After two years, I am closing off this environmental gateway web site and its associated enviroblog weblog. I set up environmental gateway as both a repository for research records and as a way of maintaining connections across the alumni of the now closed Centre for Ecological Economics and Water Policy Research at the University of New England in Australia. Two years is enough to provide continued access to those resources so now it’s time to close off the facility. This also means that the associated transdisciplinary gateway site will also go.

My interest in writing around the general territory of re-imagining opportunities for dealing with the world’s pressing environmental issues through across- or transdisciplinary interaction and learning remains, so I am going to keep on writing for as long as I am able. There are so many new opportunities for intellectual exchange and learning emerging through the open-communicative discourse of the internet. The future of laterally reconfigured alternatives to disciplinarily free-form learning is exciting, if not disturbing to established communicative interests. We are right on the edge of a tipping point from the old ‘expertocratic’ model of instruction to more interestingly collaborative, if not discursively-bracing learning frameworks.

The key problem with the standard model of academia is its inclination to self referentialism as a setting for individual and group validation. Peer reviewed publishing is, I think, a poor option in terms of being a vehicle through which to spark new ideas and intellectual progress. But peer reviewed publishing still remains the be-all-end-all of conventional academia to this day. Personally, I could not care less about miniscule readership, arcane, communicatively exclusive publishing. Innovative thinking is, I would suggest, poorly serviced by the conservatism and closed-shop character of an exclusive or dominant reliance upon peer self-referentialised publishing. The transdisciplinary project with which I have been engaged for 20 years or so is, or should be, all about harnessing the opportunities to be realised through breaking down disciplinary cliques to the insight and learning available through interaction with a broader, more eclectic and even discursively-disorganised pool.

For me, my interests now turn to fulfilling my lifetime interest in communication through the synthesis of words and image. My focus is on writing and photography combined. So, I have created a new front door to the next iteration of my professional life in the form of rodericgill.com. Associated with that new internet home is my new blog: PhotoEssays. That new blog will constitute the next generation of enviroblog. Naturally, my entire bicyclism.net/bicyclism.blog adventures will continued unabated. I’d certainly appreciate the readership of envoblog travelling with me to the new PhotoEssays space. I have a few posts up and running there already.

Thanks for your interest in my ‘academic projects’ to date.

The ecology of commerce. It’s a never-ending upward spiraling game between income and the price of life in the economy to which most of us subscribe. Life outside the economy is life on Mars… Life outside the economy is a dream that thrills, attracts or repels like forbidden fruit; the idea of life outside the constructs of the market place fascinates like a car crash from which we can’t avert our gaze.

Life outside the economy is not what we see in the laneways of third world slums; it’s not what we see when we drop a coin into the hand of a beggar in Sydney or New York. The miseries of beggars, the impoverished and the unemployed are defined by the economy to which they are very much attached. No, our dreams of a rustic, ‘authentically natural’ life outside the economy are probably more about life on Gilligan’s Island, an endless pursuit of the perfect wave or life with a tribe still undiscovered by the modern world. Perhaps we seek connection with fantasies such as these when he head off into the wilderness with a backpack and no phone.

Life outside the economy is, essentially, incomprehensible to most of us. Which is why most folk give a life such as that so little, if any, thought. The economy is the the greatest, most profoundly encompassing social construct of all time. Never has the human race devoted more collective imagination than to this particular project. Never has the human race devoted more collective energy to the creation of a system of existence that is so fundamentally unreal. The economy as a construct has no shape, texture or colour. You can’t feel it, you can’t take it’s photograph. We can observe it only through its manifestations; we can feel the products of commerce, but not the construct through which they were created.

Rocks are real. Trees are real. Rain is real. We are real. Bicycles are most certainly real! The economy, though, is a reality only in our minds. If we were all to enter into a simultaneous, global, meditative zen zero state, the economy would cease to exist for as long as we could sustain the enlightenment of a completely free mind.

Think about the weft of human society and how the web of the economy has become the warp or foundation for the lives we lead. The economy is not just about cash. Our place within the economy defines how we live, what we do, and how we do it. The economy is the world’s most elaborate system of rules; some explicit, many implicit; but rules nonetheless. Rules within rules within rules; rules in hierarchies, rules in sequence; rules to be revealed and rules being continually refined. The patterns of our interconnection are a cyber construct of intermeshing values, attitudes and beliefs.

If we can begin to accept the economy as the collective enterprise of our minds, we can begin to accept the possibilities for laterally considered intentional change. The constructs of our imagination can be reconsidered, adjusted or overthrown. We rarely, however, contemplate the opportunities we might have in that regard. We are like prisoners blocked by invisible bars.

If we can begin to accept the economy as the collective enterprise of our minds, perhaps we can view the things we do, the anxieties we have and the trajectories of our lives as directions more amenable to self-adjustment than we might ever think. Our frantic, life-engrossing raptures with capital accumulation, our day-in, day-out strivings on the floor of oppressive shop floors or suffering the managerialist fanaticisms of demented managers can be revealed as the detritus of a life removed from how we might really like to live. If the miseries of our lot are constructed around our particular connections into the enterprise of society’s collective imagination, then we should have the power to re-imagine a better life.

Those who persist at the fringes of the conventional economic fabric are, it might be proposed, those with the capacity to exert an independence of mind. Perhaps they recognise a power of control over how we each connect that is overlooked by those otherwise too connected to see.

There’s no doubt that the best time to reflect on the compulsions of our times is when the order of those times is under threat. This is the case when there are wars. Wars confront the autopiloting of lives rooted deeply within a social matrix that’s rarely disturbed. We get visions from outside the set of the stage which has otherwise captured our minds. They are times for reinvention and re-invention. But the cost of war is a high cost to pay for the sudden onset of generic introspective renewal.

