Our film about David Fleming's potent legacy is starting to take shape. And here's the first taster - a beautiful five minute wander through Deep Time, with a shocking ending..!
https://vimeo.com/236050600
I'm so proud of these tasters, and happy to see that they're currently going viral on Facebook, with over 1.5m 2.5m 4m views already. For more head over to the home of the film:
https://www.flemingpolicycentre.org.uk/the-sequel/
We look forward to hearing your thoughts there, especially on what else should be included when the final film comes out next summer :)
Because why not?
I have a passion for tracking down that elusive rarity - eco-songs that don't suck! And thanks to several Dark Optimism readers, my collection's growing, from a wide range of genres.
Back in 2011, I published the first 'Dark Optimism album', but sadly it was lost due to my using an external MP3 player which later disappeared.
Just hit play below for the 2017 edition, with a few more recent favourites added to the mix:
[playlist ids="4766,4769,4787,4797,4773,4771,4798,4795,4780,4781,4786,4785,4792,4779,4790"]
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Honourable mentions also to these pieces from Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, Akala and RapNews, each brilliant in their own way, but not quite hitting the spot for this collection. Enjoy!
And any more songs (or other creative responses) that you'd like to share greatly welcomed in the comments below.
In a couple of weeks (Feb 6-10) I'll be leading a week-long course at Schumacher College based on David Fleming's legacy: Community, Place and Play: A Post-Market Economics. It will be an exploration of what 'life well lived' looks like in a world of ecocide and collapsing civilisational structures, and a call for those present to ramp up their involvement in the informal economy of relationships and Nature. The key resources for a thriving future.
Myself, Rob Hopkins and Mark Boyle have all been walking variants of this path for at least the past decade or so, and are much looking forward to discussing and debating the most delicious, enlivening ways forward in today's world. And all of us are deeply inspired by the work of David Fleming, the mentor I first met, along with Rob, when they taught me at Schumacher College ten short years ago. It feels a great honour to follow in his footsteps and continue his work.
I'm also particularly delighted that we will be able to première the beautiful, challenging and yearning film We, The Uncivilised as part of the course. It fits perfectly with the themes we will be exploring and is, quite simply, the most memorable film I have seen in years. It will be a real highlight and catalyst.
Here is a quick Q&A I did with Positive News on the course, and I believe one or two spaces are still available if you wish to join us. Can't wait!
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Edit - 14th Feb 2017 - I had intended to do a full blog post reflecting on the course, but in the aftermath I find myself exhausted, thrilled and satisfied, with a deep yearning for quiet and stillness. Suffice to say that the week was even more potent than I had hoped, and felt a transformational experience for most, if not all, of us there. Many powerful relationships were formed and ideas mooted, and I look forward to seeing what emerges as we all continue on our paths.
On the eve of the #Brexit referendum, I have found myself struck by the juxtaposition of two exceptional pieces of writing which run somewhat deeper than the 'lowest common denominator' debate running in the mainstream media.
It wasn't immediately clear to me which way I would vote, but reading these nuanced pieces - which draw out sensible reasons for considering both sides of the argument - helped me to make a decision.
The first is this piece by Giles Fraser in The Guardian. I believe Fraser has declared that he will vote 'Out', yet unlike many 'Brexiteers' his piece makes a crucial argument in favour of free movement for people:
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National borders exist to pen poor people into reservations of povertyWhy, in this era of advanced globalisation, do we believe in free trade and the free movement of goods, but not in the free movement of labour?~Rev. Giles Fraser~
He is not one of my regulars. From Cameroon, he says. And hungry, poor bloke. I can tell he’s had to swallow a lot of pride to beg for food at my door. I apologise to him, say that because we’ve just made a delivery to the food bank, the church is out of supplies. And personally, I haven’t done a shop in days. I rummage around in my cupboards and come up with an avocado and some spaghetti hoops, which really isn’t good enough. Is there any work out there, I ask him. It’s hard to find without the right papers, he says. Bloody Home Office, I say. He smiles.
We are so hypocritical about borders. We cheer when the Berlin Wall comes down. We condemn the Israelis for their separation barrier and Donald Trump for his ludicrous Mexican fence. But are we really so different? We also police our borders with guns and razor wire as if we had some God-given right to this particular stretch of land. Through the random lottery of life, I have a UK passport. I didn’t work for it or do anything whatsoever to deserve it. In economic terms, I just happened to be born lucky. My new friend from Cameroon, not so much.
Within our own borders we complain at any suggestion of a postcode lottery. When the north of England has a different standard of healthcare to the south, we consider it a scandal. But when the global north has a radically different standard of healthcare to the global south, we think that’s just the way it is. In fact, it’s far worse than that – we somehow think it our duty to fence off our advantage, to protect it against those who would share in our good fortune. And these people we disparage as illegal immigrants, as if they are thieves or terrorists – though they are just doing globally what Norman Tebbit famously advised millions of unemployed in the 1980s to do: to get on their bike and look for work.
