The following in a summary and introduction to: Gaian Democracies: Redefining Globalisation and People-Power, by Roy Madron and John Jopling, published by Green Books.

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Gaian Democracies

Roy Madron & John Jopling

In the midst of the prosperity and affluence of Western ‘democracies’ there is a pervasive sadness and sense of impotence about the future of our societies, of humanity and of the natural world. Many well-informed people have focused those negative feelings on the idea of‘globalisation’. For them the very term carries with it a sense of global despoliation, greed, oppression, injustice and irreparable loss. At the same time, many of us in the West are uncomfortably aware that the unprecedented material abundance we enjoy is being bought at the expense of the rest of the world’s peoples, natural resources and wildlife. Within the societies forced to pay the costs of today’s form of globalisation, tens of millions of citizens are seething with anger, envy and frustration.

Yet today’s globalisation is but the latest—and hopefully temporary —phase of a globalising process that has been going on for thousands of years. In effect, we humans are a global species: we have evolved the capacity to inhabit virtually every corner of the planet. Thus some form of ‘globalisation’ is part of our destiny. What is in question is the form that human globalisation will take in its next manifestation.

Like millions of people, we have come to the conclusion that today’s globalisation is fundamentally unjust and unsustainable. Like them we want to make a useful contribution to changing this unjust and unsustainable system of globalisation into a just and sustainable one. But we believe that to bring about such a fundamental change in an enormous and complex system we first have to understand its main characteristics as a system. Thus in Chapter 1 we introduce some of the key concepts and insights from systems theory, in particular ‘soft-systems theory’, as the basic grammar of ‘a new language of change’. Soft-systems theory is the branch of systems science that deals with human systems.

In Chapter 2 we apply those concepts to a review of the environmental, social and economic impacts of today’s form of globalisation on the world’s peoples, natural resources and wildlife. We cite sources and material in Chapter 2 that will be familiar to many readers. However, by adopting the systems concepts and insights f rom Chapter 1, we are able to shed new light on what might otherwise be a rather familiar recital of the ills that globalisation has produced.

In Chapter 3, by again using a systems approach, we can see that the huge range of unjust and unsustainable impacts we describe in Chapter 2 is not haphazard. The unjust and unsustainable aspects of globalisation stem from the purposes, principles and ideologies of a purposeful human system we have called the ‘Global Monetocracy’. In systems terms, injustice and unsustainability are ‘emergent properties’ of the system a whole. As a purposeful human system, the Global Monetocracy is not designed to deliver justice and sustainability. For this reason, we do not attach blame to any specific group or class. Many people, not just the financial and business elites, have prospered immensely in the service of the Global Monetocracy. There are others who defend it ferociously against its many critics. Even so, they are just minor components of a complex system that has evolved over several centuries. To blame them as individuals, or specific groups or classes, is to make a fundamental strategic error. If we want a just and sustainable global system in the future, it is the Global Monetocracy as a whole that must be reconfigured —the totality, not just parts of it.

Our description of today’s global system as the Global Monetocracy originates from our identification of its core purpose as a system. Every human system has a purpose that governs the way it works, and this is true of today’s form of globalisation. The systemic purpose of the Global Monetocracy is the continuation of money growth in order to maintain the current debt-based money system. It is not widely known that almost all the money we use comes into existence, not by governments creating it, but as a result of a bank agreeing to make a loan to a customer at interest. Only about 3%—the notes and coins—is government-made. The other 97% comes into existence as a debt owed by a customer to a bank. We cite authorities such as James Robertson, Richard Douthwaite and Michael Rowbotham to show that the effect of this is that our economies have to grow in order to avoid financial collapse. The debt-money system is thus the driving force behind the Global Monetocracy. The risk of collapse forces governments to give priority to policies that serve the money growth imperative; and in turn, these policies produce the unjust and unsustainable form of globalisation that we have today.

The blatant injustice and unsustainability of the Global Monetocracy has already aroused a great deal of opposition. In Chapter 4 we briefly summarise the limitations of the strategies employed by its leading opponents.

In Chapter 5 we outline the components of ‘Gaian Democracy’, a model of government that we believe will ensure our societies can use systems concepts to become—and remain—just and sustainable.

‘Gaia’ is the name of the Greek goddess of Earth. James Lovelock adopted it for the scientific theory he first put forward in 1972, in the journal Atmospheric Environment. The Gaia theory sees the planet’s physical, chemical and biological systems as a single evolving, self-regulating ecosystem. It explores how these systems interact to maintain the overall temperature and the chemical composition of the land, the atmosphere and the sea, within limits that make the Earth habitable by countless billions of living creatures. This way of thinking about the planet—thinking within the framework of Gaia theory—has led to many important new perceptions in the sciences of the Earth, and has contributed to the foundation of a new, multidisciplinary effort known as Earth System Science.

Gaia’s systems are all self-organising and interactive. We have called the form of government we are proposing Gaian Democracy, because our proposal is shaped by principles similar to those of the Gaian system itself.

Our proposal is also, crucially, based on the insights from soft-systems thinking that are outlined in Chapter 1. Gaian systems have evolved naturally. If we are to purposefully and consciously reconfigure our democratic and economic systems, we need to make use of the most soundly based and well-tried strategies for bringing about change in human societies. These are to be found in soft-systems thinking .

In Chapter 6 we discuss some of the factors that encourage us to believe that a vision of a global network of just and sustainable Gaian democracies is not a pipe-dream, but is in fact highly practical and entirely feasible.

In short, this Briefing argues that, since today’s Global Monetocracy has been devised to serve an unjust and unsustainable set of purposes, we need to replace it with a global network of just and sustainable Gaian democracies.

Taking on the power of the Global Monetocracy

The elites of the Global Monetocracy use many varieties of power to influence the actions of hundreds of millions of people every minute of every day in every part of the planet. They have always been ready to use the most unscrupulous and brutal methods to enforce their aims and to defend their privileges. But these are just the tip of a vast apparatus of power. Power does not only flow from the barrel of a gun, a tear-gas canister or the use of the torture chamber by surrogates of the system. With great skill and determination, the Global Monetocracy’s elites use the power of property, personality, tradition, technology, myth, propaganda, the media, government, professional and technical expertise, the judiciary and the police, patronage and, crucially, the power of ideology.

If today’s unjust and unsustainable Global Monetocracy is to be replaced by a global network of just and sustainable Gaian democracies, the question of ‘power’ must be addressed. What alternative forms of power could be generated to bring about a fundamental global transformation in the face of the huge variety of power that the Global Monetocracy can command? To answer that question we have to understand the difference between change strategies and defence strategies.

Change strategies and defence strategies

To illustrate the vital difference between ‘social defence’ and ‘social change’, George Lakey, the veteran American community activist, cites the rapid disillusionment of young Russians in the aftermath of their defeat of the attempted Communist coup in 1991.

Thousands of idealistic young men and women had put their lives on the line to resist the attempted overthrow of Gorbachev’s reforming government by former Soviet apparatchiks. Yet even though they had stopped the communist old guard in its tracks and put Yeltsin into power, they soon saw him and his ministers helping the rich to get even richer and driving the poor ever deeper into poverty. By the time Lakey encountered them a few years later, the young Russians were psychologically devastated by the aftermath of their courageous resistance to a return to totalitarianism. They were finding it extremely painful to have to face the fact that they— or as they saw themselves, ‘the people of Russia’—had “lost their big move for radical change”.

With his many years of experience in the black community’s protest and resistance movements, Lakey was able to point out that what they had been doing in the streets of Moscow was a hugely courageous example of social defence of their society, but that the kind of social change they ultimately wanted to achieve would take a lot more than idealism and raw courage. “A strategy for fundamental change is a quite different project from what the pro-democracy Russians did, which was to defend Gorbachev and what he represented (the status quo) against the attack by the reactionaries.”

