Ode Magazine

Five freedoms for all

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 17:28:12 EST

How the 2048 movement is helping “me” and “we” to work together.

Photo: istockphoto.com/arissanjay

2048 is a plan to prevent future wars, eliminate poverty and create the conditions necessary for a sustainable existence on our planet. These ends can be achieved through a written agreement to live together that is enforceable in the courts of all countries.

This movement began with the creation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a set of fundamental human rights for all people, which was adopted unanimously in 1948 by all countries in the UN. This movement can be completed by the year 2048, the 100th anniversary of the Universal Declaration. The way to accomplish this is first, by educating all people, including students, in all countries about the human rights they all share; and second, by drafting a document, an international bill of rights, that embodies humanity’s agreement to live together and that is enforceable in the courts of all countries. This document is called an International Convention on Human Rights because a convention is a treaty that can be agreed to by all countries.

These two steps, to educate people in all countries while working together to draft an international convention, are complementary and interrelated. They are good news. The worn-out story that war and poverty are just the way things are so we should keep spending trillions of dollars perpetuating them is giving way to a new story, a new narrative that says peace and prosperity are attainable if we have a plan and we are willing to challenge those who keep propagating the same old myths.

2048 dispels myths. One of the most pernicious myths is that peace and prosperity are hopelessly complicated and unattainable. This is untrue. Peace and prosperity can be attained through the realization of five basic fundamental freedoms, for all people, everywhere in the world. They are: freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from want, freedom for the environment and freedom from fear. Of course, other rights are needed too, but these five fundamental freedoms establish a framework within which other rights can flourish. If our international community remembers these Five Freedoms, and if they become a regular part of our daily lives, then collectively we will carry the core of 2048 in our minds and it will become our way of life.

Please look at your hand for a moment. Hold it up, palm facing you. We all have five fingers, but the first we call a thumb. It looks different. It stands out. And it is strong. It represents freedom of speech, the idea that stands out, that stands up to dishonesty and corruption. Next, look at your index finger. We point with this one. It gives us direction. It represents freedom of religion. Each of us is free to choose our own direction, with or without God, and for those who decide that God is their guide, then they are free to have their own relationship with God without the state telling them what that relationship must be. Interference by the state pollutes the relationship with God.

Third is the middle finger, the longest of all. It represents freedom from want, the long road of existence and the certainty that there will be food, water, education and health care for every one of us no matter where we may be on that road. Next, for many of us, is the marriage ring finger, either the right or the left hand, and for all of us, a finger with a direct link to our nervous system. It represents freedom for the environment. Life. We all have a direct link to the Earth and the ecosystem of which we are a part. When the life of the Earth is spoiled, our lives are spoiled. Finally, there is our “little finger,” shorter and smaller than the rest. It represents freedom from fear. It’s the “finale” of our hand, our reward. All the others lead to this one.

As you take a look at your hand and recount the Five Freedoms, remember that you didn’t ask for that hand, you were born with it. So, too, you do not have to ask for the Five Freedoms, you were born with them. They are five freedoms for all!

Four of these Five Freedoms originated with U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt. He stated the following, in his State of the Union address to the U.S. Congress in January 1941: “We look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms: The first is freedom of speech and expression—everywhere in the world. The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way—everywhere in the world. The third is freedom from want—everywhere in the world. The fourth is freedom from fear—everywhere in the world.”

The beauty of these Four Freedoms is that they are an outline of an agreement for humanity. They are a social formula. When we, the people of our international community, have created a social order whereby all people enjoy the first three freedoms—freedom of speech, freedom of religion and freedom from want—then we will have created a society that allows us to share in the fourth freedom, freedom from fear. This formula was not just born out of a desire to end World War II, but, as President Roosevelt said, “to end the beginning of all wars.” This quote and the Four Freedoms are a guiding light for 2048.

Roosevelt saw the Four Freedoms as achievable within a generation. Commenting on his speech, he said, “It is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation.” Perhaps he was overly optimistic about the speed at which the Four Freedoms could be achieved everywhere in the world, but steady, immediate action is the message; we can’t put these rights off forever.

The Four Freedoms are the essence of a good life for all. They ensure the following: We can think freely, say and write what we want and peacefully organize to protest; we can have a relationship with a god of our choosing, without interference by the state; we can live in security, knowing that education and health care will always be available regardless of circumstance; and finally we can live in peace, without fear of rampant crime and continuing war. In short, the Four Freedoms are the core of our social contract—our agreement about how we will live together.

President Roosevelt’s recitation of the phrase “everywhere in the world” at the end of each freedom is key. In effect, the Four Freedoms were a New Deal for the world. Roosevelt had long been a champion of the common man in America. Through the New Deal, Roosevelt took the hard edges off capitalism. He made sure that working people were not left destitute while wealth and power were consolidated into the hands of a few. With the Four Freedoms, he was expanding his gaze to all men and women, in all nations, to ensure that destitution did not befall anyone, for in destitution he saw the seeds of war.

While the Four Freedoms ensure dignity and cover most of our social contract among ourselves and our government, we need a fifth freedom to preserve our planet, including the ecosystem that provides joy and beauty, and also sustains us: freedom for the environment. Just as our human DNA is 98.5 percent the same for all people in all countries, so too our well-being is intertwined with our physical environment.

Equally important, as we have learned from global warming, the health of our environment affects us all, everywhere, and therefore, as with the first Four Freedoms, freedom for the environment must also apply “everywhere in the world.” The demise of our planet’s ecosystem teaches us the folly of only working on local environmental issues while dramatic degradation takes place worldwide.

Furthermore, it’s time to discard the myth that we must be willing to sacrifice the environment for the sake of economic competition.

What is needed is uniform, international regulation of the type that an international convention would provide. Without an international approach, there will always be pressures for some countries to sacrifice the environment to gain market advantage. Capitalism works well, but it tends to create a race to the bottom when it comes to environmental protection.

Creating a fifth freedom for the environment is harmonious with the other four freedoms. Often, destruction of the environment results from the actions of impoverished people who are struggling to survive, whether by cutting down their local forest to an extent that it does not grow back, for example, or overfishing until fish stocks do not come back. The lack of the first three freedoms, particularly freedom from want, can thus lead to the destruction of the environment. As we reach an agreement regarding the first four freedoms, we provide well-being for all; the result, then, is that the need to sacrifice the environment to survive is reduced. In this way, the Five Freedoms are intertwined and the success of each bolsters the others.

Given the strength and well-being each of us will gain from five universal freedoms, it is time to dispel another myth—that there is not enough to go around. We pay dearly for the myth that we can’t afford to have health care and education for all, and the myth that environmental protection is too costly. These myths are untrue. For example, studies have conclusively shown that not only will global warming cause serious suffering and diminishment of our daily lives, but it will cost us more to pick up the pieces after hurricanes, droughts and flooding than it will cost to avoid these calamities. Similarly, while education may cost more initially, it creates good jobs to construct schools and results in highly productive workers. So in addition to generating fulfilling lives, implementing 2048 would deliver financial savings.

