​​"Round One" Topics and Discussion
​​"Weaving the New Economy and Community Resilience Movements" produced by the Post Carbon Institute and the ​+Conversation Collaborative,​ in collaboration with the New Economy Coalition and the CommonBound 2014 conference.
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​​+Participants on the 9/18 call ​proposed two topics to begin our dialogue, and a third was added for online discussion yesterday. See below for notes from the discussion so far, and to add additional thoughts on these topics. 
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​​​+Round Two starts Monday​​+ on this pad​--feel free to post topics there now as well.
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​​Use the Index in the right-hand margin for easy navigation on this rather long pad.  Note: you must sign into hackpad to edit this page, using either Facebook, Google, or an email and password you set up. More on how to use hackpad here.
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​Building a Movement Proportional to the Challenge We Face 

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​Initiator: Earl
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​​Topic description 
​​We are faced w/ a collapsing civilization. The rapidity and the depth of the collapse is uncertain. The magnitude and rapidity of worsening environmental situation is uncertain. The current direction of civilization has a higher confidence level.
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​​9/18 Call Notes 
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​​Earl, Marissa & Ebo ebothorbas@gmail.com
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​​What attracted you to this topic - how do we build a movement that is proportional to the challenge we're facing?
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​​Ebo: facing a systemic problem which is essential to address very seriously
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​​Marissa: Movement bldg, diff btwn this conv and other conversation; centralized movement top down vs. bottom up; not replicate the same problems
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​​Earl: env collapse is coming, but "chicken little" approach turns people off. Much greater awareness in "sacrifice zones" where people are really suffering from the impacts of our fossil-fuel based economy. Connections between racism, colonialism, public health, ecocide, and our economy. Separate movements are finally coming together. "Disruption" movie about PCM preparation shows more age, ethnic, gender diversity. 
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​​Confident we'll build a diverse movement, not confident we'll do it fast enough. 
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​​Our Power Conference in Richmond - made up primarily of communities that are already suffering, mostly people of color. Dialogue going between Richmond, Detroit, Black Mesa, etc. Economic and political injustice are increasing.
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​​Ebo: no mechanism or organization respecting the massive style of shift necessary. We're failing to organize the conversation. Combination of 350, PCI, independent people like Chris Hedges, etc. How can we organize for genuine shift? No one capable of financing the shift necessary, and lack of political leadership.
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​​Earl: Richmond Progressive Alliance - we feel betrayed by Democrats & Republicans, and are having some leverage. 
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​​Re financing: Tom Steyer & others are investing in a clean future, electing candidates who are ready to address climate change.
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​​M: Grief, being good ally. Anti-oppression trng. 
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​​Earl: There is a level of lack of awareness or willingness to take on environmental justice especially  among some UU congregations still somewhat isolated from environmental degradation. It helps doing grief work, particularly with boomer generation because we're leaving our children a horror, and need to accept that responsibility to work through the guilt.
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​​To be a good ally - you must be present, and go with a listening ear.
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​​White folks in the Civil Rights movement felt alienated by black power. When I speak to a congregation I tell them things have changed. We're all in the same boat, and it's going down. Go into this on basis of solidarity and mutuality, not charity. Have to go out into other communities.
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​​Marissa: What about empowering young people?
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​​Ebo: to inspire leadership, we need to have a coherent agenda & goals. 
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​​Earl: Through my work with 350BA & other Bay Area orgs, am working with many well-educated young adults and I would be a fool not to defer to them. My two daughters are to some degree succeeding and to some degree struggling. Because some orgs pay so poorly, there is a huge class issue in terms of who can participate in the movement. Working class white folks are often part of sacrifice zones too.
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​​As part of messaging committee for Our Power, working with young people and with people from frontline communities, I stepped back far enough that I no longer had a seat at the table. It's a balance to be an ally, listen well, and still be heard.
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​​We need to be able to meld talent, energy and concerns of young people with the experience and wisdom of elders.
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​​How do we educate both younger adults and older adults?
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​Online Discussion
​​Share further thoughts on this topic. All are welcome, whether you were part of this group on 9/18 or not.
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​One, Two, or Many Movements? 

