Phoenix Conversations Networking Call #4 February 19, 2008

 

Participants: 

 

Sue Supriano, Eugene, Oregon

Since we last talked, we have started forming a local coalition in our area, around climate change and other survival issues. 44 people came to the initial meeting, which is a lot of people for Eugene. Many represented organizations, while others were attending as interested individuals – some new, some long-time activists in the community.

We eventually realized we needed a longer meeting, to get to know each other better and explore our common goals. So a week ago, we had a longer retreat, with a facilitator (Tree Bressen), and it went well. It’s challenging to build a movement of people who are awake… the word sustainability gets overused, greenwashing is a problem, people who live in the city talk about being sustainable, and yet still vote for more highways!

I’ve also been shaken recently by hearing a talk by Mary Wood, who is a professor of law at the University of Oregon. It was sobering to hear her perspective on how fast climate change is moving. She states we have two years to reverse things; we could really change the way we live and work together, if we have the will to do so. This means a national effort, as well as a huge voluntary change in our lifestyles.
 

Patrick Dufour, Western Massachusetts

I’ve been working on being active locally, but it can be complicated to figure out where to start. My own interest is in linking a number of movements.  I’m particularly interested in the movement for Dialogue and Deliberation. For me, it connects with the concept of collaborative learning. I feel that a lot of people are trying to come with solutions for the issues, as if it was possible to do so individually– but I think solutions only come from much broader conversations, with many people participating in them.
  

Rex Greene, Freemont, California

Changing the way things are going is an uphill battle. The American Centrist Party is growing dialogue groups at local level. At the same time, I feel that we need a national effort, which is why I’m interested in growing a party. It will take a lot of work however to do so. I’m interested in hearing from others.

We have 525 members in our official party, which was formed 4 years ago. We’re looking for people to expand our base. We want to address local issues and propose candidates in local elections. We need to work on developing huge networks of groups that are all interested in changing the way things happen.

Three books that have been particularly influential in my understanding of where we are and where we need to go, are “Escaping the Matrix” by Richard Moore, “The Great Turning” by David Korten, and “Truth or Dare”, by Starhawk.
 

Jennifer Atlee

 (Jennifer will be filling in her section later.)
  

Susan Cannon, Seattle, Washington
 
I began working actively in this area in the mid 90’s, when I was doing research (generative interviews) on “cultural creatives”, looking at the ideas about the future that these people held. I found that in the interviews, people got very creative: it was almost like they were sensing into the future. One very common theme that emerged, is that individuals often felt that we would go through some kind of a societal shock or breakdown, as part of the process of creating a more positive future. While this feeling was very common, each person thought that they were the only ones who felt that way.

When I tried to continue this work, I ran into a lot of resistance. People didn’t want to hear it; it sounded too “negative”, and it didn’t match the mainstream views of the future. This was before 9/11, and also before the tech bubble burst. Years later, I met Peggy Holman and Tom Atlee. They were focusing on idea of collective conversation, and I wanted to follow that thread. Then, in the last 6 months, Tom and I started noticing that these interlocked trends that we’ve been tracking for years, seem to be accelerating in a downward direction, much faster than they were before. We became curious if others were noticing this also, and we discovered that there were a lot of “water-cooler” conversations about this, although it was not being talked about publicly.
  

Abigail Grafton, Berkely, California

I have been a psychotherapist for 30 years. After 9/11, I became fascinated by the work of Joanna Macy. In the early 80s, she pioneered a group process to help people move through despair and into empowerment around nuclear issues. I feel this is something that is very much needed right now, as people seem to be feeling overwhelmed by all of these issues. Therefore, I’m taking a course with Joanna Macy, to learn more about doing this work.

My other project is a Web startup, focused on empowerment and the healing arts. There are many people with talent and training in the healing arts, who don’t know how to transform what they do into a business. The website is Healingartssuccess.com. These two efforts I am involved in, aren’t so dissimilar, as in both of them the focus is empowerment. I’ve been reading Tom Atlee on web for many years, and I would like to have contact with others with similar interests and concerns.
  

Rosa Zubizarreta, Western Massachusetts
 
My initial background was in bilingual education and then in education reform, so I also feel strongly about the parallels between dialogue & deliberation on the one hand, and collaborative learning on the other. I connected with Tom Atlee particularly around his work on Y2K as an opportunity for community empowerment and societal transformation. I have always resonated deeply with the sense of discontinuity and potential crisis about the future that Susan was talking about. This particular “potential crisis” had a certain beauty to it, as there was no “enemy”, just a computer glitch. At the same time, it was an opportunity for many of us to become aware of the major issue of what it would take, to make our way of life sustainable, and how interdependent we have all become.

Y2K turned out to be a minor blip, but in process, I met some amazing people, and experienced how can we move through our sense of hopelessness and overwhelm, into a more empowered place of commitment to strengthening our communities. Afterward, I returned to school for a degree in organization development, became involved in the dialogue and deliberation movement, and worked on helping Tom get his book out.