Americans, on the whole, like people in all other countries, are fundamentally good and generous souls with whom you can sit and talk at the kitchen table. Many do not know that their government gives less than one-fifth of one percent to foreign aid and is at the bottom for giving among developed countries. They probably also don’t know that the U.S. spends more on its military than all other countries combined. Part of the role of 2048 is to help spread awareness. When people know the truth, they support reallocation of resources as part of the agreement to live together, in keeping with their self-interest and morals.

Awareness can be created with a small percentage of people. Just as it will only take 1 percent of the GNP for the realization of education and health care for all, so too it will only take 1 percent of humanity to share the news of 2048. Word of mouth, spurred by our innate desire to live in peace and security instead of war and want, will spread the word. This 1 percent of humanity already exists within the arts and media, our non-profit and for-profit businesses, our places of worship, our universities and even our governments; now the Internet and 2048 are bringing all these communities together.

Knowledge of the Five Freedoms is essential to achieve this 1 percent “tipping point” for the success of 2048. Students and the public generally need to be able to recall the Five Freedoms just as easily as they can count the five fingers on their hands. As they learn their rights, they come to expect them, both from one another and from their governments. What they expect today, they will demand tomorrow. The Five Freedoms are deeply held cultural values that lead to lasting results.

The 2048 Project is an affiliation of educational institutions, human rights centers, non-governmental organizations, businesses and foundations collaborating to educate students and the public about the evolution of human rights and to provide a process to draft an international framework for enforceable human rights that can be in place by the year 2048, the 100th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

This is an edited excerpt from 2048: Humanity’s Agreement to Live Together by Kirk Boyd, published by Berrett-Koehler.

Issue: March 2010

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Don't forget to breathe

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 17:28:12 EST

Breathetext.com reminds you to take a deep breath, via text.

Photo: istockphoto.com/martinedoucet

Do you sometimes feel a little over-whelmed by life’s pace and uncertainties? Steve St. Clair has an answer: Pause and take a few deep breaths. And because that can be easy to forget, he created a text message service that reminds you of this simple act. St. Clair, a meditation teacher in Salt Lake City, Utah, believes conscious breathing can “be calming and have great value. In general, we as a society have become disconnected from our breath, as evidenced by the shallowness of our breathing, no doubt due to the stress in our daily lives.”

Last year, St. Clair co-founded breathetext.com, a “global community of breathing together.” You can join by texting the word “breathe” to 313131. You’ll get one free text message per day alerting you to take a few deep, cleansing breaths. You can also follow @Breathetext on Twitter. St. Clair stresses that many centuries-old teachings about breath require discipline, time and dedication to make the intake of oxygen something profound and life-changing. He thinks it’s more feasible today to practice something a little bit easier. “Simple as this may sound, such a fundamental form of breathing has the capacity to reconnect individuals to their hearts and cores, thereby creating profound changes in them. And because we are breathing synchronistically, individuals unite with one another and with the larger collective forces at play.”

Issue: March 2010

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The joy of dirt

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 17:28:12 EST

Soil is as essential a natural resource as air and water. Yet we’re running out of healthy, fertile dirt at an alarming rate. One man’s odyssey to retrace and reduce his soil footprint.

At his farm in Willits, California, John Jeavons teaches the next generation to grow soil.

Photo: Cynthia Raiser Jeavons

John Jeavons is saving the planet one scoop of applesauce at a time. Jeavons stands at the front of the classroom at Ecology Action, the experimental farm he founded on the side of a mountain above Willits, in Northern California’s Mendocino County. For every tablespoon of food he sucks down his gullet, he scoops up six spoonfuls of dirt, one at a time for dramatic effect, and dumps them into another bowl. It’s a stark message he’s trying to get across to the 35 people who have come from around the country to get a tour of his farm—simplified, to be sure, but comprehensible: For every unit of food we consume, using the conventional agricultural methods employed in the U.S., six times that amount of topsoil is lost. Since, according to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the average person eats a ton of food each year, that works out to 12,000 pounds (5,443 kilograms) of topsoil. John Jeavons estimates that using current farming practices we have 40 to 80 years of arable soil left.

If you don’t already know the bad news, I’ll make it quick and dirty: We’re running out of soil. As with other prominent resources that have accumulated over millions of years, we, the people of planet Earth, have been churning through the stuff that feeds us since the first Neolithic farmer broke the ground with his crude plow. The rate varies, the methods vary, but the results are eventually the same. Books like Jared Diamond’s Collapse and David Montgomery’s Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations lay out in painful detail the historic connections between soil depletion and the demise of those societies that undermined the ground beneath their feet.

According to the International Soil Reference and Information Centre (ISRIC), as of 1991, human activity has brought about the degradation of 7.5 million square miles (19.5 million square kilometers) of land, the equivalent of Europe twice over. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the U.N. has estimated that the value of lost soil nutrition in South Asia amounts to some $10 billion a year. Each year, says Montgomery, the world loses 83 billion tons of soil.

Still, these abstract facts have a way of eluding our comprehension. When we put a human face on them they begin to sink home. The U.N. Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) has estimated that desertification in Sub-Saharan Africa will drive 60 million people from their homes in the next 20 years. While agriculture has thus far been able to keep pace with growing demand, it has done so by borrowing soil fertility from the future. But whether a global crisis is 20, 50 or 200 years away, the point remains the same: We as a species would be wise to take better care of our dirt.

In the hyper-abstracted economics of today, it is easy to forget that land is one of the irreducible foundations of all economies. As the world economy has deflated in the last year, it has driven many people all over the world back to earth, if only to grow a few tomatoes in their backyards. In 2009, the Associated Press reported a 19 percent increase in residential seed sales in the U.S., a bump known in the business as “recession gardening.” When the Obamas planted a garden on the White House lawn, it was at once an economic, environmental and spiritual gesture—a nod, if nothing else, to the primacy of dirt.

Like most everybody else on our little planet, save for a few hunter-gatherers and breatharians, I have been a silent accomplice in this process. So I have decided to take matters into my own hands, largely figuratively and more than a little bit literally, and see what I can do to minimize my soil footprint. In the course of this exploration, I will follow my interaction with dirt as it moves in a cycle, through the food I eat, as that food leaves my body, and, ultimately, as I myself leave my body.

With this in mind, I made the pilgrimage up from San Francisco to sit at the feet of John Jeavons, who has probably spent as much of his life thinking about building soil as anyone who has ever lived. Jeavons started his career in the 1960s as a systems analyst at Stanford University. When the spirit moved him to pursue agriculture as a vocation, he brought that kind of analytical thinking with him. These are the questions that drove him: How many calories does a person need to survive? What is the smallest plot of land needed to grow those calories for one person for one year? How much land do we need to feed all the people on the planet?

Jeavons has devoted his career to answering these questions and spreading that information around the globe. A small but significant chunk of that learning can be found in his book How to Grow More Vegetables Than You Ever Thought Possible on Less Land Than You Can Imagine, first published in 1974, which has sold half a million copies and gone through multiple editions.