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​Initiator: Ken 
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​​Topic description 
  • ​​Is there just one movement, or many? Are the community resilience and new economy movements completely aligned? 
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​​9/18 Call Notes 
​​Rachel: The movement is completely fragmented, and there are too many conversations but not enough between groups. Difficult to build momentum and get traction. Too many choices: locally, nationally, internationally. Information overload. Clutter. Too much to focus on: climate change, econ justice, sustainable agriculture, etc. Difficult to connect to and build allegiance.
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  • ​​Bruce Schuman (posted after the call):  Hi, just wanted to comment on Rachel's observations.  I think her description is exactly right, and what is needed is a strategy that 1) understands this situation, and 2) sees why it is happening; 3) has a vision for how all these various pieces and "fragments" could come together -- how they could be an effective part of one whole -- and then 4) has an activist outreach/coalescence kind of strategy, that can find hundreds or thousands of groups, each one with a "piece of the puzzle" (maybe highly overlapping with others, in who-knows-how-many different ways) -- and can attract them into "collaborative resonance".  
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  • ​​I personally think we need to see all of this, then develop a collaborative outreach that can contact groups and organizations one at a time, around their own skills and passions, and build bridges into a common multi-faceted framework that addresses it all.  I've been writing on this subject lately, and this link is a start on a design that could support something like this: 
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  • ​​The activist piece of this approach could work with an internet strategy as simple as "keywords" ("tags"), and build affinity between groups and individuals, 1) without requiring allegiance to a detailed central agenda; 2) while supporting co-creativity and "diversity" (disagreements on some issues).  The movement cannot be monolithic -- it is much too complex, embracing a huge array of controversial issues.  No two individuals or groups are going to see all the answers the same way.  The general solution has to be 1) we want to work together; 2) we realize we will disagree on particulars; 3) we see this diversity as a strength; 4) we are all here to listen and learn -- and in that spirit, 5) become a transformative influence.
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​​Eleni: Are some interconnectivities happening, but very poorly funded because main strands are environmental and social justice. funders in own silos. hard to get funding to retreats to bring leaders from all the dif't sections together. Developing strategies to work together on dift parts of the system, having a unified voice, etc. is needed, and much easier said than done.
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​​Rachel: do we know how to cultivate the clientele to build the movement? Each one is so busy focusing on their priorities of the moment. And there are too many distractions.So we don't know the pressure points to put our resources into
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​​Ken: Something tangible to do is one way to break through this. the community resilience mov't. offers that. Rooted in a place, with relationships.
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​​Ben: So much going on. But we may not have figured out how to create this level of systemic change. The mainstream says "There Is No Alternative." Are we creating a movement, or just creating a narrative about a movement that we hope will emerge? Here are some further thoughts on this subject: ​+Musings on the Butterfly Metaphor​
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​​Mira: Just trying to survive. Resources go into small organizations, and difficult to collaborate. Is it helpful to have micro organizations? Gives us autonomy to experiment, but 50% or more of energy goes into just running an organization. A lot of time spent trying to differentiate, rather than collaborate.
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​​Ken: Trying to live with one foot in the present while the other strides into the future. New economies are (for now) dependent on the old economy.
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​​Mira: Organizers/activists are deciding to make a huge sacrifice, especially hard for low-income folks to do this. 
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​​Ben: is it helpful to think of one Movement, so that whatever piece of it you are engaged in, you can see that as supporting everything else as well (since it's all interconnected)?
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​​Flequer: Difficult to hire people for movement when you have to pay low wages. Coops have embraced social issues, and others. For example, farm has brought people from food movement, immigration activists, social justice people. Coops build relationships. For example, launched energy efficiency, brought into contact with Electrician and HVAC unions. Religious leaders. Environmentalists. Social justice. All have a stake in making worker coops successful. Meeting weekly or biweekly to build trust, relationships.
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​​Rachel: Can think about one issue, but as you work specifically, you can broaden your focus and also build community and move from (and include) one thing and another. What brings people together is relationships and commitments, not ideology.
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​​Ken: Since relationships underpin any effort to build a local economy, we expected that this would be a valuable piece that the community resilience movement would bring into focus.
