a birthing centre.

‘This may be my life now, it is possible I will never leave here. I would like to study human rights and have resources to do more for my community, I love them. But there’s so much that needs doing.’

JP has been watching Congolese refugees, mainly traumatised widows and children, arrive at Nakivale. They’re escaping M23 rebels who use rape as a weapon and who kill, torture people or force them to join them. His home district, where his family remain, has been particularly affected.

Under the Trump (Musk) administration USAID was shut down, which means food aid is limited, with the WFP (World Food Program) also reducing aid due to the Palestinian genocide diverting resources. Medical aid, including medications for HIV, Ebola and malaria have run out, and are heavily impacting sufferers. JP tells me thousands have died, mostly women from easily preventable causes.

JP sends me images of people who’ve dropped dead from starvation, or were found bound and tortured by M23 and left for dead. Suicide is on the increase as families are torn apart and displaced. One of the images is of a young man who wrote a note to his brothers before walking into another room and cutting his throat.

He’s championing Afisa, a 38 year old mother of 7. She arrived at the refugee center two years ago after her husband was killed by unknown people. Afisa raises money to pay her rent, feed her children and send them to school by frying cassava.

Afisa has breast cancer and the only hospital that can treat her is charging $1200US. With the average Ugandan wage being $20 a week, it roughly translates to being asked to pay $120,000. Not possible. JP has been selling chickens and has put up his modest home as surety. $500AUD has been raised, another $1200AUD is required or, come August 20, he loses his house. He does not complain. He sees Afisa for who she is, a quiet woman of great strength, dignity and kindness, how could he not be willing to do anything to help her? It’s a steep price to pay considering he has a toddler and his wife has been unwell herself.

The struggles keep doubling, and still JP assists where he can. He’s finding places to house people when there are no houses left. There was $25 in a fundraising account, he was desperate to obtain it so he could buy a plastic tarp for a family to shelter beneath.

‘My team and I, we want to support the newcomers. We start with permaculture training so they can produce their own food and be self sufficient and then move to vocational skills such as tailoring, hair dressing, baking, animal keeping and entrepreneurship, so they can earn an income.’

He’s pulled together a funding proposal and I’ve helped him set up a Chuffed campaign to raise money to achieve these goals. ‘We are calling upon everyone to help us rescue and support these people.’

At the end of the interview I tell him that the money from this article will go to him and his face lights up, immediately he’s thinking about how he can use it for the benefit of his community. In a world gone mad our hope lies with people with big hearts. Jean Peter’s couldn’t be bigger.

(The article was to run with the ABC Organic Gardener 2 years ago, but was pulled at the last minute - JP received the $300 regardless.)

You can help JP and the refugees of Nakivale Refugee Settlement by donating at

https://chuffed.org/project/146628-help-jean-peter-help-refugees-at-nakivale-refugee-camp

or chip in for Afisa’s medical treatment as Mulago Hospital in Kampala. August 20 is the due date.

https://chuffed.org/project/184282-can-we-help-afisa

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I’m also not into fairy floss or utopian visions of endless energy and technological advances that defy biological limits - glorifying the progress trap.

I acknowledge we’re currently in late stage capitalism and as a species we are in decline. All the symptoms of a civilisation on the edge are visible to anyone brave enough to look. But I don’t believe collapse is inevitable. There are paths away from the looming mega-disaster. Everything I write faces up to both how bad things are and how good they could be if we got our shit together.

Eat My Shadow is a story set 20 years beyond collapse, but our story is not over. Two communities have survived and found new ways to get their shit together.

Book IL Button Up Buttercup now out

Goodreads reviews 4.6/5

www.togetherpress.com.au for Australians

www.amazon.com for everyone else

Happiness seems a reasonable goal, but when motivated within a capitalist culture, it’s a hedonic treadmill, the one that works us hard but gets us no closer to happiness, only making it more elusive.

Then there’s the RENT model. Shirley Chisholm coined the phrase, ‘Service is the rent we pay for living on earth.’ Service is a stand in word for the ‘give’ in Reciprocity. Rent, is a transactional word - tit for tat rather than what comes around goes around, but it’s a useful acronym. Admittedly it did come out as RNET, but it sounded like I was trying to make cheese, so a bit of creativity and the pyramid allocates greater proportional weight to NECESSITY than it does to EFFICIENCY.

Reciprocity: we give as good as we get, is the foundation stone, the driving force for life on earth and the method to restore long-term equilibrium. If doing something takes without commensurate return, then we’re operating in deficit. Continually operating in deficit eventually crashes the planet. We may be able to achieve large-scale objectives, but only by finding a way to reciprocate. I can’t see space travel being anything other than a deficit, for example. But we’re ingenious, maybe someone can achieve it. But we should hold off until such time as we do.

Efficiency: reduces the need for energy expenditure; for example, products should be designed to use less energy, or to have an extended lifespan, reducing the need for more of them over time. Designing for ease of recycling is another form of efficiency. Efficiency can also be logistical; eg. not harvesting potatoes, shipping them to an area 200km away to be cleaned and packaged, and then returning them for sale. But efficiency is only an extender. We’ll still be investing in energy and resources that cannot be easily replaced.

Necessity: Necessity trumps efficiency. It’s not a word we get to hear often as a part of a decision-making process. Questioning the necessity of a product, action, process, or event can prevent the need for energy expenditure on things that do nothing to improve the quality of our lives or that of the living world. The question would then be, can it be swapped out for something else that does, or be eliminated altogether? In our profit driven world necessity is a swear word: the only necessity is the need to create profit.

Necessity eliminates things at the source. Necessity requires us to keep asking the question, ‘do I need it?’

Years ago a kind and smart woman depressed the hell out of me by proclaiming. ‘I have to fly! I have to get out of Tasmania every now and then or I will go insane!’ I knew she knew the state of the world, yet her priority was personal rather than staying within planetary boundaries. Fast forward five years and she’s on social media taking a no-fly vow. Her priorities changed. And she’s no more insane than she used to be. Our priorities or necessities are a moving feast. Because people say. ‘I would simply die if I didn’t – insert heart-felt desire – doesn’t mean it’s a forever priority. If we change the civilisational narrative, our priorities likewise change.

If we cease to take everything for granted and ask ourselves, ‘is this a necessity?’ eventually a judgement is no longer required and we’re back in sync with what our needs are rather than our wants. We’ve been given a narrative that says we deserve anything and everything and as soon as possible. Our wants have been artificially inflated by profiteering motives and an addiction to novelty (and dopamine), and no longer bear a resemblance to what we need to survive or thrive. It’ll take us a while to change, and it won’t be easy.

Technology: The pinnacle on top of the pyramid indicates the need to reduce our reliance on it, not just for our way of life, but also as the go to method to resolve issues arising from our past over-reliance on it. Appropriate technology is important, it’s a way to augment the power of our bodies and reduce the physical strain of living. It should not require energy beyond that which the living world can replenish annually, and the production of it does not pollute, or impoverish or stop people, including our descendants, from living well.

This is only an attempt at pinning down the differences between a capitalist and a reciprocal decision-making process. Pull it apart, make it your own.

An excerpt from The Quiet Revolution

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We’re trapped in a system most of us don’t understand, we’re not supposed to. The degree of complexity, the exclusive language, a lot of closed doors and lack of transparency make it impossible. Hardly anyone, including economists, understand how it works. Here’s my ‘big picture’ attempt.

In a capitalist utopia the FREE MARKET drives. FINANCE sits in the passenger seat and provides directions. They’re not sure where they’re going, but it’s going to be bigger, better, faster and more than where they are now.

WORKERS build the road as the FREE MARKET drives. Workers are lazy, always bleating about cost of living, needing a break or a pay rise. BUSINESS in the back seat says they’re paid for their labour, they should be more grateful.

The WORKERS are tired and some are angry. Services are either under pressure or have been scrapped while their taxes subsidise corporate welfare and tax cuts. Sometimes, instead of laying the road they jump up and down on it with slogan covered cardboard.

The STATE (government) has been convicted of attempting to meddle with the FREE MARKET and is handcuffed in the back seat and can only throw encouragement out the window while signing laws at FINANCE and BUSINESS’s behest to make it illegal for WORKERS to protest.

BUSINESS hangs out the other side of the car and hammers in For Sale signs on property once owned in common by SOCIETY.

What they’d done with commonly owned property was tragic; it’s best privatised. All mention of SOCIETY has been pasted over with advertising signs.

TRADE has been siphoning off petrol (energy) and selling it to buy everyone in the car wine and caviar, (the STATE gets a thimble full). The car, (the ENVIRONMENT), provides its own fuel and construction materials; it’s endlessly useful. TRADE keeps pulling parts off and selling them, and they seem endless, though there has been some talk of running out. But there’s enough right now, and clearly the car’s still running. The FREE MARKET calls the car his Free Ride.

We live in a capitalist, free market economy, which advocates for the deregulation of environmental, economic and social laws, which capitalists, who suffer from deuteranopia (the inability to see green), call ‘interference.’ They believe the free market is more efficient and will show self-restraint and responsibility regarding things like environmental performance, and the consumer choices people make will steer the market.

It’s delusional.

We need to talk about alternative systems, ones that can regenerate the world and its people. They exist.

This is an excerpt from The Quiet Revolution: Debt Free & Working Less, How Our Species Survives. It’s available on Amazon

AI was used to create the image, but will never be used to generate text.

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We’re ticking all the boxes. And considering the last few days of posting infographics on Substack depicting our overuse of resources and reliance on perpetual growth - it’s inevitable. But only if we stick with it.

The two most important factors are in 5. Loss of trust in the current system - absolutely, we need that, but only if we remain flexible enough to adapt to a new one.

If we are to survive we must lose faith in capitalism even faster than we already are - a global average of 53% feel capitalism does more harm than good. It’s up to 70% in some countries.

And if we match it with a willingness to adapt to a new system, investing ourselves in exploring new options - we might yet survive.
Technology is a small part of the answer, our attitude - is everything.

With our thoughts we create the world. I always thought it was baloney, not anymore. Not while we, by our thoughts, are destroying the world.

Take heart - we can change the story. We must be open to new ways of being, ones that unite rather than divide, that understand we are in relationship with the world. We can change. That’s one of the reasons the human species survived as long as it has - we adapt to new circumstances.

If you’ve read this far you’re one of the brave people who can tolerate thinking about something as momentous as collapse. What are your thoughts?

