David Peat’s Webinar on “Gentle Action”
23 May 2pm Eastern Standard Time
On May 23, the group Social Actions will host the first in an anticipated series about ways to think about taking action. This first event will be a facilitated discussion with F. David Peat of the Pari Center for New Learning. Dr. Peat is a theoretical physicist who explores the social and physical sciences for explanations of why the world is the way it is. In his latest book, “Gentle Action: Bringing Creative Change to a Turbulent World”, he shares a number of insights into how we might create positive effects when we set out to make a difference in the world (whether across the globe or down the street).
Abdul Quadri worked as an investment banker in the US and was inspired by the ideas of the Grameen Bank. He returned to his native Bangladesh with the idea of making a low cost mobile phone service available in rural areas. He also began the Village Phone program which is now available in over 50,000 villages, as well as Community Information Centers to provide Internet access.
A few posts back we met a cardboard oven, a neat idea, and a promotional video which tended to take a “politically correct” stance on the notion of a carbon footprint.
Now I’d like to promote a crazy idea of an oxygen tax. Large forested area produce the oxygen that is necessary for our particular form of life on planet earth. A major source of this oxygen is are the rain forests of the Amazon. However for a variety of economic reasons large areas of these rain forests are being cut down to produce land that can be employed for other uses including farming.
Now we are quite willing to accept that if a particular nation has natural resources such as oil, coal or fresh water that other nations should pay for these products. Brazil, however, supplies the world with oxygen yet no one appears to think it reasonable that Brazil should be paid for the great resource it supplies to the planet.
Of course there are considerations of supply. If a nation has great supplies of oil then it builds pipelines and charges for its product, likewise a river of fresh water could be dammed but it would be rather difficult for Brazil to contain the oxygen it freely supplies to the planet.
It now appears to be politically acceptable that nations should reduce their carbon imprint, or in some cases offset the carbon dioxide they release. So why not introduce an oxygen tax and recompense Brazil, as well as other heavily forested areas, as a reward for preserving their forests?
Is this a totally crazy idea? Would anyone support it. Or to we simply sit by, calculating our individual carbon imprint, or trying to figure out if its better to use paper or plastic bags, while the world’s major forests are cut down.
Thanks to the sort of world we live in – of Twitter, Facebook and Youtube – Susan Boyle within a matter of days and even hours became on of the most famous people in the world and also challenges us about our preconceptions about appearance. At birth she experienced oxygen deprivation which left her with some partial brain damage and learning disabilities. After school she enrolled in some government training schemes and on the death of her father she spent the rest of her time looking after her mother who died in 2007. However one of her passions was singing and she became a member of the local church choir.
Finally she decided to audition of a TV talent competition “Britain’s Got Talent” and appeared on the show a few days ago. Walking on the stage produced laughter from the audience for she looked dumpy and far from attractive and her answers when questioned by the judges, particularly when she confessed that she had never had a boyfriend and had never been kissed, produced a great deal of laughter from the audience. When asked her ambition she said it was to be a professional single like Elaine Paige – one of the top stars of English musical theatre.
Then Susan began to sing and the audience went wild – not with laughter but cheering such an exceptional performance. In just 24 hours the You-tube clip of her performance was seen by 4.5 million people. As of 15.00 on 20 April over 87 million people had viewed the clip. She was being followed by Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore and 4393 others on Twitter.
Take Baby Formula as an example of an action with in some cases did not work out as planned. Aid organizations in Africa, concerned that nursing mothers with Aids would pass on the disease to their babies were given donations of powdered milk.
However when they discovered that the milk and feeding bottles had been dumped some distance away they realised that for a mother to be seen feeding her baby with a bottle would be interpreted by the local community that she had been diagnosed with Aids.
I have just returned from the European SPES conference (Spirituality in Economic and Social Life) Luk Bouckaert made an interesting point. We are collecting many examples of “gentle actions” at the local and the international level but it would also be interesting to have some examples of when such actions have failed and why. In this way we can go a little deeper into how Gentle Action can operate.
L’Anthropological Survey of India ha fatto sapere che dal maremoto si sono salvati non solo gli animali, ma anche molti pescatori non impegnati nei resort paradisiaci per occidentali, come le popolazioni delle isole Andamane (Jarawa, Onge e Sentinel) – tra gli ultimi cacciatori-raccoglitori senza contatti col mondo (mentre hanno avuto vittime i coltivatori delle Nicobar). Evidentemente non hanno completamente perso l’istinto e sono fuggiti al seguito degli animali. Si sono visti ad esempio gli elefanti che barrendo tristemente ore prima del maremoto, si sono allontanati giusto in tempo dalle spiagge con i loro turisti in groppa. Gli elefanti sono particolarmente intelligenti – “seppelliscono” i loro morti sotto foglie e arbusti cantando delle nenie funebri – ma anche tutti gli altri animali si sono salvati, non vi erano carcasse in giro. Nell’antichità e nel folklore non a caso gli animali erano spesso considerati divinità sacre o protettrici. Nel 1975, in base alle osservazioni sullo strano comportamento di molti animali, la popolazione di Haicheng fu evacuata dalle autorità cinesi ore prima che un terremoto magnitudo 7,3 distruggesse il 90% della città, così si salvarono 90.000 persone. Anche in Giappone il sistema è applicato con successo da secoli, soprattutto dopo il Big One dello Huaxian, che nel 1500 fece 800.000 morti.