The premise from which Jeavons operates is that nearly all farming on the planet, be it organic or conventional, First World or Third, takes more than it gives. Most organic farming, for example, borrows soil nutrition, in the form of compost or manure that has been generated elsewhere. Jeavons’ standard for sustainable land stewardship proposes a very simple, obvious benchmark: It must generate at least as much topsoil as it uses. And as the world grows smaller and each scrap of arable land becomes less expendable, borrowing nutrition from some other piece of land is not solving the problem, he argues, but simply moving it around.

You can get much of this out of his books, but to get a direct transmission it helps to visit the farm when it is operating in full force. Ecology Action sits 700 feet (213 meters) up on the edge of a ridge, with a sumptuous view of the Willits Valley. There are many reasons Jeavons ended up on this particular plot of land, but none has to do with the quality of the soil, which was judged marginally acceptable for grazing when he picked it up in 1982. He enjoys working with the challenges of sub-optimal soil and limited sunlight, and is up-front about the fact that, by the standards of Grow Biointensive, as he calls his system, the gardens here are only moderately productive.

By the standards of the average visitor, however, the garden is exploding with life. Rye grass and Jerusalem artichoke wave across at beds of quinoa and amaranth. What looks like a casual paradise is actually a closely monitored science project. Every leaf that leaves the premises is weighed and recorded. Interns from around the world buzz through like bees, tending beds and fruit trees. The catch, if indeed it is a catch, is that Jeavons’ methods work best on a small scale, on relatively small plots of land, executed by people who are paying attention and care enough to expend the necessary labor. And while he believes his methods can be scaled up, his philosophy in general is that civilization needs to scale down, localize, put more elbow grease and less fossil fuel into the food chain.

At the heart of Jeavons’ system is a maniacal focus on composting. Now, when he uses the term he is not merely referring to the quaint re-circulation of leftover bits of lunch. Jeavons recommends that a gardener devote a full 60 percent of planting space to growing crops the principal purpose of which is to add biomass to compost piles. Cereal grains, giant overgrown daikon gone to seed and six-foot-tall (two-meter-tall) cardoons are among the many plants born to die and rot un-tasted, cut down and fed through the system, capturing more carbon with each generation.

On average, around the world, it takes 500 years for nature to produce an inch of topsoil. Number crunchers claim modern farming techniques increase erosion at 10 to 40 times the rate of nature. When his system is operating at peak productivity, Jeavons can grow food and increase topsoil at 60 times the rate of nature.

After I left Ecology Action, I began to see soil nutrition everywhere. The stalks of feral fennel growing in the middle of the road, the otherwise-useless clumps of bamboo decorating my front yard: All started looking like more carbon sources for my compost pile. A bushy tomato planted too late to fruit, a radish gone to seed—what I used to see as gardening failures, I now see as dinner for the next generation of plants.

At 7:42 a.m. on Friday, in Vacaville, California, Truck No. 17246 backs onto the ramp at Jepson Prairie Organics and regurgitates its contents into a massive heap. The sight of a 24-ton trailer tilted up on end, spewing rotten vegetables, cardboard and yard trimmings into a small hill stirs me on many levels: mechanical, biological and olfactory. This is the first of some 400 tons of organic material hauled out from San Francisco each day and put through the composting mill. At the end of 60 days, most of the resultant matter will be trucked to vineyards in Napa and Sonoma counties. Some small percentage of it will make it to organic farms in the area.

The Jepson Prairie Organics’ compost process: Organic material such as food scraps and yard trimmings (1) is processed and fed into a grinder (2), where it is mixed and made ready for microbial decomposition. The blended material (3) is pushed into a composting system of plastic pods with feedstock, where it remains for 60 days. The compost is then placed in windrows so it can age. Larger pieces (4) are separated from the compost, which is mixed again (5). The end result: nitrogen-rich compost (6), ready to be shipped to customers.

Photo: NorCal Waste Systems, Inc.

Jepson is a subsidiary of Recology, the waste management company that hauls away my trash in San Francisco. The folks at the composting facility have worked too long tweaking their system to turn their secrets over to their competitors, so they’re cagey about revealing the details of their process. All you and I need know is that they sort, they grind and they blow the green waste into long windrows, which they aerate each day with a huge industrial windrow-turner. The combination of central valley sunshine and bacterial action helps get the row hot enough to break down in 30 days. The compost is given another month to cool and age before it is carted to its next destination.

Walking through the massive windrows, I get a chance to talk to Bob Shaffer, a composting guru who works as a consultant to both Jepson and the wineries who use its product. He’s been a student of the soil since he began gardening for himself 35 years ago. Shaffer explains it is not simply the sheer volume of soil that is at issue, but the quality of that soil. He gives me a quick lesson in soil mechanics: “Plants, in conjunction with microbes in soil, produce what are called polysaccharides. These polysaccharides can loosely be called gums, glues and gels. They stick the soil together, make it harder for water and wind to blow it away.”

The hidden story in farming, says Shaffer, is the decline of soil health in general. “It adds up over years and ends up in soil erosion,” he says, “kind of like the buildup to the dust-bowl. As the humus level—the amount of the degraded organic material in the soil—drops and drops, the polysaccharide content drops and drops, and finally the soil loses its ability to adhere and stay in place even if we have mulches and ongoing measures to prevent it.”

When I hear “dustbowl,” I tend to think of a past problem, sepia tints of Okies squinting in the wind. But China has been working on its own massive dustbowl for years, overgrazing and over-farming in fragile grasslands resulting in the displacement of millions of people and in annual dust storms that blow through Beijing like a plague.

Before things get to that point, Shafer says, more communities need to start closing the loop, to bring as much organic material as possible back to the farms. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that nearly a quarter of all municipal waste comes from food scraps and yard trimmings. (Organics buried in landfills also generate methane, which is 23 times as potent a greenhouse gas as carbon dioxide.) “It’s not the whole solution,” he says, “but it’s a start.”

Nigel Walker of Eatwell Farm, happy consumer of Jepson Prairie Organics’ compost.

Photo: NorCal Waste Systems, Inc.

Borders usually get fuzzier the closer you get to them, but in this case the contrast couldn’t be more stark. I am ambling around the perimeter of Nigel Walker’s humble organic spread in Dixon, California, also known as Eatwell Farm. The fields of sunflowers that lie to the north unfold in perfect rows, not a single weed in evidence, on a laser-leveled flat that stretches as far as the eye can see. While the immaculateness of this conventionally grown field holds some initial allure, the effect gradually begins to feel spooky, manifesting a degree of order not found in the rest of nature.

Things are wilder on Walker’s side of the line: pigweed and lamb’s quarter competing with cabbage and potatoes and onions. Eatwell’s acreage is subdivided into six fields, each growing a variety of crops, divided by windbreaks of tall poplars.