#collapse #civilization #obsession #sex #food #sport #environment #overpopulation #war #famine #inequality #signs #signsofcivilisationalcollapse

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1kWh of nuclear power produces only 12g of carbon compared to burning coal, around 650g in Australia. It’s a selling point. But it’s not just about balancing out carbon emissions. While nuclear power emits far lower levels of carbon, it creates other, potentially more harmful, waste products.

‘On average,’ says the World Nuclear Association, ‘the waste from a reactor supplying a person’s electricity needs for a year would be about the size of a brick. Only 5 grams of this is high-level waste – about the same weight as a sheet of paper.’ Which is a great way of making it sound pretty innocuous until you add everyone’s contribution together.

Worldwide there are 442 nuclear power stations, and around a quarter of a million tonnes of highly radioactive waste they’ve produced sitting in storage at nuclear power plants and weapons production facilities.

It’s not to say they aren’t working on how to contain the waste. The latest research has focused on enclosing it in vitrified glass inside steel canisters and storing them underground, but research has also shown the limitations of the process, with steel rusting, water, if present, slowly degrading the glass and releasing the waste, possibly within 1000 years. We have no safe way of storing nuclear waste.

Niger is a landlocked country the shape of a landed fish. It has the highest birth rate in the world at 7.2 children per woman and one of the lowest GNI’s (Gross National Incomes) at $540 per person, less than $US1.50 a day.

70% of its export revenue is derived from uranium mined by a state-owned French nuclear power company, Areva, now Orano. They’ve operated there for over 40 years. Niger is the fourth largest uranium producer in the world but only a paltry 5.5% royalty fee finds its way into the nation’s pockets, though plenty of radiation does.

Studies from Greenpeace, CRIIRAD and ROTAB show the radiation levels around Arlit, the main mining region, are almost 500 times higher than normal, ‘Even spending one hour per day over one year at this location can expose a person to 10 times the annual radiation dose’, warns a report. 4 out of 5 water samples taken by Greenpeace were above the recommended WHO limits.

In a drought-stricken land around 270 billion litres of water has been drawn from now failing aquifers. In 2010 an estimated 200,000 litres of radioactive waste was spilt contaminating the land. Hospitals, who are the recipients of Orano funding, tell the sick they have AIDS, of which Niger has low rates, rather than admit their cancers, birth defects, infertility, abortions and hormonal disorders could be attributed to radiation. No one knows the full impact on the people. ‘There is something evil in the dust,’ says a mining worker discussing the local understanding that people and animals are getting sick.

It’s illuminating, at least for the French, as 3 out of 4 of their lightbulbs are powered by Nigerien uranium despite only 10-20% of Nigerien urban areas having access to electricity, and only 2-3% in rural areas.

In 1960 Niger became independent of France but the relationship is still economically predatory. Having promised them ‘a little Paris’ 40 years ago, they delivered a radioactive hell. Uranium corporations such as the Chinese SinoU, Korea’s EPC, Japan’s OURD and Spain’s Enusa are preparing to pounce on the region and expand.

It’s also possible nuclear power stations could be targeted in a war, causing a meltdown or explosion, contaminating the surrounding areas. It’s been a very real possibility during the Russian invasion of Ukraine at the Zaporizhzhia plant. There’s also the possibility of natural disasters, as with the 2011 earthquake in Fukushima. It generally takes 20-30 years to decommission a nuclear reactor, but in the case of Fukushima, it will take forty.

Nuclear is not a renewable source of energy. The Nuclear Energy Agency, (NEA) has estimated that economically accessible forms of uranium could provide energy at current rates of consumption for another 200 years. And then what? If it takes 20-30 years to decommission a nuclear power plant, what energy source will our descendants be using to both do that and power their lives? Perhaps it’s moot; given our current trajectory we’re likely to have collapsed before then. Will someone stick around to manage reactors, unpaid and unresourced – or will they be abandoned?

All the studies assume we’ll keep on keeping on, but what if we don’t? What will our legacy to the earth be then?

Excerpt from The Quiet Revolution: Debt Free & Working Less, How Our Species Survives
Available on Amazon and at www.togetherpress.com.au (Australia only)

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You are not alone! We are part of a vast, global movement:
the epochal transition from empire to Earth community.
This is the Great Turning. And the excitement, the alarm,
even the overwhelm we feel, are all part of our waking up
to this collective adventure.

Joanna Macy

Most of us are deeply aware of how bad things are, we’re eager for solutions. And it’s time to enact them, not like a side salad, but as the main course.

There are movements springing up that challenge the dominant paradigm. Transition Towns and Degrowth are the best known alternative economic models, and they’re opening the door to others, including alternative ways to produce food and provide shelter and support communities.

Movements are attempts to change current ways of doing things. Many discussed here do not consciously address capitalism, but are a response to the emotional, physical and environmental effects of it, and they’re proliferating.

The list on the following pages are of movements that seek to either avoid, resist, protect, fight or replace the capitalist paradigm.

Daniel Schmachtenberger is a social philosopher and a founding member of The Consilience Project, which aims to improve public sense-making, an intriguing concept which ties in with the concept of our cognitive threshold. It’s the point we become so overwhelmed with the complexity of a problem that we become, individually and collectively, socially paralysed. The issues are so difficult and intractable that rather than deal with them, we ignore, suppress, and pass them on to the next generation to solve, because we literally cannot get our heads around them. The Consilience Project’s goal is to assist us to do so.

Daniel talked to experts, asking them to narrow down the crisis to one primary cause. Their views are varied; it’s all a matter of the economy, deal with that and everything else is sorted. Others believe it’s down to the government, or education, media and so on, and they’re married to their conclusion. Schmachtenberger’s conclusion is they’re all right and it’s best not to get ‘too fundamentalist about any particular solution.’ ‘The answer to all the problems,’ he says, ‘is all of the solutions.’

People are relearning how to grow and preserve their own food, keep domestic livestock, or embrace living without producing waste. Others go carless or vow not to fly. The responses are springing from the cracks in civilisational concrete everywhere, as are counterculture movements like rewilding, not just landscapes and biodiversity, but people.

Australian writer Claire Dunn spent a year learning to live in the bush and wrote My Year Without Matches. She then explored the possibilities within a city in Rewilding the Urban Soul. She teaches people to increase their awareness of the untamed pockets tucked away in surprising corners of Melbourne, how to forage for wild food and build primitive shelters. She pushes the envelope, discovering the wildness of the Yarra River as it passes through the city, trapping and killing feral foxes, and converting them into a coat.

And in Far North Queensland, Australia, John Plant, YouTuber and author of Primitive Technology, A Survivalist guide to Building Tools, Shelter and More, pushes the boundaries still further and has relearnt ancient practices. He demonstrates skills our forebears haven’t known in hundreds, if not thousands of years, all without the aid of modern tools or, in John’s case, a spoken word. He harvested iron bacteria from creek beds and forged it into iron prills, then into a crude iron knife. Even though he’s an intrepid explorer of the past, with facts at his fingertips, his skills have only reached the beginning of the iron age, and he’s talented. And while I’m not suggesting we dive that deep, public fascination has resulted in close to 11 million YouTube subscribers. Many of us are fascinated by extreme self-sufficiency, though few of us would want to go that far.

We don’t need to start a new movement. The movements are already here. They eschew aspects of capitalist culture, embrace simple living, or create community resilience, but they’re fragmented, and as such will never have the power to topple capitalism and will only gnaw at the edges. We need to gnaw at the foundations.

An umbrella term is not just for convenience, but combines the impact, makes a movement larger, more visible and harder to ignore. Create one hundred and two individual movements and give them all different names and they’re lost in movement soup. The Peace Movement had yoga, pro-drugs, anti-war, free love, alternate religions and much more beneath its tie-dyed canopy.

Capitalism is a word that conjures up a concept, an instantaneous understanding without having to elucidate. We have a mental picture of people in business suits, sleek high-rise buildings, laptop screens with graphs that forever point up, and factories full of dull-eyed but efficient workers and dirty smoke stacks.

Happiness is a word that defines a concept: we don’t have to explain every time we refer to the state that it’s an often fleeting sense of satisfaction or pleasure, a sensation like an inner glow that irradiates us with the feeling of a smile. A single word can evoke an understanding of what can be a complex thing, process or emotion. In the advertising world, successful branding means a word can elicit a positive association. Which is why fabric softener ads usually depict an adorable baby loosely swaddled in a soft fluffy towel in soft pastel colours, associating their brand with family values, cuteness and comfort. Our brains soak it up and, it could be argued, are softened by them too.

We need a picture or phrase that evokes what it means to live in the new paradigm. Building confidence in it is the way to create a bridge from this failing civilisation to a new one. To build a solid identity we need a name we all recognise.

The Climate Movement is not enough. It suggests we have only one issue to deal with. But should we solve it, like we kind of did the ozone layer, there will be other issues lined up and we’ll have to go into battle yet again. We have hundreds of problems in the queue. The Climate Movement doesn’t strike at the heart of the issue, that we’re living unnatural lives with far-reaching and devastating impacts, or that we could be living better lives.

If they haven’t already, someone’s bound to come up with something snappier, but The Quiet Revolution is my suggestion for an umbrella term for a movement that attempts to address the core issue: our unnatural lives spent serving an errant economic system that’s destroying the joint.

Where possible we need to be specific; vague waffle may convince a few, but for most, that undeveloped polaroid of a paradigm isn’t clear enough to encourage a change in direction. It should be a hopeful, joyful process, something to look forward to, to lean into. Something with meaning, structure, certainty and connection – nothing less will entice us.

I’m not suggesting that someone who’s into zero waste has to live in a tiny house, or use an alternative form of monetary exchange. But the overarching goal needs to be recognised: to move from a capitalist, competitive civilisation into a reciprocal, cooperative one. And it doesn’t mean everyone has to be in total agreement with everything an eco-feminist says, or approve of veganism, but should share, in principle, the idea that we need to respond to the issues of today collectively, and recognise we may have different strategies and priorities. The infighting and attack-dog mentality we too often engage in weakens our stance, and makes it all the more likely to fail.

As Tim Hollo points out, ‘The danger exists if we haven’t begun to build our better alternative institutions and norms when collapse arrives, leaving the space open for dominating power structures to reassert themselves, often in a more authoritarian way.’

The inertia of our dominant culture is huge. It’s like being addicted to sugar; trying to give it up is nearly impossible when the stuff is so ubiquitous and socially acceptable. Easy access to the spoils of our culture is addictive.

Changing from the capitalist paradigm and swapping to a new one is to find oneself constantly drawn back to the old, the familiar, to ‘this is how the real world works’. It has a powerful draw, and if the majority of the world is still running with it, then it feels safest to stick with the crowd.

