On Being Shown a Way to a Peaceful Global Civilisation

The great religious and philosophical influence in my life is the teachings and life of Baha’u’llah. Taking for himself the appellation, Manifestation of God, the fulfilment of the promise, Baha’u’llah’s life and teachings are of a consistent high-mindedness and ethic, that convinced me of the truth of the matter of His declaration and His mission.

His mission is expounded in over 100 volumes of letters, treatises and books, and include a book of laws (Kitab-i-Agdas), treatises on practical mysticism such as the Seven Valleys, and practical spirituality such as the Hidden Word, and a full exploration of His station in relation to the teachings and prophecies in Judaism, Christianity and Islam (Kitab-i-Iqan).

As a number of hotspots of conflict around the world are uprooting millions of people, Baha’u’llah’s declared future and mission to the people might best be encapsulated by these exhortations:

“It is incumbent upon every man, in this Day, to hold fast unto whatsoever will promote the interests, and exalt the station, of all nations and just governments. Through each and every one of the verses which the Pen of the Most High hath revealed, the doors of love and unity have been unlocked and flung open to the face of men. We have erewhile declared — and Our Word is the truth — Consort with the followers of all religions in a spirit of friendliness and fellowship. Whatsoever hath led the children of men to shun one another, and hath caused dissensions and divisions amongst them, hath, through the revelation of these words, been nullified and abolished…

Of old it hath been revealed: “Love of one’s country is an element of the Faith of God.” The Tongue of Grandeur hath, however, in the day of His manifestation proclaimed: “It is not his to boast who loveth his country, but it is his who loveth the world.” Through the power released by these exalted words He hath lent a fresh impulse, and set a new direction, to the birds of men’s hearts, and hath obliterated every trace of restriction and limitation from God’s holy Book.

” O people of Justice! Be as brilliant as the light, and as splendid as the fire that blazed in the Burning Bush. The brightness of the fire of your love will no doubt fuse and unify the contending peoples and kindreds of the earth, whilst the fierceness of the flame of enmity and hatred cannot but result in strife and ruin.” (Bahá’u’lláh, “Gleanings from the Writings of Bahá’u’lláh”, Passage XLIII)

An important aspect of Baha’u’llahs exhortation is in the realm of our Being. One of his tablets is dedicated to a list of how we are to be to realise the greater mission of the unity of humanity. He is a part of what He writes:

“Be generous in prosperity, and thankful in adversity. Be worthy of the trust of thy neighbor, and look upon him with a bright and friendly face. Be a treasure to the poor, an admonisher to the rich, an answerer of the cry of the needy, a preserver of the sanctity of thy pledge. Be fair in thy judgment, and guarded in thy speech. Be unjust to no man, and show all meekness to all men….” (Gleanings from the Writings of Bahá’u’lláh, Passage CXXX)

On a personal note, I found over the course of a few decades of my adult life, that I seemed to have certain limitations to my development of the practical application of such virtues. I felt that I had, apart from the occasional outright failing, “hit a ceiling’. I felt that I had explorations in life and contributions that i could be making but which in some way I seemed lacking.

Nonetheless, in picking up the yoke of those contributions, especially in creativity, the arts, and theatre, I found an access, a gateway, to another world of human development – ontological coaching. This particular gateway lead me to the thinker, Werner Erhard and the offshoot of his work, the company now called Landmark Worldwide. The work I have participated in through Landmark including the Being a Leader Course in which I met and interacted with an ageing Werner, himself, has had a number of impacts:

i) a breakdown in regard to what i was unable to see regarding my own lack of integrity in the world;

ii) an simple, appreciative, caring acceptance of myself as cause in the matter of my lack of integrity and inauthenticity; and the real limitations of my mind that are a function of my genetical personality and a considerable number of physical and psychic assault events over the course of my upbringing; and

iii) An equally appreciative and exciting recognition of my capabilities and skills that were developed over many decades, including the lessons I learnt from what I failed or did not so well. From this recognition I could aspire to something bigger then who I wound up being that gave me a safer, more controlled, push through life, to participating more fully in the global landscape.

