Earth Connected

The picture above gives the essential features of our vision for PlaNet Diss, a pilot project for a local sustainable and collaborative community, based in Diss, Norfolk, UK. At its centre, is ‘synergy’ people working together to provide such basic needs as food, transport, energy, caring services. The other areas are there to keep it stable and working effectively.

This combination is what we feel is our innovative contribution to the many projects around the world beginning to build communities with sustainability, collaboration and social justice at their core, building a movement to provide solutions to humanity’s deepest environmental and social problems.

The picture is described in more depth in two documents attached to this post: “The social model for the PlaNet Diss project” and “The software description for the PlaNet Diss project”. The picture is the end point of the social model and the starting point for the software description.

From the social model document:
Very many of us see the main economic and political structures around us as literally insane: destructive of people and the natural world, not leading to a ‘good life’ for most. We are looking for and building the beginnings of a society that actually works: that protects the natural world, provides a modest but comfortable living for all (rather than wasteful throwaway consumption), people doing jobs they like on a basis of trust and integrity, and especially, where people of all backgrounds treat each other well and live in relative harmony.
We see this happening from the bottom up, not the top down. It isn’t a matter of waiting until sympathetic governments get elected, and certainly not a matter of overthrowing anything. The early steps, as in this project, will start with a small group of people, perhaps a few per cent of the local population. For them, it will provide a modest improvement in their lives, but mainly will allow us to learn the skills of doing it: how to coordinate a bottom-up, self-governing community, how to organise to provide some of the basics of life and in so doing provide some local employment, how to work on a basis of trust and respect, how to build a community-based exchange system that reduces people’s dependence on external money.

The purpose of the software is to connect the members of PlaNet Diss in various ways, but especially, to act as a scaffolding for the social vision, reminding them of the overall social model and enabling them to access the various parts (exchanging, getting information about other members, seeking resources for handling conflicts, taking part in the self-governance, and planning.)

The current step, in preparation now, will be a ‘Green Living Day’, to be held in Spring 2024 in a new ‘community space in the heart of Diss’: No 8 Marketplace. Its purpose is to “come and get a taster of sustainable living, with local food, entertainment, small group workshops, and more… Help us map out and start more sustainable living for Diss”.

The Green Living Day will include stalls and entertainment, but also planning discussions and prototypes of community infrastructure that form a key part of sustainable living, specifically a) a communication system that incorporates a local social network (PlaNet Diss), b) a Community Fund and Exchange System that allows people to earn and save money by dealing with people they know and trust, and c) a Peacemaking group that offers training in communication skills and support for handling conflicts constructively.

If the above resonates with you, we invite you to read the documents and comment on them, either on this blog or in other media. Or write to me at garyalexand[at]gmail.com. In particular, we need help and advice on the infrastructure in the previous paragraph.

I am just so appalled at what is going on in Israel/Palestine, and the reactions to it. I refuse to take sides, even though my heritage is as a Romanian Jewish New Yorker. Taking sides is to totally misunderstand what is happening. Both sides co-create the ongoing tragedy.

It isn’t a matter of who is the more evil. What is evil is not the people, it is the ideas they are all caught up in. It is the way each side reacts to the other, and this is a pattern that really is a disease of the human spirit. We are all one people: the humans. My view of the only real solution is true peace, where both sides learn to forgive each other, probably in a “truth and reconciliation” process, and become a single, powerful, prosperous nation. Seems impossible, but it’s is necessary!!!

Below is an extract from my book eGaia, Growing a peaceful, sustainable Earth through communications“ p. 170.

The following includes extracts from a book by two people who have been involved at close quarters (Bassam Abu-Sharif and Uzi Mahnaimi, Tried by Fire, The searing true story of two men at the heart of the struggle between the arabs and the jews, Little, Brown and Co., 1995.)

Bassam Abu-Sharif is a Palestinian who changed from being an active terrorist/freedom fighter (depending upon your perspective) to leading the internal Palestinian struggle to start the peace process. Uzi Mahnaimi is an Israeli who was an intelligence officer and became a journalist working for a peaceful settlement.

The Palestinian perspective: From the Palestinian point of view, the Israelis have expelled most of them from their land, and through their settlements are continuing to do so. The Palestinian’s violence is a reaction of despair, which, although arguably self-destructive, they see as desperately defensive.

Bassam: “Until the Zionists came, the Abu-Sharif family had lived in Jerusalem for the better part of 500 years.”

The Israeli perspective: From the Israeli point of view, the Arabs are living in land which was historically Jewish. This is the only place where they can be safe from the persecutions they suffered in the past. If the Arabs would only let them be, there would be no problems. But if not, they will show that they cannot just be slaughtered as in the Holocaust. The Israelis retaliate strongly to any attack on them. They see this as entirely defensive.