At the same time, many of the global issues that have come up in the early 21st century -- the threat of terrorism, the growing realization of global warming, peak oil, etc. etc. -- all address the sustainability of our way of life, and are eerily similar in some ways to what we were looking at before the turn of the century with the potential computer crisis. So in a way, that earlier Y2K work has felt like a “drill” for all of these other issues that keep coming up: an example or prototype of how we might respond in constructive and positive ways to big, scary societal issues.  I’ve been looking to see where the next place I want to contribute is, and when the call for Phoenix Conversations came out, it was clear to me that I wanted to support this work.  

Themes from the conversation

How can we talk about these issues, in a way that people can respond to?

1. When we talk about “climate change”, it can feel more overwhelming to people, like there is little they can do about it. It may be helpful to reframe it, as “level of consumption” – that is something that people can do something about.

Emphasizing the practical things people can do, can help people feel more hopeful…

2. There are a lot of scary things that are happening right now… this is not all about some future problems. Crops are failing, islands are melting, yet we are still putting lots of carbon in the air. One of the hopeful things, is that some people in our area have been working on the issue of food security, how to grow more food locally.

Some of us get impatient with “just talk”… others of us DON’T want to talk about it at all…

3. There is a sense of urgency, that we don’t have a lot of time… sometimes a lot of frustration with talking about the issues, because it feels like we need so much more than talk; at the same time, it’s also important to have spaces where we CAN talk about these things, as one of the things that is most scary, is the extent that people DON’T want to talk about stuff.

4. There is a reoccurring thread in these conversations, of how to address the practical survival issues, and at the same time, how to address people’s emotional responses that keep them from even beginning to address the issues of survival.

5. “Just facts” doesn’t work… you can put all facts in world in front of people and it doesn’t move them – they could say “gosh you’re right”, and still not do anything.

6. The people who would do the despair and empowerment work, are the ones who are already somewhat awake. “Fear of Fear” is a hard issue to crack. One has to be somewhat conscious already, to want to deal with it.

The importance of story and vision in helping people move through fear…

7. Paul Ray, on another of these calls, mentioned his work in co-hosting workshops on these themes. They have learned about the importance of story and vision: by offering people a narrative thread, that includes a sense of something positive emerging on the  other side of these crises, that creates a sense of meaning that allows people to be less afraid of the crises.

& the message of inclusion: everyone has something to contribute…

8. Another thing that Paul Ray has found, is the importance of letting people know that everyone’s unique contributions are necessary. Some people’s gifts may be in encouraging others, or handling administrative details, or something else. Not everyone is going to be involved in directly addressing survival issues like food or water.

9. Another important need is to change people’s reference groups. We’re mind-managed by mass media. They’re distracting people from what’s important, with entertainment. We need to invite people into groups where they can talk with others, about what is really going on.

How did we get here in the first place?

10. One way of understanding how we got to where we are today, is to look at the shift from a hunting-gathering culture to an agricutural culture, 3000-4000 yrs before the written word. We can trace the development of hierarchy and patriarchial values to this transition.

11. Another aspect to understanding our present system has to do with looking at the evolution of the banking system. In the 1600’s, systems were invented to loan money to governments, and power began to shift to the investment bankers.

Conspiracy theories can sometimes stir up miscommunication (at best), prejudice and scapegoating (at worst)….

12. When we talk about the role of banking in our world situation, and about “small groups that are in power and control the whole world”, there are lots of opportunities for stereotypes, prejudice, and misunderstanding about the role of Jewish people that can come up. And, we experienced some of these difficulties on this call.

13. It can be helpful to speak from our own experience, rather than to present our historical theories, as it can prevent misunderstanding and help us find more common ground. 

14. One of the “negative images of the future” that some of us hold, is that anti-Semitism will crop up more and more. As things get more difficult, and people feel more helpless and powerless, they often want somebody to blame, and the tendency to scapegoat grows.
This is also connected with the rise in fundamentalism.

AND, we can’t just “avoid” them, either!

15. If we are going to talk about how to build a positive future together, we also need to be aware that there are many of us who hold “conspiracy theories” about how we have gotten to our present situation.

The role of shadow work in transformation... dealing with the scary stuff, in empowering ways…

16. This may be part of the transformational process, that there IS often a shadow side to it. For example, many of us are feeling very drawn to the transformational power of the Obama campaign. At the same time, that transformational potential is also bringing up a lot of fear in some of us. There are some people who feel terrified, for example, that if a black man were to win presidency, it would set of a race war, between the skin-heads and “white power” advocates on the one hand, and disaffected youth of color in urban areas, in another.

17. It may be that there are aspects of our world of unequal power that shouldn’t be ignored because they have significant repercussions. On one side, whether or not we are conspiracy minded, those with substantial political/military/monetary power can have a major impact for good or ill (School of the America’s, etc). On the other side, powerlessness and oppression can breed fundamentalism and hatred. Working on community empowerment and greater equality can help us move beyond these traps.

18. On a personal level, we don’t get anywhere without doing shadow work. This may be true on a collective level as well, that stuff has to come up and be made conscious and worked through.

 

and, in closing, a long-term evolutionary perspective.... 

19. It may be that a thousand years from now, we’ll look back at this time… WW1, WWII and what we are going through these days -- as one big stage in the evolution of humanity, where the theme was learning to overcome ethnocentric hatred and working it out, in order to evolve a more sustainable way of living together on this planet....