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​​Ken: Another tension was around both the local focus and the need for things to scale. Are others coming up against this too?  I.e. the old model is to return the initial investment by growing exponentially and moving beyond it's local roots.
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​​Flequer: My finance training taught that profit is all we should focus on as managers. That never clicked with me. Coops have been successful in bringing the social and environmental components into the business model. 10% of our profit has to be used to incubate more coops too. and our investors are not expecting more than 1-2% returns, or even less. That's limiting though, as too many investors want higher returns and only care about profit.
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​​Fred: re the traditional model of expansion, the world is faced with resource constraints, so inevitably we need to relocalize. The markets will be forced to do that.
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​​Mira: Recycling resources within community, and also resourcing the movement: public banking seems pretty mission critical, if difficult to get going. Need for access to resources. Other fulcrum points include: education, land, currency. Not clear they have a specific goal: what provides a sense of urgency?
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​Online Discussion
​​Share further thoughts on this topic. All are welcome, whether you were part of this group on 9/18 or not.
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  • ​​Bruce Schuman posted a comment above (indented), in response to Rachel
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​Harvest for 9/18 Call

​​Notes from final full group conversation:
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​​Hope based on the number of people waking up, and the interconnections between environmental and social justice and economic issues. Point to the Big Picture, and the interests who want to keep it that way, and the complicity of many in that effort.
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​​The importance of tangible work to do. E.g. cooperative food enterprise has brought people together across differences and silos. Ditto community energy.
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​​Emerging understanding of the shared goals and interests of environment and social justice movements, and the value of working together.
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​​We're talking about people when we're talking about building a movement. Are people being attracted by the concepts, or the need, or the economics, or the image? Do they want to be labeled as part of a movement? Do they want to be included? Are the moved by ideology/theory? Do they need to "fit"?
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​​Ben: For every one of us on this call, there are millions of others engaged in this work. We're trying to put labels on this make it easier to see this diversity as a coherent movement, and "connect more of the movement to itself." Thanks to all for representing your slice of that movement.
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​Post Call Harvest Reflections
​​What might be taking shape here beneath all the various individual comments? What are we missing? What's the next level of thinking we might address?
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​Limits to Growth

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​Initiator: Ben Roberts
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​​Topic description 
​​I am moved by Paul Krugman's column today, "Errors and Emissions: Could Fighting Global Warming Be Cheap and Free?", to open and online discussion on the subject of economic growth. As he trumpets the good news that there are powerful economic dividends associated with a rapid shift to renewable energy, Krugman also takes a swipe at those (including PCI specifically!) who argue that growth itself must give way as an economic goal.
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​​We discussed this in ​+section 3.1 of our report​ as well, both as an issue in itself and as one that interacts in challenging ways with the social justice goals of the movement.  It also came up in the comments on our report on the PCI website, in the form of ​+this exchange​. And PCI has addressed this question frequently, most notably Richard Heinberg's book The End of Growth, and the report PCI Executive Director Asher Miller co-authored with Transition Movement Founder Rob Hopkins on Climate After Growth. An excerpt from the latter:
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  • ​​Perhaps it seems too radical to publicly challenge the economic growth paradigm. It may be that many environmental advocacy organizations understandably make the strategic decision not to do so. But we believe that the environmental community must at least internally name the elephant in the room and adjust its strategies and programs based on an understanding of the “new normals” [i.e. the end of the era of cheap fossil fuels, stable climate, and economic growth "as we have known it"]. (p.20)
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​​Online Discussion 
  • ​​Do we need greater consensus on the degree to which growth can be sustainable or is part of the "old economy" and must give way to a steady state (and perhaps "degrowth" as well)?
  • ​​Krugman dismisses the limits to growth argument as a "marginal position even on the Left." How is this best addressed given the consensus within the New Economy movement on the need for a narrative that resonates with the mainstream?
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​​What are your thoughts?
​​Ken White: Thanks, Ben, for raising this issue, which came up in some conversations around this report, although not on 9/18. Indeed, this is one of the biggest (if not the biggest) elephants in the room. We're so accustomed to looking to GDP and the S&P 500 as measures of progress that we have learned to couch even activities meant to address "market failures" (like almost all most nonprofit work) as boosting economic growth.