Lakey’s social defence vs social change dialectic opened the eyes of the young Russians. They now realised that to achieve the kind of change they wanted for the Russian people called for a strategy for change. This would entail bringing together the popular movements —who were concerned with defending the things they valued —around a vision of what a genuinely democratic Russia would look like. Upon that shared vision they would then be able to build a viable political movement to campaign at elections for every office in the land.

As this Briefing explains, we need to replace today’s unjust and unsustainable Global Monetocracy with a global network of just and sustainable Gaian democracies. Consequently, as George Lakey makes clear, if such hugely ambitious changes are to happen we must set about building viable political movements to offer the vision of Gaian democracies to people in every country where elections are held.

The Gaian model of democracy is shaped by the conviction that, with the tools provided by soft-systems methodologies, the peoples of the world have the political capacities to co-create global networks of just and sustainable Gaian democracies. As we explain in Chapter 5, the fundamental political and governmental changes we need cannot be initiated and sustained without at first thousands, and ultimately millions of active citizens thinking, acting and learning together to co-create societies that are just and sustainable. We agree with Professor David Held, when he says, “Our established ideas about equality, justice and liberty [and, we would say, sustainability] have to be refashioned into a coherent political project robust enough for a world where power is exercised not just locally and nationally but also on a trans-national scale, and where the consequences of political and economic decisions in one community can ramify across the globe.“

By its very nature, the Gaian democracies project must be capable of handling and tackling effectively a tremendous variety of issues, while building and sustaining the trust and commitment of the citizens it seeks to serve. If future historians are to judge today’s Global Monetocracy to have been a painful but temporary cul-de-sac, the Gaian democracies project will have to cross all boundaries and include all disciplines. It will need to have many starting points in order to build the necessary power and range of competencies needed to fulfil its purpose. Those starting points will most likely arise at the margins of the Global Monetocracy’s empire. No matter how small and how tentative those initial steps may be, the Gaian democracies project will gain in strength and certainty through citizens sharing their experiences of thinking, acting and learning together to bring about fundamental social, economic and political change. When citizens think, act and learn together they build the shared competencies and understanding through which effective forms of people-power can be generated.

With an accelerating accumulation of shared experiences, competencies and people-power, there will eventually be a tipping point at which ‘globalisation’ will come to mean the global network of Gaian democracies, rather than the Global Monetocracy. By that point the vast varieties of power that the elites of the Global Monetocracy have at their command will have evaporated. Instead, the global network of Gaian democracies will be exercising a very different but equally comprehensive variety of powers to serve a very different range of purposes.

The sooner that tipping point is reached, the better it will be. As we explain in Chapter 2, if it is delayed much beyond thirty years the environmental and social consequences could be disastrous for the human family and many other species. But in order to reach the tipping point as soon as possible the Gaian democracies political project will need to learn from all the practical examples of people-power from which we have drawn much of the material for Chapter 5.

People-power in the real world

As the diagram at the beginning of Chapter 5 shows, the key components of Gaian democracies are:

• The Gaian system
  
  
• Shared purposes and principles
  
  
• Soft-systems concepts
  
  
• Paulo Freire’s learning principles
  
  
• Participatory change processes
  
  
• Liberating political leadership
  
  
• Network government

Together these seven components provide the systemic basis of Gaian democracies, enabling them to generate the people-power that will re-define ‘globalisation’ in terms of a network of just and sustainable societies. To illustrate some of the concepts on which we have based our thinking we have chosen the following examples of organisations and governments, which have adopted and applied several of the components of Gaian Democracy. In so doing, the forms of people-power they have generated have led them to reconfigure their enterprises and achieve outstanding success. In the space available, we can give only a brief sketch of each example, but fuller accounts are available at www.wwdemocracy.org.

The success of these examples, in highly competitive environments, can be attributed to their development of structures and processes whose complexity matches that of the environments they have to contend with. As Shann Turnbull says:

“The challenge for developing a new way to govern is to determine the simple basic design rules to create organisations [or as we would say, Gaian democracies] that manage complexity along the same principles evolved in nature. The reason for following the rules of nature to construct ecological organisations is that these rules have proved to be the most efficient and robust way to create and manage complexity.”

1. Examples from business

The MondragÛn Corporacion Cooperativa (MCC)
MondragÛn is a city in the Basque region of Spain. By the early 1990s, the cooperatives that make up the MCC had annual sales of over £4 billion. Their 53,000 worker/owners were organised in a self-governing network of firms, kept mostly to a human scale of around 500 people. When a member-cooperative grew to about 500 worker/owners, part of it was spun off into a separate business. Thus for many years the MCC grew organically, by cell division, not by take-overs or by unlimited growth in its component parts. Eventually each self-governing cooperative was part of a complex system of self-governance comprising over 1000 ‘compound’ boards or control centres. Contrary to the received wisdom of the Global Monetocracy’s elites, it was this highly complex and devolved system of governance that enabled the MCC to achieve its high levels of productivity and profitability, its stability of employment and its capacity for innovation and flexibility.

Like most of the examples we give, the MCC had ‘hard-wired’ its capacity to generate extraordinary levels of people-power by making very conscious decisions about its financing, organisational structure and governance processes at a very early stage of its development. The guiding spirit behind these decisions was JosÈ Maria Arrizmendi-Arrieta, a Jesuit priest who encouraged his parishioners to set up their first cooperative enterprises back in the 1940s.

Visa International
The constitution of credit card company Visa International was designed through the ‘chaordic design process’ invented by Dee Hock, who became its first Chief Executive. We quote Hock’s insistence on the vital importance of purpose and principles in Chapter 1 and discuss them at length in Chapter 5. Once commonly understood statements of purpose and principles have been arrived at by all relevant and affected parties, it is comparatively easy to agree a constitution.

Chaordic design combines elements of competition (chaos) with elements of cooperation (order). The parties involved in setting up Visa had to decide in what respects they needed to cooperate, and in what areas they could compete. The outcome was an institution owned by its functioning parts. The 23,000 financial institutions which now create Visa’s products are at the same time its owners and customers. It has multiple boards of directors, none of which can be considered superior or inferior, as each has irrevocable authority and autonomy over geographic or functional areas.

The whole subject of stakeholder ownership of corporate bodies is closely linked to Gaian Democracy. The principle is the same: people-ownership instead of money-ownership. The record shows that—provided at least some of the components of Gaian democracies are in place—it works. 

The Semco Corporation: Sao Paulo, Brazil
Like Visa’s Dee Hock, Ricardo Semler is a liberating leader who emerged from the corporate world. In his best-selling book Maverick!, Semler describes how he used his position as owner and chief executive to transform the decision-making processes and culture of his family company, Semco:

“My role is that of a catalyst. I try to create an environment in which others make decisions. Success means not making them myself.”

“We have absolute trust in our employees. We offer them the chance to be partners in our business, to be autonomous and responsible.”

“We are thrilled that our workers are self governing and self managing. It means that they care about their jobs and that’s good for all of us.”

“We get out of the way and let them do their jobs.”

Specific changes included the following:

• All financial information was made freely available and open to discussion, and people were taught the skills they needed to make use of this information.
  
  
• Structures were set up to enable as many decisions as possible to be taken by the people who would implement them—circles instead of a pyramid.
  
  
• Menial jobs were shared; perks, privileges and unnecessary formality done away with.
  
  
• People were encouraged to think for themselves and use common sense.
  
  
• Fewer bosses, fewer bureaucrats. Semler himself, instead of being chief executive, became one of five ‘counselors’.

