What Burning Man taught me about liberation

I recently had the opportunity to do some writing for Beyond Burning Man (a Medium publication by the Burning Man Project) on the topic of the 2020 uprisings and mutual aid efforts sprouting up around the U.S. Read the full piece on Medium.

My nine years of participation with the Burning Man community have radically shaped how I experience myself and move through the world. The playa¹ and this community have given me a taste of what personal and collective liberation can be, as well as tools to practice and move towards it daily.

First and foremost, Burning Man taught me about my own liberation — the experience of being free.I think particularly for those of us socialized into whiteness, masculinity, straightness, an experience like Burning Man can be profoundly eye-opening…

Read the rest of this post on Medium.

Is WWII the Right Metaphor for Climate Change?

Last month, I wrote a response to Bill McKibben’s recent piece in New Republic calling for a “war” on climate change. It’s an excellent piece and Bill is not the first to use this metaphor. But, I have an alternate view…

The narrative of climate change has been capturing more and more attention in the media and politics this year as we see more and more devastating weather effects and significant steps forward on our international response.

We struggle to find good metaphors for talking about it — the scale and complexity of the problem, the risk to our society and planet seem greater than challenges we have faced in the past…

Read the rest of this post on Medium.

 

Dem Convention, Climate Council and other happenings

This has been a rather hectic 5 or 6 weeks for me with running shipping logistics for our Meso Creso camp at PEX Summer Festival, visiting friends in Utah for a few days, time with family in NYC and maybe most significantly, traveling to Philadelphia for most of the Democratic National Convention. My initial plan was to go and share our petition on carbon pricing in the national platform, but of course as fate would have it things went in a slightly different direction. A couple of weeks before, I connected with a couple of delegates from California who wanted to organize a Climate and Environment Council within the Democratic National Party. Of course I had the same reaction that I’ve now seen many times since I got involved last month – “Why doesn’t this already exist??” – and rolled up my sleeves to help. I ended up taking a key organizing role with this group (as someone with the organizing skill and the time to commit in the lead-up to the convention) and it was a truly powerful and eye opening experience, although not without frustration and disappointment at a few moments as well. During the convention, we successfully brought together over 100 people: delegates, prominent activists, party leaders – even Dennis Kucinich and James Cromwell stopped by for some of the proceedings of our kickoff organizing meeting. We made progress on bringing together a widely diverse group of stakeholders, agreed on the council existing as a vehicle to help grassroots organizers be heard and have a stake in the establishment’s direction, hold leaders accountable for party platform promises and hold space for those who’s climate concerns til now had been marginalized in the party. We’re developing the structure and formal motion to enact this council over the next couple of months, and I’ll continue to be one of the key organizers and deeply involved in the heavy lifting to make this happen.
The rest of the convention was quite the experience – I was deeply moved by the level of frustration and conflict on display, and felt grief about how this was being downplayed and hidden by the party story and the mainstream media. At the same time, I was inspired by the openness and welcoming, appreciative and empowering attitude of the many grassroots organizers I connected with – this felt so fresh and real and I immediately felt kinship with these people. To the point that they welcomed me to step in and help with our disruption of a Politico event funded by the American Petroleum Institute that was pushing fossil fuel propaganda left and right. I was also deeply struck by the interconnectedness of the many groups, causes and individuals from around the country on display and working together, directly and indirectly at the convention (mostly within the progressive movement from my position on the outside of most of the formal proceedings). I showed up on the east coast less than a year ago with a clear feeling to focus on carbon pricing and a desire to learn what I could – so quickly I have felt my appreciation expanding that there is no single fight to win, no straightforward solution to the converging crises we are facing. And this experience really showed me much more profoundly how necessary all of these fights are, how important they all are regardless of whether local, state, national or international, and how deeply we must support and build upon each other. And of course my current hero Charles Eisenstein published a piece on this very subject days after the convention, which I’ve been sitting with quite a bit and highly highly recommend.  
Disrupting Politico / API Event
Disrupting API’s propaganda event hosted by Politico
And, I would be remiss not to mention my deep gratitude for my friend Roman who joined me from DC throughout the convention and provided tremendous help, insight, wit, empathy, action and a growing friendship that I’m extremely grateful for. A final cool note to round out the month – I have been thinking a lot too about how I might use my gifts here in DC more directly to work toward more unification and healing of the deep social wounds we’re facing – ones that lead to things like our inability to understand each other, increasing political polarization and the rise of national leaders where terribly low approval ratings, and ultimately to our relative paralysis in the face of crises of ecocide and climate change among others. A great opportunity for this has come up in a spot being offered to me on the Board of Directors for Catharsis on the Mall, a regional burn/activism event here in DC that I’ve been helping out some with since it was founded last year. Very excited to join that team and see how I can help shepherd it along!!  