Werner Erhard’s most fabulous work since the 1970’s and the widespread impact of that work on millions of people, was influenced by his vast reading of philosophical and religious thought, a powerful epiphany, and conversations with other modern influencers of thought. In all that Erhard took on the philosopher of Martin Heidegger, a mid 20th century German existentialist, and member and sympathiser of the anti-jewish views of the Nazi Party during WWII and to the end of his life in 1976. Heidegger’s philosophical work and teaching at the University of Marburg in Germany in the 1920’s, inspired many students and fellow philosophers including Hannah Arendt, and the French existentialists such as Satre . By the 1960’s and 70’s Heidegger’s work was presented face value to the world without more than a nod to his Nazi history. The post mortem release of Heidegger’s diaries, showing his dedication to German National Socialism, has certainly un-nerved many who have come to appreciate his works on Being. As might be expected, the philosophical camp falls into those who reckon that Heideggers work can be separated from his Nazi attitudes, and those who reckon they must be entwined. One of the most recent explorations of Werner Erhards early mass coaching practice, “The Forum”, is Bruce Hyde and Steve Kopp’s book, “Speaking Being” ¹ that has an analysis of how Erhard’s work can be seen as a practice of the linguistic and existential philosophy of Heidegger,

I am personally of a kind who can sit with the work of another, regardless of their ideology, and see whether there is something I might find interesting, of wonder, or even true. For example could it be true that, as Heidegger says, there is a ‘throwness’ to human existence, a facticity, such that how existence show up to us is already informed (by ourselves) and is disclosed through our moods. In practice, from this type of view, it is only a short step to asking of anything we have an opinion and as such have an emotion or mood that comes along, “is (xxx) true”? However, developing my capacity for sitting with the diverse view has been also under Baha’u’llah’s encouragement, “Warn the beloved of the one true God, not to view with too critical an eye the sayings and writings of men. Let them rather approach such sayings and writings in a spirit of open-mindedness and loving sympathy.”² without which I may have maintained many of the cultural attitudes I was raised within, some of which are harmful in social practice to others.

While this can seem like a vicious circle of questioning the answer and never coming to a conclusion, indeed my experience is that there is a capacity for humans to holding the inquiry while also standing in an immediate working conclusion. This does require some deft cognitive ability and is not a strength of many people. For those of us for whom it is a strength, there is also an ethical response to also sit with other’s less complex opinions for as long as it requires. Under the practice of ‘consorting’, we might think of the action as providing a clearing or space of listening for anyone to express themselves fully and being ‘gotten’. While consorting is a moral exhortation of Baha’u’llah, “being gotten’ is new language designed by Erhard to express being able to authentically reflect a person’s expression back to them so they can see that indeed you ‘get’ what they are saying. Yet in asking why we do that, the existentialist would say, “in order to (achieve, consequence, avoid)” while Baha’u’llah would also say “for God”. Rather than “God” Erhard simply states, that “to be a leader (consequence) you will need to be given being by something bigger than yourself”. And the placeholder “God” if defined as what is ever unknown and unknowable, the fundamental essence of pre-existence, is as big as it gets.

On the other hand, in the world of action, Baha’u’llah is emphatic about the role of justice both as a personal response and attitude and a social and political response. “Justice and equity”, He writes, “are twin Guardians that watch over men. From them are revealed such blessed and perspicuous words as are the cause of the well-being of the world and the protection of the nations.” (Bahá’u’lláh, Epistle to the Son of the Wolf, P23)