“I am a soil custodian on your behalf,” says Walker. “A steward of this 105-acre piece of California.” Eatwell Farm has been providing my wife and me with a weekly box of produce for seven years, but this was my first chance to set foot on the land. I had read that small, organic farms tended to be more soil-friendly than big, conventional farms, but I wanted to find out from Walker exactly what he was doing in this regard.

Walker takes a few minutes out of his insanely busy day to walk around the farm with me. The issues of soil and water are inextricably entwined, he explains. “When I first took over the land in 1999, it was a plain, brown field. When the winter rains came, the water ran off, and it was brown, and it collected in a catchment pond. And when the pond was full it was pumped into a drainage ditch, and it eventually ended up in San Francisco Bay.”

This is erosion at its most conspicuous, the physical transportation of earth via wind or water. Farming on hillsides, logging and road building all minimize the land’s ability to hold moisture, and when the water runs off it takes the land with it on a one-way slide downstream. In his book The Food Revolution, John Robbins calculates that every year, the equivalent of 165,000 Mississippi River barges full of soil is flushed out of Iowa alone. “When you see that the bay is brown,” says Walker, “that’s your soil, and your grandchildren’s soil, being washed out to sea.”

What he has been doing to prevent this is textbook organic farming: planting cover crops, avoiding compacting the soil with heavy equipment, rotating chickens through the fields. The deeper he can keep the structure of the topsoil, the more roots he can extend into the ground, the more water the land will hold and the less of it there is to run away with his soil. “Since that first year, not a drop of water has rolled off this land,” he boasts.

Nevertheless, Walker still has to import soil nutrition in the form of compost to make up for the tons of nutrition that he exports weekly as fruits and vegetables. As it happens, the farm lies just 15 miles (some 25 kilometers) up the road from Jepson, and receives some 400 tons of its product every year, so theoretically some atoms from my hedge trimmings and dead flowers come back to me as tomatoes and swiss chard.

The hole in the loop, he points out, is the digested remains of all that good food he sends away. “I should make you show up with a bucket of waste each week you pick up your box.” He’s joking, but only kind of. Organic certification standards prevent him from doing anything of the sort, but it’s one of the ways we deplete the soil each year.

As it turns out, it’s one avenue in which I can make the biggest difference.

I climb out of bed at 6 a.m. on a Sunday. The air is still and cool, two desirable attributes when you’ve got a smelly project in your backyard and don’t want the neighbors to get a whiff of it. I have eight buckets filled mostly with ground coconut hulls, buried in which is also a month’s worth of human excretion from my household. I crack the lids on the buckets one at a time and quickly dump the contents into the nest of straw I have constructed inside a steel cage. Within two minutes, the offending material is transferred and buried under a layer of soil and straw, the cloud of stink dissipated, the cage closed and no one the wiser.

A humanure composting toilet can help fight soil depletion.

Photo: Wessel Kok

Yes, you read that correctly. I have been composting my own dung in my backyard. Like many advances in human technology, the hegemony of the flush toilet is not forever, and as the planet has grown increasingly crowded, more people are reevaluating its merits. Every day, millions of tons of potential soil nutrition are sent downstream to treatment plants, where they are mixed with industrial effluent and spent pharmaceuticals, chlorinated, dechlorinated and condensed into a material that the industry likes to call “bio-solids,” but everyone else prefers to call by its old name: “sludge.” Most of this sludge ends up covering over the layers of garbage in landfills, contributing to the aforementioned methane problem. Then there is the dubious practice of soiling and cleaning our drinking water in an increasingly thirsty world.

On top of this, the nutrients contained therein are effectively lost forever. According to John Jeavons, all but a tiny percentage of the minerals necessary to produce a year’s worth of food for one person can be found in a year’s worth of that person’s waste.

My first step was to get a copy of The Humanure Handbook, published in 1995 by Joseph Jenkins, a slate roofer in western Pennsylvania. The Jenkins method is the model of simplicity. One merely expresses oneself into a bucket and covers it over with a carbonaceous material such as sawdust or rice hulls or ground coconut hulls or even finely ground leaves. Each bucket is then added to a compost heap, which is monitored with a thermometer to see that the pile generates enough heat to destroy any pathogens. After a year, the pile is closed down and a new one started, and after the second year the first year’s contents are ready to feed to plants.

I won’t lie to you: It took some skill and some tools to build my rodent-proof urban composting cage. Nor will I pretend that maintaining the system is as easy as pushing a little lever. There is significant hauling of buckets in and out of my house these days. I had to find straw to line the cage and I may spend the rest of my life on the prowl for suitable carbon-heavy cover materials.

The latter is crucial to the process for two reasons. First, its small particles cover your effusions, all but eliminating the stink factor. Then, when they are dumped into the compost pile, the dry carbonaceous stuff balances the wet nitrogenous stuff that comes out of your body, creating the ideal environment for the thermophilic bacteria already present in your gut to thrive. The fury of bacterial activity drives the temperature of the pile high enough to kill off pathogens. It takes 24 hours at 122 degrees Fahrenheit (50 degrees Celsius) to kill all the bad bugs. At 115 degrees Fahrenheit, 46 Celsius, it takes a week.

The path of humanure is not one of instant gratification. Jenkins recommends you wait two years before feeding your plants, three if your pile did not get hot enough for long enough. For the time being, my reward came when I uncovered mine after a few weeks and discovered that every last vestige of stink had been gobbled up. What remained was the benign, earthy smell of a forest floor in spring. It will be years before the contents return as apples or tomatoes, so until then, this will have to do.

The woodland burial area of Carlisle Cemetery in the U.K., where bodies are interred without embalming, is the first of its kind.

Photo: Val Corbett

Outside of fission and collapsing stars, it is impossible to create or destroy atoms. So on one level, no matter how my body is disposed of, there will be no getting rid of me. The typical burial in the U.S. tries to slow down the inevitable with embalming fluids, concrete vaults and thick caskets. Cremation, with its energy usage and its air pollution, is differently indefensible. “Green burial,” which has been around for some time but has started to catch on in mainstream circles, speeds the process, using shrouds, biodegradable caskets and memorial parks that serve as land trusts.

After I shed this mortal coil, I would like to get back into the mix as directly as possible. I call Cynthia Beal, who runs a company called Natural Burial that sells products and services to assist in the effort to reintegrate with the planet in a more orderly fashion. “It’s all about dinner,” she says. “In this case, you’re what’s for dinner. You will be the life of the party—literally.” She says the fastest way to dispose of your body is not to bury it at all, although for obvious reasons she is not recommending this. Next best is a shallow grave, 20 to 24 inches (a little more than 50 centimeters) deep, since this is where many of the organisms that will be eating you are living. The rest you are already carrying around with you in your gut.

In Germany, for example, it is the custom to use the earth to “clean the bones,” as it were. Bodies are buried for 15 to 20 years, during which time the decomposition process breaks down all but the skeleton, which can be returned to the family of the deceased and the plot resold to the next customers. Driven by economic forces more than anything else, a number of small farms in the U.K. have taken to selling burial plots. Beal is working with some small farmers in Oregon to bring this phenomenon to the U.S.