Video from our DC Fire Collective

The past four months, I’ve had the rare privilege to work, play and dance with Revolutionary Motion, DC’s fire spinning conclave. We just finished a video of the piece we choreographed, which we’re hoping to take to Burning Man this year to perform in front of 50,000 people. I’m featured spinning poi in the third section and my contact staff in the fifth section. Needless to say, I feel very grateful and excited!! I also got to do the music for the video (we performed it without music), and I’m really happy with how it came out and for a chance to share a few of my favorite tracks. Check out the video below!

On Certainty, Complexity and the Illusion of Control

Why popular solutions often fail to address big problems like climate change, and what this says about us.

[This post was recently featured on the Medium publication How We Get To Next, about “inspiring stories about the people and places building our future.”]

Like many of my peers, I have spent much of my adult life unconsciously valuing security and certainty in my major life decisions. Believing I could set myself up to have control over what happened to me, and thus be certain of a good life. Today this belief is deeply ingrained in Western society, and difficult to avoid. A lot has changed for me lately and I’ve come to see things a little differently (more on this later). I’ve seen that this control-based approach often doesn’t work very well for me when facing the complexity of the real world.

I believe this same bias toward certainty and control is playing out today in how we tackle some of the biggest, most complex problems facing our society. From global poverty to chronic disease, education to climate change, the trend has often been to seek top-down, “command and control”-based solutions that are supposed to guarantee the results we want if only we engineer them well enough. More often than, strategies based in this mindset fail to meet expectations. We often blame human nature, not accounting for enough variables, or similar, and go back to the drawing board without examining our core assumptions.

It’s time that we let go of this obsession with control, in our own lives and in our approach to global problems. It’s time to acknowledge that no central organization or plan will ever account for all the variables, or provide a guaranteed fix to complex problems. Instead, we can acknowledge the uncertainty of the real world, the imperfection of our planning and engineering. At the central level, we can seek to provide incentives and support for a diversity of local actions that move us in the right direction, and seek to better trust, teach and understand each other so that our collective actions build and evolve towards our goals over time.

By now this probably sounds overly idealistic, woo-woo, pie in the sky, so I’m going to talk a little bit about how this plays out in practice with an issue close to my heart, climate change.

Climate change, the story so far: (A quick refresher)

  • The scientific consensus is that excessive greenhouse gas emissions from humans are changing the Earth’s climate.
  • As the Earth’s climate changes, the likelihood that very bad things will happen increases significantly (scientists predict more and worse natural disasters, massive drought, food supply collapse, rising sea levels and the sixth mass extinction).
  • The more greenhouse gas we emit, the more the climate changes and the higher the risk of these very bad things.
  • So, a lot of activist and legislative activity focuses on putting a hard, enforced and regulated limit (or cap) on greenhouse gas emissions, particularly carbon dioxide, to avoid the very bad things.

By controlling emissions at a certain level, the thinking goes, we can have control over the outcomes we see. On the surface, this regulated limit approach is a very attractive concept — we really want to avoid the very bad things. Surely any proposal that would provide certainty here is worth adopting, or at least looking hard at.

But seeking certainty about climate change through control is a trap, and one that many leaders and organizations in this space have been stuck in for many years. Why? A few reasons…

Reason #1: The real world is a lot more complex than our models, and we can’t precisely predict the level of greenhouse gases where the impact moves from “manageable” to “catastrophic”.

TemperatureUncertainty
IPCC 2013 Report Figure SPM.7(a): “Simulated time series from 1950 to 2100 for global annual mean surface temperature.” The red line is a temperature forecast for a less optimistic emissions scenario, blue is more optimistic. The lighter red and blue area represents the range of uncertainty in temperature given fixed emissions — often called “error bars” in statistics. Image credit: Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), largely considered to be the consensus authority on climate science, periodically publishes a set of reports with the latest in climate data and forecasting. The above graph from the 2013 IPCC report shows temperature forecasts for two considered scenarios of greenhouse gas emissions. For both, the range of uncertainty for possible temperature outcomes is nearly 2 degrees Celsius. This may not seem like much, but expert modelers predict that there is an astronomical difference in extreme weather outcomes between an average of +2 versus +3 degrees increase. Just getting to +2 degrees could trigger massive extinctions, coastal flooding, drought and food shortages, etc.

