3-6-2015
Involvement in alternative systems creation seems to pertain to your mentioning of someone having a process-oriented personality.
Process matters, in terms of seeing to it that means are congruent with ends. King talked about that a lot. For me, regarding a connection with nature, process is often a factor.
For example, I am late for or totally miss some gatherings because it takes a while to bike from one part of the city to another, and because I occasionally allow people to talk my ear off and keep me from going on my way.
For me, paying attention to process is a matter of integrity. It’s sometimes a matter of what tempo one allows in one’s day-to-day life. Being purposeful and exuberant is good, but racing from one place or appointment to the next seems to result in me being less attuned to nature and less sensitive toward the feelings of others.
‘Spirituality’ for me isn’t based in a belief in incorporeal being, but instead is based in a holistic sense of purpose. I loose that sense of totality if I rush around with the degree of busyness that many within the middle and upper middle classes seem to regard as necessary for social status.
As for results, tangibility matters. For example, I like telling people my gardening peers and I provided about 500 lbs of fresh tomatoes to local food pantries last summer and fall and helped grow hundreds more pounds of produce that people in low income neighborhoods harvested as they got involved, adding their own labor to the mix.
I’m trying to cooperate with your conversation framework regarding results, not brag, when I say I’ve saved thousands of gallons of treated water via my household conservation efforts.
I could similarly quantify the results of several years of car-free transport, in terms of less air pollution, less carbon emissions, and less petroleum usage. Further still, I could generally quantify my electricity usage, which according to the guy who owns the house I rent, has at times been about 1/8 of what other tenants use.
Yet, somehow, those aspects of my daily seem to me to be essentially a matter of process, where I aim to make my means congruent with my goals.
This is something I’m thinking about now, in terms of trips I might take for pedal cabbing or activist purposes. For example, it might make more sense to use less fossil fuels and organize a local version of a national protest instead of flying on a plane or driving hundreds of miles for an out-of-town gathering, (though not in all cases).
As for how focusing more on process and values than on results pertains to pedal cabbing, which is the main way I get money, I seem to do best when I don’t work toward a dollar amount.
As for you suggesting I imagine what my ideal world would be like, thanks. I think it’s a good thought experiment, even though or especially because I’m more values and process oriented.
But as an example as what I see as a flaw of being too results-focused, one of my vegan peers has a timeline. She’ll say things such as “by 2030 or 2050 at the latest, we’ll be looking at pretty much an all or mostly vegan world.”
Sorry if I’m taking this discussion about values on a tangent that you didn’t intend, but I don’t relate to setting goals in that way, nor to how some eco-minded folk have made predictions with specific timelines that haven’t come true, such as Paul Ehrlich predicating in the late 60s that there would be mass starvation in the mid 1980s.
Some of the peak oil writers have made predictions according to a timeline, and futurists do that too. Opposite of the gloom-and-doom are the techno-triumphalists such as AI scientist and writer Ray Kurzweil. He likes to predict according to a timeline. He may be brilliant in various ways, but his usage of timelines seems a flaw in his arguments. Am I on a tangent. Sorry, if so, but I associate timelines with being results-oriented. Perhaps I’m mistaken about that association.
But a bit more about timelines : city, state, and the federal government are often proclaiming such and such a goal will be achieved by such and such a date, and many of those target dates come and go without the goals being achieved. So the results-orientation of the timelines are good, even though organizations and individuals often don’t meet them ? If so, that reminds me of the theological idea that God’s standards for human beings are unrealistic, so as to show us that we can’t meet them, and thereby humble us. 😉
Somehow the theme of comparing the extent to which we’re focused on values or process or results reminds me of the two main categories of efforts to change the world : resistance and the creation of alternative systems.
When I think of the latter, hands-on pursuits come to mind. An online forum that’s exceptionally useful for that is permies.com.
One hands-on aspect I’ve mentioned already is community gardening. We started setting up our grow lights for germinating seeds last night. As for my greenhouse, I’m still researching designs. Repurposing hundreds of plastic soft drink bottles for the walls intrigues.
As for simpler pursuits, I’ve found making kraut to be cheap and easy. Its beneficial bacteria seems to curb my appetite. Another endeavor is making kombucha. A friend gave me a jar of her first batch. Her success motivates me to try making some.
I won’t delude myself into thinking that community gardening and organic farming will solve every problem, and I’m aware that the local and organic food movements can, if we’re not careful, slide into a sort of nostalgia that can be insular and irresponsibly apolitical, even xenophobic, racist, or classist.
But having noted that need for caution, it’s also useful to note that people involved in social movements—such as Gandhi, King, Black Panthers, and so on—have paid attention to the importance of people working together to address one another’s practical needs, such as the need for food or shelter. That’s the good news. Nearly everyone can find some way to contribute to the project of working to create a better world.
I will try to end for now by saying resistance and the creation of alternative systems go together. All that seems to require a combination of being focused on process, values, and results. Some personality types may tend more toward one or another, but each person ought to include all three, at least to some extent.
———-2-20-2015
“When you say ‘organizing’ and ‘discourse’ and ‘cross-pollination,’ what result are you wanting?”
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