This brings me to Hannah Arendt, student and lover of Martin Heidegger, who fled to Paris in 1933 after arrest by the Ghestapo. Arendt was Heidegger’s friend to the end. In an interview about her book, “We can Change the World.”, Lyndsey Stonebridge, says Arendt understood that friendship was not transactional. Arendt laid out in a paper called “The Banality of Evil” that it takes a mass of a population to sign up to a progrom like the holocaust. And the people are not evil, they are just making ‘banal’ / ordinary choices given the sweep of a cultural message, and do not believe or see they are comitting a crime. She spoke of the holocaust as a crime against humanity on the body of the jewish people, not just one more anti-semitic progrom. Arendt was also influenced by Husserl who was fired by Heidegger because he was a jew. Yet fully from Husserl and Heiddeger we find a philosophy that can be a practical pathway to a greater human being, regardless that Heidegger himself fell into a narrow superstitious rut of it, perhaps in part to assuage himself of the existential nihilism he experienced as a lapsed catholic and an existentialist.

Werner Erhard, in noting this nihilistic quality in existentialism, discovered, and asks us all to discover, that nihilism is not to be battled, yet an inverse solution lies in moving through the nihilistic awareness of existensialism. To understand this, we must understand that nihilism is the idea that the world that humans understand is based in language, and particularly language that contextualised everything. If we take away the context, e.g. ‘a tree provides shade to humans’, we are left with ‘a tree’. It is the thing “tree” that exists, not any such meaning or context or purpose, we might apply. The existential provocation means that everything is meaningless. Werner Erhards, genius insight was that it is all empty and meaningless including empty and meaningless. Erhard in being able to express this, created a practice for building a ‘dasein’, a being as a clearing in which anything could show up, or could be created. In ‘getting’ that empty and meaningless is empty and meaningless, dasien (I-Me) can be a future that is really relationship(s) of my own choosing. Simultaneously, Erhard saw that all of our relationships were already of our own choosing. So instead of feeling we are choiceless or driven at times, of any of those choices we are driven by habit or upbringing, we can also move into the created future as our choices. In the clearing of empty and meaningless is empty and meaningless, all choices can be divested especially when they take on the complete attribute of meaninglessness. This is not to be mistaken with anything paranormal or super human. This is not about wishful thinking or fantasy. All invitations into a clearing can only be given as allowed by current states i.e relationships including those with ourselves e.g. our bodies and embodied states. In such clearing we can create a future for justice for the whole world, and see that future fully expressed in the world. Baha’u’llahs writings are replete with the created future of a global civilisation and the characteristics of humans and communities and governments required to see that future fully expressed.

In the life of Baha’u’llah and his son and successor, Abdu’l-Baha, certain religious and political authorities murdered many of their followers in Persia. While chastising these persons, they always invited said persons to correction of their moral behaviour. Indeed one such person, on accidentally meeting Abdul-Baha, did implore forgiveness and was accepted caringly and forgiven. This was an extraordinary act, overwhelming to witnesses who knew the suffering and who couldn’t quite grasp the response.

In this day of so many millions dispossessed by conflict, by so many who perform assault because they are provided political and even corporate approval, we must continue to chastise the bad players and the banal supporters, to step down, to reflect on their moral compromise, and to ask forgiveness. Some in the current conflict, like the Nazi leaders, will face war crimes tribunals. The rest like Heidegger will face a lifetime of tolerance. My hope is that the vast majority will face reconciliation and shame and be offered radical forgiveness. That is the only way to a peacful, just world. To those currently in authority I implore you take it.

1Speaking being, Bruce Hyde, Steve Kopp, Wiley 2019

2 Gleanings from the Writings of Bahá’u’lláh, CLIV

The 3 Scenarios of Climate Response

I’d advise everyone with an interest in restoration technologies such as iron fertilisation to read the new book by the founder of the Foundation for Climate Restoration , Peter Fiekowski.  Peter has been investigating this work and others with a lot of the scientists over a decade or more, so you will find identified in the book the parameters for the appropriate use of such technologies.