Hollo discusses the interregnum, the gap between one ruler and the next, one dominant paradigm and the next. ‘The old world is dying and the new is struggling to be born,’ he writes, ‘In order to seize the opportunity, we need to rapidly construct new institutions based on a different common sense - participatory assemblies, co-ops, community protection, urban agriculture - and use them to withdraw consent from existing common sense and demonstrate a different way of being. If we do this well enough, existing institutions of power will either be transformed, or they will collapse.’

A revolution is usually a bloody, noisy, violent thing; this one’s quiet. It’s a revolution, not just in our mode of living, adopting new work models and economic systems, but of reimagining our place in the scheme of things. Answering, we don’t know who we are, with this is who we choose to be.

With a singular term to encompass a diverse set of movements, The Quiet Revolution is effectively a three-word slogan but it also needs to provide a conscious goal. The Quiet Revolution, which is not original and has been used in other contexts, might just be up for it. It’s a concept that embraces them all, without seeking to control them.

Many of the movements listed in this chapter provide an emergency fall-back position for when capitalism collapses. There will be pockets of protected biodiversity, healthier oceans, alternative building techniques and materials that ‘don’t cost the earth.’ Some people have learnt useful and diverse skills, the most important of which is to build community. In this individualistic world knowing how to operate in a community of inter-reliance (self-reliance is a word we’re much more familiar with), is going to be key to surviving, if not thriving. Unity.

Excerpt from The Quiet Revolution: Debt Free & Working Less, How Our Species Survives
Available on Amazon and www.togetherpress.com.au (in Australia)

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The second in the series demonstrating the ridiculousness of trying to perpetuate an economic system aligned with exponential growth.

Our current extraction of 100 billion tons of resources a year is .00000038% of earth's mass.
By increasing that amount by 60% (commonly recognised rate of increase) every 25 years in 1200 years we'd be (theoretically) mining the equivalent of close to 4.35 planets every year. By 1400 we'd be mining close to 9.

Clearly we'd be long gone by that time. If we survived our own predations we'd weaken gravity so far we'd float off into space. There's the next disaster movie right there!

It took 2 nights using Affinity Photo - No AI involved, though I suspect the calculations may have been powered by it. Hard to escape it these days, it's embedded in so many programs.

What are your thoughts?

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One of the goals I have is to help people understand the long term ramifications of an infinite growth model. We must adopt a new system - but the propaganda out there tells us we’re naïve to think so, yet sticking with capitalism, no matter how many tweaks and adjustments are made, is nothing more than a recipe for extinction.

Knowing this doesn’t give us an out. We need to ‘invest’ (to use capitalist language) in a new system, and get excited about what comes next.

The Quiet Revolution: Debt Free & Working Less, How Our Species Survives - is something we can lean into, look forward to. The most powerful strategy for replacing capitalism is done in our heads. Capitalism is a confidence trick - if we stop believing in it, its power rapidly depletes, and if instead we are reinvesting our thoughts and energies in a new system - we have real change. Not the fight every step of the way, win some, lose all (because in the end everything will have to be sacrificed to the economy to keep it going. Capitalism is a ‘game’ we cannot win).

Renewables, greater efficiency, innovation - these kinds of strategies cannot compete with a system that doubles every 25 years, it means efficiency etc has to too, and there are limits to everything. Capitalism has reached its limits. The environment is past its limits. It’s past time we swapped out capitalism for a system that could conceivably last until the sun goes pop.

Eudaimonia - a system that incentivises the flourishing of people and planet - achieved through the process of Reciprocity with both. It’s how every species on the planet operates.

The Quiet Revolution: Debt Free & Working Less, How Our Species Survives - available on Amazon

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So here we are. In the moment of all moments. At the pinnacle and looking down. We are the generation with the unenviable task of having to save not just ourselves, but all generations to come.

Politicians long ago ceased to speak for us. They speak on behalf of the economy. We’re watching millions of people die, or live with the constant threat of dying. They’ve been deemed economically worthless – therefore it’s okay to sacrifice them to the economy. It’s not okay. It’s never been okay. We’ve watched the UN, without teeth when it came to Palestine, achieve little if anything over decades, unite within days to respond to the economic threat of a war on oil.

We peasants rarely get a say. What we’re given is the illusion of choice, the opportunity to vote for either political party, let’s just call them Bad or Badder. The predator class, let’s not call them elites, are a group of self-entitled, out-of-touch, money addicts whose only interest is increasing their wealth and power. So it’s not surprising that when we hit the streets with cardboard signs and beg to be listened to we’re ignored, or subjected to rubber bullets, batons, water cannons, police brutality, deportation or jail. Yet on a global level people are rising. We can no longer watch the horror while people, mostly children, are forfeited for dollars, as though dollars matter more. The invented system of capitalism, upon we hold in such esteem and base the majority of our decisions, can never matter more.

Humanity doesn’t have an alternative to capitalism. Our species doesn’t even have a goal. Most businesses, even the smallest, have a mission statement – humankind – nada. In the vacuum capitalism has provided one. If it had a slogan it would be simple, catchy, easy to understand; Get bigger, forever. Even if it’s an ambition far beyond this little island-filled fish tanks ability to fulfil, we’ve accepted it, co-opted it as our own. It’s given legitimacy at the end of every news report. We measure our success or failures based on numbers generated by a system few of us understand.

We are consumers, neurally wired into the death cult of capitalism from the moment we’re born. We’ll sabotage proposed changes, preferring to stick with the status quo, even if it kills us. Anything that doesn’t fit with the dominant narrative is at risk of being thrown out simply for non-compliance with our idea of how the ‘real’ world works. We don’t have any overarching sense of connection or purpose to hang on to, so we hang ourselves on the meaninglessness of acquisition, accumulating stuff to stuff into the gaps in our traumatised psyches. We’re lost.

What goal could we have beyond capitalism’s Get Bigger, Forever? That tired beauty queen trope, World peace? As wishes go, its cornered the market of big dreams. within the death cult of capitalism world peace can never be achieved. It’s a burn it down accelerant aimed at people kept in poverty in countries with exploitable resources. Watch out Greenland, watch out Venezuela, Palestine, Sudan, Congo… but eventually, capitalism will not be able to help itself but eat us all.

The system can’t risk being seriously questioned. It’s protected by a bristling barrage of automatic thought responses. Want to change out capitalism? What for? Communism? Socialism? Authoritarianism? Fascism? Tried that it didn’t work.

Capitalism has (probably) killed more than any of those isms. We’ve not bothered keeping track.

Don’t be naïve, capitalism is the best option. The idea that we can continue to grow at the rate required to keep ahead of our debts, and do that forever, is the definition of naivety.

Roughly every twenty-five years the economy doubles.

• In 100 years it will be 16 times bigger, and require 12 planets of resources to feed it.

• In 200 years the economy will be 256 times bigger and use 80 earths.

• In 300 years it’ll be over 4000 times bigger, requiring 530 theoretical earths.

• 25 years later it will need to double again and be 8000 times bigger than it is today with over 1000 earths being plundered to keep the economy afloat.

• 25 years later we’ll need to produce and procure 16,000 times a year more than we are now.

I don’t need to tell you that’s impossible. Or stupid.

According to the Edelman Trust Barometer an average of 53% of the global population believe capitalism does more harm than good, and only 36% believe that the world we pass on to our children will be better than ours. I’m surprised its that high but capitalism won’t die from disillusion or disbelief.

It’s time we abandoned this corrupt and dangerous narrative. In a world that runs on new ideas. We need something bravely new.

But we’re enslaved by debt. We can’t just decide to jump off the treadmill, we have to keep running. No matter our principles, we need to eat and live in a house. We can’t escape this aberrant civilization, not while we’re fearing the dangling debt sword of Damacles.

It follows that survival depends on first freeing ourselves from the debt trap. Debt amnesties, or absolutions, have happened throughout history, generally as a response from those in power to rising inequality and the risk of being lynched by rioting mobs. Inequality has never been this extreme. And those red numbers in our bank accounts are owed to the planet. Paying each other back in the currency of our invented economy by plundering resources from earth’s increasingly mangy hide, is a death wish. It’s time we emancipated both the earth and ourselves from a system that’s outlived its usefulness.

Lucky for us Donald Trump came along. I’d compare him to Nero, but emperor is all he’d hear, not the story of the looney bastard who paid 5,000 soldiers, the Augustans, to cheer at his performances and burnt Rome to the ground while playing the fiddle.

There’s always the danger that should oil prices return to normal, and the currently encumbered countries are thrown a conciliatory bone or two (ie. we stop killing them or their children), that we meekly return to voting for bad or badder and continue to grease the wheels of extinction.

Hopefully we’ve finally stirred from our torpor, from our trauma. We’re living at the crumbling ends of this civilization, to survive we must get our shit together and do what Lennon sung about fifty-four years ago, imagine a different world. We’ve not had that option before, we’ve been kept quiet with shiny things, baubles, endless debt and the misconception that this is the real, real world.

Plenty of us are still invested in the capitalist world and will fight for it, but that doesn’t mean attempts to replace it are doomed. When it comes to any entrenched issue, it’s always a small percent of people who get things rolling, but once moving, the human dynamic gets going and the impossible becomes possible. It’s how change has always happened.

To free ourselves from the Predator Class we’ll need to dismantle the way we see the world with an equitable one.

My votes for Eudaimonia – it’s the Greek word for flourishing. A one word goal for a flourishing people and planet. The practice that achieves it is Reciprocity. People assume reciprocity is a human to human process and cannot think of examples where we practice it with the living world. It’s a sad reflection on our species that we can no longer identify natures standard operating practise. What one species draws from the system it gives back in other forms. What’s waste for one is food for another. It’s a self-perpetuating dynamic we’ve dubbed living in harmony or balance, the cycle of life.

Reciprocity is the reason pre-agricultural humans woke up to an intact world. Every species before them practised it. But we’ve forgotten how. The best we’ve come up with is increased efficiency, less toxic processes and recycling, which, while good, are not giving back into the system, only trying to limit the damage.

Extracting ourselves from extraction won’t be easy. We’re a fickle lot and 100% consensus will never be reached. When has it ever? I’ll try head off at the pass the next capitalist learnt response.

I want to be part of the generation that frees billions of slaves, that reflourishes the world and reinvigorates the biosphere. We’d find our lost purpose, become the ancestors we were always meant to be. Not passing on a world our descendants have been lumped with ‘fixing’, but one that’s flourishing. That has always been our purpose.

Too idealistic? Too touchy-feely, too Kumbaya? We’ve been trained to think that way too.