Mentre sarebbe interessante capire che cosa e perché nei nostri cervelli civilizzati non funziona più, la scienza cerca intanto spiegazioni sul comportamento degli animali, da usare per il monitoraggio e allarme globale in tempo reale. Il geologo James Berkland della contea di Santa Clara in California è riuscito a prevedere terremoti al 75%, incluso quello di Loma Prieta nell’89, soltanto prestando attenzione al numero degli annunci sui cani smarriti – ma è stato licenziato. Ted Miller riporta che anche uccelli, pesci, molluschi, millepiedi e formiche avvertono uno scuotimento terrestre fino a una settimana prima che si manifesti. Una prima teoria esplicativa (Diego Baratono e Giovanni Ferrero, Osservatorio Meteosismico Canavese) è che gli animali sentono gli infrasuoni delle onde sismiche, fra i 2 e i 12 Hertz, oppure gli ultrasuoni, che noi non udiamo. Un’altra, che sono sensibili alle variazioni del campo magnetico terrestre che avviene attorno all’epicentro. Marsha Adams, ricercatrice a S. Francisco, ha costruito sensori (una ditta ne ha brevettato il segreto tecnico) che misurano segnali a bassa frequenza elettromagnetica tali da permetterle previsioni accurate al 90%. I segnali sono emessi dalle rocce cristalline lungo le faglie tettoniche, il cui sfregamento fa emergere in superficie il venefico radon. Tribusch (del Mit) studia sopratutto le variazioni negli assi del quarzo. Altri organismi, secondo Ulomov e Malshev, rispondono ai cambiamenti di polarità e concentrazione negli ioni dell’atmosfera, il che cambierebbe le quantità di neurotrasmettitori nel loro cervello. Ma di nuovo non mancano ipotesi sui “poteri psichici” degli animali: Sheldrake ne è un fautore, ricordando come molti animali hanno avuto inspiegabili comportamenti ore prima di un bombardamento, e persino gli umani a volte avvertono un gran cerchio alla testa che li paralizza.
There is a new case at www.gentleaction.org/cases. It is the winner of the Climate Change Challenge, sponsored by the Financial Times and Forum for the Future. Jon Bøhmer has invented a solar powered cardboard oven that can cook food and bake bread. Most importantly it can boil water to eliminate water born diseases that kill millions of children each year.
While I feel that the cardboard box oven is an interesting and useful idea I do have considerable reservations about the Youtube video which appears to be a promotional tool that glosses over many important issues.
It focusses on a woman who collects wood in a particular area where it is dangerous for a single woman to be in a forest on her own. But this cannot be true for most wooded areas. It suggests that collecting wood is something that in itself is not a desirable occupation – but it is a tradition in many areas of the world. It hints at possible physical injury from collecting wood, yet industrial accidents also occur when people erect solar panels on houses.
This may appear to be nit picking issues yet I would suggest that they all point to an over simplification of some highly complex questions of which we have only a partial understanding, yet on the other hand it is so very easy and attractive to take a political stance on such issues as being either “good” or “bad”.
However, the particular point, amongst others in this video, that I would question is that of the “carbon footprint”. It argues that by using a cardboard oven someone in a highly forested area of Africa is reducing their carbon footprint and so helping to save the planet from global warming. My agrument here is that I certaintly do not know if this is true and, moreover, I am not at all clear if a variety of experts have any idea of what are the global implications of a small community burning wood in a forested area would have on the fate of the planet.
Global warming is a serious issue and greenhouse gases – carbon dioxide and methane – are clearly the leading culprits. However in a forested area carbon dioxide is “breathed in” by trees and, with the help of sunlight, the carbon becomes part of the photosynthesis process that helps trees to grow. In other words has anyone any idea of the implications of burning small amounts of wood within a heavily wooded region? Do small communities who burn wood have a negative effect on the planet, or is the whole thing a matter of fostering an equlibrium within a particular region – something very different than flying transAtlantic in a jet or using your car when you could easily walk to the corner store?
Quite another point is the maintaining the good order of forested areas for the avoidance of forest fires – which certainly would have a significant carbon imprint. So indeed it is a useful thing to clear areas of a forest from time to time – which of course has little to do with local people collecting wood, but implies management on a larger scale.
I think the point I’m making here is that again and again we would like to be presented with a series of easy solutions, simplistic slogans and black and white choices.
The oven seems to me an excellent idea yet its implact, for me, has been subverted by what I feel is a politically biased promotional video.