I ran the idea past Walker at Eatwell, who was daunted by the bureaucratic implications of securing approval from the authorities. “And I don’t think we have enough land to offer this service to all our subscribers,” he said. Still, he thought it was a great idea, one that he personally hopes to employ for his own disposal. “With all the time I’ve put into this place, I would love to be pushing up figs when I’m done.”

As I have no immediate plans to die, I figure this gives Walker some time to work out the details. Remember, man, that I am dirt, and unto dirt I shall return.

Larry Gallagher is a journalist who in more than 20 years of magazine writing has never written a dirtier piece.

Issue: March 2010

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Book Excerpt: Power and Love by Adam Kahane

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 17:28:12 EST

Published by: Berrett-Koehler, San Francisco, 2010

Beyond War and Peace

Our two most common ways of trying to address our toughest social challenges are the extreme ones: aggressive war and submissive peace. Neither of these ways works. We can try, using our guns or money or votes, to push through what we want, regardless of what others want—but inevitably the others push back. Or we can try not to push anything on anyone—but that leaves our situation just as it is.

These extreme ways are extremely common, on all scales. One on one, we can be pushy or conflict averse. At work, we can be bossy or “go along to get along.” In our communities, we can set things up so that they are the way we want them to be, or we can abdicate. In national affairs, we can make deals to get our way, or we can let others have their way. In international relations—whether the challenge is climate change or trade rules or peace in the Middle East—we can try to impose our solutions on everyone else, or we can negotiate endlessly. These extreme, common ways of trying to address our toughest social challenges usually fail, leaving us stuck and in pain. There are many exceptions to these generalizations about the prevalence of these extreme ways, but the fact that these are exceptions proves the general rule. We need—and many people are working on developing—different, uncommon ways of addressing social challenges: ways beyond these degenerative forms of war and peace.

A character in Rent, Jonathan Larson’s Broadway musical about struggling artists and musicians in New York City, says, “The opposite of war isn’t peace, it’s creation!” To address our toughest social challenges, we need a way that is neither war nor peace, but collective creation. How can we co-create new social realities?

Two fundamental drives

To co-create new social realities, we have to work with two distinct fundamental forces that are in tension: power and love. This assertion requires an explanation because the words power and love are defined by so many different people in so many different ways. In this book I use two unusual definitions of power and love suggested by theologian and philosopher Paul Tillich. His definitions are ontological: they deal with what and why power and love are, rather than what they enable or produce. I use these definitions because they ring true with my experience of what in practice is required to address tough challenges at all levels: individual, group, community, society.

Tillich defines power as “the drive of everything living to realize itself, with increasing intensity and extensity.” So power in this sense is the drive to achieve one’s purpose, to get one’s job done, to grow. He defines love as “the drive towards the unity of the separated.” So love in this sense is the drive to reconnect and make whole that which has become or appears fragmented. These two ways of looking at power and love, rather than the more common ideas of oppressive power and romantic love (represented on the cover by the grenade and the rose), are at the core of this book.

Our full world

We cannot address our tough challenges only through driving towards self-realization or only through driving towards unity. We need to do both. Often we assume that all it takes to create something new—whether in business or politics or technology or art—is purposefulness or power. This is because we often assume that the context in which we create is an empty world: an open frontier, a white space, a blank canvas. In general this assumption is incorrect.

Let’s look at a historical example. In 1788, British settlers arrived in Australia and encountered the indigenous people who had arrived 40,000 years earlier. This history illustrates not only the courage and entrepreneurialism of people willing to travel across the globe to create a new social reality, but also the human and ecological devastation that this pioneering mind-set can produce. For more than two centuries, the conflict between settlers and aboriginal peoples in Australia was framed in terms of the doctrine of terra nullius, a Roman legal term that means “land belonging to no one,” or “empty land.” It was not until 1992 that the High Court of Australia ruled that the continent had in fact never been terra nullius, and that the modern-day settlers had to work out a new way of living together with the aboriginal people.

None of us lives in terra nullius. We can pretend that our world is empty, but it is not. Our earth is increasingly full of people and buildings and cars and piles of garbage. Our atmosphere is increasingly full of carbon dioxide. Our society is increasingly full of diverse, strong, competing voices and ideas and cultures. This fullness is the fundamental reason why, in order to address our toughest social challenges, we need to employ not only power but also love.

A challenge is tough when it is complex in three ways. A challenge is dynamically complex when cause and effect are interdependent and far apart in space and time; such challenges cannot successfully be addressed piece by piece, but only by seeing the system as a whole. A challenge is socially complex when the actors involved have different perspectives and interests; such challenges cannot successfully be addressed by experts or authorities, but only with the engagement of the actors themselves. And a challenge is generatively complex when its future is fundamentally unfamiliar and undetermined; such challenges cannot successfully be addressed by applying “best practice” solutions from the past, but only by growing new, “next practice” solutions.

The fullness of our world produces this threefold complexity. We can pretend that we are independent and that what we do does not affect others (and what others do does not affect us), but this is not true. We can pretend that everybody sees things the same way, or that our differences can be resolved purely through market or political or legal competition, but this is not true. And we can pretend that we can do things the way we always have, or that we can first figure out and then execute the correct answer, but this is not true.

When we pretend that our world is empty rather than full, and that our challenges are simple rather than complex, we get stuck. If we want to get unstuck, we need to acknowledge our interdependence, cooperate, and feel our way forward. We need therefore to employ not only our power but also our love. If this sounds easy, it is not. It is difficult and dangerous.

Two pitfalls

Power and love are difficult to work with because each of them has two sides. Power has a generative side and a degenerative side, and—less obviously—love also has a generative side and a degenerative side. Feminist scholar Paola Melchiori pointed out to me that we can see these two sets of two sides if we look at historically constructed gender roles. The father, embodying masculine power, goes out to work, to do his job. The generative side of his power is that he can create something valuable in the world. The degenerative side of his power is that he can become so focused on his work that he denies his connection to his colleagues and family, and so becomes a robot or a tyrant.

The mother, by contrast, embodying feminine love, stays at home to raise the children. The generative side of her love is that she gives life, literally to her child and figuratively to her whole family. The degenerative side of her love is that she can become so identified with her child and family that she denies their and especially her own need for self-realization, and so stunts their and her own growth.

Love is what makes power generative instead of degenerative. Power is what makes love generative instead of degenerative. Power and love are therefore exactly complementary. In order for each to achieve its full potential, it needs the other. Just as the terra nullius perspective of focusing only on power is an error, so too is the pop perspective that “all you need is love.”

Psychologist Rollo May, a friend of Paul Tillich, warned of the dangers of disconnecting power (which he referred to as will) from love. “Love and will,” he wrote, “are interdependent and belong together. Both are conjunctive processes of being—a reaching out to influence others, molding, forming, creating the consciousness of the other. But this is only possible, in an inner sense, if one opens oneself at the same time to the influence of the other. Will without love becomes manipulation and love without will becomes sentimental. The bottom then drops out of the conjunctive emotions and processes.” May’s conjunctive processes also operate on a social level, and nonviolent social change can be achieved only if we use both power and love.