We can reinvest our confidence in a system more aligned to who we evolved to be. The world turning on its heel and walking away from empire isn’t such a big reach. Not given where we are and the trajectory we’re on. I want to be part of the story of a new world, one where the news headlines are dominated by stories of rehabilitation, regeneration, reinvigoration and rejoicing. I believe it’s entirely possible if we open ourselves up to a new story.

The end of humanity is being written. The escape routes are small and getting smaller, but maybe, just maybe, this time we peasants win. But first we’ll need to harness a superpower greater than any on earth – our collective.

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It's not surprising we think so poorly of our species, especially given the times. But we are slowly working out that East v. West, White v. Brown has been a beat up.

Times are changing and who we are is up for reinvention, our entire world is. It's both terrifying and exciting. The Quiet Revolution: Debt Free & Working Less, How Our Species Survives is a deep dive into how we got here, the pinnacle of progress and madness - and how we de-escalate and save, not just ourselves, but all generations to come. We can. But we have to unlearn some of the things that hold us back.

Here’s a quick first 7. Some of them seem counter-intuitive… give up on facts? No, but we do rely on them when they are not the changemakers we thought they were. If the facts don’t fit our world belief they don’t penetrate, we shed them.

It takes years and lots of positive reinforcement to change people’s ‘frames,’ the way they see the world. But right now people around the world are confronting uncomfortable truths (the discomfort of having their frames shift which might as well be the earth beneath their feet). We need to take advantage of that. Either we are entering the point of no return or we are creating a movement towards a flourishing planet and people. It could go either way. But hope is not dead.

You were born into a world where the frames were already hanging on the wall for you to look through. They created neural pathways in your head. When we say, this is how the real world works, it’s just a set of frames we hang our belief systems on, they don’t necessarily reflect how the real, real world works. And that’s dangerous.

Another dangerous frame we have is… if there’s a problem there’s a high tech solution to resolve it. We’re facing a mountain of problems caused by our overuse of technology – adding more is not a winning strategy. But people who read and understand and even agree with this will still fall back to their dominant frames and automatically consider a new or expanded technology to be a solution. This frame alone could be enough to end life on this planet. And that is, without any exaggeration, what’s at stake.

But! There’s a theory that homo sapiens survived when other human species died out, not because we were smarter, but because we were mentally flexible, enough to know when a system wasn’t working and change, adapt and experiment with other ways of being. But you won’t see that conversation on mainstream media, the fearsome gatekeepers of the status quo. They’re there to keep us in the frame, and rarely step outside of it.

A woman read The Quiet Revolution, accepted it was probably right, but disregarded most of it as outside of her ability to do anything about. She finished it with a ‘yeah, that’d work, but no one will do it’. Then her life changed dramatically, her frames took a battering. On the off chance she picked it up again, re-read it and had an aha moment! The first read her frames were too tight, and the reframing, while it made logical sense, couldn’t be assimilated. A year on things had percolated through, they were no longer new and unknown ways of seeing the world, and her world had changed, and loosened her frames. The old frames weren’t gone, they’re still there, influencing her decisions. New framing needs reinforcing many times before it eventually becomes second nature.

A recent review started off saying it was the most important book they’d ever read, and they implored others to read it because it was possibly the only way to save the world. They then followed up with, ‘unless AI does it first.’ Technology and our reliance on it is a very sticky frame. Chapter 6 of The Quiet Revolution shakes that up.

A reader told me he had a deeply emotional response to chapter 6, the reliance on technology as our saviour frame, had taken a battering. It’s difficult on many levels, not just cognitively and it takes a lot of thought, discussion and action to change them. It requires cognitive strain – which turns out to be good for us.

Another reader, deeply invested in The Quiet Revolution (their review is on the front cover) – seemed to have got the take home points but recently surprised me by advocating for mining Tasmania for minerals for the renewable industry and exporting them. We already have the dishonour of having one of the world’s most polluted rivers - from mining. But somehow this time we’ll do it differently. Yeah…?

Our reliance on extractive industries like mining is a well established frame. The economy and jobs are more important than the environment – the planet is ours to do what we like with – pollution can be dealt with… these are all frames we have relied on – but we can rely on no longer.

Reframing takes time. Something we no longer have a lot of either. If The Quiet Revolution and other ideas like it, are possibly our only survival strategy, we need to talk about them constantly. It will be difficult, people fight for their frames, even when they know it makes no sense to stick with them.

Have we lost our flexibility, become, like other homo species, doomed to extinction? No. I don’t think so. We just haven’t been reframing capitalism and any possible successor. We have work to do!

The great irony is it took Trump to get us here, a place so bad we are actively questioning our frames, and if not seeking new ones out, being prepared to look at others. Thanks to a dementia sufferer with a god complex and a gold pass to the A list of top predators, we might yet save the world.

We’ll have to reframe the goal to being a collective one we’re all in this together rather than the old disenfranchising one – we’re a population of individuals and we’re powerless against forces greater than us.

The take home is – be prepared to hear new concepts that challenge your old frames. Hold both in your mind at the same time, feel the discomfort of talking back to your frames and be prepared to look through new ones.

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Now is the moment.

After World War II we said we didn’t want another one. Those who lived through it endured an inglorious six years of bloodlust. We don’t know how many died, somewhere around 60-75 million, a nameless number, seemingly small change, an expense worth expending to those in power.

We crawled out of it traumatised and sickened and wishing we’d stopped it before it started. We insisted on Never Again. Smart people pored over the ash and bones of it for the next 80 years, teasing apart the why’s and wherefores in order to know how these things play out so we could see and stop them before any future wars arrived. One’s arrived.

Zionists; the new ‘Nazis’, are here and they are in control. When fascists are in control and they’re no longer hiding, then we all need to fear.

Israel is in a psychopathic state, gleefully indulging in an insatiable bloodlust with no sense of morality or remorse. They’ve the collective emotional maturity of tantruming five-year-olds. It’s not hard to see why. They’ve been inculcated since birth into the belief they’re the chosen ones, similar to the delusion of exceptionalism the US suffers from. Only they don’t suffer, they make others suffer.

If the people they’re terrorizing lift a finger in self-defence they’re pounded into dust. They, in this case the Israelis and American politicians, are in cohoots with the media, and reframe the victims as dangerous terrorists. A while back a Palestinian child, only a few years old, was shot just metres from the front of his shredded plastic tent. It was reported in the Israeli news as being the execution of a terrorist with no mention of their age.

In war we will always call each other terrorists. Trying to capture the moral high ground. It’s the propaganda narrative of thousands of years of human history. Demonise and dehumanise your enemy. The Germans did it successfully enough to convince the country to go to war with pretty much the rest of the western world. The Israelis are doing the same now, demonising and dehumanising the indigenous populations of the region because they feel they have a right to their land and resources.

Hamas see themselves as the resistance, and frankly, so do I. Yet the Israeli/US war machine uses the media to relabel them as terrorists. Unless every Palestinian kneels with hands on their heads and asks for a bullet - any form of defence will be labelled as terrorism.

For the past 500 years we’ve been purposely ensnared in the debt trap, with little say over the system that feeds on our labour. We’re so inculcated into the cult of capitalism that most of us spend our working lives decorating the cage or whacking on gizmos or extensions and enticing each other to go further into debt.

How do we escape? We’ve used protests, petitions, boycotts and now divestment strategies, and they’re all useful, but limited tools. We’re either asking the predators to behave (yeah, that’s going to happen), or calling them out. There will be no wins there. We can make limited strikes on financial targets with boycotts and divestment. They’re great strategies, but can they save us? No. They can’t.

The predator class is in power, in their eyes might is right. And when it takes just a hundred nukes to create a nuclear winter and the world has 12,241, letting the predator class keep the keys is risky business.

One of the most important, freely available to all, is language. Whoever controls the narrative controls the world. It’s unsurprising that the media has been infiltrated, bullied and bribed to keep the predator classes narrative front line and advancing. But people have seen the discrepancy between what they say and what’s really happening. They’ve seen the lies.

Up to 70% of people now believe capitalism does more harm than good - that’s the most hopeful statistic I’ve seen in a long time. We have an opportunity, one that’s taken 500 years to arrive.

People no longer believe the old story, they’re ready for a new one. That’s where the true power is. The current system runs on the oil of our belief. If we stop believing in it, it not only weakens its hold, it runs out of fuel.

But we can no longer afford to just be against something, we must be for something, something strong enough to eclipse the old story. What has that kind of power? I’ve spend 25 years researching that question. There are answers.

We cannot control the story if we’re too busy working to pay back mortgages or speaking out risks us losing our jobs.

Global debt is now at $111 trillion which means more than total annual global GDP. We have a debt issue. Sometime in the next 25 years we will endeavour to double the current GDP - we have to, paying off the old, pesky debt requires new debt. Ours. The cost of living will continue to rise. We, and the planet (from which 60% of global GDP is derived) are on the debt treadmill and tired.

We’d need a 100% debt forgiveness to be able to restart a new economy, one that incentivises rather than disincentives a flourishing people and planet. One, that cannot help but improve the world and all those living on her. And to catch our breath.

It’s a nice idea, but is it possible, can it be done? Yes. Yes, it can. Debt forgiveness has happened throughout history, though never at this level.

I’ve dubbed a possible new system Eudaimonia, the Aristotelean word for flourishing. The practice that creates it is Reciprocity – which is the game nature plays only we’ve forgotten the rules. But we are nature.

We are ancestors in the making. We must save, not just ourselves, but all generations to come. We can only do this by telling a new story, one not based on usury, competition, scarcity, abuse of power, endless growth, inequality, expansion and resource extraction but on collaboration and abundance for all. A story stolen from us 500 years ago.

The Quiet Revolution: Debt Free & Working Less, How Our Species Survives is a manual for meaningful change. It opens up a new conversation, one that hasn’t been possible until now.

Maybe this time the peasants win.

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PART SIX: A FLOURISHING WORLD

The exercise of imagination is dangerous to those who profit from the way things are Because it has the power to show that the way things are is not permanent, not universal, not necessary. Ursula K. Le Guin

Drawing the dimensions of the looming environmental disaster is no longer a useful strategy. We know it’s bad. Clearly knowing how bad doesn’t inspire us to do enough about it. Fear is a poor motivator. But casting light on the process by which we’ve strayed from being part of the natural system to its self-appointed master allows us the opportunity to disrupt the pattern.

A new narrative to live by is the only way to displace the old. Fighting the old one only entrenches it. We need people to be excited by the possibilities of what comes next and their part in it. It makes the old story obsolete and only relevant in how we dismantle it.