Recessions will also do the trick. Like the one we have now. There’s nothing like loosing one’s job to inspire the rebooting of our minds. With more and more people confronting deep introspections of this kind, the unwieldy machinery of a deeply set social construct can begin to shift and reconfigure. As more and more people confront the sudden onset of these hard shifting times, more and more will notice that the palate from which we might construct our renewal has also fundamentally changed. The palate that formed the system now under collapse did not recognise the urgencies of a climate out of control; of a global population beyond comprehension at the time of our last great reset (the catalyst of the second World War).

The palate from which to construct the Next Great Age is one that must recognise plentiful labor, the fragility of ecosystems at the margin of a catastrophic tipping point into the abyss, and the possibilities of social connectivity beyond the imagination of the pre-computer age that has held sway right up until these last, final dying days of an age our imaginations and physical ecosystems can no longer sustain. I am looking forward to the possibilities that might now unfold.

Sometimes, fighting fire with fire works as a containment tool. But how does fighting the environmental excesses of consumption with consumption work?

I have long been bemused by the warm and fuzzy, handpicked, organically-certified, hession-hemp’d, sandalwood-scented bandwagon as a response to the Global Ecological Crisis. Especially when its advocates are so keen to excite their enthusiasms through an introspective depth never greater than a micron or two.

Let’s consume our way out of consumerism! Can we ’save the planet’ through designer hemp cosmetics and ‘green’ branded clothes? Can we save the world through fashion-templating the urgencies of conservation? Can we, in other words, address the boated global orgy of over consumption with yet more consumption? Putting it another way, can we address the impacts of our more ‘toxic’ consumption patterns (like buying and using a car, indulging in unnecessary air travel, and leaving our coal fired lights turned on) through patterns air brushed with an eco-sensitivity that apparently defines the merchandise from the ‘Eco-Zen Boutique’?

While it might be reasonable to simply claim a case of cashing-in on public concerns unleashed by the highly profiled Global Ecological Crisis (aka Climate Change, aka Global Warming, aka the travails of a planet in decline…), our rather hyperbolically creative marketers may be doing us all a favour. Maybe this is a kind of misdirected, tangental, blunderbuss response to a problem that we are all remiss to address in more direct ways (by not driving that car, not hopping on that plane and reconfiguring our very concept of ‘necessary consumption’ down to more Gaia reasoned levels).

I am convinced that the solution to purposefully addressing the challenges of our contemporary ecological Koyaanisqatsi* lies outside the cult of the market place. Outside the domain of economics. I am convinced that the problems we now face are entirely the product of the funnel-visioned castration of our minds by the market place-solves-all shared mental model/mass delusion/cargo cult social construction to which we all truly pray. It’s a construction that blocks the view of all except, perversely, that tiny few who know, meaningfully and deeply, that the true intentions of Zen can never be realised through the trinkets of the marketplace.

But for the rest of us…perhaps we can be facilitators of meaningful change through sharing in the redecoration of market economics with a broader-brushed, aesthetically damped rearrangement of the already flooded furniture decked out on the sinking ship of all our States. A cultural reconfiguration of consumption preferences is a start. It’s more often than not a foray into the direction of improvement; or at least a respite from the direction that makes things worse. The way I see it, a culture that even admits some deeper ecological dimension into how what we do connects into the great, rich, mysteries of environmental-economic causal chain reactions is a more enlightened space to be. It’s a better space to be than the one where most of us sit: a non-reflexive consumption besotted continual prayer session at the giant cathedral of economic growth (at all costs). More reflexive environmentally brushed cultures of commerce admit at least a degree of reflexivity into our ultimate, personal responsibilities for the consequences of our consumption choices. Reflexivity means that the door to deeper insight is at least located; if not ever so slightly opened into the ecological realities that make our human-centric, economics-validated self-obsession the nonsense it really is.

Perhaps the consumers at the Eco-Zen Boutique will adopt a cultural inclination to reject the very worst excesses of econo-man. While adorning themselves in the stupendously unnecessary ‘eco-fashions’ of the affected enviro-caring brigade, they might meet some more reflexively enlightened types who can catalyse their inclinations to walk more purposefully through that door. Perhaps. At the worst, they just make the fallaciousness of the consume-our-way to glory path a laughing stock to a wider crowd; and that of itself might inspire improved introspection.

*life out of balance; a Hopi inspired term coined by the redoubtable Philip Glass

On either side of this walking track, the rocky ridge disappears 800 meters straight down. To the left, I can see a razor edge half a meter from my feet that disappears into a breath taking chasm; straight down to the wild and furious river below. A vertical rock wall cliff rising from the far side of the river backdrops the entire scene, reinforcing the uncompromising vastness of this humanity-trivialising scene. My photo hints at the scale of this amazing place; it tells us nothing, though, of the cold tinged, granite-earthy-wild thing sensory overloading presence of the place.

On the other side of the track, the edge disappears with slightly less of an assault on my vertigo. But fall there and your descent will interrupted by trees as you sky-dive down a slope too steep to climb. Over that edge, you can see the river again as it switches back around the edge of the knife edge ridge I am descending. It’s a young river, a sharp river. Narrow, fast; the centre-piece of this infinitely untouched landscape of unspoilt and steadfastly uncompromising wilderness. It’s the Chander River. Fresh from its descent down one of the world’s highest waterfalls. A harsh, hard, loud if not screaming cascade to defy the senses of any and all who stand transfixed at any of the tourist viewpoints that stand like monuments to suicide on the edge of the unimaginable chasm below.

The track I am descending sheds connection to human places with every progressive step. It’s a monument to a residual of sanity in this risk-managed society bent over to the whims of the commerce of insurance and the generic outsourcing of any sense of personal responsibility for the consequences of our actions. That a track such as this can still exist is a connection back to those times when people made their own judgements and accepted the risks of their actions. It’s a track to defy the oppression of Politically Corrected managerialism that now sweeps the world like a lice infested plague. It’s a track that allows us to enter a realm without the handrails and boardwalks tuned to those legions of couch potatoes who would only tangentially dabble with a world disconnected from the human grid.