One of the greatest practitioners of nonviolent social change, Martin Luther King Jr., was both a practical activist and a spiritual leader. He demonstrated a way of addressing tough social challenges that went beyond aggressive war and submissive peace, thereby contributing to the creation of new social realities in the United States and around the world. In his last presidential speech to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, King—drawing on his doctoral studies of Tillich’s work—emphasized the essential complementarity between power and love. “Power without love is reckless and abusive,” King said, “and love without power is sentimental and anemic.”

My own experience of the past twenty years entirely bears out King’s analysis. Power without love is reckless and abusive. If those of us engaged in social change act to realize ourselves without recognizing that we and others are interdependent, the result will at best be insensitive and at worst, oppressive or even genocidal. And love without power is sentimental and anemic. If we recognize our interdependence and act to unify our social groups, but do so in a way that hobbles our own or others’ growth, the result will at best be ineffectual and at worst, deceitfully reinforcing of the status quo.

Power without love produces scorched-earth war that destroys everything we hold dear. Love without power produces lifeless peace that leaves us stuck in place. Both of these are terrible outcomes. We need to find a better way.

In his speech, King went on to say: “This collision of immoral power with powerless morality constitutes the major crisis of our time.” This collision continues because our polarization of power and love continues. In our societies and communities and organizations, and within each of us, we usually find a “power camp” that pays attention to interests and differences, and a “love camp” that pays attention to connections and commonalities. The collision between these two camps—in the worlds of business, politics, and social change, among others—impedes our ability to make progress on our toughest social challenges.

An imperative

Power and love stand at right angles and delineate the space of social change. If we want to get unstuck and to move around this space—if we want to address our toughest challenges—we must understand and work with both of these drives.

Rather than a choice to be made one way or another, power and love constitute a permanent dilemma that must be reconciled continuously and creatively. This reconciliation is easy in theory but hard in practice. Carl Jung doubted whether it was even possible for these two drives to coexist in the same person: “Where love reigns, there is no will to power; and where the will power is paramount, love is lacking. The one is but the shadow of the other.” His student Robert Johnson said, “Probably the most troublesome pair of opposites that we can try to reconcile is love and power. Our modern world is torn to shreds by this dichotomy and one finds many more failures than successes in the attempt to reconcile them.”

I have seen many examples of reckless and abusive power without love, and many examples of sentimental and anemic love without power. I have seen far fewer examples of power with love. Too few of us are capable of employing power with love. More of us need to learn.

If we are to succeed in co-creating new social realities, we cannot choose between power and love. We must choose both. This book explores how.

Issue: March 2010

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Coming Soon.

Issue: March 2010

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Malaria Consortium saves lives one net at a time

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 17:28:12 EST

Photographer William Daniels documents an organization that is saving lives by providing free mosquito nets to those in the developing world where malaria has become a widespread.

Malaria kills one person every 30 seconds. Nine out of 10 times, the victim is a young African child. The Anopheles mosquito, which transmits malaria, feeds at night. So an effective way to avoid infection is to hang a mosquito net around the bed. Yet, many families at risk can’t afford nets.

Enter Malaria Consortium, the world’s largest organization dedicated to fighting malaria. Operating in more than 20 countries, it distributes free mosquito nets to groups in need, teaches prevention and provides medical treatment, especially in rural areas. The work of the organization, which originated at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, has been documented by William Daniels, a Paris-based photographer, who traveled to Uganda, Burkina Faso, Tanzania, Sierra Leone, Nigeria, India, Thailand and Myanmar to raise awareness about one of the biggest killers in the developing world.

At a displaced persons camp near Gulu in northern Uganda, a woman and child shelter under a mosquito net.

Photo: William Daniels

At a displaced persons camp near Gulu in northern Uganda, a woman and child shelter under a mosquito net.

Photo: William Daniels

Last fall, some six million insecticide-treated nets were distributed across Kano state in northern Nigeria. Nigeria has a population of roughly 150 million. Each year, half of all Nigerians come down at least once with malaria; 300,000 children die from the disease.

Photo: William Daniels

An ode to PhotoPhilanthropy

This photo essay by William Daniels has been awarded the 2009 PhotoPhilanthropy Excellence Prize, which acknowledges excellence in social photography. PhotoPhilanthropy is a San Francisco-based organization that promotes, supports and connects photographers, both professionals and amateurs, to non-profit groups around the world. Founder Nancy Farese, a veteran social documentary photographer, believes that through the camera lens you can “witness both the desperate need for action as well as the heroic efforts of the non-profit organizations striving to meet these challenges.” Ode and PhotoPhilanthropy have partnered to bring a new photo essay to our website every month. Check out odemagazine.com for details.

Issue: March 2010

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Partners in Health continue to help people of Haiti

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 17:28:12 EST

Beyond mountains, there are mountains.

...so goes the Haitian proverb, and those words can resonate and pull at you like a perfect bass line. Head and heart become joined. Your feet begin to move not toward any one destination, but to all destinations. Climbing a mountain is one thing, but climbing one, with the full knowledge that a higher peak awaits just behind, is quite another. Dr. Paul Farmer is one of the real heroes of our time, though he would be unlikely to admit it. He has been climbing steadily for more than 20 years, and gaining strength, without tiring.

Partners in Health (PIH) or Zanmis Lasant (in Kreyòl), began its operations in the early 1980s in Cange, Haiti (about three hours from the capital). The foundation was formally established by Farmer for over 25 years, together with Ophelia Dahl, Jim Yong Kim, and philanthropist Tom White. With the steady support of individuals and organizations like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, PIH has evolved into one of the most efficient and effective NGO’s operating in the world today.

Partners in Health believes that health is a universal right, not an arbitrary gift. Paolo Freire wrote in his Pedagogy of the Oppressed that ‘True generosity consists precisely in fighting to destroy the causes which nourish false charity.’ PIH offers true primary health care, administered by Haitians, in partnership with local communities, and via the public sector, for free. Astounding in its goals, and even more so, in its achievements, PIH has never succumbed to the cynicism of most public health organizations. “Too complicated, too expensive, not feasible” are unintelligible concepts to Farmer and his team. In PIH and Farmer, we find a lesson in what it means to engage with the world and to engage with an open heart and with conviction. The wisest among us, in the face of total confusion, are able to find areas of true clarity, areas of moral clarity, and Farmer is certainly one of our wisest.

On Tuesday, January 12 at about 5pm, a 7.0 quake struck 10 miles southwest of the Haitian capital, Port-au-Prince. The Gonave microplate runs between the North American and Caribbean plates, creating a fault line with some similarities to the San Andreas fault. When these fault lines shift, the quakes run shallow, causing massive and rapid damage, leaving all above vulnerable to violent aftershocks. At the time of this writing, estimates of the dead have run wildly from the tens and tens of thousands.