Semler sees this as merely a beginning: “We have been ripping apart Semco and putting it back together again for a dozen years and we’re just 30% finished.” He is a tireless learner, driven by a belief in unfettered democracy, but he does not underestimate the difficulties:

“Participation is infinitely more complex to practise than conventional corporate unilateralism. . .  Nothing is harder work than democracy.”

2. Examples from politics

The real life democratic innovations of the greatest significance for Gaian democracies are those introduced in Athens in the 5th century BC and in Brazil since 1989.

Athens: Kleisthenes, the inventor of ‘people-power’
Two and a half millennia before Semler, Kleisthenes also came from the ruling class. On becoming chief archon (mayor) of Athens in 507/8 BC, he determined to break away from the tradition of government by a small ruling elite. He seems to have asked himself: “How can I enable the 40,000 citizens of Athens to govern themselves so that together we can successfully manage the conflicting interests and demands facing us?” It is the kind of question liberating leaders ask, and Kleisthenes’ answer was, “People-power!” By committing his government to people-power, Kleisthenes started the process through which Athens became the nearest thing to a genuine democracy the world has ever seen.

Like almost all societies until well into the 20th century, the Athens of 2,500 years ago excluded women (and slaves) from government, so this form of people-power was restricted to males over the age of 18. Obviously a modern Kleisthenes would not have to work within those restrictions, but, in systems terms, these historical factors do not diminish the importance of Athenian democracy as the prime example of a system of government based on people-power.

Recognising that elections favoured the well-born, the prominent and the wealthy, Kleisthenes started by restructuring the political geography of the city, creating ten phylai (brotherhoods) of 4,000 citizens, each representing a cross-section of Athenian (male) society, so that no one class could dominate. The business of the citizens’ Assembly was managed by the Boule (council). Each month fifty citizens were chosen by lot from one of the phylai to constitute the Boule, so that in any one year the Boule was rotated between all the phylai.

Government decisions, including the conduct of wars, were taken by the Assembly itself, meeting up to 40 times a year on the Pnyx, a large theatre-like meeting place on the hill west of the Acropolis. A quorum of 6000 was required. As John Dunn has written: “for the most part, ancient Greek citizens had far greater direct experience of politics than all but a handful of citizens in modern states. Every citizen of Athens was entitled to attend, vote and speak at meetings of the Assembly, which decided the great issues of state: the making of peace or war, the passing of laws and the political exile or death of individual leaders; and they did so by simple majorities.”

Professor Dunn argues that the benefits of people-power were enormous: “Kleisthenes turned a motley, insecure and essentially powerless aggregation of residents in a vaguely demarcated territory into a proud and self-confident sovereign people.” Seventy years after Kleisthenes’ death, the legendary soldier and statesman, Pericles, summarised Athenian Democracy thus: “. . . the city of Athens, taken all together, is a model for all Greece, and each Athenian, as far as I can see, is more self-reliant as an individual and behaves with exceptional versatility and grace in the more varied forms of activity.”

It is no coincidence that it was during this period, while it was engaged in the world’s first experiment in people-power, that the city of Athens saw the flowering of one of the most humane, adventurous, artistic and influential civilisations there has ever been.

The ‘OrÁamento Participativo’ or Participatory Budget Process
The benefits of people-power are being experienced today in over 100 Brazilian cities, and especially by the 1.3 million residents of Porto Alegre, the capital of Brazil’s southernmost state, Rio Grande do Sul. It was in Porto Alegre that the Participatory Budget (PB) process was first attempted. Since 1989, Porto Alegre has been governed by a leftwing coalition led by the Brazilian Workers’ Party (PT). In a whole range of sectors—housing, public transport, highways, garbage collection, clinics, hospitals, sewerage, environment, literacy, schooling, culture, law and order—the city has made spectacular progress. The key to this success has been its PB, first introduced by the PT the year after Ol“vio Dutra’s victory in the 1988 Mayoral elections. [8]

For the purposes of the PB, the city is divided into sixteen administrative areas or regions. To enable an integrated vision for the whole of the city to be defined, there are five citywide themes: public transport and traffic; education; culture and leisure; healthcare and social security; economic development and taxation; and city management and urban development.

The PB process takes nine months, starting in April. The first round assemblies—in all of which the Mayor participates—are held in each of the sixteen regions and on the five themes. These review the basic components of the budget and major investments of the previous year. Then neighbourhood and sub-thematic meetings are held to identify investment priorities. The second round assemblies take place in June, when investment proposals are presented to the city’s senior officials.

Each region has an elected Regional Budget Forum that coordinates neighbourhood priorities into a list of priorities for the region as a whole. The Forum then settles any disputes with the various city agencies, and negotiates and monitors the implementation by those agencies. The elected Municipal Budget Council coordinates the demands made in each of the regional and thematic forums in order to produce the city’s annual investment plan.

In addition to the improvement in municipal services, the PB has greatly reduced corruption while increasing the incidence of neighbourhood mobilisation and active citizenship. Poorer people in particular find it a more effective way to exercise their rights and responsibilities of citizenship than voting at elections. In 2002 over 45,000 citizens and 1000 local organisations and enterprises participated in Porto Alegre’s PB.

People-power and liberating leadership

Each of the above examples shows some of the components of Gaian Democracy at work in the real world. They are by no means templates for Gaian democracies: women and slaves were excluded from public life in Athens; Semco, Visa and MondragÛn all operate within the Global Monetocracy. However, in every case they illustrate the need for liberating leadership, whether in the corporate world—as with Dee Hock, Ricardo Semler or JosÈ Maria Arrizmendi-Arrieta—or in the political world—as shown by Kleisthenes and Pericles in Athens and the Workers’ Party in Brazil. They show that people-power is immensely rewarding for all the people concerned and for the system as a whole. They suggest the wide diversity of situations in which the model could be applied. And they all show that the kinds of changes involved in creating Gaian democracies can be peacefully initiated and sustained by liberating leaders who are prepared to ‘hard-wire’ people-power into the principles, purposes, structure, organisation and processes of their enterprise.

None of our examples illustrates a society that has succeeded in reforming its economy so as to become just and sustainable. There are of course thousands of projects and initiatives around the world which have these aims and which the Gaian democracies of the future can build on. But, as no society can insulate itself from the Global Monetocracy, there are no examples of modern societies coexisting in a symbiotic relationship with the rest of the Gaian systems. Hence the need to reconfigure the Global Monetocracy itself.

The transition phase

In every one of the examples we have cited above, the fundamental changes were initiated in the most unpromising circumstances. The people of MondragÛn had been devastated by Franco’s victory in the Spanish Civil War and were suffering harsh repression. Dee Hock and a small team worked out the enormously radical organisational concepts that eventually became the trillion dollar Visa International at a time when conventional credit card businesses were losing hundreds of millions of dollars a year in the USA. Semco was lurching from crisis to crisis and heading towards bankruptcy when Ricardo Semler converted himself from a command-and-control workaholic to a laid-back liberating leader: then he could start the process by which the people in the company were empowered to turn it into a huge success. In the decade before Kleisthenes became archon of Athens, the city had been ruined by a violently autocratic tyrant, and suffered the indignity of being policed by ‘advisers’ from Sparta and governed by puppets of the Spartan regime.