In this era of advanced globalisation, we believe in free trade, in the free movement of goods, but not in the free movement of labour. We think it outrageous that the Chinese block Google, believing it to be everyone’s right to roam free digitally. We celebrate organisations such as Médecins Sans Frontières for their compassionate universalism. But for all this talk of freedom from restriction, we still pen poor people into reservations of poverty. It’s like our own little version of The Hunger Games. And it is so normal to us, we don’t even recognise it as a moral issue.
The free movement of people is what political scientist JW Moses called “the last frontier of globalisation”, implying that it too will fall. Because, in the grand scheme of things, of course, no force on earth can insulate us against billions of people without enough to eat. Many will tragically drown in our Mediterranean moat, others will be stopped for a while at our fences, but nothing will stop more people from trying to come. And eventually they will succeed. Artificial national boundaries, just lines on a map, are no match against the massed forces of human need. This week I met in London a guy I last saw in Calais trying to get into the back of a truck. It took him months of trying to get past our borders. But in the end he made it. And good for him.
Before the Aliens Act of 1905, the UK had no border controls to speak of. They were first erected to stop Jews coming from eastern Europe. “England for the English,” was the slogan. The Manchester Evening Chronicle explained what this meant: “That the dirty, destitute, diseased, verminous and criminal foreigner who dumps himself on our soil and rates simultaneously, shall be forbidden to land.”
Border controls have always been racist in character. And it’s much the same today. They are about locking in our wealth and keeping mosques out of the Cotswolds. At present, globalisation is a luxury of the rich, for those of us who can swan about the globe with the flick of a boarding pass. The so-called “migrant crisis” is globalisation for the poor. They are blowing their trumpets around our walls. And our walls will fall.
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The second piece is this extract from the late David Fleming's Dictionary for the Future, which I have been editing in preparation for its release next month.
It is the dictionary's entry on "Closed Access", building on Elinor Ostrom's Nobel Prize winning work on the concept of the commons:
(the *s are pointers to related entries in the dictionary)
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Closed Access. A *necessary condition for the management of a *commons. With limited numbers of people within its boundaries, the demands made on it, too, are limited, making them realistic and *sustainable.
The members of a managed commons must undertake to comply with the rules necessary for its maintenance; it follows that they must exclude others who do not comply with those rules, or whose demands would exceed the limits of what it can supply.
The principle underlying this is known as “subtractivity”, or “rivalness”—the idea that what one person harvests from a resource subtracts from the ability of others to do the same. There is a simple recognition here of the objective reality of the resource: it has its limits, and no amount of technical trickery or *emotional pleading can make that fact go away. Recognising subtractivity is a case of growing up—as in realising that the powers of your parents to provide are not unlimited; moving on from the child-think of unqualified confidence that the*political economy you live in can provide.
And a second principle follows from this. If the resource is limited, then there has to be some way of excluding people who, if their access were unlimited, would destroy it. That is, there has to be a way of defending it, which may be relatively straightforward in the case of, say, farmland, but is harder in the case of a fishery, or a forest, or a river, or a culture, or an atmosphere with a limited ability to absorb *waste; it is also harder when the damage caused by exceeding the limits will only become evident in the future, by which time it may be too late to repair.
This is an especially difficult problem for a super-scale *civic society such as our own. Our *size, *growth and *technical powers insulate us for a time from having to think about the limits to the resources we depend on. There therefore seems to be no need to think about the cost of *protecting them. Maybe we can all be free riders, benefiting from assets which we have done nothing to produce or protect: we can affirm a liberal right to be a free rider. It is an attractive, inclusive philosophy. It would be immoral to disagree with it—until, that is, it comes face-to-face with the laws of physics.
For the human societies to which the laws of physics are more immediately evident, closed access is the determining and shaping property of their *culture. This does not by any means imply a Scrooge-like hoarding of an underused resource without regard for the needs of other people who could make use of it. Closed access, once established as the enabling condition for the sustainable management of the commons, can provide the foundations for an extensive and rich culture of sharing and generosity: it can be expected to allow access to others for particular purposes, such as harvesting medicinal plants, or hunting a prey across the territory; it is able up to a point to share the proceeds on a regular basis. Sometimes a softening of strict closed access extends to “sleeping territoriality”, in which, say, a Pacific island reserves the right to exclusive access of a fishing-ground, but applies it only at times of scarcity. What we might see as uncaring exclusion is seen by the participants in a closed-access commons as responsibility, as belonging to the land:
"Expression of worldview through respect, patience and humility; and people being viewed as a part of nature are common in traditional communities. The Lax’skiik and Gitksan of British Columbia, in general, have a personal and spiritual identification with their territories and resources, which form the basis of their cultural and economic life."