In his Letter to Countess Margot Sizzo-Noris-Crouy, Rainer Maria Rilke, wrote that “Life always says Yes and No simultaneously. Death (I implore you to believe) is the true Yea-sayer. It stands before eternity and says only: Yes.” In death we find life, and in facing it, a celebration of life. Rather than focus on the defeating notions of ‘poverty’ and ‘hopelessness’, we could offer to Haiti a return of some small faction of its dignity by removing these words from our own vocabulary. If ‘poverty’ and ‘hopelessness’ are the descriptions we require to understand Haiti, then we would do well to recognize that these our own words and represent conditions inflicted upon Haiti. As Wendell Berry has said, “We cannot comprehend what comprehends us.”

Action is the message; not woe, or fruitless debate. Farmer, himself, likes to quote Margaret Mead: ‘never underestimate the ability of a small group of committed individuals to change the world’ (Kidder, Mountains Beyond Mountains, p.164). That small community clinic he started in the village of Cange in 1985 has grown into the Zanmi Lasante (ZL) Sociomedical Complex that features a 104-bed, full-service hospital with two operating rooms, adult and pediatric inpatient wards, an infectious disease center (the Thomas J. White Center), an outpatient clinic, a women’s health clinic (Proje Sante Fanm), ophthalmology and general medicine clinics, a laboratory, a pharmaceutical warehouse, a Red Cross blood bank, radiographic services, and a dozen schools. ZL has also expanded its operations to eight other sites across Haiti’s Central Plateau and beyond. By 2007, the total number of patient encounters at ZL hospitals and clinics had already increased to more than 1.1 million for the year, and total visits this year will more than double that figure.

PIH’s actions have always contradicted the presumptions of larger public health organizations worldwide. Farmer has consistently insisted on equal treatment for all and refused to accept the artifices of global pharmaceutical pricing as an obstacle to care. In 1998, Zanmi Lasante launched the world’s first program to provide free, comprehensive HIV care and treatment in a country at risk. PIH achievements in the areas of HIV and TB have defied all public health organizations’ estimates. Its stubbornly maintained principles have driven drug costs down to a fraction of “market” rates, while cure rates achieved for TB by PIH organizations have exceeded 80%, surpassing levels achieved in many U.S. hospitals.

Haiti forces us to reconsider our own indices of right and wrong. Rather than becoming paralyzed by suffering itself, Farmer might ask us to act out of conviction, and not out of fear. True engagement cannot be false. It must come from real recognition, from true moral clarity. I would ask you all to engage right now, in whatever way you can, and make it known that Haiti matters to you. This year’s early news on Haiti, compressed as it was, into a readily understandable headline of an earthquake, will continue to fall away, and with it, the hopes of yet one more generation of people who do not deserve the lot they have been handed.

Please don't let their story fall away quickly to the back page.

If you would like to learn more about Paul Farmer, please read Tracey Kidder’s remarkable book, Mountains Beyond Mountains (1993), and I would urge you to visit the Partners in Health website, and give more than you ever thought possible to give.

Issue: March 2010

Transforming sewage waste to biofuel with the Q Microbe

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 14:27:17 EST

A microbe has been found that can break down anything that contains cellulose and turn it into ethanol.

Photo: Susan Leschine/University of Massachusetts

In 1996, Thomas Warnick was exploring the Quabbin Reservoir in Belchertown, Massachusetts, when he came across a tiny microbe with a big name—Clostridium phytofermentans. Warnick, a microbiology research assistant at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, was sent to the reservoir to find micro-organisms that could break down plant cellulose. His boss, Susan Leschine, had searched areas as diverse as Brazil, France and Hawaii for these organisms, but she’d never seen anything quite like what Warnick brought back. The “Q microbe,” as it came to be known, is no ordinary bug. It can ingest—and produce ethanol from—virtually anything that contains cellulose, including human and animal sewage waste. So Qteros, the company Leschine founded to exploit the microbe’s abilities commercially, struck up a partnership with Applied CleanTech (ACT), an Israeli firm that generates alternative energy from wastewater solids. ACT’s sewage-recycling system transforms solids into “recyllose.” It turns out the Q microbe has a sweet tooth for recyllose, converting the cotton-like substance into ethanol for use in automobiles. Jeff Hausthor, Qteros’ lead researcher, imagines a uniquely local market for this new biofuel. Obviously, waste materials are a burden to farms and municipalities, both financially and ecologically. But by putting the Q microbe to work, small-scale ethanol plants situated around sewage processing plants could become a reality.

Issue: March 2010

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Experiments in workplace autonomy

Fri, 26 Feb 2010 12:11:15 EST

Traditional employee management techniques are out of sync with human nature. Get ready for a renaissance of self-direction.

Photo: Dusanzidar/ Dreamstime.com

A little past noon on a rainy Friday in Charlottesville, Virginia, only a third of CEO Jeff Gunther’s employees have shown up for work. But Gunther—entrepreneur, manager, capitalist—is neither worried nor annoyed. In fact, he’s as calm and focused as a monk. Maybe that’s because he didn’t roll into the office himself until about an hour ago. Or maybe that’s because he knows his crew isn’t shirking. They’re working—just on their own terms.

Gunther has launched an experiment in autonomy at Meddius, one of a trio of companies he runs. He turned the company, which creates computer software and hardware to help hospitals integrate their information systems, into a ROWE—a results-only work environment.

ROWEs are the brainchild of Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson, two former human resources executives at the American retailer Best Buy. ROWE’s principles marry the common sense pragmatism of Ben Franklin to the cage-rattling radicalism of American community organizer Saul Alinsky. In a ROWE workplace, people don’t have schedules. They show up when they want. They don’t have to be in the office at a certain time—or any time, for that matter. They just have to get their work done. How they do it, when they do it and where they do it is up to them.

This appealed to Gunther, who’s in his early thirties. “Management isn’t about walking around and seeing if people are in their offices,” he told me. “It’s about creating conditions for people to do their best work.” That’s why he’d always tried to give employees a long leash. But as Meddius expanded, and as Gunther began exploring new office space, he started wondering whether talented, grown-up employees doing sophisticated work needed a leash of any length. So at the company’s holiday dinner in December 2008, he made an announcement: For the first 90 days of the new year, the entire 22-person operation would try an experiment. It would become a ROWE.

“In the beginning, people didn’t take to it,” Gunther says. The office filled up around 9 a.m. and emptied out in the early evening, just as before. A few staffers had come out of extremely controlling environments and weren’t accustomed to this kind of leeway. (At one employee’s previous company, staff had to arrive each day before 8 a.m. If someone was late, even by a few minutes, the employee had to write an explanation for everyone else to read.) But after a few weeks, most people found their groove. Productivity rose. Stress declined. And although two employees struggled with the freedom and left, by the end of the test period Gunther decided to go with ROWE permanently.

“Some people [outside of the company] thought I was crazy,” he says. “They wondered, ‘How can you know what your employees are doing if they’re not here?’” But in his view, the team was accomplishing more under this new arrangement. One reason: They were focused on the work itself rather than on whether someone would call them slackers for leaving at 3 p.m. to watch a daughter’s soccer game. And since the bulk of his staff consists of software developers, designers and others doing high-level creative work, that was essential. “For them, it’s all about the craftsmanship. And they need a lot of autonomy.”