Changing the dominant paradigm is huge, and until a few years ago I thought it impossible. But so many of us are done with the old one; new stories are possible.

CHAPTER 25: Eudaimonia – The Goal

Hunger, poverty, environmental degradation, economic instability, unemployment, chronic disease, drug addiction, and war, for example, persist in spite of the analytical ability and technical brilliance that have been directed toward eradicating them. No one deliberately creates those problems, no one wants them to persist, but they persist nonetheless. That is because they are intrinsically systems problems—undesirable behaviours characteristic of the system structures that produce them. They will yield only as we reclaim our intuition, stop casting blame, see the system as the source of its own problems,and find the courage and wisdom to restructure it.

Donella Meadows.³⁴⁵

I started writing The Quiet Revolution seven years ago. I’d adopted the word Eudaimonia, a jewel of a word. I felt like it was mine. But it was like when you buy a new car, you suddenly notice how many of them are on the road. The word eudaimonia became, if not ubiquitous, then not uncommon. Tim Jackson discusses it in his book Post-Capitalism.³⁴⁷ It gets a mention in Yanis Varoufakis’s, Talking to My Daughter, Jess Scully’s, Glimpses of Utopia

Aristotle came up with the word eudaimonia, which is derived from eû – good or well, and daímōn meaning dispenser or guardian spirit, or protector of a place, person or culture.³⁴⁸ and in the paper, Why Protect nature? Rethinking Values and the Environment, which asserts that people will be willing to self-limit excess if it leads to a life of greater meaning and connection:

‘Although the term is abstruse, the longstanding idea of eudaimonia brings attention to relationships between people and nature, and to the foundations of well-being (e.g, trust in neighbours, empathy, mindfulness, and purpose, rather than an accumulation of things)…a relational/eudaimonic perspective might welcome or instigate self-motivated limitation—for example, deemphasizing consumer gift-giving in favour of convivial shared experiences—as a shift toward more meaningful lives.’ Why Protect Nature? Rethinking Values and the Environment.³⁴⁹

³⁵⁰ It’s often translated to represent a state of good spirits. Others have tried to pin down a definition based on Aristotle’s use of the word. It’s been reduced to as little as happiness, to living well through to aretē – virtuous activity in accordance with reason, which is getting closer.³⁵¹

Socrates believed it to be a good and happy life, made possible by health of the soul, not wealth of the wallet, or the pursuit of power. And it’s a happiness that’s only possible if one possesses self-control, piety, courage, and wisdom, and one’s actions are just. Pleasure is a byproduct of virtuous action.³⁵²

Plato had a go with a harmonious soul, with all its parts functioning well. ‘For the unjust soul is at war with itself. Even if our greatest desires are met, a lack of inner harmony frustrates our ability to achieve a eudaimonious state.’³⁵³ True. But not my preferred version.

The word has continued to be built upon, with W.D Ross’s suggested definition of wellbeing; and that word too is being drawn into the centre, with talk of swapping from a focus on GDP to a well-being economy as did New Zealand under Jacinda Adhern’s leadership.

The Stoics came up with doing and living well, prosperity, blessedness, living a morally virtuous life. But my favourite, which feels as though it encompasses them all, and in one convenient word, is John Cooper’s flourishing.³⁵⁴ And while his has the word human floating invisibly before it, I’ve extended the word Eudaimonia (with a capital E), to encompass not just people, but the planet.

Buen Vivir is a phrase much like Eudaimonia. It has no one distinctive meaning, though collective wellbeing is considered close. It originates from the South American countries of Bolivia, Peru and Ecuador. It’s the belief that a good life can only be achieved when you are part of a community, and the community includes the living world. The Ecuadorian Constitution states: ‘We decided to construct a new form of citizen co-existence, in diversity and harmony with nature, to reach el buen vivir, el sumak kawsay.’³⁵⁵ (The Good Life).

In the Australian Indigenous Ngaanyatjarra language. Walykumunu nyinaratjaku means, to live a good life.³⁵⁶

Winona LaDuke grows organic hemp using low fossil fuel technologies on tribal land in Minnesota. She writes, ‘Our Seven Generations and Seventh Fire prophecies tell us we are in the time when we have a choice between two paths. One path is well worn, scorched and leads to our destruction. The other path is new, green and leads to Mino-Bimaadiziwin (the good life). We must choose to walk the new path.’³⁵⁷

Yet we get out of bed in the morning and hit a non-living floor. Everything we touch in the house, apart from pets and other people (if we have them), are likely to be non-living too. We dress in mostly synthetic clothing, step out in our plastic/rubber soled shoes, insulating ourselves from the ground. We climb into a car – dead, drive on roads – dead. We walk into work, where all we touch; phones, laptops, chairs, desks, cups of morning coffee – are all inert, man-made substances.

Unless you’re a gloveless gardener getting your hands in the soil, or chopping up fresh food, there’s not a lot of opportunity in a man-made world to get in touch with the living one; a barefoot walk is something we rarely, if ever, do. We’re so ‘tame’ we’ve shielded ourselves from the wild. We’ve become an unnatural wee beastie.

Yet we revive and feel most alive when in contact with the living world. Research proves what many already know: time spent with trees, rivers, waves, or accompanied by the sounds of birds, reduces anxiety and depression, boosts our brains, and increases longevity.³⁵⁸ Yet, for many of us, time spent in wild places is rare.

It’s a sobering thought to know the planet would be in a flourishing state without us, but it’s also an emerging cultural challenge to change that story. What if we become the daimons – the guardian spirits of place and culture that make the place flourish? To turn things around and walk in the opposite direction would be a challenge almost insurmountable given our current trajectory. Yet I can’t imagine a more rewarding one.

Nat Rutherford writes, ‘Unlike happiness, eudaimonia is realised through habits and actions, not through mental states. Happiness is not something you experience or obtain, it’s something you do.’³⁵⁹

It’s the thing that drives heroes in movies to get through the hard stuff and pop up at the end, arms raised in triumph. We may not live it as dramatically as they do, encapsulated as they are in an hour and a half screen time, but the reason the hero’s journey is so satisfying is they’re made of the stuff that makes lives great. Challenges, losses, learning from failures, adversity, reward, refining/redefining ourselves, giving back as good as we get, celebrating and rarely, if ever, doing it alone.

Learning to find fulfillment, to flourish in everyday situations is a kind of yoga of the soul that many of us no longer practice. We prefer to flex financial power over externalities to deliver temporary happiness boosts, but getting a workout on the Hedonic Treadmill is an exercise in frustration. Happiness is not a muscle you build, but a practice of gratitude, kindness and meaningful action.

What’s the current vision we wish to replace? As in Chapter 14: We don’t know Who We are, we don’t have a cogent narrative for why we’re here. We’ve gone beyond mere survival, or at least many of us are lucky enough to have, and as Frankl says, we no longer rely on instinct to guide us. We’ve eschewed tradition, the stories handed generation to generation of who we are, and what we do. We’re floating, untethered to a culturally defined meaning. Lost. We’ve tried to plug those keenly felt, but unnamed gaps in our souls with the proverbial sucked thumb of pleasure-seeking distractions or quests for money or power. And having failed to appease our hungry souls, we’ve fallen into the hell of addiction, aggression, and depression.

David Bramwell wrote in the last chapter of his book, The No 9. Utopia Bus: ‘Perhaps utopia is a place where we have something important to do, like a project. After all, don’t we all need something to struggle for, something bigger than ourselves to make us feel truly alive, whether it’s family, friendships, work, a hobby or a cause?’³⁶⁰ I think many if not most of us dream of being a part of something that outlasts us, to leave our mark on the world, or in this case, to leave less of one.

The old paradigm used wealth to judge the state of a country’s well-being, but it’s a poor measure. There are still people living deep in jungles who’ve never held currency in their hands but who live rich lives. Judging the health of a country by its wealth incentivises wealth building, which then creates a cycle of unintentional poverty as our economic system gift wraps the rewards of the labour of the many, and presents it to the few, while encouraging the belief that if only we try harder, we too can be the recipients.

We have an entire entrenched ecocide machine to dismantle. It’s going to take a hellish amount of work to re-flourish the planet. We need to fall back on the energy we’ve already invested in our current infrastructure and resources rather than start another wave of energy expenditure we, and the planet, don’t have a budget for.

Our attempts to apply the first aid of new technologies to repair or replace the old has been a stop gap. What we need is a system of living that incentivises Eudaimonia – a flourishing planet and people, rather than continuing to carve it up for profit and dish it out in unequal portions, assuming humans are the only ones that need feeding.

To stop degrading the planet is a negatively geared goal. The idea of stopping doing something ‘wrong’ does not have the same power as a quest to restore the world to a state of flourishing. We’re an ingenious lot; converting from a goal of individual wealth building to collective flourishing is a meaning with ramifications that will echo through time. If we seriously set ourselves to the task, I have no doubt we can achieve it.

The Quiet Revolution: Debt Free & Working Less, How Our Species Survives is available on Amazon or (for Australians) www.togetherpress.com.au

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Enisled (adj.) To make into an island. To isolate from others

I miss Hog.

He was old, cranky, and never had a good word to say. I adored him. It’s an odd thing for one man to say of another. But true. It wasn’t just because he was a fount of fantastic malapropisms—the moment we parted I’d have my notebook out jotting them down. He’d have been mortified to know he’d been mispronouncing El Nino as El Meano for fifty years. But it was perfect.

So perfect, a person might think Hog was being clever. The assumption would’ve been incorrect. Nor is it saying, I, a supposedly lofty academic, was casting sniggering aspersions on my uneducated neighbour. Because I knew full well his views on academia.

‘They slice a thought into a thousand pieces and then try reassemble it. But they’ve released it, whatever whatsamagidget was in there. It ain’t got it any-fucking-more!’ He’d slam down his tea and exclaim, ‘What pisses me off most is you bastards got paid to do it!’

I couldn’t disagree, not entirely.

What Hog knew was far superior to anything I had to offer. I once made the mistake of telling him the origin of the word scythe.

‘Sek—which was Indo-European for cut—had numerous changes until, by the seventeenth century, it was sythe, without the C. It gained the C because of its association with scissors.’

‘And you’re thinking, I’m thinking that’s in any way important? And would you fucking watch what you’re doing with it, you almost had my ear!’

But after an hour I’d look up from those long, loose swings, the satisfying his of severing of grass, leaving it short in a way nature never could, and I’d catch Hog sitting on a stump patting his dog Rex and looking back at me with an expression I can only interpret as pride. He’d look away, almost guilty for having been caught in a kindness.