On the broad issue of technology and science in climate change solutions. While many investigations were in their early bloom a decade ago, much is now known. And of the unknowns, such as ocean fertilisation, a lot more research in the field is now required. For some people (an I have talked to environmental consultants who raise this objection), trying to solve nature with science is anathema. And they have a lot of well-documented stories of everything that has gone wrong so far. Even if there was an outside chance of making an error, let’s say, to really stretch the argument, making an endangered species, extinct, why might we use science? The answer to this question is a risk management one. It goes like this, (and you can fill in the data gaps): What are the losses of xxx species, xxxxx individuals of flora, fauna and human, and whole local and regional ecosystems, given three scenarios: unmitigated climate change; nett zero emissions by 2050 but only by restoring local ecosystems; and restoring atmospheric CO2 levels using a range of technologies for removing CO2 from the atmosphere and sequestering as such in a variety of ways.

In the first scenario, we are already experiencing touch and go on species loss. At some point we will begin to have local ecosystems fail, here and there. And as that chaotic system change amplifies over time a certain tipping point will probably cause the collapse of all global ecosystems which could increase those losses logarithmically and very quckly. Here’s a species loss story from the USA in the 19th c to exemplify what can occur. There was a pigeon called the Postal Pigeon. It is recorded that there was only one huge flock of these pigeons in such numbers as to darken the sky for hours when they flew overhead. Colonisers would just go out with shotguns and shoot in the air and bring down hundreds of pigeons. It seemed they never dented the population of these birds. Then one year, and it is estimated that the flock numbers were still around 1 million birds, the species went extinct. Apparently less than 1 million birds created a breeding collapse. In other words, we will find it difficult to predict the collapse point. Perhaps we are already near there.

In the second scenario, we already have 95% of the CO2 in the atmosphere. Natural restoration like planting trees is estimated as unlikely to restore the CO2 levels except over a long time. Meanwhile the chaotic climatic conditions are already perturbing though a high flux and that flux drives itself along a positive feedback loop. Some of you will be aware that the mathematical theory called chaos theory was identified by a climateologist, Lorenz. To remind us, Lorenz in the 1960’s found that an 1/1000th of a shift in the conditions (a parameter of data) at any time compared to a predictable order, will create a vastly different weather pattern over time. This came to be called the butterfly effect. The greenhouse in which we are now living is not just a new stabilised system. It is a very unstable system that will, for sure, over a long time, find it new ‘strange attractor’, a new stability, a new more or less predictable pattern. But whatever happens between then and now throws all ecosystems and human communities to the whim of an increasingly unpredictable and volatile weather system. And at ‘then’ the pattern will be most likely unkind to our current ecosystems and therefore unkind to us. We may still find ourselves faced with tipping point collapses of ecosystems, globally.

In the third scenario, we are able to restore the greenhouse to pre-industrial levels. Let’s say over the period 2030-2050 there is a double effect: the gradual movement to nett zero emissions from humans AND the gradual removal of legacy GHGs from the atmosphere. The weather continues to be increasing unpredictable but now also in a different way, hopefully a softer way, as energy is removed from the climate and weather system.  I doubt we can say that we can ‘restore the climate’ which is the catch phrase of F4CR, however, so long as we have i) softened those volatile and unpredictable effects in the first instance; and II) bring the climate to a new more human-friendly balance, we will have mitigated the loss of many species, billions of individual members, local ecosystems and avoided tipping into global collapse, then only being able to say that a species loss (say) is unlikely under a new technology is the only viable stand we can make for a future that can sustain us and the ecosystems we flourish within.