Actually, this track is officially closed. The ‘Do Not Pass This Point’ sign stands like a sigh to the oppression of the managerialised world of all-caring but couldn’t-really-care-less State paternernalism. The Track Closed sign is a flag of departure from the fallacious security blankets of our nature-disconnected existence.

Down, down, down via an avalanche of switchbacks, loose scree, criss-crossing animal tracks; down to the roaring watery heart of this monumental gorge. At last - from the days when people were permitted to build such things; when people were still adventurous; before our current all-consuming virtual reality of global consumerism, before the humanity crippling displacement activity of wealth compressed away the last vestiges of awe and respect for the untamed world - I come to some steps. A precarious ladder down the final slope into the river that has created the vertical landscape through which I have just passed.

Stop and sit. In perfect, complete quiet; except for the roar of water on rock, the waves of wind through endless trees and the calls of a universe of birds.

Then, of course, comes the fun of the ascent. There’s two ways out. A three day trek down river to the nearest walkable exit spur. Or back the way I’ve just come. Straight up, step by step, an unrelenting climb. A magical climb that rewards those who are fit and defeats those who are not. Which is mainly why the track is closed. Half way up, there’s a place to recoup, and graze back down to directly measure the progress I’ve made. The rewards I take in were derived from nothing but my own exertion, not at the expense of anyone or anything else. These rewards are real and available only to those willing to invest in the hard core of unrelenting physical exertion. Rewards a cyclist, a marathon runner; a mountain climber will understand. But which are alien and out of reach to those who have self-amputated their capacity to live adventures such as this through the withering of legs and the bloating of body through a degree of self-indulgence that, poignantly, ultimately threatens the persistence of these wild places which which they can no longer connect.

In a blast of astounding irony and tragic pathos, my serenity is smashed by the slash of hurtling helicopter blades. This flying one finger gesture of contempt vomits its way down the gorge from which I have just climbed. As it landed, I watch it rain its human deluge down on the beach that until then carried an imprint of humanity amounting only to the mark of my shoes. I watch as a duo of big bwana fisher hunters deposit themselves into a space that I had gained through a two hour descent (and another two to return). But, on reflection, I feel a deep sense of pity for these poor adventurers who, though they stand where I stood, will have no sense of the journey of achievement and connection with place that only walking can provide. They’ve used their money and their impatience to buy only the last page of the artfully written story that this place reveals to those who listen through the language of effort.

Then I consider that this predilection for cursorily abbreviated connection with the unaccommodating realities of the world untamed by man is a metaphor for all the crises the human world has produced; and is essentially the root cause of the damages we inflict on the natural world we should otherwise hold with reverence and respect. The ugliness of this maniacally fuming helicopter assault is a metaphor of human contempt for all those places that refuse the effort-free inclinations of modern man. Our virtual helicoptered adventurers will never know or realise a full sense of the sacred that is the greatest reward to those who enter wild places on terms tuned to the realities of these places with which they truly wish to connect.

Our actions are too often removed from the consequences they incur; rewards are unearned in the currency through which they should be configured. We have replaced the currency of effort with the currency of cash. To connect with a place such as this; to understand the place; to know the place, we need the lived experience of connecting on terms dictated by that place rather than through the terms the toys of our technology would impose. The experience twisted and distorted through our intent to sample reality from the comforts of our technology coocoons is a cartoon-like warp of the reality we earn through the exercise of our feet. This emasculated virtual snapshotting of reality presents us with a shallow connection to places such as these, and an even shallower sense of what it is we loose through permitting them to be tamed and herded down to the whims of the human economy. Places such as these should never be regarded as ‘resources’ at our command. It takes at least a four hour walk to know that places such as these are bigger than men. Places such as these are beyond men. They are not ours. We learn respect when we enter these places with the reverence that only the true familiarity of connection can provide. We derive this respect when we enter these places on the terms dictated by those places rather than through the terms our helicopters, bulldozers, explosives and chainsaws might impose. The entry fee to this wild free river is a price beyond money, beyond commerce, beyond equal opportunity or any other human value equation. This is not a place to take or accept our commands.

Tighe lives on the wall. It towers above his village and falls away below it. It is vast and unforgiving and it is everything they know. Life is hard on the wall, little more than a clinging on for dear life. And then, one day, Tighe falls off the world…

from On, by Adam Roberts

Have you ever read one of those stories that deliver an utterly unexpected, otherworldly ending? I refer to stories that construct a picture of character ambitions, dreams, anxieties and passions that are all revealed, through an utterly twisted ending, to be misplaced diversions when scaled against the reality finally revealed. I’ll give you some examples of stories such as these: Inverted World by Christopher Priest; The Fabulous Riverboat Series by Philip Jose Farmer and On, by Adam Roberts

The surprise ending comes through the revelation of incompatibly parallel contexts; the one that we assumed was real and the one revealed to be so. The context we assume that shapes the lives of the characters we observe or the life we lead ourselves is the framework of meaning that makes what we see and think seem real. Of course, these life shaping contexts shift with time and experience but that shift is evolutionary, or emergent; our context changes bit by bit. Even if the context becomes revolutionary, we still can track the history of that context shift. We can recall where we came from as a way of giving meaning to where we are now. Unlike the characters in the stories I mentioned above, we don’t usually discover that our life contexts are a total fraud.

Context wraps up the notion of objectivity. What we say is so, or should be so, is usually shaped by this background context. Many of us devote our entire lives to progressing along pathways that are valued or validated by the contexts we have constructed. The context tells us what is good and what is not; and how to measure how well we do and how bad things can get.

What if, though, we do live in a world where there are multiple contexts all twined together; some similar and some totally at odds. What if through one context what it is that you do is measured to be a success but through another would be regarded as abject failure? Scary huh?