And I couldn’t help myself but love him for it.

When I use the scythe, his scythe, the one he’d taught me to use, the sound of the grass whispers, I miss you, I miss you. He’d have laughed at me if he’d known.

I have a wheel, and I need to replace the bearings. Hog would know how. I have an axe handle design I’ve been working on, and buggered if I can’t help but want his approval.

We never said a kind word to each other. Not a one. It was like a challenge, and though I could never have been cruel, I couldn’t be kind either. If he said something I disagreed with—and on most things we did—I’d interrupt his rant about how one party, had it got into parliament, would have met the climate challenge with, ‘Hogwash!’

It always surprised him. I was usually obsequious, so careful not to offend. But I could never restrain my enjoyment, and towards the end, nor could he.

Had I been brave enough to ask him if we were friends, his response would have been, ‘Who the fuck do you think I’d lend my John Deere to?’

He’d be aggressive, hands on hips, but his eyes would smile.

The Authorities, as he called them, with a capital A, ‘Came here talking H2O language. You know, chemical formulas and shit, all that volatile organic compounds and conductivity stuff. They wouldn’t just come out and say your ground water’s fucked, even when I asked them straight. Couldn’t get a Yes or a No—not possible. They just spilled more word ink over everything.’

‘You sound like you probably know something of the H2O language,’ I’d said mildly.

‘Well,’ he’d replied, ‘If you’re going to shit on something, it’s good to at least be able to say the name of the thing.’

Perhaps I have grown maudlin, waiting for Finn to return. Yes, yes I have. When I look down the valley and see Hog’s house there’s not a damn time I don’t wish he was still in it.

When Rex died he said, ‘Well there he goes, best friend I ever had. And there won’t be another.’ He’d picked up the limp animal and shuffled over to the grave he’d prepared, warning me away with a glare. He laid Rex in it and patted his head fondly, ‘Least I don’t have to be thinking where his next bloody meal’s coming from, even before I think of my own. Nope. Won’t miss that.’

‘A good plain name for a dog,’ I’d said, awkwardly.

‘It was short for Tyrannosaurus Rex,’ He’d sniffed.

‘Not so plain.’

And he buried him, blubbering like a child. He was mortified, and I loved him more.

Then it clicks. I’m stirring my cup of sugarless—doesn’t need stirring—lemon verbena tea, when I realise we’d had a father/son relationship. He’d filled the unsubtle need in me to be fathered in a time there were no more authority figures to turn to. I couldn’t even turn to Google for answers. But Hog was there, rock steady. With Hog, it was always clear the path you took. ‘One step just follows the other. Don’t try to fucking fox trot.’

He didn’t like Finn. It was obvious from Hog’s determination to ignore him. Eventually, he danced out of the way of the then three-year-old, who’d been doggedly trying to engage, and exclaimed, ‘I hate children, always worried I’ll stand on ‘em.’

He turned, walked off, and I never took Finn with me again.

After Hog died and we’d buried him, Piper made us wait a fortnight out of respect before we ransacked his place. During our gentle ransack I found a photo of Hog as a child with his three younger brothers, Duncan, Ian, and Andrew. They looked like miniature Hogs. Later, I came across a death certificate for Andrew. He’d died, aged seven, from chest injuries sustained when a utility vehicle reversed over him. It didn’t take a lot of imagination to realise who’d been driving the ute.

Years ago, Finn mentioned his confusion when we’d visited Piper’s grave under the wattle tree ‘Why do we sacrifice flowers to dead people?’ I’d laughed, but after some thought, copped out and called on tradition, ‘Because it’s what we’ve always done.’

But apart from being beautiful, they spoke of the time taken out of busy days to forage for them in hedgerows, a tribute which meant more than the flowers alone. In modern times it’d been a monetary exchange, with little heart in it. But I didn’t really know. The origin of traditions was a different kind of study, a different kind of pulling apart a thought into a thousand pieces. We never put flowers on Hog’s burial site. He wouldn’t have wanted them anyway.

I have a sister. Annette. Or maybe it’s had. She was twenty-six when the slope started. She was raising my nephews, James and Ethan, alone. Her ex-husband, Michael, was in jail for killing some guy in a bar brawl. Tawdry business; and Annette had never been tawdry, and despised the taint. Our father, Devon, was widowed and alone. Mum had died the year before. Cancer. Odd, an entire life is lived and the last word, the most important aspect, is how you departed it.

My mother peppered every conversation with racial slurs and clichéd hatreds. It was a couple of years before complete collapse, and just before the doctor pulled the cancer card on her, it was when she was still doing well for herself while others slowly drowned in weak civilisation soup.

She’d knitted some crappy hats and scarves for the homeless and had gone to the areas where they huddled and handed them out. She wanted to see people putting them on. I can almost taste the awkwardness and see her oblivious smile.

A young man declined her offer of a hat and she was pissed. Genuinely pissed that this poor guy with nothing, felt himself too good for her knitted hat with the pom-pom. She’s telling me this and I lost it.

I’d said to her, ‘That’s not how altruism works, Mother. It’s a process where you give and acknowledge you have been given the gift of being good. Tomorrow you may not be, and yesterday you may have been the world’s biggest bitch—but right at that moment you are getting a kick out of feeling good. Fine. But there are levels of altruism, the highest is the point in which you approach a person and gift them something of yourself—not just money or goods. You approach them as an equal. Your similarities are greater than your differences. You also recognise the person could do with a hand, and it is an honour and a privilege to be that hand. Wherever they’ve been, whatever they’ve done, or not done, or will do—it’s not ours to judge. Suppressing the desire isn’t difficult—it simply isn’t there. This is the highest form of altruism,’

‘And then there’s the kind which boasts of itself, takes great pride in itself, It cannot see the person, only the gift. Once given it requires payment—in gratitude. And it is affronted, convulsed with pique, should it not be paid. That is the lowest.’

My regret is not that I berated her, but it had taken me so long to do so.

But I digress. Of Annette, James, Ethan, and Devon, I know nothing. We had one last phone call—it was brief. Long enough to half say what was happening in our disparate lives. Annette was evasive and when she asked of us, I was the same. I could not confide the depth of my terror. It was a kindness to refrain, and I realised she’d done the same.

Instead, we spoke of small things. The broken window which couldn’t be replaced, the need to clear her lilac bush of plastic bags every few days. Rubbish was no longer being collected, yet people left it out anyway, and the streets were full of detritus. Small gripes and a hesitant goodbye. We knew things were being left unsaid, but neither of us knew how to say them.

It’s been simpler, all these years, to assume they’ve exited. No details. Just gone. Annette: dead, James & Ethan: dead, Dad, who would be eighty-seven if he’d lived: also dead.

Piper had a brother, Nax. Annette and he had dated. It was strange to think our siblings might’ve married. But it didn’t last long. The cracks started early and rapidly made the relationship uninhabitable.

I have a feeling Nax may have made it. I base this entirely on him being the outdoor type. He did triathlons, ate tofu and was ridiculously healthy. If he was alive and wondering if I was—he’d assume I was dead.

I was of the indoor persuasion. I’d been an academic, I’d had few real-life skills and no definable muscles. When we made the leap, the only skill I had was the ability to acquire skills. And I did. From never having grown a radish, to growing the majority of our food, recycling recycled materials infinite numbers of times, with few tools, and a willingness to make things which looked ugly. And of course, my persistent moccasin making endeavours.

Eat My Shadow - Book I & Button Up Buttercup - Book II, are available on Amazon & at www.togetherpress.com.au (for Australian book buyers). Eat My Shadow was shortlisted for the Fiction Factory Award. Book III, Swallow My Echo is in progress.

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We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.

Buckminster Fuller

After years of ongoing and worsening symptoms which defied diagnosis to the degree my medical records probably state I’m a hypochondriac, it was a shock to discover I have heart failure. I don’t look the part. I have a healthy diet, an active lifestyle. I don’t drink or smoke and I have ‘pristine’ arteries. So how is it I have idiopathic dilated cardiomyopathy? Idiopathic means no known cause, but it doesn’t take a genius to realise that after 35 years of long days and seven-day weeks pushing myself beyond my physical limits, something had to give. Stress, it turns out, really is a killer.

Heart failure is a degenerative disease and incurable. The damage already sustained accumulates and impacts other organs which feedback into each other as the body slowly starves of oxygen and all the various organ ‘pumps’ are driven beyond the limits of what’s capable of sustaining life – and you die.

The planet is a lot like this. It has a series of ‘pumps’, the best known of which is the hydrological cycle. As children we were taught it as the Water Cycle. Precipitation falls in the form of rain, hail, snow or mist. It’s absorbed by the soil, used by animals, plants, and fungi, before it moves into collection points like ponds, streams, rivers and back out to sea where it eventually evaporates to start again, a cyclical pump, cleaning and distributing water around the planet.

Then there’s the atmospheric pump which is caused by air pressure, ocean currents, carbon, heat and humidity which move ‘weather’ around the planet and, like the water cycle, is becoming increasingly unpredictable due to climate change.

Below water the planet uses the Thermohaline (heat/salt) cycle to circulate water around the planet. It hauls warm water from the equator to the poles at an amazing 35-45 million cubic metres a second; even so, it still takes about 500-600 years to do one cycle. It’s been dubbed the Great Ocean Conveyor. It conveniently stops the northern hemisphere from freezing and the sea from stagnation. The thermohaline cycle has stopped in the past and is a probable cause of past mass extinctions. The pump has weakened 15-20% over the past 200 years.

There’s also the nutrient/carbon ‘pump’ of plants, fungi, insects, birds, reptiles, fish and mammals who eat, shit and die, which feeds further life through nature’s favourite recycling method – rot. Increasingly we get in the way of this process, capping the earth in concrete and fuelling the mass extinction of species through urban sprawl and utilisation of herbicides, insecticides and knocking anything on the head that gets in the way of economic gain or personal interest.

The planet’s ‘pumps’ are failing and as the slow decline feeds back into itself, the giant organism earth will eventually slip below the parameters capable of sustaining life – and life on its thin skin will die. It’s what we’re seeing now; the process is degenerative. This is uncharted territory. We don’t know if we can reverse it. We’ve not killed life on a planet before.

Chaos theory: ‘If a butterfly flaps its wings in the Amazonian rainforest, it can change the weather half a world away.’ Everything that happens is the result of everything that’s come before it, and we’ve made pulling the wings off metaphoric butterflies our game.