But, in order for qualities of sharing and altruism to happen, the responsibility of a particular group, and their ability to sustain the commons and determine access to it, must be unambiguously defined:
"...the management of common property is impossible unless the land is owned by a well-defined community."
The alternative is the ‘Tragedy of the *Commons’, the destruction of a common resource as individuals make ever-greater demands on it, benefiting from what they can get individually, but not seeing as their problem the damage done by those ever-greater demands to the commons as a whole. This is a Tragedy created by the global *market economy, which has destroyed the community cohesion essential to the long-term management of commons.
In a society used to cheap travel, and to the idea that destruction—when it comes to *boundaries and the *rhetoric about “tearing-down barriers”—is a good thing, the idea of closed access at first invites unease; there is a sense both of being locked-in, and of unfairly locking-out. But in fact it works the other way. Almost wherever you go in the market economy, you find yourself in the same place—in the globalised market with its shared banality, its fullness; at the end of every lane is a busy road and a housing estate like the one at the beginning of it.
You cannot get out of a *globalised world, because there is no out. Closed access does not mean closed-in, it means the protection of distinctiveness: when you are out, you are somewhere else, in a different in.
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At first reading, these two pieces seemed to be in contradiction with each other, yet both made clear sense to me - especially given that 'the commons' has been core to the only sustainable societies the planet has seen. This confusing juxtaposition got my attention, because it clearly had something to teach me.
After some reflection, integrating the two perspectives seems to demand a recognition that those of us inside the walled palaces are collectively acting as free riders - taking no responsibility for the resources and ecologies that we benefit from.
We of course recognise that there must be a limit to the number of people who can be supported in the manner to which we are accustomed (by accident of birth, as Fraser says), and so many instinctively want to defend 'our land' from overwhelm. Then we draw an arbitrary line of entitlement - of 'us' - perhaps around those who were born here, and declare those who were not to be 'them'. As Fraser highlights, this is morally unjustifiable (especially since so much of our wealth is taken from other nations).
But both sides of that debate rarely follow the analysis to its logical conclusion and accept the corresponding need to take practical responsibility for caring for the place we live (whether born there or not). Since there is little acknowledgement that most native Brits are free riders, the argument never gets beyond whether we should open the doors to allow others to strive for similar lifestyles or not.
Yet if we could get past "us and them" altogether, the underlying question of limits - of "subtractivity" - would still await us. Wherever people come from, no place can support unlimited numbers of free riders (and to be honest, having worked with asylum seekers and refugees in the UK, I tend to think they are far from the main culprits in this regard).
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Then there is the question of closed access on the global scale - taking us straight into questions of global population.
In a sense our planet itself also has a border - that between the living and the as-yet-unborn. I find it interesting to consider the immigration debates in the light of this border, and apply the same arguments here, such as:
Should more potential humans be stopped at the border and excluded from our global commons..? Should more already-living non-humans be forced to emigrate..?
The late David Fleming has already emigrated across this border, so gets no vote on #Brexit. I believe Giles Fraser has declared that he will vote 'Out'.
As for me, like Noam Chomsky, I'm left without any strong allegiance in the Brexit debate, but I am concerned that a more independent Britain would likely be even more environmentally destructive than it currently is, and that a national 'out' vote would only be perceived as the voice of xenophobia. So I voted "in" - with slight apologies to the rest of Europe for inflicting our politics on them - but I can't escape the feeling that it's really somewhat beside the point.
What gets my juices flowing is avoiding something with far clearer consequences for all of us - #Gaiexit.
I am pleased and proud to be able to mark the 5th anniversary of my friend David Fleming's death with the news that his life's work is approaching publication.
I believe that a beautiful way to honour those we love after their death is to keep alive in the world that which was best in them. In David's case, there was no clearer way to do so than to see his masterwork Lean Logic: A Dictionary for the Future and How to Survive It reach the audience that deserves it.
As Rob Hopkins and Jonathon Porritt explain in their forewords (yet to be released), it is a book that has been hugely influential even before its publication!
The copy-edited manuscript is now with the publishers ahead of its summer release, but I thought I would mark today by sharing the new cover design (I love it!) and my introductory preface:
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Editor's Preface
David Fleming was one of my closest friends; a mentor, and an inspiration. His sudden death in late 2010 came as a complete shock. At the time we were in the midst of final preparations ahead of the publication of a jointly-authored parliamentary report on his influential TEQs scheme (see the entry in this Dictionary), so getting that launched as he would have wanted was the immediate priority. It received international headlines but, for me, in the wake of the flurry of interest came the emotion, and the realisation that this book – his great work, his legacy to the world – remained unpublished.