When Ol“vio Dutra was elected mayor of Porto Alegre he inherited a shambles that was getting worse by the day: the city had been bankrupted by the previous Mayor and his party; there were virtually no public services in the poorest parts of the city; and corruption was endemic at every level in the administration. Then, as now, the PT’s political opponents controlled the local newspapers, radio stations and TV channels. The growing electoral success of the Brazilian PT is therefore especially encouraging for political parties engaged in uphill struggles to build people-powered Gaian democracies elsewhere in the world. In each election in Porto Alegre since 1988, the PT has been rewarded for its liberating leadership by an increased percentage of the vote. In the 2000 mayoral elections the PT candidate was supported by more than 63% of the electorate. And, most encouraging of all, the PT’s Lula da Silva won 61% of the national vote in the 2002 presidential elections.

The leaders of these enterprises knew that the old ways had turned out to be a recipe for certain disaster. In each case their new ideas involved rethinking the purposes and principles, the structures, the processes and the governance of the enterprise, whether it was an organisation or government. And at the core of these examples was a fundamental commitment by liberating leaders to people-power as the means by which disaster could be surmounted and a new way of life developed.

Moreover, each of these liberating leaders was working in virtual isolation and faced fierce opposition. Athenian people-power had to overcome the implacable hostility of the Spartan war-machine and a permanent fifth column within the Athenian elite. Porto Alegre had no other city to call on for help and guidance as it painfully learnt how to turn its commitment to people-power into a successful Participatory Budget process. Moreover, even though over 100 Brazilian cities now have PT administrations committed to people-power and participative budgets, their leaders still have to put their lives on the line. Its officials and their families routinely receive death threats, and within the last two years, two of the PT’s city mayors have been assassinated. No one had ever devised ‘a chaordic organisation’ before Dee Hock and his small team of middle- ranking bank officers worked it out from first principles, and then implemented it while the rest of the banking world waited for them to fail. Similar stories can be told of Semco and MondragÛn.

So, starting in the most unpromising and even dangerous circumstances is the norm for liberating leaders who commit themselves to people-powered, fundamental change. People-power is sometimes hard-wired into the enterprise from its very foundation, as with Visa and MondragÛn. Alternatively, and more usually, people-power can be introduced as the key element in a radical strategy for fundamental change in a crisis situation, as with Semco, Porto Alegre and Athens. These conclusions imply an almost infinite range of opportunities to introduce the Gaian Democracy model and initiate fundamental long-term change. There must be a few potential JosÈ Maria Arrizmendi-Arrietas, Dee Hocks, Ricardo Semlers, Kleisthenes and Olivio Dutros in every community, city, company, public service and political party.

There is no space in this very condensed Briefing to describe all the examples of people-powered fundamental change that we know about. What they all have in common is the application of at least some of the components that we believe are essential if Gaian democracies are to be successful. By their very nature, these examples help to move the transition process towards the tipping point when a global network of just and sustainable Gaian democracies emerges out of the unjust and unsustainable shambles of the Global Monetocracy. The Gaian Democracy political project will have to identify, encourage, support and connect all people-power change initiatives so that we can reach the tipping point as soon as possible. The longer it takes, the greater the damage that the Global Monetocracy will do to the human family and to the natural world on which we all depend.

“Real success can only come if there is a change in our societies, and in our economics, and in our politics.” —Sir David Attenborough in The Ecologist, April 2001.

References

1. For example, see the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research at http://www.met-office.gov.uk/research/hadleycentre/; and the International Geosphere-Biosphere Program at http://www.igbp.kva.se/cgibin/php/frameset.php

2. For an excellent discussion of the difference between social change and social defence see George Lakey, ‘Human Shields in Palestine and Pushing Our Thinking About People Power: Part Two’ at http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2002-06/01lakey.cfm

3. David Held (ed.), A Globalizing World?: Culture, Economics, Politics (Understanding Social Change), Routledge, London, 2000.

4. Shann Turnbull, A New Way to Govern, a paper presented to the Organisations and Institutions Network, 14th Annual Meeting on Socio-Economics, University of Minnesota, Minnesota, USA, June 27-30, 2002.

5. For example, see Shann Turnbull, ‘Curing The Cancer In Capitalism With Employee Ownership’ at http://cog.kent.edu/lib/TurnbullCuringCancerForConference.htm; The National Center for Employee Ownership at www.nceo.org; and Employee Ownership Options at http://www.employee-ownership.org.uk/.

6. Ricardo Semler, Maverick!, Century, London, 1993.

7. John Dunn in the preface to John Dunn (ed.), Democracy; The Unfinished Journey 508 BC to AD 1993, OUP, Oxford, 1992.

8. This is the best known of a number of innovations in participatory democracy being conducted by the PT in Brazil, the Frente Amplio (Broad Front) in Uruguay, and elsewhere in South America. See the MOST Clearing House for further examples at http://www.unesco.org/most/bphome.htm.

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Web of Democracy

Roy Madron & John Jopling

Over the past 50 years, systems thinkers have become increasingly influential in every field of human endeavour – from astronomy to agriculture, from economics to health, from crime prevention to traffic circulation. The practical benefits of systems thinking in these fields have been immense, yet little use has been made of it in tackling the social and political problems that we face.

If systems are separated into their component parts they cannot perform the functions of which they are capable when put together in the right combination: a pile of bicycle parts cannot be ridden until assembled in the correct way; an amputated arm cannot throw a ball. A tree here, some ants over there and a pile of leaves do not provide an environment in which an ecosystem can be sustained. A rideable bike, ecosystems and ball throwing are ‘emergent properties’ of different kinds of systems. This is the single most important concept in systems sciences because it requires us to think in terms of whole systems and their relationships, not just their parts.

Self-organizing systems

Living organisms and ecosystems are ‘self-organizing’. This means that their behaviour is not controlled by some external agency but is established by the system itself. Yet, even without external controls, natural systems exhibit high degrees of order. This is a consequence of the ordered but dynamic relationships between the parts of the system and its environment – between, for example, an ecosystem such as a forest and its inanimate environment.

Like living systems, purposeful human systems are also self-organizing. The more complex these systems become, the more they self-organize and arrive at their own form of order – though the form of order they arrive at may or may not be helpful in achieving the system’s purpose. Think of how any complex organization you have been involved with – a local council, a hospital or a school – seems to defy all attempts to impose tight control upon it.

The ability of living systems and purposeful human systems to self-organize enables them to adapt to changes in their environment without losing their integrity. An ongoing enterprise is still ‘the firm’ after all the original staff have left and it no longer makes what it used to make. If you looked at its parts, they would all be different; but the system as a whole has retained its identity.

Network democracy

All members of the system are interconnected in a vast and intricate network of relationships. They derive their essential properties and, in fact, their very existence from their relationships. The success of the whole community depends on the success of its individual members, while the success of each member depends on the success of the community as a whole.

In contrast, engineered systems have predictable outcomes, because all their components can be precisely designed and controlled. Most of our political, administrative, business and NGO leaders assume that purposeful human systems should be as predictable as engineered systems. But it is only as they become both increasingly complex and increasingly self-organizing that purposeful human systems and their component parts also achieve an ordered state, which arises as an emergent property of the system as a whole. As Margaret Wheatley, the American leadership and systems thinker, says: ‘You can’t look at something like self-organization or complex adaptive systems in science, no matter what unit you’re looking [at] – plants, molecules, chemicals – without realizing that this is a kind of democratic process. Everybody is involved locally and out of that comes a more global system.’

Thus, if we can think of ‘democracy’ as meaning a system through which members of communities organize themselves, rather than a system for controlling them, our democratic systems would be getting closer to being complex, adaptive and self-organizing.

For as societies become ever more complex, their leaders have less and less control over the internal and external complexities they face. There is simply too much information for a small group of decision-makers, with limited skills, knowledge and time, to process in order to make confident decisions – no matter how powerful their computers or how vast their resources. Thus information processing and decision-making power should be devolved as widely as possible. The leaders and the subsystems can then take actions which aid the viability of the system as a whole.