So even if we restricted emissions to the more optimistic scenario above, there would huge risk to our society. Thus, any perceived certainty about the outcomes through controlling emissions levels is really no certainty at all. With the number of variables and possible trigger points involved, no realistic amount of improved modeling and prediction is going to precisely tell us the real danger threshold.

Reason #2: Control is expensive, burdensome, and sets us against each other.

Kyoto_Protocol_parties
Only the countries in green currently have binding targets for the Kyoto Protocol. Image credit: Wikimedia Commons

World leaders have been working on the Kyoto Protocol (which seeks binding emissions targets) since 1992. Almost 25 years later, only a handful of countries are still tracking binding targets (in green on the map above). And why would they? Measuring, enforcing and reporting emissions through traditional means requires a large, expensive regulatory apparatus and pits government against the businesses who support them, suggesting that polluters are the “bad guys” who need to be controlled.

Corporate leaders can only view this as one more obstacle to overcome in their mandate to produce profit for shareholders. The whole thing feels set up to make us opponents, exerting our power over the Other. No wonder research suggests that, here in the United States, the Republican “climate denier” movement is largely driven by the fact that these big government regulatory solutions are anathema to many pro-business conservatives.

So why do many of our leaders and prominent activists continue to advocate for control-based solutions?

In places like Washington state we have even seen liberal, environmentalist, climate change-believing groups actively working against climate strategies that forego control in favor of market-based incentives, like the emission reducing initiative I-732. Why is it so difficult to get these solutions on the table? I believe the answer lies in the roots of our Western culture, a survival strategy that has been reinforced especially in the past hundred years:

We deeply fear uncertainty, and when faced with it we do everything in our power to assert control over our surroundings.

Our whole culture is built on this idea of controlling our lives and our destiny — from the time our ancestors first began to cultivate and store crops to control their food supply, trading a nomadic lifestyle for one that was seemingly less exposed to the uncertainty of shifting seasons and natural disasters. Today, we see the same trend in older generations’ desires for stable jobs and marriages above most other priorities — a hedge against uncertainty.

The control-based structure of most corporations follows from the same principles, established during the Industrial Revolution. This reaches its logical end with the corporate culture of rigid, fixed office hours and dress code, valuing the boss’s perception of control more than the overwhelming evidence that this practice is actively counterproductive.

This really isn’t helping anyone. Image credit: Boycott Workfare // CC BY-NC-SA 3.0

Because the thing is, in most cases beyond trivial complexity, this sort of “control” is an illusion that perhaps makes us feel safer but ultimately makes us less resilient to the unpredictable happenings of real life.

This point was made really clearly in my own life last year when a major, unexpected loss suddenly shattered a multi-year life, career and relationship plan that I had, forcing me nearly back to square one. These moments in our lives drive home the fact that no amount of planning or maneuvering can ultimately determine the direction of our lives, and the same is true for our collective decisions and our planet. Catastrophe can strike at any time. For myself, I am focusing a lot more now on flexibility and resilience now rather than moving towards a specific plan in my own life.

Bending-Tree
We’ve got to stay flexible. Like this tree. Or Confucius. Or something. Image credit: Zsoldos Szabolcs // CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

So what should we do going forward?

This flexible, open approach can be used for tackling thorny problems that arise in our own lives as well as complex global issues like climate change. We can acknowledge uncertainty as our understanding of what is possible changes over time. Trust, enabling, and thoughtful incentives for local action will get us much further than trying to control from the top, even though they provide no “guarantee” about the eventual outcome. This is our best hope for a bright future.

This is as true at the macro level as it is in our individual lives. In terms of central climate change policy, it suggests our best approach is to provide economic incentives, support and collaboration to encourage everyone in the direction towards a better, cleaner world. We see this shift away from “command and control” to some extent already, both at the international and local levels.

Internationally, the COP21 Paris Agreements last November (generally considered very successful) came through a similar strategy: give each country autonomy to select their own emissions targets, based on trust and common interest, and flexible to evolving over time as technology and our understanding continue to progress.

Meanwhile, in the United States, many high profile folks are advocating for a price on carbon (and increased investment in clean energy technology). These strategies forego expensive regulated control in favor of simpler, more transparent economic incentives and support to encourage action, innovation, and collaboration.

What do you think? Is this a real connection I’m seeing between the individual and the macro, or am I just projecting from my own life? Would love to continue the discussion in the comments. Thanks for reading!