Uzi: “Gideon [Uzi’s father] reached manhood with one very strong conviction: that to survive as a Jew meant learning how to defend yourself – to the death.”

The two sides have entirely different world views, in which the other side is demonised. Many, perhaps most, members of each community have almost no contact with the other.

A Palestinian explains: “I grew up in Gaza hating all Jews, believing that they were bloodsuckers, that they had robbed me of my land, my rights and my freedom and that they killed my fellow men. That was before I met my first Jew.”

Uzi: “I knew nothing of the Arabs except that they were all demons. … Like all Israelis, I had been brought up in the Arab-entirely-wrong/ Israeli-entirely-right school of history. …The dislike and distrust imparted by this teaching was compounded by the almost total lack of contact between the two communities. …Most people in Israel know nothing about Arab people, and care less. They have no Arab friends. …They think themselves superior in every way to the Arabs.”

In the January, 2001 election, “The despair and anxiety that possessed the Israeli public – and the total lack of awareness of Palestinian pain and suffering – are what has put Sharon in power”. Neither side has any sense of the other as ‘ordinary people just trying to get on with their lives’, the way they see themselves.

From the point of view of someone sympathetic to both sides, they seem like cousins who have much in common, but have fallen out. There is an ongoing cycle whereby violence on one side creates a violent reaction on the other side that creates another violent reaction, and so on. They react with shock at each new ‘outrage’ from the other side as more evidence to confirm that the others are truly demons. Yet neither side sees what they are doing as connected to what the other is doing to them. Both sides believe that the other side will respond only to force.

Both sides are traumatised and drained of resources by the war effort and the destruction. The chairman of the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme says that ‘martyrs’ (‘suicide bombers’ to the Israelis) almost without exception had suffered severe trauma as children, watched their parents killed or humiliated or their homes destroyed – and felt they had to combat their sense of helplessness and victimisation on behalf of their nation. (Note that this is the answer to the question “What kind of person could commit such atrocities?”)

Very few on either side can really envisage the prospects of true peace. Yet a unified Middle East, with its oil wealth added to Israeli technical and industrial ability could be a world power to reckon with.

Bassam: “Peace should not mean only the end of war. At the same time it must mean the development of joint economic, social and political programmes. Israel could never fully become a part of the Middle East unless and until it made peace with the Palestinians. …It is through a self-governing Palestinian state… that Israelis will eventually drive to shop in the Souq al-Hamadiyyeh, the magical ancient central market in Damascus.”

There is a lot to be learned from this example, which applies to very many other human conflicts. First, there are two communities which are at the same time intimately connected and yet with very limited understanding of each other. Thus each can build up a view of the other’s motivations which the other would totally reject. Each community, within itself, is continually regenerating that false view of the other community. Strong emotions stop both sides from even considering the View of the other side.

If this post resonates with you, please share it widely, and feel free to quote it (giving credit).

I gave this talk to the 2023 Metaphorum conference on Saturday 10th June 2023. It builds on the talk I gave a month earlier, at the Fair Green Green Fair, but was a lot more explicit about the theoretical background. Below is the PowerPoint file. You can play it as a slide show, or, if you just look at the slides, you will see my presenter’s notes which will give you more of an idea of what I said.

I suggest that before you look at it, you have a look at the 3 minute video we made, A New Common Sense, which is linked from this blog.

This talk, and especially the last few slides, gives the most up-to-date version of my overall vision.

The Fair Green Green Fair: Coronation Bank Holiday Monday!

The best solutions to our energy future don’t require massive new electricity grids

There is a new campaign that I’m beginning to get involved with. It builds on my early experience as Director of the Open University Energy Research Group many years ago, but also is an opportunity to present a genuinely sustainable solution to our energy problems.

The Issue

National Grid is proposing to build “a new 400,000 volts (400 kV) electricity overhead transmission line” across East Anglia and is presenting it as a ‘green’ solution: “a crucial role and pivotal in turning the UK’s net zero ambitions into reality.”

They say:
“The existing network in East Anglia currently carries around 3,200 megawatts (MW) of electricity generation. Over the next decade we expect more than 15,000 MW of new generation and 4,500 MW of new interconnection to connect in the region.

That is, they say their network needs to carry SIX times the power it does now. Imagine the current set of pylons and the lower voltage feeder networks around East Anglia expanded by a factor of six. A large and growing number of people are very upset by this prospect and rightly so.

National Grid present this six times expansion as a necessary fact, and are consulting only on the details of the proposed new transmission line, such as whether it should go east or west of Roydon. But of course, it isn’t a fact, it is a fantasy, and a dystopian fantasy too. It is applying 20th century thinking to a 21st century problem, but a much better 21st century vision is available that is much more environmentally sound.