Phytoplankton are another name for a butterfly. Phytoplankton are not only the base of the food chain, they also consume carbon and sequester it, and produce 50-80% of planetary oxygen. Their numbers are in decline. We’ve knocked back 40% of the population in just 50 years. Their importance outranks GDP, yet how often do we hear about the thermohaline cycle and the role of phytoplankton in keeping our little island-filled fish tank alive?

Clearly a rapid response is common sense and crucial. With our combined efforts we’ve managed to slow a wall of water moving around the planet. It’s a feat that makes parting the Red Sea look like child’s play. We’ve not done it directly or intentionally – it’s happened because we’ve inadvertently warmed and acidified the ocean with excess CO2.

Solar panels and wind turbines don’t come close to the forces of nature. We cannot mimic any of these systems at any kind of scale. To repair it we’d need to drastically reduce CO2 emissions and aid nature in removing it from the ocean via seaweed farming and tying up the atmospheric excess with trees, biochar and soil regenerative techniques, and get out of the way so the giant organism earth can repair itself.

There’s a reciprocity factor in working less. If we’re not working so hard, we’re not working the planet as hard either. Win/win. Restoring it, restores us. Weaning ourselves off work won’t be as easy as it sounds. It’s a tough gig. Divesting myself of a work ethic I’ve held my entire life has been nearly impossible. But the stress I once inflicted on myself is no longer there; I’m no longer running on coffee and adrenaline. We could all do with a similar break. What if, in assisting the planet to heal, we healed ourselves?

Stop the Clock: The Environmental Benefits of a Four Day Week, is a 2021 UK study that showed moving to a four-day week by 2025 would have the equivalent carbon reduction benefits of removing all private vehicles from UK roads, and reduce national emissions by 20%, while having positive social benefits without productivity loss. It sounds like a positive move. But perhaps we could apply the necessity principle, encouraging an increase in work from home positions and eliminating pointless Bullshit Jobs, as Dave Graeber called his book on the subject. A three-hour day, five-day week, Keynes thought, should be sufficient to ensure we have something to tether ourselves to. ‘For three hours a day is quite enough to satisfy the old Adam in most of us!’

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Don’t you love it when you’re standing in the middle of an untamed place and when you look around its as if you can see the landscape breathe. You’re aware of all the raucous chaotic thriving life of it all. How every bird is going about its business and telling the world its news. And the trees, so stoic, standing there. I imagine their roots exchanging the whatever it is they do, communicating, not in words but in some form of nature’s song.

And when I stand there I feel such reverence for it all and thankful to be part of it, sharing the space. And I’ll mimic the kookaburra and try out sing the lyrebird, and it’s all so good.

I could not dream of being without it.

If resonating with the landscape does not resonate with you then its time to get out there and listen. The world has something it needs to say to you.

This week the news came out that Mount Tongatabu, a small mountain in Southern Tasmania, Australia, where I live, has been saved from logging. It’s taken 3 years of community and legal action to protect it. It’s not a greatly significant coupe, but one day it will be, and today, it kind of is. It’s another step towards ending native forest logging as the court decision sets a precedent. I’m part of a small group of people who stood our ground and made it happen. It’s a part of my reciprocity towards the planet. When I was diagnosed with heart failure four years ago, walking up that hill increased my heart function - and perhaps saved me.

There’s a saying that floats around, that ‘activism is the rent I pay for living’, but that’s transactional capitalism talking. What activism really is is reciprocity, what comes around goes around, there’s no payment required, no tit for tat exchange, just giving freely into a system in a way that creates abundance for all.

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When you were born you were roughly 50cm long. By your first birthday you were three times the size. And it was good.

By age 12 you’d tripled in height to around 150cm. If you continue to triple every 12 years, by the time you’re 24, you’re 4.5 metres – over 2 refrigerators tall and sleeping on the bedroom floor with your feet pulled up.

If you keep growing at the same rate by the time you’re 36 you’d be 13.5 metres tall, not quite the height of the Hollywood sign and no one invites you to dinner anymore. You’ll weigh roughly the size of a whale's testicle, and whales' testicles are big, around 500kg. You sleep outside.

By the time you’re 48 you’re 40 metres tall, tall enough to reach up and touch the top of the Leaning Tower of Pizza, and it would take all the pizzas in Italy to feed you one meal.

12 years later you’re tall enough to celebrate your 60th birthday by standing beside the Statue of Liberty and taking a selfie of yourself resting your elbow on her head.

By 72 you’re not quite the height of the Empire State Building, but plucking Godzilla off wouldn’t be a stretch.

By 84 it would take someone 12 minutes to walk from your feet to your head, and the size of your dandruff would be dangerous to hikers.

By 96, and I don’t mean to be rude, but I doubt you’ll make it – you’ll be a bit ‘short’ of the width of New York City.

Growth is good. But everything in the world grows to a certain size and then stops.

For the last few centuries we’ve been doubling the economy every 25 years. Every time we do it needs more energy and resources. We’re already using 1.8 planets of them every year, and even with all the labour saving devices, we’re investing one hell of a lot more in work hours to prop it up. We need ever more people and ever more resources to serve it. It’s exhausting.

Everything in nature grows and then stops. Is there a plan to end economic growth? No. We have no plans on stopping.

Maybe it's time to start talking.

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I want to save the world. I don’t have any illusions of grandeur, no superpowers, I’m just the same me I’ve always been, and the rules to saving the world are… what are they again?

I’ve been at it for 25 years and I’m happy to admit, I’ve mostly got it wrong. I was relying on technology, renewables, greener consumer options and the idea that individual actions would ‘save the planet.’ After initial resistance, these were strategies ‘green lit’ by capitalism, the window we see and judge the world by.

My attempts to save the world go something like this…

In 2003 I convinced my partner, Trev, to go six months without spending a dollar on food, power, water, transport or consumer goods. Two years’ preparation later, we took our 6-year-old son along for the ride (on the back of a $2 tip shop bike.) We wrote about it in Living the Good Life, How One Family Changed Their World from Their Own Backyard. Our goal was to see how far we could reduce our impact from a suburban block and make voluntary simplicity look sexy. Trev was more convincing.

We were exhaustingly rather than exhaustively interviewed after the book was released. The most commonly asked questions were, but how did you go without chocolate? And what did you wipe your bum with.* I was disappointed by the lack of sexy questions about sustainability. Rather than discuss the 95% reduction of our environmental impact, people only wanted the salacious details on our unusual weight loss scheme. That’s not entirely true, we still hear from people who tell us the book was pivotal in their own efforts to save the world, and that’s gratifying. But the world still needs saving.

The book was filled with facts and I thought, ‘If people just understood…’ but facts rarely change people. Sensing their impotence, we feel compelled to pile on more until it takes but a nudge from people who oppose them to make them fall. They’re not the changemakers we thought they were. But we still rely on them.

Not long after our six-month experiment we moved to Tasmania and hand-built a straw bale house with clay from the dam, locally sourced bales, and 400-year-old celery top pine we’d saved from being burnt as firewood. We made tiles from recycled glass and eschewed concrete, PVC and toxic finishes, while embracing the motto, if there’s a hard way to do something, we’ll find it.

Weekends were spent rendering the house with mud the consistency of firm diarrhoea. During the week I worked to revive a dying community house, converting it into a solar powered community hub running sustainability workshops whenever I could find the funding.

In 2013 local Greens councillor Liz Smith, and I started the Huon Producers’ Network, a not-for-profit that sought to increase food resilience by supporting local farmers to adopt low tech, organic and regenerative practices. The group started a local farmers market and an online ordering system where growers driving home from the market became the delivery system at drop off points throughout the valley.

I left paid employment for market gardening. Between Trev and I we earnt $15,000 the first year – considering the average cost of what we sold was $3 that’s 5000 bunches of carrots. In the second year we more than doubled our income -$35,000. It was unrelenting, 7-days-a-week, hard work.

We transitioned into Seed Freaks, growing rare heirloom vegetables for seed, having decided it was better to teach people to fish than to feed them. Our finances improved, the workload did not. Still, we were determined to contribute meaningfully to helping the community prepare for the civilisation that comes next.

But after 23 years of 7-day weeks, 12-16 hour days, I keeled over and was carted off to hospital; it was another six months before I was diagnosed with heart failure. I don’t look the part: I’m active, not overweight, I don’t drink or smoke. But it turns out those with a superhero complex have their own kryptonite – adrenalin. Stress really can kill. And I hadn’t even made a dent in saving the planet. We sold Seed Freaks and I did my best to recoup some heart function bushwalking and calming the fuck down.

But if what I had been doing didn’t make a difference, what would? The question consumes me.

I’ve been researching for 25 years, collating obscure facts, looking for the chink in our species’ armour. World saving epiphanies don’t come often, but I documented those that did, often waking at 2am to scribble illegibly in notebooks. My cryptic-night writing. But there I was, the beneficiary of enforced down time. I could finally collate my notes and throw myself back into the fray – but in a gentler way. I’d write a book to save the world!

Eat My Shadow, a clifi novel that connects readers to our descendants, came first. Publishers rejected it without reading, telling me, ‘People don’t want to read dystopia. It’s too close to the bone.’ I get it, on a bad day I can smell it coming too. People want romance, bromance and cosy mysteries – escapism is the name of the game. So I fried a few more heart cells and self-published. Readers connect deeply with Finn and Father, who live in a world where civilisation is just a memory. It ties in with our present-day actions, and readers say they have a compulsion to save the Finns and Fathers of the future, and that’s gratifying. But they, like me, don’t know how. Creating impetus is pointless; without a clear path it only encourages people to binge read The Thursday Murder Club series – guilty!

It’s taken many years, but I’ve put over 500 books, research articles, podcasts and movies through my head and my weary heart. Humming along in the background while I wrote Eat My Shadow was, The Quiet Revolution, Debt Free & Working Less, How Our Species Survives. My first draft won an Australian Society of Authors Mentorship. In a deep superhero voice… ‘It’s an audacious plan to save the planet.The Green Agenda

’I’ve summarised a couple of main points, first the bad stuff, before hitting you with the good, because that’s how these things roll.

Economic system

We have an economic system that incentivises the destruction of the natural world and the degradation of human lives. Capitalism is growth dependant. 97% of the money circulating in the world is debt. If the economy stops growing we can no longer service that debt and the economy crashes. Every 25ish years we must double the size of the economy to service it. That requires chewing through 1.8 planets, more resources than the planet is able to bioregenerate annually. If by some miracle we maintain growth at 3% a year, in 100 years we’ll have an economy 16 times the size it is now and we’ll be using 12 hypothetical earths.** In 200 years it will be 256 times bigger and we’ll be chewing through 80 earths. An impossibility. Capitalism guarantees extinction. And it’s not just chewing through the planet; we’re weary of servicing it, manipulated to take on debt and busting ourselves to repay it, and others who are excluded from the system are cast aside. There’s a social imperative to end capitalism too.