I have come across arguments, the most recent during a trip through a town called Lismore, NSW, Australia, in which an environmental activist told me she would be okay with the loss of human beings from the planet, so long as we just stop playing God with nature, coz the planet will bounce back. Given what we had seen here in 2019-2020 with massive bushfires (wildfires), I must admit to a horrified feeling at the casualness of dealing with the possibility of the losses worldwide. A few weeks after our conversation Lismore had the biggest flood since colonised settlement, 14metres, people clinging to rooftops to get rescued. Two weeks later, it got re-flooded, just a clean-up of the first was partly underway. The issue with this is that, Lismore is flood-prone, it was predictable, except this year people thought the flood period was over, safe for another year, and then it was just worse than ever, and a double dose. I haven’t had the opportunity to find out whether anyone feels differently about the climate ‘mission’, in Lismore. I have some empathy. It is a big ask for us to deal with all of who we are as human beings without feeling it can all go to hell in a handbasket. It is a big ask to take on that we might make choices that result in the loss of a species for the saving of a hundred species (this is the classic challenge from moral philosophical mind games). While there’s no such thing as an isolated species loss as fall-out, definitely not when it comes to endangering the lives of a lot of homo sapien sapiens for those critters have a tendency to hunt and dig up and chop down anything for their survival. Nonetheless, it is an important question for all of use to ask, what would we trade off (let go, even for now) for what we would work towards solutions. I think we can certainly avoid species loss from any technological adventuring as there is no reason why we are unable to finese any work. And there is hopeful expectation in most arenas that the technology even improves ecosystem restoration as well a human economic activity. 

Scarcity, Energy, Climate Solutions, and a New Civilisation

Andrew Nikiforuk of The Tyee, writes, “So, if our current civilization is to survive in any shape or form it needs to fundamentally rethink all energy spending, from how we harness it to what we use it for. As Michaux concludes in his number-crunching report, “replacing the existing fossil fuel powered system (oil, gas and coal), using renewable technologies, such as solar panels or wind turbines, will not be possible for the entire global human population. There is simply just not enough time, nor resources to do this by the current target set by the world’s most influential nations. What may be required, therefore, is a significant reduction of societal demand for all resources, of all kinds.”

Erin Remblance responds, “How we make that transition to lowered demand should be the most prominent discussion in our media, classrooms and households. Why is it nearly invisible?”

She goes on to note, “Years ago the great psychologist Bruno Bettelheim wrote a book about what happens to people in dehumanizing environments. Having survived two Nazi concentration camps, Bettelheim knew the subject well. Near the end of The Informed Heart, he offered this prescient observation. Jews who accepted the status quo and believed in business as usual perished. Those who did not believe in business as usual left before the Germans arrived, sailed to Russia or America or joined the resistance. Many survived. “Thus in the deepest sense the walk to the gas chamber was only the last consequence of a philosophy of business as usual,” wrote Bettelheim. It was “a last step in no longer defying the death instinct, which might also be called the principle of inertia.”

Now a widespread inertia prevents us from seizing control of our fate. We must do all we can to overcome that torpor. The implications are plain. Those communities that reject business as usual and cut their energy spending and all the materialist values that go with it, just might survive the long emergency and write a different ending to this story.

I have two responses to Erin’s points. They are my elaboration on the two key notions in her comments: Business as usual, and scarcity of energy.

I open talking about business as usual because seeing this clearly is the foundation of any transformation of civilisation, and technological and energy paradigm shift is pivotal in sweeping civilisation transformation along. (See particularly the copious and optimistic works of Jeremy Rifkin). What some have called ‘spiritual malaise’ and others “tranquilised obviousness”, business rarely is as usual, and if, like the history of European Jews, you punish a group regularly in small to harsh ways, I reckon they might just think the next bit of noise is just more of the same.

It does take quite a bit of training to be able to get up in the morning and take a fresh look at what’s happening, and that requires even putting yesterday in the past. It also requires being fully cognizant of our biases and mindsets. Anyone who says they don’t have any are doomed to play them out. What then do we hold to that gives us some predictive viability? First is cultivating an independence of thought, a detachment from the tribe whether professional, national, sub-cultural, or party as usual. And that is not antipathy, even the opposite, what others have called “indifferent love”. This stance supports an ability to: follow the evidence from several fields of science; hold doubt without discarding anything until resolved in evidence; and reviewing fully any arguments against. This ability for independent thought supports the interdependence of all independent thinkers for it is only in the recognition of true independent inquiry (search for truth) that a collective of thinkers can divine a greater magic.