Here’s a 2 page document I wrote that gives a more sensible alternative.

This little 3 minute video was first published in May, in the first lockdown. My hope is that it will be used as a starting point for group discussions, by groups looking to build a new kind of future, as the pandemic subsides.

Really, what is The new common sense?

I’m really proud of this video, love the graphics and all the little personal contributions. It was a group effort, that included various family members and close friends. The YouTube page says:

We hope this video will inspire you to think about what you would like to see happening after the pandemic. Add your own selfie and see others on our FaceBook page: https://www.facebook.com/groups/52237… Also, for more information: https://planet.coop .

Created and produced by Gary Alexander, Madeline Lees, David Alexander and Daisy Lees. Graphics by Alex Brenchley. Special thanks to Maty Sene Carpenter, Anna Mudeka, Samira, Clive, Aicha, Sinder, Rama, Mimi, Arthur, Max, Jane, who all feature in the video. Thanks also to Vibha, Ali, Hamidou, AH, Renata, Keely, Dulcie, Sam, Basil, Jon and Angela.

For much of the past year I’ve been working on a major new project, which has gone through various incarnations and working titles. It started with my presentation to Open:2018, where I was proposing that we build the Open Coop’s long standing design for “PLANET – An open-source operating system for a collaborative, sustainable economy” on top of Holochain.  Then we discovered a €1 Million EU prize, Blockchains for Social Good, that seemed perfect to fund it. We put in an application for that prize on 2nd Sept 2019!

For a quick overview of the project look at our new website, planet.coop (isn’t that a great URL?), and for a fuller description, download a copy of our EU Prize application (also found on the About page of the website).

We may or may not win the EU Prize, but applying for it has meant that the vision I’ve been writing about in eGaia, and Partnership for People and Planet now has a great start. We have a good team and a fine set of partner organisations working with us, and think we are in a strong position to get other funding should we not get the EU prize.

Here’s what I think is the confidence trick in Theresa May’s current stance.

The Prime Minister claims that the deal she has negotiated is the only one possible, which may be true, but only given her ‘red lines’. If they are loosened, a different deal is possible.

In particular, her insistence on no customs union (i.e. getting out of the tarriff-free EU), requires new tariff agreements on all forms of goods and services. That affects all borders, including the Irish border and all ports. With an economy totally integrated into Europe after 40 years of free trade that will take a lot of time to negotiate, most of which is left to the ‘transition period’, after we leave the EU. It isn’t part of the ‘deal’. That is why the EU has insisted on the backstop, which basically keeps us in the customs union until  those new tariffs are agreed. So the backstop really is very likely to be needed, and probably for a long time.

This really is an impossible situation, so she is pushing it until the last minute before we leave the EU, to frighten everyone with a prospect of no deal, and that is why she won’t agree to rule out no deal.

The anger of the vote leave people is real and justified. It is due to rising inequality and austerity, but the far right has played their usual trick of blaming it on scapegoats: the EU and immigrants. So that anger will erupt if we don’t leave now. A second referendum would give people a chance to see through the con job and so defeat the chance to leave the EU.

The real solution is a changed economy based on equality and environmental soundness. The movement to build that is now growing quietly, within the existing economy, but it is still well below the radar. For example, I spent three hours yesterday in two online video conferences about it (as a participant, not an organiser or speaker). One was the Municipalities in Transition project, bringing together community groups working with their local governments for a more collaborative and sustainable economy. The other was a progress report on the Holo project, building a decentralised internet, which would form the basis of a decentralised economy with alternatives to the dominant financial institutions.

So, would leaving the EU, especially crashing out make this more or less likely?  I don’t think that is knowable and can see scenarios both ways. The fragile, embryonic new economy could be empowered by economic chaos but it could also be squashed by an increased authoritarianism. It is a global, not a British project, so I think we would be better off building it while within the EU.

I gave a talk at the Open Coop event, “Open:2018 Platform Coops”on 27 July 2018 in Conway Hall, London.  The Open Coop has recently completed putting its various talks and workshops online, so I’ve linked mine below. I thought it was a great event, and recommend people look at various of the other parts of it too.

My talk was about 12 minutes long and then there are another 12 minutes or so of questions and answers. It included four polls of the audience to see how much the vision was actually shared. See how much you agree too!

Note that I used slides that built in stages, and you will see that the poor editor who tried to turn this into a coherent video struggled with that, but the audio is clear throughout.

Alternatively, here is the PowerPoint presentation. If you look at it in presenter mode you can see my speakers notes (here augumented for clarity) and the slide builds. Alternatively, here it is as a pdf, with notes, but no slide builds. Open2018 talk with comments(ppt)   Open2018 talk with comments (pdf) (Caution: both big files.)