|
Global Teach In 25 April 2012: Bruce Nixon - YouTube | |
www.youtube.com/watch?v=AF-L-uy_beg2012년 6월 3일 - 8분 - 업로더: globalteachin Global Teach In 25 April 2012: Bruce Nixon ... My new book - "A better world is possible" is for people |
Introduction
Another world is possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.
Arundhati Roy
A period of extraordinary change I began writing this book eighteen months ago. It has been a period of
extraordinary change. George Bush Jnr. has gone, replaced by Barack Obama. The global economy collapsed.
Warnings about climate change and the threats to all life on the planet have grown louder. Public awareness
has grown, though not enough. Politicians, or most of them, still fail to take the necessary actions to avoid
global environmental catastrophe. So do most of us ordinary citizens. And now, in the UK, citizens voted for
a hung parliament, New Labour has gone and we have a Lib Dem Conservative coalition government
promising new politics and fresh ideas.
Many people in UK and the rest of the world are angry about what has happened to them as a result of the
financial crisis – recession, poorer chances of employment , lost livelihoods and homes, diminished savings
and pensions, indebtedness and the constant feelings of insecurity. This is alongside the trillions given to
banks by taxpayers, the blatant greed that caused the crisis and continuing excessive pay and bonuses.
Worldwide poverty, hunger, disease, injustice and inequality continue, whilst pledges given by rich nations
remain unfulfilled.
What has been happening over past decades is an outrage. We need to feel it. Yet we have allowed it.
Change does not come about from within a system – it comes from outside, namely us.
The two key arguments of this book are:
The whole global system has to be transformed to serve ordinary people everywhere.
We, ordinary people, need to turn our anger into effective action to bring about positive change.
I shall set out clearly how the system works, what the key issues are, what needs to be done and what
ordinary people can do to bring about this transformation.
It is clear that we could be at the dawn of an exciting New Green Industrial Revolution – if enough of us take
the necessary steps. It could bring enormous benefits, if we grasp the possibilities.
We face the greatest threat to human life in known history. We’ll look back on the past century and wonder
how we could have been so stupid. We could be at the beginning of a new age in which we cherish the
earth’s resources and diversity, an age of sustainability, fairness, economic justice and peace - an age of less greed, selfishness and more wellbeing. An age in which nations and their leaders, instead of grabbing the Earth’s resources, threatening each other, and murdering each other’s and their own citizens, respect their differences, focus on common ground, common values, collaborate, live in peace and work together to save the human species and all life.
We could be on the threshold of time when, at last, we realise that we are all inter-dependent and part of a
miraculous, beautiful and interconnected web of life. In that way, we’ll save ourselves, just in time, from the
potential disasters of climate change and nuclear obliteration.
It is our choice. It won’t just happen. Some things do just happen but not this. We certainly cannot leave it to
politicians. It depends on what we all do, not waiting for some great leader of fantasy land, but every one of
us, 6.7bn people, using our power to create a far better world. We cannot afford to indulge in despair or
cynicism and pretend we are powerless. We are not. We have a unique opportunity to transform our world
for the better, in a way in which everyone can participate. Everyone is needed to play their unique part.
The purpose of the book is to help create the mass movement needed to prevent catastrophic climate
change, save our planet earth, create a sustainable and just global economic system and put an end to war.
This book is about how we can do use our “people power” to change things for the better. But if we want to
save ourselves and future generations from disaster, and put effective pressure on government, we need to
see the system clearly and target total system change. That is the message of this book. To be able to use
your people power, you need to be well-informed. This book is full of information – you may need to choose
from the contents what you most need or want to read.
Part One – Making sense of the situation we are in. If we want to change things for the better, we first
need to understand the underlying system. We shall not succeed in bringing about transformation if we are
system blind. The starting point is accepting what is. In this part, I hope to open eyes to the situation we face
and describe the system that has failed to resolve our biggest problems and has created a crisis. I aim to help
you make sense of the system, how it works, its consequences – good and bad - and the underlying issues. I
express my views; I know there are many others. I hope this will help you form yours.