Take a soccer game, for example. Suppose there are 11 equally talented players on each side but the players in one team can only do exactly what the captain tells them to do. Obviously, their opponents would run rings round them because, within certain fairly loose rules and shared understandings, they would play as a ‘complex, adaptive, self-organizing system’. By being ‘self-organizing’, the winning team would be able to generate more variety than the team that could only do what their captain told them.

Underlying causes

Failure to use systems thinking when developing solutions to the problems caused by, for example, the current model of economic globalization – that is, focusing on the system’s emergent properties rather than its underlying structural causes – can only lead to ineffective, and sometimes gravely damaging, actions.

It is this failure to understand the need for soft-systems approaches to what systems thinkers call ‘wicked’ problems that leads to the incompetence of governments in dealing with almost all of the issues on their agenda.

According to systems thinker Professor Horst Rittel, almost all the major problems that confront our societies can be classified as
‘wicked’: they are problems that arise from non-linear systems’ complexities, as opposed to ‘tame’ problems, which arise from linear system faults. The main features of ‘wicked’ problems are:

• There is no definitive statement of the problem because it is embedded in an evolving set of interlocking issues and constraints.
• You only begin to understand the problem when you have developed and tested an interim solution.
• There are many people who care about, or have something at stake in, how the problem is resolved. This makes the problem-solving process fundamentally social rather than technical.
• Because there is no objectively ‘right answer’, what is important is that the stakeholders work out and accept whatever solution looks most promising.
• The constraints on the solution, such as limited resources and political ramifications, change over time. The constraints change – ultimately – because we live in a rapidly changing world. Operationally they change because many constraints are generated by the stakeholders, who come and go, change their minds, fail to communicate or otherwise change the rules by which the problem must be solved.
• Since there is no objective version of the problem, there is no definitive solution.
• The problem-solving process ends when you run out of time, money, energy or some other resource – not when some perfect solution emerges.

We live in a world full of ‘wicked’ problems: homelessness, drug dealing, terrorism, racism, overfishing, global warming and so on.


‘Tame’ problems, on the other hand, have definable outcomes and can be objectively solved. Even putting a human being on the moon is a ‘tame’ problem: it is difficult and hugely expensive but if you throw enough time, skills and resources at it you can do it; and you know when you have done it.


‘Tame’ and ‘wicked’ problems call for totally different approaches. With ‘tame’ problems there are recognized techniques and solutions. The standard approach is to divide the problem into manageable sub-problems and deal with them in a logical, linear sequence. Each of these will often call for different kinds of technical expertise. Once all the sub-problems have been solved, the solution to the whole problem is complete. The process is linear. The fatal error is to use linear processes to try to solve ‘wicked’ problems. Because ‘wicked’ problems can never be finally ‘solved’ in the way that ‘tame’ problems can, soft-systems concepts and methodologies are essential if we are to get to grips with them.

The soft-systems approach to ‘wicked’ problems arising in complex human systems requires the people involved in the problem situation to be actively involved in a constant cycle of thinking, acting and learning together. They need to understand each other’s perspectives; to do what they can to make things better and then to evaluate how successful they have been before starting the process all over again. This is a participatory, whole-systems approach to ordering our societies.

The whole business of soft-systems thinking is directed to the question of change within the chosen system. The more we understand about systems, the better we will be at learning how to create the democracies that will enable our societies to become more just and sustainable. Systems thinking has been successfully applied in many fields; it is now high time that this approach was applied to government and politics.

These soft-systems concepts can be used to reconfigure any complex human system from a school or a hospital to a government department, from a neighbourhood to a city to a whole nation. They provide the practical frameworks through which the citizens engaged in participatory change processes keep in close touch with the realities of the system that they are trying to improve. They build the knowledge and skills needed for citizens to work creatively on their ‘wicked’ problems while observing the shared purposes and principles of the system as a whole. And in doing so citizens and their liberating leaders gain in knowledge, competence and mutual trust. Thus equipped, they are able to tackle ever more complex and difficult ‘wicked’ problems in their society.

The idea that government could become a learning experience for all concerned is wholly foreign to command-and-control leaders. But the application of these concepts to the political field could transform the way democracy and government work.

Diversity, flexibility and subsidiarity will be the inevitable result of addressing ‘wicked’ problems with a soft-systems approach. Network government will encourage creativity and freedom in the design of all economic systems, in industry and agriculture as well as finance. What we are predicting here is the gradual emergence of a very different world. But it is not one that can be specified or ‘imagineered’. In systems terms, imagineering is inevitably a linear process and as such cannot take account of the complex adaptive nature of human societies.

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These ideas are developed further in the Schumacher briefing Gaian Democracies: Redefining Globalisation and People-Power, by Roy Madron and John Jopling, published by Green Books. This article first appeared in the New Internationalist magazine, ‘Reinventing Power’, September 2003.

Buckminster Fuller taught that a positive future for humanity would require that we do ‘more with less’. He coined the term “Dymaxion” to represent this concept of maximum efficiency. …The following article is reposted from Yes! Magazine.

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Less is More

Guy Dauncey

Americans are addicted to the joys of the open road. But the joys come at too high a price and we’re about to hit bottom. We can get around without oil. Here’s the 12-step program to do it.

If you were a redwood tree with a lifespan of 600 years, and you started life as a seedling in the year 1700, you would be able to live for 200 years in a world without oil, witness the beginning, middle and end of the Age of Oil, and still have 200 years to observe how humans fare in a world without oil (assuming you survive the timber companies).

Our personal memories rarely reach back more than 100 years, to the stories our grandparents told us. Geological time seems to have nothing to do with us. So when someone points out that the Age of Oil will end within our lifetimes, it’s hard to register. But that’s the reality.

Does this mean we’ll revert to the state of medieval villagers, never traveling more than a few miles from our doorsteps? Or can we redesign our transport system so that we can get where we need without burning oil?
 
The answer to the second question is “Yes,” and it can be done using reasonable, accessible steps and currently available technology. My conclusion is that we could meet all our transport needs without any oil transport fuel. We could use 86 percent less oil, and the remaining 14 percent could be replaced by biofuels. I leave hydrogen out of the picture, because biofuel and electricity provide a better delivery of net energy (see more on this argument in Mieszkowski article). To view my calculations, see “12 Steps: the cascading maths“

Total U.S. oil consumption is 312 billion gallons a year and rising. Transport accounts for 68 percent (212 billion gallons). I focus chiefly on trips in cars and light trucks, which use 54 percent of the transport oil (118 billion gallons a year). This includes trips to work, to the stores, to school, to visit friends, for vacations, and everything else. So buckle your seat belts, and get ready for an oil-free ride. We’re going to lose our addiction!

1) stay home
 
We can divert 5 percent of our trips by combining errands or not doing them in the first place. Thanks to the internet, many jobs can be done from home or in a local telework center, either full time or one day a week. Grocery shopping can also be done over the Internet, with home delivery by truck being a far more efficient use of fuel than individual shopping.
 
5 percent less fuel needed


2) walk

We can do 5 percent of our trips by foot; ancient people walked all the way out of Africa and around the world. Children could walk to school (www.iwalktoschool.org), instead of being chauffeured by their parents. Many people could walk to work and enjoy the exercise. We could redesign our cities and suburbs to make walking a pleasure, and rejuvenate the suburbs by developing  local neighborhood centers, creating places where people could shop, have coffee, and meet their neighbors—all by foot. (www.walkable.org)
 
So far, we need 10 percent less fuel


3) cycle

Fifteen percent of our trips can be done by bike. Some people say cycling is the most efficient use of energy ever invented. In Davis, California, 80 percent of the streets have bike lanes, and 20 to 25 percent of all local trips are by bike. Imagine a world designed for bicycles, with safe bike lanes, off-road bikeways, bikes with trailers (www.bikecartage.com), electric bikes (www.electric-bikes.com), and folding bikes (www.dahon.com) that are easy to take on a bus or train. In some communities, as much as 40 percent of trips might be made by bicycle. In others, where it snows in winter or there are more hills, the number might be 10 percent.
 