Guess what? We do live in a world of multiple contexts that sometimes sharply diverge. That’s how come we can have sustained argument, disagreement, hatreds and war. And that’s how come a critic at iStockPhoto managed to reject a photo I recently submitted when it was a winner to me. I understand that his context is his and mine is mine; and that to him, mine is wrong and his is right. I also understand that his context is that one that stopped me selling that picture…

It’s at this point when one person’s context is asserted over others that I get riled. Much worse, though, is when those who would assert their own contexts reject the existence of any others. That’s context fundamentalism. This says that my belief system (context) is right and yours is wrong because yours is not mine and mine is all there is. Much much worse is when those who would assert context fundamentalism do so in a position of empowerment. That’s called the privileging of positions. Privileging via empowerment to judge or to be privileged via access to a gun.

That’s why the world’s gone to pot. That’s why my photo got rejected…

My plea is simple. We need to make people know a few simple things:

• Your context or world views are not the only ones possible
• You could be wrong (your context could be a fraud)
• I could be wrong (as you would maintain)
• We all could be wrong!
• When our disagreement is at the level of divergent context, we will never agree; and we are both right when right is defined by conformity with individual context.

I’ve had misery from this context thing for years; and so, I am sure, have you. Years and years of having research papers rejected by context blinkered funnel vision thinkers with an incapacity to see outside their personal cave. Years and years of battling moronic motorists whose context asserts their uncontested ownership of the road. Years and years and years of battling moronic context besotted motorists who contemplate complexities like roundabouts as the setting where only they have the right of way…

Years and years of hearing critics trash art that I think is both powerful and great. Literature, paintings, photography, music and ideas that send a quiver of shivers to my sensibilities are rubbished by those whose context of vision is not the same as mine. Why can’t we all just agree to the richness discursive difference? There’s a huge power of enriched intellect and pleasure to be had by embracing difference; because in difference we can often find insight that could answer the problems that our prevailing certainties sustain.

My problem is that I sincerely do not believe in experts. In a world that is too complex to define definitive understandings, there is no one or no group of ones who can know all that there is to know about, really, anything at all. By the time we think we might know, the show moves on. Just looking causes the stream to diverge.

In a world without experts, or definitive uncontestable knowledge, there is no objective truth. Which means that truth is always subjective. Which means that what we think is true might not be true at all. We might all be living a cargo cult of delusion via attachment to a context that’s a dismal fit to everything that’s going on around us. Like the truth proposition that we need to live in an economy of perpetual growth. That money is a metric that matters. That personal value is tied to dollars. That personal value is tied to peer-referentially asserted pedigree (the experts’ plague).

I have a simple recommendation. If you are feeling committed to your own personal cause; if you are feeling nice and confident in your vision, if you believe that there are sages who really, really know, I recommend a simple but challenging tonic. Read Adam Robert’s book for a taste of what’s its like to transcend from one context to an utterly disconnected other. Once experienced, a crash-like context challenge is like cycling for the mind. Transformational and invigorating. Life changing and a thrill.

It’s really a religion. A religion with more followers than for any other. It’s the world’s most destructive, insidious cult. It’s priests are busy burning us all in their furies to make us conform. It’s a religion to which the most surprising people belong. Just about all the world’s most empowered leaders, and then some. It’s a belief system that’s totally pervasive in universities, government departments, in our mega corporations and, generally without reflection, by people just like you and me.

It’s the cult of the free market. The gospel of neo-classical economics, the sacred creed of free markets left to do their thing. This is the very bedrock of those mountain ranges of government policy that direct and shape the way our world works; that defines how our leaders plan and how they react to the challenges that define and challenge the progress to which most of us aspire.

Just think about how entrenched this belief system has become. Look to any aspect of the mechanics of business, government or even sport and you will find this cult firmly entrenched. The fate of football stars, orchestras, newspapers, new technology TV’s and of our rainforests are all determined, more or less, through the battlefields of the market place. When performance fails to satiate the appetites of our market place gods, jobs are lost and systems collapse.

The market place is held to be the mechanism through which to resolve the tensions of demand and supply, to resolve the uses to which the world’s resources might be conferred. The market place is the place where all the world’s scarcities are resolved. Or at least resolved to the degree that lends the perception of credibility to the choices made, the losses we reconcile ourselves to bear, and the damages that our lifestyles might inflict. The market place is the lynch pin of economic-social (and, without recourse to a more sensible model, environmental) order. Just look what happens when the carpet of the market is removed: Zimbabwe, the genocide of Pol Pot and Stalin’s purges. We see these scary things and we renew our vows to the perceived perfections of the market place once more.

We know it’s a wild beast. We know the kicks it can inflict. It takes us in, it kicks us out. It bestows bounties beyond imagination for some, and the pleasures of rummaging for food in rubbish bins for others. It has leveled most of the world’s rainforests. It has given us global warming. It’s given us the iPod and the hegemony of the car. Money is the clothing of success; it’s lack thereof is nakedness; to be out in the cold. To be nothing. To no longer be a ‘factor of production’ in the economic machinery of the state.

Our faith in this cult is a heavy trip up-the-steps-to-the-headchopping high priest indeed. The blood sacrifices are a torrent through which we wade. Waterfalls of blood wash down the sacrificial steps of this high economic temple.

‘Yes, but…’ says the high priest. ‘We know the market place is less than perfect. That’s why we have politicians and leaders’. Their job is to - ‘keep hold of the reins and keep the saddle of the state out of the dust’. Economics is not, they’d claim, as clinically mechanistic as my rhetoric would suggest. Actually, the main job of economists, they’d say, is to work around all the damages that our wild free market rides incur; they make informed choices, give prescriptions for damage control. Their job is to hand out bandaids to the crowd fleeing the path of their rampaging market bull. Better the bull you know than the anarchy you don’t. Did we mention Zimbabwe?

This is my own personal tipping point out of the economics game. I was an economics professor before my market value declined to zero…(’rightly so’, my critics would claim: ’see the market works!’ they’d exclaim…). I refuse to play the game of apologetics. I prefer to trip a reset button on my 25 years of economics teaching and research to enable the space for a more lateral view. I am definitely not alone. I’ve known thousands of economics thinkers who take a more agnostic view; but by and large, they sit up the back and are removed from the influence their skepticism might otherwise inspire.