This situation we find ourselves is a call to be so much more than we have ever been, so much more than we wound up being, individually and collectively. We will either rise to the call or we will fall. And whatever happens will be what happens. As the WWII holocaust found traction, Lydia Zamenhoff chose to go back to Poland from the USA in the face of immanent danger, she chose to support the last moments of her community and die with them. We don’t know how many hands she held but we do know she died with them. Those of us in the frontline of transforming this civilisation may well find ourselves in a future of ‘holding hands’. We must accept that this is one possible future.

In terms of policy, economics, and human behaviour, the basic economic reality of scarcity does work. Many people living in rural Australia grew up looking after water usage. If you have to make a meagre annual rainfall and a watertank last a year, you have watch usage like a hawk. On the other hand, if old people can’t afford heating in winter, they could die. Well, that’s a time honoured tradition. Australia has ineptly allowed gas companies to sell much of its gas, internationally, leading to scarcity and high prices for energy as we enter winter. I’m expecting an unusual winter death rate among the elderly this year. Feeding into an inflationary boom, those on more basic incomes can be expected to suffer housing dislocation. This in, perhaps, the wealthiest per capita nation on the planet.

Meanwhile the environmental impact of windfarms is already been felt and the next phase of renewable energy farms will not be given such an easy ride. The real difficulty is that we aren’t learning fast enough because, here in Australia, for the last 20 years 80% of our intellectual energy has been spent on arguing climate change denialism with our government. In the end, the example of the holocaust goes to one characteristic of modern politics so far – we are often very slow to the table. Timing being the essence, and we can’t escape the clear timing the IPCC have provided, we will damage our way out of this catastrophe. The question is, which is the lesser poison or the better trade off? Presumably the one that improves the chances of the ecosystem and human civilisation. There’s not much chop in voting for the view that 1 or 2 or 3 billion people can just suffer and die. There’s not much chop in loosing much more of the world’s ecosystems and species than we already have, because that will inevitably lead to the billions of people suffering and dying. The inextricableness of human development and a narrow range of climate and a particular variety of ecosystems, is conclusive. I support the work of the Foundation for Climate Restoration, the third and often overlooked leg of climate solutions. The scalability of technologies of removing CO2 from the atmosphere over the next decade is likely to have less impact and perhaps even a very positive total impact on ecosystems, than any other climate change solution, namely renewable energy development and population adaptation. To solve this crisis, to transform global civilisation so the next phase of human development is of a higher order of workability for people and ecosystems, we’ve got to work urgently together on all fronts, even if it means government ordered rationing.

The UK in WWII proved that a people faced by a single existential threat can adhere to austere rationing policies for several years. Even in the 1930’s the mathematical and nutritional knowledge was ample so that there were no cases on malnutrition in the UK during WWII. Today, we certainly have the capacity to design sophisticated systems for the allocation of energy, the development of renewables, the weaning from fossil fuels, and the equitable establishment of systems worldwide, together with an food security systems. What is still required is for nationalistic governments to get to the table put aside their extreme patriotisms for the future of humanity and the planetary ecosystems that support us.

We have a political choice: the easy choice or the hard choice. The easy choice is for all national governments to come to the table with good will to design global systems that will create both equity in resource access and as rapid a transition from fossil fuel energy as possible. The hard choice is to continue to bicker and terrorize each other.

Either choice will lead to the new civilisation, will lead to the transition off fossil fuels and to equitable distributions of resources. Even if making the hard choice, once a billion people have died and billions of others have suffered through the defensive and aggressive attitudes of extreme patriots, the billions of people of good will remaining,will see those extremists off. Such has been the way of history to date. Will this be the moment we will be able to put our past in the past and take the easy way, or will we insist that the past dictates our actions and only massive numbers of deaths will convince us that another model of governance and social organization is viable.?