We’ve saved 25 percent so far


4) share rides

Five percent of our trips can be done sharing vehicles. Picture a system where any resident in a community can join the Community Ride Share Club (www.scan.org/rideshare). If you need a ride, you just flash your card, and a member of the Club will stop and give you a ride. People living in a neighborhood or region could create a website where they offer and receive rides based on shared destinations. It also builds community, as people get to know each other.

We’re down to 30 percent less fuel


5) mass transit

Twenty percent of our trips can be done by bus, light-rail transit, or train. When Boulder, Colorado, re-organized its transit system, substituting minibuses for the big old dinosaur buses, and introducing a city-wide Eco Pass that buys a year’s travel for just $50, the share of trips made by transit increased from 1.6 percent to 4.6 percent. It’s small, but it’s a start.

Imagine minibuses that arrive every ten minutes, and transit stops with electronic timetables within a five-minute walk of every home. Imagine major public investments in light-rail transit, as Portland, Oregon, has done, and high-speed railways(www.hsgta.com), as Europe is doing. If each full bus carries 20 people,  it can replace 15 of today’s cars, and using a hybrid engine can reduce bus fuel use by 95 percent.
 
We’re at 50 percent (Fuel for buses added later.)


6) share cars

Car sharing (www.carsharing.net) is the big social invention that will make a future without oil manageable. Car sharing started in Europe in the 1980s and spread to North America in the 1990s. As a member, you buy into a fleet of vehicles parked in convenient spots around the city, and when you want to use one, you book it by phone or over the Internet. Because members pay by the mile and the hour, they think twice before driving. The average member of Vancouver’s Cooperative Auto Network(www.cooperativeauto.net/ with 1,600 members) drives 1,400 kilometers a year, compared to a local norm of 6,000 to 24,000 kilometers. You pick the vehicle to suit your trip, and for most trips a small efficient two-seater will do fine, allowing a huge saving of fuel. For our fuel-saving math, we’ll assume that 50 percent of the car-driving public joins a Car Share Club. (No direct fuel reduction.)


7) electric vehicles

Electric vehicles (www.evworld.com) have been given the cold shoulder by the big auto companies, which have decided there’s more money to be made from hybrids and hydrogen vehicles, so they’ve ditched the idea and recalled their EVs, to the immense frustration of EV enthusiasts.
 
But EVs do make sense. The new lithium ion batteries (www.evuk.co.uk/links/art2.html ) can last for nearly 200 miles between charges. When oil costs  $5 to $10 a gallon, EVs are going to be very enticing, and fully half of the cars on the road might be electric. For Car Share members, a small EV will work just fine for most trips, while a larger fuel-efficient hybrid can be used for longer trips. But will there be enough electricity? See Step 11.

Down to 75 percent less liquid fuel


hybrid cars

The new Toyota Prius, (www.toyota.com/prius) which is winning praise from its users, averages 48 miles per gallon, twice the efficiency of today’s average car. But wait. If you take a hybrid such as the Prius and increase the size of its battery so that it can be charged up from the grid when parked, as well as from its on-board engine, its fuel efficiency improves to 167 m.p.g., an 85 percent reduction on today’s typical fuel use (70 percent better than the regular Prius), while still providing the distance for longer trips. Car Share members might use a plug-in hybrid EV for 20 percent of their trips, while private drivers use one for 80 percent; on average, drivers will use them for half their trips. (more on plug-in hybrids: www.calcars.org/vehicles.html)
 
We’re at 86.25 percent less fuel


9) smart cars

They’re already in Europe, and they’re coming to Canada this fall. The Mercedes diesel Smart CDI two-seater does 69 m.p.g.. The Volkswagen One-Litre, a two-seater prototype that’s been on the roads in Europe, does 237 m.p.g. Yes, you read that correctly. By 2010, they’ll probably do 250 m.p.g., providing a 10-fold improvement on today’s average.
 
Car Share members might use a Volkswagen One Liter for 80 percent of the trips for which they don’t use an EV, while private drivers might use them for 20 percent. We’re down to 3 percent of the original oil we were using, or 3.7 billion gallons a year.

97 percent less fuel

Pause for Breath

What we have here is a series of changes that produce incredible results. We reduced our need for car-based trips by 50 percent and used EVs for half the remaining trips. For the remaining 25 percent of our trips, we used hybrid EVs that are 85 percent more efficent than today’s cars for half of them and smart cars, which are 90 percent more efficient than today’s cars, for the other half. Altogether, these steps reduced our liquid fuel needs by 97 percent.

We now have to add the buses. Today, they use 1 percent of the transport oil (2.1 billion gallons). This could be cut in half with a hybrid electric drive. Add fuel for the big increase bus ridership in Step 5, and the total comes to just 2.23 billion gallons. Add the 3.7 billion gallons we need for personal vehicles and we need about 6 billion gallons to get around. Can we find a replacement for that remaining oil?


10) biofuels

When ethanol is made from crops grown specifically for fuel, such as corn, its energy balance shows a possitive return of 26 to 33 percent. When cellulosic ethanol is made from grass crops and farm residues that would otherwise be burned, however, its return is 79 percent, without diverting production from food. The Minnesota-based Institute for Local Self Reliance estimates that cellulosic crops could produce 10 to 20 billion gallons a year.

Biodiesel has won fame and popularity through the Veggie Van, and other adventures. It can be made from corn oil, canola oil, cottonseed oil, mustard oil, palm oil, restaurant frying oils, animal fats, restaurant trap grease, and algae. The combined U.S. production of vegetable oil and animal fats, if it were all diverted, could produce 4.64 billion gallons a year. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory has estimated that 4 billion gallons could be produced from mustard oil.

Michael Briggs, in the University of New Hampshire’s Biodiesel Group, calculates that if we grow algae on waste streams such as sewage at treatment plants or animal farms, or build large algae farms in a salty environment such as the Salton Sea, or the Sonora desert in southern California, the algae could produce a billion gallons of biodiesel a year from every 20,000 hectares, using sea-water and sunshine.

There are other biofuels, too. Zurich, Switzerland, runs 1200 vehicles on Kompogas from composted organic kitchen and yard wastes (see page 33). One ton produces 17 gallons of fuel, and a typical city produces 0.174 tons of organic waste per person per year, which could make 3 gallons of biofuel. If every community in the U.S. composted like Zurich, this could produce 0.9 billion gallons of biofuel a year.

Changing World Technologies is developing a technique called thermal depolymerization, which mimics the process that converts forests and swamps into fossil fuels. Using this process, Changing World estimates that America’s agricultural wastes could produce 168 billion gallons of biofuel a year. The process is 85 percent efficient, needing 15 percent of its output of energy to keep it going, reducing the net output to 143 billion gallons. The Philadelphia City Council is planning to use the process to treat the city’s sewage, opening up another huge possibility to turn waste into fuel.


11) electricity

In this scenario, 25 percent of our personal trips are made in electric vehicles, and 12.5 percent in hybrid vehicles, which use electricity for 75 percent of their energy. Taken together, we’ll need electricity for 34 percent of our mileage. Right now, those trips use 40 billion gallons of oil, enabling Americans to drive 1,000 billion miles a year at 25 miles per gallon (8,500 miles per household).