It is a convenient myth that the issues are too complicated for the average person to understand. It is vitally
necessary to understand this increasingly complex, interconnected living system which is constantly
changing. Our understanding of the miracle of life will always be incomplete. There will be fresh insights
every day. There can be no certainties. Out of control politicians with big ideas are dangerous. Margaret
Thatcher’s “There is no alternative” (TINA) is a dangerous argument. Apparent solutions will bring
unexpected consequences as they always have - hence, the importance of applying the precautionary
principle, risk assessment and due diligence. It is essential to involve all stakeholders and a wide diversity of
people to reach wise decisions.
Part Two – A vision for a better world – possibilities for a better future - what needs to be done. In the second part, I put forward practical ideas that could make a difference. I describe constructive ways
forward, key proposals and good models that already exist. Above all, we need to focus on Creating
Possibilities. Many people I meet are experts on why we cannot change things for the better; maybe they
tried and are weary and discouraged. But we need leaders, like you, who have hope and are focused on how
we can, not why we can’t. So, this part of the book is about all kinds of exciting possibilities for a better,
more sustainable, fairer, non-violent world. However, it is most important that you dream and create your own possibilities. We need to be aware that breakdowns nearly always herald breakthroughs! That’s if we choose to make it so. It helps to realise that breakdowns are normal and happen all the time.
Here is another amazing possibility: that we, the majority of 6.7bn people on the planet, realise our power to
transform things for the better and take the necessary action. I’ll suggest actions that everyone can take to
turn the situation around. I invite you to play your unique part in a perfectly achievable transformation. To
do so is a choice we all have.
We are truly living in interesting times; transformation is unfolding at an astonishing pace. Paradoxically,response to crisis is also frighteningly slow and superficial. When I started writing this book in October 2008, humanity was already facing the biggest crisis in known history – climate chaos. Then the Sub Prime crisis and Credit Crunch emerged, tipping the world into an unprecedented breakdown in the financial system, followed by deepening recession. Meanwhile, Barack Obama’s election, the first black American President, and his acceptance speech moved millions around the world and gave new hope.
Will we to go down in history as the Age of Stupid? In March, 2009, I attended one of the countrywide
premieres of the Age of Stupid film. It was one of the most terrifying, moving, inspiring and empowering
events I have experienced – truly “people power” in action. The whole campaign was created and organised
by two inspired women, Franny Armstrong and Lizzie Gillett and their large team. The aim of the film was to
get people all over the world onto the streets on 5th December to put pressure on their governments and
make sure they do the right thing at the UN Summit, to replace the Kyoto agreement, which expires in 2012,
with a new framework. Showings of the film took place worldwide.
The Wave On Saturday 5th December, 2009, more than 50,000 people, women, men, children, young and
elderly people came together in the Wave, organised by the Stop Climate Chaos Coalition to demand action
on climate change, the biggest ever UK climate change march. I am glad I was part of such an inspiring
experience. The Wave called on the UK Government to take much more urgent and effective action. We
encircled Parliament. Government did respond.
The UN Climate Summit in Copenhagen Beforehand, it looked like the best chance we had to save ourselves and future generations! The outcome was very disappointing. For the first time representatives of 193
nations, including 110 world leaders, met with climate change as the single issue. An accord was reached but
no binding agreements. China and the USA showed they could work together. Money to help poorer nations
combat climate change was pledged. Mistakes were made from which we learn. The process was flawed.
Now we need to continue and do everything possible to ensure the momentum is kept up. We, the 6.7bn
people, have to keep up the pressure, everywhere in the world. We can be sure that there will be much
more campaigning to be done to make sure our governments do much MORE.
We need a continuing mass movement. So, arm yourself and your family and friends with this book. Use it as your handbook. It will help you inform yourself about the whole system and what you can do to transform
it to create a better, sustainable, fairer and non-violent world. Get lobbying for the possibilities you want!
We have to believe in ourselves and that anything is possible and “Yes, we can!”