There is no question that part of my motivation for undertaking the work on this book has been my deep love and gratitude for David, but I am driven far more by the sense that this is a genuinely important work, with a significant audience out there who deserve to read it.
For me, and for many others, it has been a touch-stone. When engaging in activities not tied to the logic of the market economy, we are forever told that our efforts are quaint and obsolete. It can be wearing, but Lean Logic is the antidote – a reminder of the deeper culture that such work is grounded in; that older ways of relating are no mirage, but rather the very foundation that society is built on; that our efforts matter more than we know. Indeed, if not for the weight, I might be tempted to carry a copy to gift to such critics!
This is, without any shadow of a doubt, a unique book. Conversations with David rank among the most startling and refreshing experiences of my life, and this book is the truest testament imaginable to the character and ingenuity of the man. The very structure of the book reflects his genius for drawing unconventional and revealing connections where they were never suspected, and it is all too easy to spend hours exploring his web of entertaining dictionary entries. And then astonishing to discover how they build, almost without being noticed, into a comprehensive vision of a radically different future. But I shall not say too much else about Lean Logic itself here, and let you experience it for yourself.
Instead, I have been asked to write a little about the past five years, and the process from the final manuscript on David’s home computer to the book you now hold in your hands.
Some of you will have come to this book after reading the paperback Surviving the Future: Culture, Carnival and Capital in the Aftermath of the Market Economy. I produced that book from this one, so your journey has been the opposite to my own, but I have had you in mind throughout, and I trust that you will find it a natural process to discover how the material from that book fits within David Fleming’s wider vision. You will encounter content that you recognise, but it will be interwoven with other material (perhaps four-fifths of this book) that will be new to you.
The rest of you are on a path more similar to mine. Although David and I worked closely in his small Hampstead flat, until only a few weeks before his death he would not let me look at Lean Logic. He said that we were too close, and the project too dear to his heart, so that we would likely fall out if I were critical! So when I found his final manuscript for this book in the weeks after his death, it was an invitation to one last glorious conversation.
Shortly afterwards, a group of David’s closest friends and family decided to self-publish 500 copies of his manuscript, as soon as possible and just as he had left it, for those who knew him and his work. Then, in 2011, we started talking with publishers about a full publication; the feedback was that a more conventional version might be necessary, as a ‘way in’ to the full work, so with advice and support from many of David’s friends – Roger Bentley and Biff Vernon especially – I tentatively started work on what would become Surviving the Future.
As that process was coming to an end, the Dark Mountain journal put out a call for submissions to their fourth book, on the theme of “post-cautionary tales”. In shock at encountering a category of any kind that Lean Logic actually seemed to fit perfectly, I felt obliged to submit some extracts. Despite being overwhelmed with submissions, the Dark Mountain team were so enamoured of the curious dictionary entries that they asked for an additional set, for their fifth book.
And that is where Michael Weaver of Chelsea Green Publishing happened across them, and so made contact to ask whether they could help in any way with publishing or distributing David’s work. Having worked with Chelsea Green before on my own Transition book, I was enthusiastic at the possibility. Initially, we discussed the publication of Surviving the Future, but quickly came to the realisation that it was most appropriate to bring the two books out concurrently, allowing readers to explore both or either, according to their taste. That brings our story up to Autumn 2014, with much of my time since spent pulling both books together into their final published form. Writing this preface is one of my final tasks; in many ways the book in your hands has been both the starting-point and the finish-line for me.
So, you can imagine how much pleasure it gives me to invite you to step into the world of Lean Logic. David bestowed the subtitle A Dictionary for the Future and How to Survive It, but, if only for want of competition, it can surely claim to be The Dictionary for the Future and How to Survive It.
But where to start with such a book? Well, one genuine answer would be “anywhere you like” – the index contains a complete list of entries to pique your interest – but if you would like some suggestions...
For full details of Lean Logic, and the chance to pre-order a copy, see the book's dedicated webpage.
But both sides of that debate rarely follow the analysis to its logical conclusion and accept the corresponding need to take practical responsibility for caring for the place we live (whether born there or not). Since there is little acknowledgement that most native Brits are free riders, the argument never gets beyond whether we should open the doors to allow others to strive for similar lifestyles or not.
Yet if we could get past "us and them" altogether, the underlying question of limits - of "subtractivity" - would still await us. Wherever people come from, no place can support unlimited numbers of free riders (and to be honest, having worked with asylum seekers and refugees in the UK, I tend to think they are far from the main culprits in this regard).
For full details of Lean Logic, and the chance to pre-order a copy, see the book's dedicated webpage.
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