A typical car that is converted into an EV uses around 300 watt-hours per mile. An EV tested by the Department of Energy was rated at 164 watt-hours per mile. If a smart-EV used 100 watt-hours per mile plus 50 watts for the battery charging, those 1000 billion miles would require 150,000 billion watt-hours (150,000 gigawatt hours) of electricity a year. That’s a very reachable target for renewable energy, as North Dakota alone has 1.2 million gigawatt-hours of available wind power potential, eight times more than we need. We would also need electricity for the trains and light rail.

Alternatively, with just three hours of sunshine a day, a house in Seattle with a one-kilowatt photovoltaic system on a south-facing roof will generate 1095 kilowatt hours of electricity a year, enough to power a two-seater smart EV for 7,300 miles. The biofuel is available; the electricity is available. Suddenly, the whole endeavor to travel without oil begins to seem possible.


12) smart policies

The lexicon of policies that could accelerate the process of change is enormous, from transportation demand management to tax-shifting to smart growth land-use planning. This is policy wonk heaven: let’s leave it at that.

A Final Word

This has been a quick, back-of-the-envelope exercise, to explore the possibility of transport without oil. It ignored heavy trucks, which use 38 billion gallons of oil a year. If every truck used a hybrid drive, as the new FedEx trucks do, this would cut it to 19 billion gallons. As the price of oil rises, there’ll be incentive for local production, so we can reduce the stupidity of shipping goods back and forth across the country and the world. A 20 percent reduction in shipping would reduce the fuel needed to 15 billion gallons.

Then there’s flying, which uses 10 percent of America’s transport oil (21 billion gallons a year). We’ve got to do a lot less flying. With a good electric train system, all trips under 400 kilometers would be faster and easier by rail, allowing 40 percent fewer flights, reducing the fuel needed to 12.6 billion gallons. If we cut our flying by a further 40 percent, by learning to live and travel more responsibly, that would reduce it to 7.5 billion gallons. Altogether, for heavy trucks and flying, we need 22.5 billion gallons. With the 6 billion gallons we need for personal travel, we need 28.5 billion gallons, still within the amounts of biofuel we demonstrated could be produced.

This exercise ignored the opportunities to save oil now used for commerce and industry, including to make vehicles (55.5 billion gallons a year), to heat homes (9.3 billion gallons a year) and to generate electricity (5.7 billion gallons a year).
 
We’ve also ignored the many benefits of embracing forms of sustainable energy. No more smog and smog-induced asthma. Less noise and way fewer road accidents. More exercise, more peace and quiet, more conversations with neighbors. The end of oil may seem scary to some, but from where I’m sitting, it looks as if it might work out just fine. 

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Guy Dauncey is co-author with Patrick Mazza of Stormy Weather: 101 Solutions to Global Climate Change (New Society Publishers, 2001), and president of the BC Sustainable Energy Association (www.bcsea.org ). He lives in Victoria, BC, Canada.

Finally, we have some synergic games to play!

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Junkyard Sports

Bernie DeKoven

Junkyard sports are “real” sports and games played with the “wrong” equipment. Because the sports are made up by the people who are playing them, they offer a welcome alternative to the traditional sport programs. Junkyard sports stress personal involvement, active participation by a diverse community, physical and psychological safety, creativity, and most of all, the opportunity to create and share fun.

CONCEPT AND PURPOSE OF JUNKYARD SPORTS

The concept we’re calling junkyard sports is as ancient as sport itself. Earlier in the 20th century, this idea was demonstrated on the streets, sidewalks, vacant lots, and backyards of most cities, when games like stickball, box ball, and pie-tin Frisbee could be found virtually everywhere there were kids. Even today, when so many kids spend their precious play time in front of the television or in organized league sports, you’ll fi nd kids playing basketball with a trashcan and a paper wad, or playing baseball with a frying pan bat and a ball of rolled-up socks. Playful minds fi nd inspiration in the limitations of equipment, environment, and physical abilities.

Junkyard sports are so inviting because they are based on sports that everyone knows. The inventiveness begins when people play the sports in some unusual place with some wacky piece of equipment that has nothing to do with how the sports are supposed to be played, and then they mix these sports with other sports. This is the spark that ignites the imagination. Junkyard sports are also played with as diverse a group of players as are available—young and old, novices and experts, those with and without disabilities—to create a sport that is truly inclusive. There is no need to adapt a sport for a specifi c population when the very population that will be playing it is creating it. There is no reason to worry about how willing people will be to play a sport when the sport they are playing is their own.

Junkyard sports are a rich, exciting, and growing resource for physical activities that will work in any environment and with any player. The activities can take anywhere from a half hour to a half day. In fi ve minutes or less you can easily initiate completely new activities for any audience. Kids will use their bodies and minds to develop and exercise their capacity for play, to develop social skills, and to learn from and with each other. They will design and experiment and play as a team.

The process of invention in junkyard sports develops the whole player—body, mind, community, and environment. In the process of developing a new, informal, just-for-fun sport, players combine physical education with cognitive skill development and socialization. From both the educators’ and players’ perspectives, junkyard sports are invitations to play and opportunities to transcend differences in physical abilities, social status, gender, and age.

There’s a big difference between a sport that you learn and a sport that you make up. Sports that you learn, despite their numerous benefi ts, have a way of separating people. There are those who are good enough, and those who aren’t. Sports set the bar, creating a challenge that its players rise to meet. But when you’re making up a new sport, the question isn’t so much about whether you are good enough to play it. It’s about whether the sport is good enough to make you want to play. Junkyard sports, then, make it possible for anyone to play with anyone else. As long as they’re making up the sport together, they’ll find a way to play together. From the perspective of a recreation or youth leader, this makes junkyard sports an ideal vehicle for serving the community. As a class project or as an event, the invention of a new junkyard sport is an opportunity for integration and celebration.

Involvement

There is only one real criterion for measuring the success of a junkyard sports event—involvement. Count the people who are playing and how deeply they are playing. If your star athletes are having the time of their lives and your weaker players are sitting on the sidelines, the design has failed. If your oldest players are dancing with delight and your youngest are hanging back, bored, something’s wrong with the event. You might call this a “the more the merrier” principle. And it really works. The more people involved and the more fully they’re involved, the better the experience is for everyone.

Complete involvement is a very harsh measure because it’s impossible to meet. Even in the best of all sports, and in the best of all junkyards, there’ll be times when people just aren’t engaged. It’s as much part of the nature of play for players to disengage as it is for them to engage. What you hope is that these periods are brief and rare.

Sometimes it’s obvious when a game isn’t working. It stops being fun. When that happens, above all, don’t blame yourself, and don’t blame the players. Blame the game. That, after all, is what makes junkyard sports so much fun. The game is only a means to an end. The end is fun—for everyone. You can’t force involvement. But you can change the game. You can call a timeout. You can add more junk. You can take away, change, or add a rule or two.

And, of course, while you’re changing the game, you’re getting everyone involved in the game change. Naturally, during the design session your unrealistic but avowed goal is 100 percent participation.

Diversity

Nothing affects the experience of play as profoundly as the people we are playing with. Their moods, intelligence, abilities, ages, and gender infl uence what we play and what we think we can play. Bringing together people who don’t normally “belong” together to create a new sport that they can all play together is a powerful and humanizing experience for all involved. It’s remarkable how many kinds of people we can bring together with a little applied playfulness. We can play with animals and get so close to them that we and the animals can actually take equal roles in determining the direction and duration of the game. We can play, as equals, with babies and toddlers, with alcoholics and schizophrenics, with people who are blind, and others with a variety of disabilities. Diversity is the name of the game. We bring together diverse materials and environments, diverse games and rules, and a diverse selection of population. Playfulness is the key. Creating and supporting the willingness to try, to see what happens while we change the rules and materials and environment until everyone who wants to play can play together, equally, are what junkyard sports are for.