Technology

We’re technocrats, we have a cognitive bias that Maslow summed up: ‘If the only tool you have is a hammer, it’s tempting to treat everything as if it were a nail.’ We’re now using the hammer (technology) to play whack-a-mole to try to resolve the unintended side effects of previous technologies we’ve come to rely on. And each new technology has repercussions of its own. As a way to resolve problems it has become the primary problem, but it’s a problem that supports consumption – it’s economic ‘fuel’.

Changing the narrative is key to changing the system

According to George Lakoff’s, Don’t Think of an Elephant (Lakoff, 2014) bitching about capitalism or the thing you wish to change, only entrenches it. Rather than reinforcing the dominant paradigm by attacking it or framing everything else in comparison to it, we need to build interest, consensus and joy in its successor. We need viral ideas and ways of thinking that supersede it.

We’re good at inventing systems. I’ve invented Eudaimonia as an example of what we might replace the C word with. It’s an Aristotelian concept that philosopher John Cooper interpreted as ‘flourishing.’ Eudaimonia is designed to leave the world better in 10, 100, 1000 years and beyond. To gauge progress towards the goal is the Eudaimonic Index (EI). It’s beyond the scope of this article to discuss, but economists tell me it’s possible.

Sustainable is a word I once embraced, but now avoid. It’s been overused and has become largely meaningless. We’re given choices: the ‘not so great option’ versus, ‘a slightly better option.’ Which is more ‘sustainable’ and so therefore the correct choice, even if it makes no difference in the long run towards the goal of living within planetary boundaries – we’ll take it. A psychological prop for our flagging hearts and a way to fuel our economic engine, for the wheels cannot stop turning. Is there an alternative?

If Eudaimonia is the system, then Reciprocity is the practice. Give as good as you get is the foundation stone, the driving force for life on earth and the method to restore equilibrium. If doing something takes without commensurate return we’re operating in deficit, continually operating in deficit eventually crashes the planet. I’m deliberately using an economic equation, because that’s how we’ve been braintrained, to ‘calculate’ how we interact with the world. By necessity Reciprocity is a simple concept. It’s the process that enabled our species to arrive in an intact world. Everything and everyone that came before us gave back at the same rate, or more, than they received. For example, birds provide a range of services, including spreading seeds, maintaining sustainable insect and fish populations, being food for other species and recycling nutrients both with their excrement and eventually their bodies.

Reciprocity is akin to permaculture but pushes hard on giving back. Most people understand human to human reciprocity but are mystified when asked about how we might reciprocate with the living world. Because mostly – we don’t.

I ask myself every day, how can our family give back? We’ve composted our poo for decades and fed fruit trees with it. But now we’re gearing up to become Black Soldier Fly breeders, feeding our poo to their larvae, which they love, and the larvae to the chooks, who produce eggs for us, and poo for the garden. Nature doesn’t do waste; everything is food for something else. Her favourite technology is rot.

I’m keen to explore converting community sewage into biogas and snapping up some of those LPG vehicles that’ve become victims of the next wave of ‘sustainable’ transport options, EVs. Doing so would lower methane production and clean up waterways while offsetting the need for coal derived electricity. Don’t pooh-pooh poo mobiles!

It’s a native animal roadkill horror show in the Huon Valley. To reciprocate we’ve fenced off the orchard to allow them access to it for a safe, off-road feed, which has also reduced whippersnipping, our workload and reliance on fossil fuels.

We had a rodent infestation. With reciprocity in mind we built ‘bait stations’- bowls of food at strategic places where the owls can predate feeding rats. We find the remains often enough to know it’s working. But it doesn’t always have to be a ‘tit for tat’ relationship. We’re still taking so much more than we give, even though we plant trees, trap feral cats and sparrows, kill European wasps and remove invasive weeds. I write articles and books about how inspirational people are tackling global issues with reciprocity. Like Bren Smith and 3D Ocean farming, Gabe Brown and Ernst Götsch with regenerative and syntropic agriculture, and Gabriel Gouveia who pays people to grow milkweed and produces insulated clothing while helping to revive the endangered migratory monarch butterfly population. Living and working in reciprocity is possible.

The next stage in my attempt to ‘save the world’ is working on a Reciprocity board game, an attempt to retrain our brains away from Monopoly, the game where success is emptying the bank into your hands and the game only ends when there’s nothing left to take. I’m working with economist Dr Alexis Wadsley and Circular Economy Huon, who are running a workshop for the community to get on board (literally), designing a reciprocity game.

Knowing our collective story, our fraught and dangerous history, how we got ourselves in this predicament is imperative if we are to change the future. I’m of Scottish, English, Irish, French origins – a mongrel, and when I say ‘we’ in the following passages, I’m referring to those of European ancestry. Something clicked when I finally realised, in order to conquer, first we had to be conquered. In order to colonise, first the minds of our peasant ancestors had to be colonised too.

Jason Hickel spoke of the instigation of capitalism in Europe when he wrote, ‘There was no gradual ‘transition,’ as people like to assume, and it certainly wasn’t peaceful. Capitalism rose on the back of organised violence, mass impoverishment, the systematic destruction of self-sufficient subsistence economies’ (Hickel, 2020). He was referring to Europeans.

The psychologist, Chellis Glendinning wrote, ‘Our society is made up of vast numbers of traumatised individuals, and our culture has come into being through a universally traumatising process. The outcome – today’s technological civilisation with its massive psychopathologies and unending ecological disasters – is a collective reflection on the traumatised personality’ (Glendinning, 2007). We too were forced from our not perfect, but natural state, and we too have felt the impacts of colonisation, which anthropologist John Bodley lists as, ‘poverty, longer working hours, and much greater physical exertion, poor health, social disorder, discontent, discrimination, overpopulation, and environmental deterioration’ (Bodley, 2015).

Although Western Europe represents only 8% of the planet’s landmass, from 1492 to 1914 we colonised more than 80% of the world. In the Americas an estimated 56 million indigenous people – 90% of the population – died from disease, slavery, warfare and displacement (Pruitt, 2019) The death toll in Africa has never been adequately estimated. It ranges from 5 million to 50 (Rummel, 2001). The figures are considered conservative. No one bothered counting. In Australia it’s estimated 10,000 Torres Strait Islanders and Indigenous people were killed in over 400 massacres (University of Newcastle, 2022).

Though historians estimate that the number of Aboriginal people killed during colonisation could be as high as 100,000 or more, due to frontier violence and introduced diseases (Harris, 2003; Reynolds, 2022). While the Aboriginal population across the continent itself was estimated to have been between 300,000 and 1 million at the time we Europeans arrived and would decrease dramatically to around 93,000 by Federation in 1901 (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2002; Madley, 2008).

We (European ancestors) systematically tore people from their alternative utopian visions and forced them to adopt our capitalist ideal. Many of these had been as close-to-as-it-is-possible-to-get utopias until we colonised and/or imposed economic development on them. We’ve rolled out dystopia to the majority of the planet with disastrous results, and congratulated ourselves while doing so.

Many of us from dismantled ancestries now look to indigenous cultures who’ve fought to retain theirs, picking like bower birds through their knowledge, spiritual beliefs and worldviews for ways forward in our own. Having lost our indigeneity, we try to pack our wounds with the ways of others. We call it cultural appropriation. I understand the attraction. We lost our magic and it’s left a hole that drive-thru McDonald’s cannot fill. We envy the sense of ancestral connection some indigenous peoples have managed to retain. But it’s not too late to remember the stories of our ancestors and own them. We were torn from our indigenous lives, as we tore and continue to tear others from theirs. It’s not too late to rip up the triple lane highway and find a pathway back.

The Good Life

Buen vivir (buuern viv-vere) is a phrase much like Eudaimonia. It has no one distinctive meaning, though collective wellbeing is considered close. It originates from the South American or more precisely Andean countries of Bolivia, Peru and Ecuador. It’s the belief that a good life can only be achieved when you are part of a community, and the community includes the living world. The Ecuadorian Constitution states: ‘We decided to construct a new form of citizen co-existence, in diversity and harmony with nature, to reach el buen vivir, el sumak kawsay (the good life) (Salazar, 2015).

In the Australian Indigenous Ngaanyatjarra (naan ya jera) language. Walykumunu Nyinaratjaku means, to live a good life. A study of Aṉangu and Yarnangu people with a disability concluded that a good life is living on their ancestral lands with their community and taking part in cultural activities (Ngaanyatjarra Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Women’s Council, 2018).

Winona LaDuke grows organic hemp using low fossil fuel technologies on tribal land in Minnesota. She writes, ‘Our Seven Generations and Seventh Fire prophecies tell us we are in the time when we have a choice between two paths. One path is well worn, scorched and leads to our destruction. The other path is new, green and leads to Mino-Bimaadiziwin (the good life). We must choose to walk the new path’ (LaDuke).

There are many ways to say, a good life, and without knowing them all, I think it’s safe to say they all consider a close connection to the land and community as integral.

We have to stop primarily focusing on what’s wrong with our human made world and be excited about getting it right. We can’t be shy about wanting to save it, even if it is from ourselves. But rather than fight each battle separately, attacking single branches of the only tree that needs toppling, we go for the trunk. The thing that connects and supports them all – our economic system. As Desmond Tutu said, ‘There comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of the river. We need to go upstream and find out why they’re falling in.’

You probably saw this coming. No one person will ever save the world. As a goal the only super it is, is super-stupid. But we’ve been brainwashed by the capitalist system to see ourselves as individuals competing against each other. It’s a successful disempowerment strategy. Will saving the living world be easy? No. Is it a quest with a timeline, an end date, a grand finale? No, that’s not how life works. But if we get it right, along the line it will become as self-perpetuating as the damage perpetrated by capitalism, and we will become what we were always meant to be – a together people.

We can either throw mortar shells of fear and self-interest into the future and discover when we get there the potholes and ruins we’ve created, or we can throw trees, clear skies and contented people and find a eudaimonious world when we arrive. The ultimate power we have is choosing our collective future.

*We bartered for cocoa. 6 months without chocolate wasn’t hard even for an addict like me. We grew loofahs, chopped them up and used pieces dipped in water, then dropped into the compost loo – better than toilet paper.

** Doubling the economy is calculated to increase resource use by 60%

Republished from Green Agenda

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