Extraordinary changes have been taking place whilst I have been writing this book. So, I have dated each
chapter to place it in its time. The book is in part a record of how the human story unfolded over these past
two years. I have created a relatively short list of references. Everything is constantly changing. It is easy to
source or update data or thinking by pasting the relevant subject into your internet browser.
© Bruce Nixon, October 2010
아래 원문전문
Money & Life by Katie Teague » words from the ...
Katie Teague is raising funds for Money & Life on Kickstarter! Can we use the opportunity of the economic ...
In the documentary Collapse, Michael Ruppert puts an incredibly fine point on the fact that, upon a foundation of finite energy, we have built an economic system that demands infinite growth. He adds that we are currently at the collision point of those two forcibly exclusive ideas. Like the various Zeitgeist films, it is a fascinating framing that, no doubt, includes much truth blended with a fair amount of speculation. It inspires the viewer to think, if not act, but its main catalyst is that of fear.
Enter first-time director Katie Teague who is in the final stages of taking a different tack toward the subject with her Money & Life documentary. Still, any venture such as this requires funding and so Teague finds herself turning to the true believers for Kickstarter donations in order to put the finishing touches on the piece.
Among those believers are the film's sound editor, Marga Laube, who has been catapulted into action just by working on the project: "By redirecting my attention away from money itself as a focus — gotta go work to get more money to pay off my debts — and onto the actual material and non-material things that I value — like the food I put in my mouth, my relationships, the fine textures of a well-knit blanket, the purity of the creek by my house — I begin to move into a state of reciprocity with all of Life that is a first step in rewriting our collective social agreement about money, and developing a new economy that grows out of our true values. The film's intelligent, compassionate reportage about money — where money came from, where it is now — is bringing about new awareness in me, about how we are creating the economic climate we are living in, and how we might want to create something different."
So, do we run for the hills with a bag of gold coins per Ruppert's suggestion? Or do we step into a whole new way of being with money, each other, and the planet? Teague offered Shareable her thoughts on the matter.
Katie Teague's Money & Life documentary asks us to look at money in a whole new way. Photo credit: Tax Credits. Used under Creative Commons license.
I've watched quite a few — too many, perhaps — documentaries that move in a similar circle to Money & Life, but without its grace. Sure, finger pointing is one avenue to accountability, but you seem to take a different approach to that tarmac by choosing to shun the angry, conspiracy-based cynicism in favor of a forward-looking, solution-based optimism. Is that a fair analysis?
That is a fair take on my approach, and it’s always interesting and informing to see/hear others’ perspectives on what I’m up to. Before I jumped off the cliff into the world of filmmaking four years ago, I worked as a psychotherapist. And, as a therapist, I could see that finger pointing — while, yes, it has its important place in terms of accountability — only goes so far and ultimately keeps us mired in a level of division and separation that, to me, is so clearly the root source of the suffering in our lives and in the world. If we stop at finger pointing, we get stuck in distraction, seduced by the momentary feel-good of blame and judgment. That’s certainly not healing. True healing is simultaneously an awakening to a deeper truth. And my impulse to make a film had everything to do with healing our disconnection from our own deeper nature, with one another, with the earth, and the wondrous world of creation.
I had decided to make a documentary film before I decided to make a film about money. Then, in September 2008, when the financial and economic crisis was coming into sharp relief, I simply had a knowing all of a sudden that the documentary would be about money. It was equal parts knowing that I needed to expose and dive into my own ignorance and avoidance of the Great Taboo and equal parts intuiting that some significant energy was locked up in the shadows of our relationship with money.
Inevitably in my research for the film, I fell down the conspiracy theory wormhole and logged many hours on the Internet overcome with fascination and horror, and experiencing a decoding of what I thought was real. This was definitely an important part of the journey. Some of the information floating in abundance is true and some of it not and I don’t know which is which.