Safety

In junkyard sports, one way to ensure safety at every level—physical, social, and emotional—is to make it possible for participants to engage at the level of their own choosing. This way, even if someone feels threatened, she can easily withdraw, regain composure and perspective, and return to the fray in her own good time.

Another way to help create a safe experience is to make and keep things fun. When people laugh a lot, they clearly aren’t taking things too seriously. When you hear people laugh together it’s a sign that they feel safe and healthy. When animals play, even if we can’t recognize their own version of laughter, the same holds true. If they are playing, they feel safe and healthy.

Creativity

Nothing fosters creativity more than a good sense of humor and a willingness to play. Nothing dampens creativity more than a somber, pressured, formal discussion about how to design a game. Get the junk into people’s hands as soon as possible. Get them to start playing with the stuff separately, then together. Give them no more than a few suggestions or instructions at a time, like, “Think we can make a baseball game with this stuff?” or “Can we make something we can play on the steps?” As soon as there’s a difference of opinion, see if you can get two separate groups going—each focusing on testing out yet another alternative. Help people understand that the only real way to tell whether an idea is a good one is by putting it into practice by playing with it.

Because junkyard sports are played by their inventors, the pressure to perform is shared. Everyone wants the game to succeed. Everyone wants everyone to succeed.

Slanted High Bar Principle

Even when a junkyard sport gets played and refi ned and players begin to focus more on challenge and performance, and what was more or less a game begins to become a defi nite sport, you can build fun and safety into the design of the competition by creating challenges that are individually negotiable. In adapted physical education, teachers are given an elegant model, called the slanted high bar principle, that puts the concept of individually negotiable challenge into practice.

If you’re a physical education teacher, one of the things you do with students is help them develop their high-jumping skills. In “nonadaptive” physical education, you did this by holding jumping contests. You’d hang a horizontal high bar at a certain height and everybody would take a turn jumping over the high bar. If they succeeded, they’d go to the next round, and the high bar was raised. The contest would continue until only one person was left, and that person would be praised as the one who established the high-jump record for the class. A problem with this kind of competitive-incentive structure is that the people who need the most practice are the people who get to jump the least often. The worse they are at jumping, the sooner they’re out of the game. Another problem is that no one feels safe. Not even you, the teacher.

Make the high bar diagonal instead of parallel to the ground. Let everybody jump over any part of the high bar, and they can take as many turns as they want. Each kid sets his own challenge. The jumpers who are not so good at jumping can still jump across the high bar as many times as anyone else—they just cross at a lower point. And, when they feel the need to increase the challenge, they can just station themselves at a higher part of the high bar. No one is eliminated. No one is given prizes. Everyone plays at his own level of safety. Everyone wins, repeatedly. Slant the high bar and the authority rolls right out of your hands—out of any one body’s hands, actually—into everybody’s hands. The challenge (jump as high as you can, and then jump higher) remains the same, but the challenger has changed. You, the instructor, aren’t the one who increases the challenge; the kids create it as a group and individually.

A challenge that is determined by the individual players is more complex because it requires refl ective action. The players must evaluate not only their own success but also the success of the challenge. And even though they can get very competitive, the challenge is ultimately self-selected, ultimately guided by sheer fun.

Without an external evaluator, each player can devise and revise the challenge. Of course, evaluation is taking place, and whether the competition is inner directed or outer directed, the jumpers (both higher skilled and lower skilled), and their inner referees are evaluating their performance, challenging them to challenge themselves. Even though nobody’s eliminated, even though everyone is free to increase or decrease the challenge, even though they don’t even have to take turns, the challenge is directed toward the individual.

Raising the horizontal high bar, you intensify the competitive relationship between the diminishing few. The game, internally and externally, becomes increasingly unsafe. Slant the high bar, and you relax the relationship so that it becomes supportive, empowering, healthy, safe.

SPORTS FOR THE FUN OF IT

One of the most radical of the implications of junkyard sports is the notion that regardless of what gets invented or played or who wins, the only thing that really counts is how much fun it is for everyone. As a criterion for success, especially for those who need to answer to many objectives of educational and public programming, the “fun for everyone” goal can be surprisingly diffi cult to communicate and defend. Most sport programs are funded by organizations that measure success in terms of the development of very specifi c athletic competencies—a belief shared by the majority of the people served by these programs. Try telling parents who sent their kids to soccer camp that, although their kids lost almost every game they played and didn’t show any particular athletic skill, they succeeded because they had a lot of fun. The “sports for the fun of it” concept was developed specifi cally for those people who are not served by sport clubs and competitions—the people for whom participation, and not competition, is the goal. It was developed because we have all begun to recognize that this is a far wider audience, with perhaps even more telling needs than the audiences served by traditional sport programs.

Many of our so-called athletes who excel in sports and eagerly embrace the rigors of traditional physical education and sport programs also ultimately fi nd themselves in a similar position of disenfranchisement and obesity, because they did not achieve or even maintain their star status. Motivated solely by the promise of professional sports, they end up embittered and ill served by the very institutions that had once provided them both purpose and identity.

The “sports for the fun of it” approach subscribes to a very different set of premises. It is based on a faith in human motivation. When people have fun playing, they put more of themselves into play. They engage body, spirit, and mind, challenging themselves to excel because in excellence there is even more fun. When they play, not for score or recognition but for enjoyment, they play for life. Central to the notion of “sports for the fun of it” is the idealistic and often unreachable goal of fun for all. As diffi cult as it may be to achieve, setting this as a goal establishes a focus that is both individually and collectively experienced. It introduces the notion of community and urges the development of both personal and social competencies.

In traditional sports, the game itself determines who is good enough to play. In junkyard sports, the players determine whether the game is good enough. The better the game is, the more fun for the more people for more of the time the game is played. By including players of different ages and abilities, you create an even greater challenge and a more profound accomplishment. The victors of junkyard sports can never be confi ned to the winning team. Victory is something that happens to the entire community of players and spectators.

By aiming at an experience that is fun for everyone, players have an objective criterion for measuring the success of the game. In the process of attempting to succeed, they also develop social skills that include compassion, communication, acceptance, shared leadership, and shared victory.

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In the study of Religious Science, you learn a powerful form of affirmative prayer called TREATMENT.

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All Gifts are Self-Gifts

Timothy Wilken, MD

ALL is ONE — ONE is ALL. Reality is whole — both physical and metaphysical. Reality is UNITY — both recognized and unrecognized — One God — One Spirit — One Consciousness. ALL is ONE — ONE is ALL.

I am the Individualization of that Oneness. Right Here, Right Now. Consciousness in me, as me, is me. Spirit in me, as me, is me. God in me, as me, is me.

I am awake now and know who I am. I am awake now and know who you are. We are the same. I am you and you are me. I am self and I am other. I am one and I am all. I am me and I am you.

When I help you, I help myself. All Help is self-help.
When I protect you, I protect myself. All protection is self-protection.
When I forgive you, I forgive myself. All forgiveness is self-forgiveness.
When I love you, I love myself. All love is self-love.

And, so I help you always, protect you always, forgive you always, and love you always.

All gifts are self-gifts. We are ONE. All gifts to you are also gifts to me.

For this truth, I am deeply grateful. I accept our oneness as true and valid. I accept our unity as here and now. I accept our wholeness as natural and necessary.

And, so it is. …

 

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GIFTegrity Defined  (PDF)
Specifications Of
Science Behind

GIFTING IT!