This is not the place for even more lengthy diatribes. Suffice it to say that my prescription is for a different role for those who seek to rein-in the wild horses of the market place.

Step 1 is humility. No one, no group of ones, no group of hundreds and certainly no enclave of priestly savants can ever, ever, know all there is to know about how markets work and why. It’s complexity theory at work. Market economics, despite the disciplinary fantasies of economists, is a nexus blending place of sociology, psychology, botany, … engineering, physics, Information Technology, history, … flag waving and bell ringing… all.

Knowing this, and few would deny, why, then do we continue to fantasise that markets work like machines? The most stupid manifestation of this particular delusion is the proposal to manage global warming with the nonsense of carbon credit trading schemes; to fight a fire with the fire that caused the fire that now enflames us all. Carbon trading is the response one would expect from a high priest seeking only to keep his job; to retain control over a problem that his profession, fundamentally, caused.

It’s time for leadership to be reborn. We need brains in charge. Not poll-driven puppets dancing on strings lynched to the thumbs of their high priest economics advisors. We need a purge of the bureaucracy. We need to purge all those with fixed minds. We need to purge all those who subscribe to the notions of command and control; to the management of our economies as a machine. We need to open the doors to the vastness of ordered open discourse. Deliberative democracy 2.0. We have the tools. We have the opportunities like never before to facilitate open-communicative planning and decision making; for community building around the needs and leadership of communities that are sensible as communities to the communities involved. Grass roots-up community building through open collaborative engagement. Powered by Web 2.0+

Step 2 is to engage collective vision. Communities engage to develop vision. Vision determines the limits to the machinery of the market place. Not the priestly pronouncements from economics 101.

I forsee a world where value is redefined. I forsee a world where grass-roots up community building will admit the premiums of the locally hand-made; where local is first and globalisation recedes to ever emergent, always reconfiguring strategic partnerships to value add what we do locally; and not the other way around! My vision admits the reinterpretation of a sustainable future, where sustainability becomes a composite construct of regionally comprehensible economic-community-environmental balance, contexted by the emergent pathways chosen by neighbors and neighbors of neighbors separated out to the full six degrees. The machinery that matters is collective dialogue, not a cult of unreflexive economic theory.

Every day, in every way, I see policy makers around the world striving and seeking to implement the vision I hold; to the degree that they are able before their insecurities of departure from the market-first cult re-seizes their minds. Cleverness keeps on creeping in. Sneaking in when it should arrive with a shout instead. Which is why I consider our current Global Financial Crisis to be such a wonderful opportunity as it leaves the legions of market-cultists stranded and floundering as the hurricane of their ill-conceived beliefs has left them high, dry and exposed. These are the times for new mental models to take shape and shape the world to come.

I remain fairly stunned by the lack of historical contexting that’s being done in relation to our current Global Financial Crisis (GFC). There’s a bit of referral back to the depressions of the 1880’s and the 1930’s, of course; and there’s a bit of pontificating posturing going on over who’s the most relevant sage: Keynes or Friedman. But other than that, the only real stimulation package going on is stimulation to the loop of self augmenting despondency over our economic future.

I simply cannot believe the generic stupidity being aired in recent times; by politicians who probably don’t have the intellect or experience to know better and by their contemporary academic advisors, who should (defeated by grants, defeated by relevance, grasping solace only within the cloisters of dismal peer self-referentialism).

It’s amazing the oceans are not rising by the meter with all the bilge dumping that’s going on under the name of economic and political commentary.

All that we have here is a self-reinforcing tide of self-defeatism fed by the moronic posturings of politicians like Barack Obama and Kevin Rudd. All they can do is act like small boys at the foot of a dyke that’s suddenly sprouted a hole. Their only response is to plug the breach with cash. When the real issue is the wall that contains the hole.

What we have here is a self-escalating crisis of confidence that’s fast becoming culturally embedded in community and government. All the world’s economies are social constructs. We gave them birth and we give them life. We built the infrastructure for these constructions of our collective wit. We live the routines and play to the rules our constructions require.

In the best tradition of games of this kind, we’ve lost our perspective on the forest as the trees increasingly crowd our view. We’ve fallen into the trap of worshiping our grand design and the machinery of State those plans conceived. We seem to imagine that the current failings of the State are akin to a flat tyre or the disintegration of a few tricky cogs. So now we contemplate sending in the mechanics and the construction of some new parts. Our economies are up on the hoist and the garage bill is in the $trillions.

The problem is, this is not an issue for the attentions of mechanics. Our economies are not like machines at all. They are the constructions of our minds. Our discursively-opinioned, impression-driven, partial-pictured, fantasy-sparked collective construct that no ONE could ever singularly understand. Worse, or even more challenging still, the more we look the more we change what we observe. This Social Fabric is a matrix that rewrites itself around our interventions as does a river through which we might wade.

So, all we need to do to relieve the discomforts of our times is to re-imagine what it is that we see and the catalytic possibilities of our tinkerings.

I’d recommend changing the set upon which our creative interventions should unfold. I recommend two backdrops for our new stage. The first is a picture of an environment despoiled by a fundamentally incompatibe economy. The old stage was a car crash to extinction. Global warming, disappearing water resources, catastrophic biodiversity loss; all the consequence of manic subservience to a world debilitating cult of the free market. The other backdrop is a scene illustrating the specter of the Borg. The Star Trek Borg; a globalised hive-mind automaton devoted only to its own perpetuation, and nothing else. That’s a picture of us in the near future. A picture realised through the linear extrapolation of where we have been headed for the past 50 years. This backdrop asks: do YOU want to end up like this?

Then, on our reappointed stage, we need to reintroduce two icons from the past; two great minds to bring the wisdom of historical context to the challenges of the present. Two great minds who are being willfully ignored. The two Shu’s: E.F. Schumacher and Joseph Schumpeter. It’s time to evict Keynes and Friendman. It’s time for the two Schu’s to return.