People still had specific goals they had to reach—for example, completing a project by a certain time or ringing up a particular number of sales. And if they needed help, Gunther was there to assist. But he decided against tying those goals to compensation. “That creates a culture that says it’s all about money and not enough about the work.” Money, he believes, is only a “threshold motivator.” People must be paid well and be able to take care of their families, he says. But once a company meets this baseline, dollars and cents don’t much affect performance and motivation. Indeed, Gunther thinks that in a ROWE environment, employees are far less likely to jump to another job for a $10,000 or even $20,000 increase in salary. The freedom they have to do great work is more valuable, and harder to match, than a pay raise—and employee’s spouses, partners and families are among a ROWE’s staunchest advocates.

“More companies will migrate to this as more business owners my age come up. My dad’s generation views human beings as human resources. They’re the two-by-fours you need to build your house,” he says. “For me, it’s a partnership between me and the employees. They’re not resources. They’re partners.” And partners, like all of us, need to direct their own lives.

We forget sometimes that “management” does not emanate from nature. It’s not like a tree or a river. It’s like a television or a bicycle. It’s something that humans invented. As the strategy guru Gary Hamel has observed, management is a technology. And like Motivation 2.0, it’s a technology that has grown creaky. While some companies have oiled the gears a bit, and plenty more have paid lip service to the same, at its core, management hasn’t changed much in 100 years. Its central ethic remains control; its chief tools remain extrinsic motivators. That leaves it largely out of sync with the non-routine, right-brained abilities on which many of the world’s economies now depend. But could its most glaring weakness run deeper? Is management, as it’s currently considered, out of sync with human nature itself?

The idea of management (that is, management of people rather than management of, say, supply chains) is built on certain assumptions about the basic natures of those being managed. It presumes that to take action or move forward, we need a prod—that absent a reward or punishment, we’d remain happily and inertly in place. It also presumes that once people do get moving, they need direction—that without a firm and reliable guide, they’d wander.

But is that really our fundamental nature? Or, to use yet another computer metaphor, is that our “default setting”? When we enter the world, are we wired to be passive and inert? Or are we wired to be active and engaged?

I’m convinced it’s the latter—that our basic nature is to be curious and self-directed. And I say that not because I’m a dewy-eyed idealist, but because I’ve been around young children and because my wife and I have three kids of our own. Have you ever seen a 6-month-old or a 1-year-old who’s not curious and self-directed? I haven’t. That’s how we are out of the box. If, at age 14 or 43, we’re passive and inert, that’s not because it’s our nature. It’s because something flipped our default setting.

That something could well be management—not merely how bosses treat us at work, but also how the broader ethos has leeched into schools, families and many other aspects of our lives. Perhaps management isn’t responding to our supposedly natural state of passive inertia. Perhaps management is one of the forces that’s switching our default setting and producing that state.

Now, that’s not as insidious as it sounds. Submerging part of our nature in the name of economic survival can be a sensible move. My ancestors did it; so did yours. And there are times, even now, when we have no other choice.

But today economic accomplishment, not to mention personal fulfillment, more often swings on a different hinge. It depends not on keeping our nature submerged but on allowing it to surface. It requires resisting the temptation to control people—and instead doing everything we can to reawaken their deep-seated sense of autonomy. This innate capacity for self-direction is at the heart of Motivation 3.0 and Type I behavior.

The fundamentally autonomous quality of human nature is central to self-determination theory (SDT). Edward Deci, a professor of psychology at the University of Rochester, and Richard Ryan, a former student who is now Deci’s colleague, cite autonomy as one of three basic human needs. (The others are the need for competence and the need for relatedness.) And of the three, it’s the most important—the sun around which SDT’s planets orbit. In the 1980s, as they progressed in their work, Deci and Ryan moved away from categorizing behavior as either extrinsically motivated or intrinsically motivated to categorizing it as either controlled or autonomous. “Autonomous motivation involves behaving with a full sense of volition and choice,” they write in a 2008 article in Canadian Psychology, “whereas controlled motivation involves behaving with the experience of pressure and demand toward specific outcomes that comes from forces perceived to be external to the self.”

Autonomy, as they see it, is different from independence. It’s not the rugged, go-it-alone, rely-on-nobody individualism of the American cowboy. It means acting with choice—which means we can be both autonomous and happily -interdependent with others. And while the idea of independence has national and political reverberations, autonomy appears to be a human concept rather than a Western one. Researchers have found a link between autonomy and overall well-being not only in North America and Western Europe, but in Russia, Turkey and South Korea. Even in high-poverty non-Western locales like Bangladesh, social scientists have found that autonomy is something that people seek and that improves their lives.

A sense of autonomy has a powerful effect on individual performance and attitude. According to a cluster of recent behavioral science studies, autonomous motivation promotes greater conceptual understanding, better grades, enhanced persistence at school and, in sporting activities, higher productivity, less burnout and greater psychological well-being. Those effects carry over to the workplace. In 2004, Deci and Ryan, along with Paul Baard of Fordham University, carried out a study of workers at an American investment bank. The three researchers found greater job satisfaction among employees whose bosses offered “autonomous support.” These bosses saw issues from the employee’s point of view, gave meaningful feedback and information, provided ample choice over what to do and how to do it and encouraged employees to take on new projects. The resulting enhancement in job satisfaction, in turn, led to higher performance on the job. What’s more, the benefits that autonomy confers on individuals extend to their organizations. For examples, researchers at Cornell University studied 320 small businesses, half of which granted workers autonomy; the other half relied on top-down direction. The businesses that offered autonomy grew at four times the rate of the control-oriented firms and had one-third the employee turnover.

Yet too many businesses remain woefully behind the science. Most 21st-century notions of management presume that, in the end, people are pawns rather than players. British economist Francis Green, to cite just one example, points to the lack of individual discretion at work as the main explanation for declining productivity and job satisfaction in the U.K. Management still revolves largely around supervision, “if-then” rewards and other forms of control. That’s even true of the kinder, gentler Motivations 2.1 approach that whispers sweetly about things like “empowerment” and “flexibility.”

Indeed, just consider the very notion of “empowerment.” It presumes that the organization has the power and benevolently ladles some of it into the waiting bowls of grateful employees. But that’s not autonomy. That’s just a slightly more civilized form of control. Or take management’s embrace of “flex time.” Ressler and Thompson call it a “con game,” and they’re right. Flexibility simply widens the fences and occasionally opens the gates. It, too, is little more than control in sheep’s clothing. The words themselves reflect presumptions that run against both the texture of the times and the nature of the human condition. In short, management isn’t the solution; it’s the problem.

Perhaps it’s time to toss the very word “management” onto the linguistic ash heap alongside “icebox” and “horseless carriage.” This era doesn’t call for better management. It calls for a renaissance of self-direction.

Issue: March 2010

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