The Future is My Past, So Long as I Can Remember It.

The adage, whosever doesn’t know their history is doomed to repeat it, goes for our personal, social, economic, and political history.

People have said to me, “Why are you guilty about things that happened 100 or 200 years ago.” While guilty is the wrong word for what I feel, and shame is much closer, the clearer expression is that I am full cognizant of my circumstances in world society and the historical facts and influences behind those circumstances.

I am fully cognizant of the whispers that maybe my ancestor was a slave trader in the Queen Elizabeth 1st era or abouts. I am cognizant that this is not considered a point of ancestoral pride. I am cognizant that my grandfather and grandmother went from poor white labourer immigrants to Australia, arriving just prior to WWI and went on to become successful middle class farmers in North Queensland by WWII, setting the opportunity for the tertiary education of me and all my siblings (5 in all) albeit that with a lot of help from Gough Whitlam’s free university program of the 1970’s.

I am cognizant that my grandfather was able to avail himself of land in 1916, on which to breed maize for the fledgling DPI while first Nations people continued to move traditionally through the countryside. Their access to country being largely locked away, my family hardly noticed that the Government moved them onto a mission. I am cognizant that we didn’t deal honourably, and certainly not with a treaty or relevant recompense for moving into the land and utilising the resource in advantageous yet destructive ways.

While a certain shame lives on in my cognizance that I was brought up not to steal, a value I hold dearly to, today, in the face of that we stole. At the best we bought stolen goods, and some might argue because our grandparents world view blinded them to the facticity of this. While that may be so, the English and Australian frontier government had no doubt they colonised a previously occupied land and fought off defenders with vile means. in otherwords they invaded and stole another people’s land.

I accept my personal history in the world of pain of many peoples of this planet. I accept the political and social history that I was tied to, and am still tied to, both in ineptitude and advantage.

Image: Tom Clohosy Cole https://www.behance.net/gallery/72357419/Destination-Planet-Earth

I am committed to creating a new future for my descendants and the descendants of all the people of the world. My past is mostly complete, like a book whose last word has been written. To the extent the society and economy and political systems have not completed the past, my past is also not complete. Everytime someone asks my, “Why do you feel…”, I know that they are ignoring or downplaying the present as given by that history, that past. I know that if too many people downplay the past, the more likely we are as a society of repeating it. Indeed, right now, many government and business institutions have failed to apply equitable attitudes because they are avoiding how they are still prejudiced. Their failure to be cognizant of how prejudice built our institutions and economy, is their failure to recognise that they are simply repeating historical world view prejudices, albeit they might declare they are only evaluating objectively who is deserving and who is not. They are not able to see that both ‘objectively’ is ‘subjective and prejudiced’ and ‘deserving’ is also subjective and prejudiced’.

Now that I am complete with my past, it sits like a clear memory of where I came from, and shows a clear possibility of where I could go on. This future is a past / historically derived future, what some call the default future. On the other hand, the past derived future is not inevitable as it would be if I had not completed my past. Ignoring and downplaying our past, leads to the inevitable repeating of it, the default future.

I now create a future. Not like a prophecy. Rather as a promise, a possibility of which I will apply every effort until such time as the bell tolls or am otherwise reduced to incapacity or convinced of the folly of my view. I stand, live, in a world which all ecosystems and every human is flourishing. As I look back over my past, to today, I see, remember, sitting here writing this article. My whiteboard nearby has a schedule of activities for today. I see my preparation for the refugee farmers seminar in Uganda that I am chairing this afternoon by zoom. I see the gathering of networks of eco-agricultural organisations and consultants around the refugee regenerative agriculture project. I see that I am wondering what to do about that funding is lacking. I’m unclear what I did about that.