Because this is a blog, and because I can hyperlink you off to follow leads in a time that suits for later reflection, let me just say this. E.F. Schumacher represents an inspired advocacy for balance between a regional focus that’s meaningful to our inherent, genetically-coded identity of Place and to a more circumspect realisation of the economies of globalisation and international trade. Small is Beautiful to Schumacher’s mind. Let us not become like the Borg. Or become batteries to power the Matrix machinery of unconstrained globalisation. Place does matter. As long as humans remain human, we need our local networks to give us our identity. Networks beyond a sense of comprehensible Place are meaningful only to the abstract theorising of mathematical economists devoid of reason. Our economies need to be Place-focused, Place-interactive and Place-networked into national and international collaborative partnerships. Place-making is more people-centric and supportive of resilient communities than globalisataion or even nationalised identity could ever realise. Read Small is Beautiful to reconnect with what E.F. Schumacher has to say.

The other Schu is Joseph Schumpeter. He of the theory of Creative Destruction. In times of crisis, the heat generated by collapse energises a reconception of how we should proceed. The collapse of the old energises a creative reconfiguration and renewal. Naturally, there’s a pretty strong set of philosophical, political-economy associations underlying what Schumpeter had to say, but essentially, we do rather seem to be following Schumpeter’s pathway of Creative Destruction right now. Right down to the proposed ‘re-nationalisation of banks’ (creative socialisation as a response to the manic market-rules-all psychosis of unbridled capitalism - if you will). Squirm and squeal, make Joseph McCarthy turn in his spotted grave. This does not mean that we will all join communes and pray to Karl Marx. Creative Destruction is all about an intentionality to explore the creative possibilities of building new from the old; to leave what’s bad and didn’t work and to adopt and adapt in the light of the realities of the world in which we now live (a world challenged by global warming and biodiversity extinction, for starters). The message is an advocacy for creativity. Rather than a collective wallow in despondency at the passing of a socially constructed system with only familiarity to its credit.

I am excited about a Great Two Schu’s Recovery! It’s time to put it into place.

Quotable quotes from notably notable authors are worthy of note. They don’t get much more notable that Robert Heinlein. If you have devoted yourself too much to economics text books or anti-whaling manuals to have discovered Mr Heinlein already, I recommend Stranger in a Strange Land. Because that pretty much sums up the message underling Heinlein’s quote and what can happen when the realities and fictions of perceptions divide way too far.

When it comes to the task of interpreting what it is that others think and do via the perceptions that shape our own lives, we all end up being strangers in a strange land. Which, apart from many other things, could mean that, to my mind, the baby you hold to be so lovingly cute is a horrible wriggly baby-thing to me! Or not. Or not until he/she/wriggly wrinkled one starts to scream or worse…

OK, the rules of the politically correct suggest that everyone’s baby is eternally cute and adorable. But I stopped being politically correct when my pay went irregular as I turned regular to writing for a living. Or, in other words, when that blessed day finally came when I no longer had to say cooing, soothingly appreciative things about that mind numbingly, mentally crippling hog wash baby of bureaucracy, Occupational Health and Safety (OH&S). Now that is a baby that is monumentally hideous in all its wallowing, simpering Darwin-defying stupidity. But a baby that must, at all costs, be declared as incontestably important if a manager wants to keep his job. Which I don’t any more. Because now I am the boss. And my only employee. I can only be politically incorrect to myself. If I misbehave, I send myself off for a bicycle ride. Which is the same thing I reward myself for for deeds done well. Life’s good in this business of mine!

Back to my point. Occupational Health and Safety. That’s the one that says that all work must halt because some bozo forgets the naturally selective processes of self-preservation, and, more importantly, of his or her duty to taking responsibility for the self.

I remember the time when, as a manager dutifully, but insincerely, feigning empathy with the ugly-as-terrorism disease of OH&S, enquiring about the OH&S wisdom of riding a bicycle to work. The reaction to such a simple question was like a descent into an infinite logic loop of programming meltdown. ‘You can’t. You can’t possibly… The risk is off the scale!. To allow that we would have to send one of our OH&S officers to follow you by car. To ensure your safety’. ‘How far did you say?!? 60km? Noooooooo!’

Or the time I asked the dreaded question more enlightened types never ask: ‘why can’t I allow my staff to work from home?. They can write their reports in greater peace and quiet. They can be less distracted by ‘phones and stuff than through working here’. ‘It’s against OH&S policy. That’s why. Why? Because. But why? Because…we can’t be sure that your home office set-up complies with our rules. Your desk might not measure up. Your chair might not comply with our accepted standards. Heavens! There might be obstructions to preclude your exit in a fire! Is your house fire safety certified? Where is your official assembly point? Who will be there to insist on 20 minute breaks? What if your water supply is impure?? Does your toilet comply?’

See what I mean? This is one hideously ugly baby that only a bureaucratically delusional managerialist could possibly appreciate.

The worst thing is the active partitioning OH&S presents between actions and the acceptance of personal responsibility. Or, going deeper, OH&S cradles those it assaults with the warm psychotic maternalism of being shielded from knowing the consequences of what it is we do to the rest of the world, including those around us. Someone else is there to look after us. Someone else is there to give us a fallacious sense of protection; of bureaucratic womb nurturing from the bleak realities of a world that really can, and does, bite back. Which is why, I would suggest, that we ended up in our contemporary globally warmed mess. Which also goes some way to explaining why the Global Financial Crisis smashed its way through our lives of late. All these things are the consequence of our individual contributions to a collective refusal to take personal responsibility; responsibility for the things we do and the consequences those things have for others and for the planet we share. We have become disconnected. We generally imagine that ’someone else’ is there to look after our interests; to partition and protect, nurture and enshroud us with the comfort of coddling where someone else is always to blame. Never us. Always someone else.