But, at the end of the day, my actions are the same no matter the relative truth. It’s just too convenient to name the evildoers as purely other and call it done. Don’t get me wrong; I think holding those who commit evil actions accountable is important. I also see it from another level, where the force of evil plays a role in the evolution of a greater whole, and that I am not separate from that. This has implications at the material level, as well as psychological and spiritual. My charge was to create a film that transcended blame and judgment, while highlighting the real precariousness of the situation we are in at the same time.
My approach has been more of a 10,000-foot perspective over the landscape of money, couching the economic crisis in a larger evolutionary context that sees the possibility of breakthrough as a corollary to the breaking down of systems. At some point, I even dropped the standard polar framing of “problem-solution.” While you could say this film is “solution-based,” I prefer to say it’s emergence-based. It’s actually a pretty significant change of framing because, in reality, we don’t know the solutions from where we stand. Solutions tend to arise from the old thinking or worldview. And I think we are on the cusp of a new era that’s pregnant with emergent possibility. The language of solutions feels too small. This film will be criticized for not providing clear-cut solutions in action-list fashion. It doesn’t tell people what to do. Rather, it paints a panoramic portrait of where we are and the patterns of what’s emerging in this now-identified space of “the new economy.”
Money & Life trailer from Katie Teague on Vimeo.
You interviewed some amazing thinkers for this project, Thom Hartmanm, Jean Houston, and (a personal hero of mine) Dr. Vandana Shiva among them. One of the points raised in the trailer is that money has evolved from a means of wealth to a measure of wealth and an “object of spiritual veneration.” Do you see us collectively reverting back to an earlier model or creating an entirely new economic system altogether?
In my view, there is no “back” to revert to. I think the genuine opportunity of this time is that we can consciously choose not to revert because we see clear-as-day that it’s not even possible. Instead, we have the monumental and inspiring challenge to collaborate with our own awareness in bringing forward a new system that is adequate and relevant to the exact moment of time we are living in. As Hazel Henderson says in the film, “We have a big redesign job, from top to bottom … and that ought to be fun because everyone can be involved.” I love that line! It’s daunting but inviting and really pointing us forward not back.
We have an astonishing amount of knowledge at our fingertips, we have access to all the world’s wisdom traditions, we have the informing vantage point of what we call history (We can save the debate on “history” for later.), and we can see what’s happening on the other side of the planet virtually as it’s happening. The gift of the in-formation age is the capacity to infuse the world of form with conscious creation. The shadow, of course, is a tragic disorganization and fragmentation from overload. We’re at a really epic confluence on the planet of which globalization is more effect than cause. I see globalization as a reflection of a deeper evolutionary process or planetary initiation, that’s a whole-scale shift in human consciousness and capacity.
I think the challenge of our time is to bring together all these unique streams of knowledge, of memory, of tribe, to re-member and re-source the brilliance and healthy manifested impulses that have come before, to retain that goodness and integrate it into forms and practices that are more relevant to the reality of today.
Let’s bring that inquiry into the realm of the economy. There’s a lot of talk about returning to the gold standard. Okay, maybe there is some wisdom in the essence of this idea of “return,” though maybe it’s not about the exact form of gold. Probably we do need to re-link the money to what’s real on the planet, but can we find ways that are more adequate to the world we are living in than the days of the gold standard? Can we find ways that reflect the real abundance of the planet while also reflecting the need for sustainability and re-generativity? Nothing is static in the world of becoming, so how do we build an economic system that builds in eventual disruption and the emergence of new forms? We are in an extraordinary moment of global emergence. Not even the so-called experts know what’s coming or what we should do.
That we are losing faith in the experts and the powers-that-be is a good sign. Then we are pressed to turn back towards ourselves and towards our local communities, to acknowledge our inner and outer assets and leverage them for some new goodness.
Money & Life - Extended Trailer on Vimeovimeo.com2011년 5월 10일 - 9분 Money & Life - Extended Trailer. by Katie Teague Plus 1 year ago / via Vimeo Desktop Uploader ... |
Looking with a broader lens, mass consumerism seems to be more of an effect rather than a cause — although, I suppose, it's both. What other issues does the film identify as root causes of our economic undoing?