Why am I looking back from the future to create how it was made? Simple because my brain is just a pattern making machine. And it takes those patterns from the past. If I want to have a future that is not defaulted to the patterns of prejudice and other limitations that I have inherited, then I must resort to putting my created future and how it got made, in the past. In reality I am as much making a new timeline of past, for my brain to make new patterns with, as I am making a new future that doesn’t exist for my brain to acknowledge. When I make the new memories of what I did next, then I’ll be clear about the steps I and many others, took along the path to this most wonderful world my grandchildren and their children are living.

Land Acknowledgements and Cognitive dissonance.

What I wrote in response to “Against Land Acknowledgement” written by a self proclaimed ‘Georgist’.

I also consider myself to be a ‘georgist’ and if by that you mean having the economic view that all living humans share equally in the planetary resources, then there are a number of issues pertaining to colonised indigenous lands, like my own Australia.

1. There was no treaty made or properly observed with the original inhabitants of the land. if you see a legal loophole then shame on you. The land is stolen and never ceded. To imagine otherwise is to say that I can come onto your property and just camp there, erect a building, force you out, and there would be no legal support you could turn to. Although this does happen in the west bank of Israel, it is anathema to most most civilised people;

2 The evaluation of land to be shared can only come about with full agreement of all parties from the get go. When one party has been force to concede, then no georgian equation can be made except on the restoration of a fully agreement of all interested parties, and that would mean dealing with restoration claims. To take that off the table is only to enact domination over part of the community, rather than any sense of equity.

3. How do we truly evaluate the resource that has been conquered, stolen centuries ago? Think of the value that has been derived from the resource of the Australian or North American continent, for that, in Georgian terms, is the full evaluation of the commons. Our failure to evaluate the commons has lead to the modern tragedy of the commons called climate change, but also the poorer developmental situation of all colonialised indigenous peoples. Why, because the failure of appropriate taxes on the value of the use of resources has lead to essential overuse, ecological systems destruction, climate change and an enormous mountain to climb in relation to social and economic equity. How do we know that? Because by definition, when resources are borrowed from the commons by a company, individual or even government as a whole, the taxable level for the use of that resource is set at a rate that allows the commons to conserve and even improve the resource. The appropriate tax does slow down the rate of development to a degree that allows conservation while placing a greater contribution from product to the community at large, thereby paying for equity in public accessible advancements – ‘highways and Byways’ like transport, energy, education, communication, knowledge growth etc.

All that being said, what has it to do with acknowledgments of country? Firstly, and as we include in many of our acknowledgments in Australia, the land was never ceded. It is a reminder across boardrooms, universities, government departments, and the self-centred, that we haven’t paid the rent. We are, like parasites, living off other people’s lost lives, and we are living off the rewards of theft, piracy, conquest.

Yet there is a deeper proposition also at stake. The proposition that, entangled with our conquering, we have overlooked important cultural resources. That too is part of the commons. And a Georgian would wonder, why are we not utilising that resource at all? Why is that human resource left to sit segregated, stagnating. My own view is that it is left to stagnate for the same reasons that up until recent decades, there was a single world view about productive agriculture and, regardless of the damage it has caused to our food quality, soils, and conservation of production for future generations, an ecological view of agriculture was laughed out of town.

But now the chickens are coming home to roost. The piper needs paying all the same, for as you imply, it is the land, the ecosystem, that requires the appropriate equities to be followed, and failing that, the ecosystem will languish, become unbalanced and ultimately become dangerous to the human being. And part of restoring those equities is fully acknowledging what we had been denying, who we are as a complete community, a commonwealth of diverse peoples, which diversity is a large part of the value of the commons.

If it feels humbling to acknowledge what you are complicit against others, then rather than give into your cognitive dissonance around it, trying cleverly to avoid what it is, you would best sit with your dissonance. Perhaps there is indeed a fully human answer that will come to you.