OH&S is symptomatic, and indicative, of a culture in decline. It’s a game we play in the end game of these times and all times when civilisations collapse. Read Jared Diamond’s book on the collapse of civilisations. Read into each story of decline. Note the emergence of bureaucracies that seek to distance the folk from the consequences of their actions. Note the emergence of the elaboration of rules, policies, elaborations of pathways that connect us to the outcomes of individual actions. These are the things that destroy civilisations and ecologies. OH&S is a symbol of our contemporary terminal decline. We should follow Robert Heinlein’s lead on this one. OH&S and all it represents is one ugly baby that only a psychotic bureaucrat could possibly love.

From the archive of stories I am weaving into my new book on bottom-up community building via Web 2.0, I thought the following account of bureaucracy-gone-mad on the foreshores of the Sydney Harbour might be of general interest.

The formal academic version of this story is available from my Transdisciplinary Gateway website. You have to register and log into the site before trying to access the document. The story I recount here is less ‘formally stated’. At the end of the day, I think there are some interesting lessons from the experiences the story recounts, not just for improving the game of harbour foreshore management, but for the administration and planning of any multiple-stakeholder environmental-economic setting.

Like any big ticket Place, Sydney Harbour is a compulsively complex blitzkrieg of government, non-government, commercial and community jurisdictions. Everyone who lives near and on this Place has a connection with the myriad of policies, plans and activities that determines how the Place is governed.

Way back in 1998, some key government officials started to think that the administrative complexities of the Sydney Harbour foreshores was a little overwhelming. Small issues like ‘who manages what, when and how’ are a frequent conversation starter whenever things go wrong or someone wants to change something in the general domain that might or might not come under the territory of the Sydney Harbour foreshores. So, the then New South Wales Government decided to set up a pilot project to ‘make sense of the administrative mess’ that so confused anyone who chose to look. The Office of the Sydney Harbour Manager was borne as a interestingly collaborative enterprise shared across an array of relevant agencies and other organisations. Step 1 was to appoint a suitably lateral thinking, charismatic figure to be in charge. Jeremy Dawkins was recruited to the post and got to wear the cap of ‘Sydney Harbour Manager’.

The first step was the best. While the engineers amongst us might imagine that the foreshores of a harbour are the rocky bits on the water side, our intrepid Harbour Manager decided to test this hypothesis via some solid collaborative lateral thinking. Putting more than a few heads together, it soon became apparent that managing the ‘wet bits’ separately from the dry bits and then separating out both of those from the governance of all those places that connect (economically, culturally, and yes, visually) with the harbour as a whole is a touch arcane; if not typical of the ways of traditional bureaucratic thinking. So, the new Harbour Manager’s first forward step was to take more than a few steps backward. ‘What exactly is this Place that I am expected, now, to manage?’ It’s a tragedy that more managers don’t ask deeply meaningful questions like that on their first day in the job!

If your intuition is that managing something as abstract as a harbour foreshore is a touch undefined, you would be right. With a brief that started with the rocky bits on the side, our Harbour Manager had soon redrawn his brief to take on the entire Sydney Catchment! Now I would hasten to add that the brief was not in the character of a typical government department take-over bid. The intent was to work out the domain of communication and engagement through which to connect that myriad of disparate interests with jurisdictions around the stupendous resource of Sydney Harbour. As is the case with so many stories of this kind, this first step was a doozy! Mainly because no one, or even no group of ones, really knew who the stakeholders actually were. Harbour-related administration had become an impenetrable jungle of overlapping, frequently conflicting and certainly communicatively disconnected administration. There was, literally, a cast of thousands, most of whom had no or little idea of who does what and when. It was a profoundly messy picture.

So, Step 1 was to poke and prod and develop a well managed conversation across that cast of thousands to paint a clearer picture of the administrative landscape involved. Our Harbour Manager knew his game well. His intent was to take all these people away from their conventional administrative settings and throw the lot into a splendid grand-scale meet and greet. Nothing quite like this had happened before. Officials met other officials and together they redesigned the map that they had previously applied to guide the navigation of their professional world.

The narrow-minded flat earth of insanely fragmented command and control was revealed to be an elephant in the bilge of this particular canoe of state. It was a vessel heading off in all directions at once as the rowers worked blind to row the routes of completely different maps. Chaos was revealed where order had once been fantasised to prevail.

It’s at this point that the main lesson comes into port. This is a lesson to be noted, studied and repeated. If the Office of the Sydney Harbour Manager did noting else at all, simply facilitating a conversation to redraw this particular landscape of governance is a leap from a flat earth to the map of a sphere. We need to realise, though, that as erroneous and ridiculously naive as the previous flat-earth map had been, it was the map from which the prevailing machinery of government had been designed. It defined the existing establishment’s understandings of Place. Those understandings, in turn, underpinned the rules and routines that defined what it was that the prevailing administration did. To redraw the map would be to send the folk into a spin.

My team was engaged, by this stage, to watch and observe. It would be safe to say that having the map of one’s perceptions of Place re-drawn in such a dramatic way would unleash a storm of motion for captains long-tuned to their previous fantasies of calm. Two responses to challenges such as this are likely. The first is to adapt and emerge. The other is to steer the ship right into the iceberg now revealed to be crossing your path.

It’s at this stage that I decided that resilient senior organisational managers fit two general moulds. Either can facilitate one’s progress up the ladder of executive pay. Type A managers excel at the containment of change. Type B excel at the facilitation of adaptation and emergence. Guess which Type dominated this particular Harbour scene? Type B are the only valid kind to lead in environments of deep jurisdictional complexity. But Type A managers were firmly in charge. The historical fallout of their inflexible machine-world minds was the communicative nightmare long obscured by a deep litter of managerialised hard-core inflexible bureaucracy. The Sydney Harbour Manager was doing a remarkable job to bring the absurdities of all this into the full light of open-community exposure.