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​​Yet, we face a future where not only will we *want* to get past GDP as a the measure of all things, but we will very likely *have* to accept that compounding economic growth is no longer an option. It simply won't be possible.
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​​If that's the probable future, then the choices we make today to prepare for that future can help us thrive. Can we choose to stop "selling" the new economies as engines of growth? Good lives, good livelihoods--sure. But perhaps we need to adjust our rhetoric to match reality.
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​​Rev. Earl: Tho I know this may be sacrilege here (hey, I'm a UU; we do heresy),  I'm not sure that "growth" is the sword on which we should fall. While I agree that we have become a cancer on Mother Earth, a focus on health and jobs is the honey that may build a movement. Limits to growth is vinegar in this economy. A path to healthy growth (using new measurements of growth) and jobs will help us build a movement.
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​​I parallel it to focusing on women's education and power rather than a direct assault on birth rates. 
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  • ​​Ben (9/20): Great points, Ken and Earl!  Perhaps as with "freedom," we need to take back the word "growth," from those who have managed to associate it with a toxic paradigm. Many New Economy/Community Resilience activists, including our ​+weaving interviewee Laura Musikanski​, are working on moving us beyond GDP as a key leverage point for the movement. It does seem to me that there are lots of ways we can "grow" while actually decreasing our net carbon and resource extraction impacts. And that certainly includes the most important element of our economy that is usually associated with "growth:" providing a means for everyone who wants it to find meaningful work and to earn a decent living.
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​​Rev. Earl: Ben, Thanks for the thoughtful reply. I like to go out on limbs and am grateful when they aren't sawed off b/h me. :)
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​​Thanks also for the interview w/ Laura. Great resource.
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​​When I started my environmental ministry five years ago, I first did a lot of reading and then built a brain trust of scientists and engineers. Once I was reasonably confident of the facts and likely outcomes, I went into a "chicken little" phase, amazed that others did not share my alarm even after I informed them of the danger.
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​​After many failures, I drew on my backgrounds in psych, advertising, and ministry to find the "sugar" to make the medicine go down. Your idea to recapture the word "growth" is an excellent one.
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  • ​​Thanks, Earl--I'm with you! Given the bad rap sugar is getting these days though, we might need a different metaphor!  (Ben)
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  • ​​Ken: Earl, Ben, I agree that scaring the pants off people in an effort to get them to "wake up" will likely result in failure and misery. And I know you're both thoughtful enough to know that the converse is true: assuming people "can't handle the truth" can quickly devolve into paternalism and the kind of "bait and switch" that leads to strong reactions.
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  • ​​Personally, I'm inspired by those who live "as if" the future had already arrived, and trust that their example will be attractive to others, who will see that a "post-growth" life just might be "net" better than today's "gross" society (mangling a metaphor that Richard Heinberg wielded recently ).
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​​More thoughts on the topic of "Limits to Growth?" 
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​​I just came across a lovely blog post by Kimberlyn David entitled "What kind of growth?" on the Metta Center for Nonviolence's website (see info about ​+their Roadmap initiative under our Resource compilation here​). An excerpt:
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  • ​​Each of us should be able to decide for ourselves what equals hard work and whether “hard” work is important. When I’ve struggled for hours, maybe days, over a piece of writing and then finally bust through the confusion? That’s hard work, and I find it important. I’ve worked hard to keep my cool when receiving anger or being the subject of unjust treatment. Definitely important. Ditto on realizing that my self-worth isn’t tethered to what I have or don’t have materially.
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  • ​​Which brings me back to the question of growth. My heart sinks at the mentions of stale economic “solutions”—expanding the middle class and job creation, both of which focus on economic growth, as if that’s the only growth that matters or is even wanted.
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  • ​​What about the growth of human potential and freedom? Or the growth of forests? Why not measure growth by how well we clean up our pollution and make peace with other living beings on this beautiful planet?...
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  • ​​There’s a lot of unnecessary suffering in the world, and much of it revolves around economic religiosity. We are the creators of economic religion, and we can eliminate our faith in it at any time—the world won’t end. And no one will burn us at the stake for saying so.
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