To put it bluntly … evolution is the cause of our economic undoing. The film doesn’t out-rightly state it in such terms, but it’s a narrative that follows the arc of living systems (without using those terms because I hope the audience stays awake during the film).
This view sees that humanity is in a maturation period, as both Elisabet Sahtouris and Charles Eisenstein illuminate in the film. You could say we are maturing from competitive adolescence, as a species, into adulthood in which cooperation or win-win competition dominates. But this transformation is predicated on a shift in the understanding of our basic nature as human beings (as referenced in an earlier question). The root cause is the lens through which we are looking. If we look through a Newtonian, mechanistic, scarcity-based lens then we will create systems and institutions and a world of incentives that feed back into that worldview. And the effect of that is our current perpetual growth economic paradigm that is the primary driver on the planet right now. And it’s a Frankenstein of “individual insatiable appetites” at this point. We are cannibalizing ourselves because we are still operating in a system based on separation and the fear that comes of separation. The fundamental economic model that is driving the modern world is the cause of its own undoing.
A quote on your Kickstarter page from Matthew Wesley of The Wesley Group jumped out at me. He said of Money & Life, “Like many good films, it challenges its viewers to see the world in new ways. But that is the least of it. The film requires something of us — a particular kind of witnessing. It demands a kind of participation that engages not only the mind, but the heart. In the end, it calls us to into a different conversational dynamic with the prevailing economic systems and the economic alternatives that are emerging.” Indeed, a holistic engagement and a paradigm shift in our language are critical components of what's to come. Being one of the trumpeters of that change is a big deal, no?
This question would not have made sense to me four years ago when I began this journey. I don’t think we set out intentionally to be “trumpeters,” but following one’s heart, it can happen that we wake up one day and feel a trumpet pressed to our lips.
About two years into the project, I realized that my saying “yes” to the film was the crossing over of an initiatory threshold, that the filmmaking process was a crucible in which I was being cooked and the film is almost a byproduct more than the goal. The idea that “I am making a film” (in the sense of an independent subject acting on a separate object) just collapsed like a house of cards. It was a moment of quantum recognition, that I am a living fractal of the film (even though the film is not about me or my story directly). And I realized that all my confusion, my rage, my grief, my awe and inspiration, my highs and lows and intense inner polarities that I had been feeling throughout the process were an exact reflection of what is happening on the planet at this time.
I think being a trumpeter requires a certain devotion that schools us in learning to stay. It can get very uncomfortable, be it under the weight of your own demonic inner voices or the outer voices of criticism that say “you got it wrong” or analytically shred the piece of work you have given your life energy to. It’s a profound practice to stay — in deep partnership with one’s self and with life — when the rocks are sharp and the seas are storming. But if we are doing it only to assuage the inner or outer voices, then we’ve settled with looking for approval but one more time.
And I’ve found — always — that the kindness of staying delivers gifts that are simply unknowable otherwise. One isn’t a trumpeter for the sake of being a trumpeter but because you’ve accepted the responsibility for what you love.
The pitfall of identifying as a trumpeter or someone walking at the evolutionary eco-tone is the shadow of self-importance. I’ve had to see that in myself again and again working on this film. And so keeping a grounded foot in the cosmic play of consciousness — that everything arising is an apparent manifestation of a singular reality or consciousness — has been immensely important for me in maintaining good inner and outer health, a good sense of humor and letting go of the outcome of the film while being deeply committed to it at the same time.
Our lives are made up of and shaped by the complex web of exchanges (and I hardly mean only financial transacting). In other words, life is relationship. We are in constant relationship with everything, living cells in the body of life. And sometimes it’s the smallest thing that makes the greatest difference. You never know. But we can overlook the “world in a grain of sand” when we are hyper-focused on the big. And while the film is certainly focused on the big issues, I think in its most subtle transmission it’s a trumpet call for recognizing the true wealth that is abundant all around and inside us.
And to be a trumpeter for awakening to the power and value that we each have by the sheer miracle of our existence is the only deal as far as I’m concerned.
|