It was a fine edged joust of push-for-change or entrenchment in the past. As is so often the case, the tipping points of governance often resolve on peaks beyond the view of community attention. That was the case for this particular exercise in engaged communicative planning. When faced with the prospect of redistributed empowerment of a more deliberative, grass-roots centred kind, the top floor doors were closed for serious strategic internal review.

Now, of course, this story would be told in an entirely different light by those who played the different roles. The problem is that the story seems to have quietly dissipated into to the archives of bureaucratic memory. The fate of this grand experiment in stakeholder-engaged Place management was never clear; except to say that the Office was soon after ‘restructured’, merged and twisted into something apparently less provocative to the establishment interests then involved. My team’s job was to analyse the experiment as external input to the inner sanctum closed processes of internal review. What happened thereafter remains a mystery I often ponder. The tragedy is that while the story remains untold; the insights derived and the lessons learnt have also been contained. There are some, though, who still recall the excitement of those times when one of Australia’s key icons became the testbed for an experiment in communication and learning rarely seen before, or since.

2009 must be the year of rhetorical renewal. That’s to be expected in these times of perceptions-driven recession; when we are all so busy sealing the deal of our fate through a beat up of gloom, doom and other manifestations of collective hysteria.

As I suggested last time, recessions are a golden opportunity for renewal. A great time to empty the bins and wash the soiled linen of the accumulated detritus of the age that’s now past. It’s time for a mental stock take and a leap into the thrills of the unknown.

I rather think that’s what’s being implied in the most recent, and rather extraordinary, public lecturing of Australia’s Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd. I am not sure how many people have really listened to what Rudd has been saying, or have bothered to read into his thinking as deeply as Rudd would so evidently like; but I find the statements he has been making to be the fresh air of a political sea change for a future better than the last.

After all, we don’t normally expect our political leaders to be in possession of insights as deep and meaningful as this. We generally expect our leaders to mouth platitudes, smile a lot, kiss babies and screen play the dramas attached to the cult of the politically correct.

What Rudd is saying, as I read it, is that politics is in need of a rethink. Political leadership needs to reinvent itself away from tillering the autopilot of the free market enterprise of State to become an instrument of deliberate, purposeful management, instead. This is pretty big stuff for a politician of the age in which we now live. It means that we need to enter the dimension when politicians need to lead from the top, not follow the mongrelized flatulence of mashed public opinion as divined by the machinery of telephone polling. Rudd is saying that leadership needs to perform a perpetual balancing act between oiling the machinery of the global free market while, at the same time, inserting itself into that machinery to manually navigate the whirlpools of social, economic and environmental change into patterns we all would prefer to the unmitigated brutality of an economist-engineered automaton marketplace. Or, putting it another way, politicians need to govern with their eyes and minds open rather than as kites flying the whims of the polls and ivory tower dwelling academics.

Now even that probably sounds fairly innocuous to the casual reader; few politicians would admit to a role different to what Rudd is proclaiming. Unless you happen to dig past the veneer of usual politician rhetoric to find the smirking face of an economic rationalist bureaucracy with its oaf like claw on the levers of the state; as is usually the case. A politician who actually, really, deliberately and intentionally leads? That is actually new, at least in societies that would identify with democracy. The real message I read here is a charter of terror to the anaerobic bog of government bureaucracy. Prime Minister Rudd wants to take the helm. Really. He wants the bureaucrats to head back to the rowing benches where they really belong. Now that’s scary! For bureaucrats at least.

Looking even deeper, the pronouncements of Rudd are blended from an interesting recipe. A touch of Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful thesis (wherein regional economies are strategically supported rather than expected to swim with the sharks of rampaging globalism), a good dollop of Schumpeter’s Creative Destruction thesis (wherein we proactively engage the mess we are in towards deeply reflexive, considered renewal), and best of all, an at least implicit firing within the kiln of the Institutional Economist’s Social Fabric Matrix.

I bet that last one needs explanation…It’s my all time favourite theory of organisation and governance (I did a Phd on this years and years ago). The Social Fabric Matrix is a rich picture of how our communities really work, as convoluted, always shifting webs of influence between social institutions, technology, environment and, importantly, attitudes, values and beliefs. The main take home points: the world’s a seething shifting tide of web-like connections between economic, organisational, environmental and human psycho-social bits. The world’s a morass of ‘circular and cumulative causation’ to quote the most impressive academic I ever met: F Gregory Hayden (who invented this lovely theoretical area). Note the importance of attitudes, values and beliefs. It’s the influence of these unruly human elements that warp their way through the weft of our economic systems that economists have so studiously ignored or reduced to inane simplification for so many years. A baseless oversimplifying stupidity that has created the very mess in which we now stand. Because it’s these very tricky, unruly human bits that have created the Global Financial Crisis; as a crisis of expectations, perceptions and self-fulfilling hysterical overreaction.

So…when I read Rudd’s essay, I was thinking that we might just have a leader who at least intuitively understands the complexities that deep thinkers like F Gregory Hayden have for so very long understood and which our leaders have for so very long ignored thanks to the culpable stupidity of their mindset besotted, funnel visioned economist advisers.

But he needs help! To give Rudd’s vision traction we need a veritable revolution in the system of governance and leadership that has so profoundly demonstrated its incapacity to lead in these most challenging times of change.

To simply deliver sentiments such as these into the mindset swamps of conventional administration is to kill this bird before it could ever take flight. Rudd (and Obama, to extend the message of change) needs to direct a revolution in governance too. The machinery of state is a machinery dedicated to brakes; to the purposeful maintenance of inaction through the truculence of managerialism.

What’s missing from Rudd’s lectures is an explicit intent to rebuild this machinery of state; he gives no advice on how his grand vision could possibly be implemented when the power of the state is of an entirely different polarity to that which his vision actually requires. You can’t plug ideas such as these (notions like the need to creatively nurture regional development within the context of global change) into the feeble current our existing bureaucratic systems provide. If rhetoric such as Rudd’s were to take hold, it would do so on a fire storm of change to the lego-land command-and-control fantasies of those who currently hold the tiller of our floundering state.