We Don’t Have To Be Productive All the Time

July 19, 2021 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Yesterday, when I sat down to write to you I didn’t really feel like making the effort. Instead, a few relaxing hours with a slow cup of coffee were calling to me. But then my thoughts challenged my feelings.

“Being useful on a Saturday morning means writing to you,” I told myself. Producing Sunday’s newsletter is on the schedule, how I’m adding (as opposed to subtracting) something to the cosmic balance sheet on this particular day.

Then I worried: Is writing this week’s post just one more unnatural way that I contort myself into Being Productive or, because it’s nurturing a community and not merely commodifying one, is what comes naturally to me here fundamentally different from the urgency that drives me at most other times?

I hoped it was the latter, because I can imagine that writing to you is not “more work” (or really “work” at all) but instead its polar opposite: an essential human interaction that’s valuable in its own community-building way, with no purpose beyond initiating a good conversation around a campfire that we’ll gather around remotely after I press “Send” every Sunday morning.

But as I dug into writing the paragraphs below, every coffee-calling part of me knew that I’d probably gone back to work instead.

We’ll get back to my conundrum later, after considering why it matters to think as well feel our ways through a version of my same, basic question:

Even when we don’t want to be working, why does it feel like we always are?

The Problem

It’s amazing, really, how much we’ve bought into the myth of continued “productivity” and “usefulness” today. Indeed, our language tells us about the depths of our belief, since the opposites of these two words (when applied to people) are almost always negative. If they’re not “productive” and “useful,” they must be “lazy” and “useless.”

None of us want to be a parasite (which is another trope). Instead, we want to contribute to that overall balance sheet, and so an entire system has been created to support, measure and reward our productivity and continued usefulness, not for it’s own sake but to sustain the system itself. You could call it 21^st Century capitalism or simply a giant hamster wheel that provides all the rationales we’ll ever need to keep on going—never getting off of it until all our energies are spent and we’ve been reduced to uselessness in it’s final form, which, of course, is death.

In the ultimate fantasy about Hamsterdom, maybe our continuous push to be useful (and never concede to retirement) can even delay the inevitable. Not worked to-death exactly, just denying its bitter aftertaste.

She was productive to the very end, god bless her. What a good life she had. That’s how I want to go too! Never a burden to anybody, she worked until the very end.

To some extent, we’ve all bought into this fantasy, but what about the price we’ve been paying to maintain it? Because oftentimes, work can be “life” (as in “life-force”) threatening.

Undoubtedly, it’s why the work we’re always doing feels exhausting. It is exhausting, sucked-dry to the marrow exhausting, because we’re condiioned to work and be productive and never be a burden to anybody, except, of course, to ourselves.

In this, we’re both the enablers of and the fuel for Hamsterdom’s productive fires, and, from its system perspective, the best part is that we’ve come to believe that working this much is actually good for us too! Busy hands are happy hands. Generous hands. Building character.

Well, it’s the ultimate hoodwink.

Indeed, this colonization of our vital energies is so complete that it’s almost imperceptible to us on most days, but we can still get glimpses of what we’ve lost when we consider our so-called “time off.”

Even our play or leisure time today is increasingly turned into a productivity challenge or been repurposed somehow as a marketable product.

How many photos can I take at a Second-Line parade in New Orleans or while I’m visiting Jerusalem? (Last week’s post.) How many experiences—photographic or otherwise—can I consume on my vacation before I’m “full” and feel I’ve made “the most of my time away?” How many pictures can I post about it? How can I improve my fitness or knowledge or adaptability today, help my kids get into better schools, show my neighbors an even more beautiful garden, whatever it is, because I’ve only got this little block of “free” time before I’m supposedly “back to work”?

Or approached somewhat differently:

If we’re smarter than hamsters, why aren’t we working ‘only enough’ to enable us to get off that treadmill for meaningful chunks of time so we can enjoy the convivial life that we’ve otherwise been missing?

Part of why I’m asking these questions today comes from reading a series of thought-provoking essays by Tedd Siegel, a prolific writer who’d been wondering the same thing and found himself in conversation with a range of others who’d been wondering about it too. (This will take you to his starting block essay, in a rich and continuing series of them.) Siegel begins with an observation:

[T]he deal we’re being offered (work yourself to death for the next thirty years while you build your human capital) requires each of [us] to take out a mortgage on the self that [we] know can never be paid off. The deferral of most personal goals to an imagined future, in exchange for laboring continually for the goals of their employers, lies exposed as a rotten deal….We’ve played by a set of rules that was too optimistic, too individualistic, and too lacking in urgency for change.

Siegel writes to agitate for that change, and he identifies several root causes for the state of our near-ceaseless work today. One results from the shift (particularly in developed countries) from a manufacturing to a service and finally to today’s digital economy. (With my asides to Siegel’s observations) this caused:

a qualitative change in our relationship to our jobs. Our jobs are more intimate to us [today], more reliant on our interpersonal aptitudes and emotional intelligence. [We are not just cogs-in-a-wheel making widgets anymore. For this new hamster wheel, we have to go to school first, know how to trouble-shoot, etc.] Neoliberal capitalism [as he calls it], has us constantly concerned with its problems [meaning that we take our work home with us], integrating them into our life problems in order to get things done.

(Once upon a time, a fellow lawyer was onto something when she asked me whether I was billing the time I spent thinking about my cases in the shower.)

As he got going, Siegel eventually introduced me to Jenny Odell, who’s a professor at Stanford, and her 2017 book How To Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy.  Two words became important to him and to me in her book title. The first is “Nothing.” Odell doesn’t necessarily mean that we should be doing nothing at all, just nothing that Hamsterdom wants us to be doing (which includes relaxing and zoning out). The second word is “Resisting.”

Throughout her book, Odell argues that all of us should create an autonomous zone of resistance to Hamsterdom’s relentless demands—a protected and even defiant place where we hold onto aspects of our lives that cannot (and never should be) optimized. It’s making a deliberate conscious choice, every day and maybe several times as day, to carve out a space for living in a way that cannot be appropriated or assimilated by the market’s logic and turned into a deliverable—because we simply won’t allow it.  (For example, in the era of Google and Facebook, that includes taking back our attention from companies that are selling it to others by turning off their apps on our phones and laptops.) Then, and most importantly, the autonomous zone we’ve recovered will allow us, at long last, to enjoy a version of “a satisfying, collective life” that’s entirely apart from work.

For Odell, the act of resisting-in-place “is to make oneself into a shape that cannot be easily appropriated by a capitalist value system.” It begins with a very specific way of “doing nothing” that involves learning (or more accurately, re-learning) how “to redirect and enlarge our attention.”

And how will we spend all of this liberated attention?  Once again, Odell’s answer is something that humans have always known instinctively how to do, at least (it seems) until quite recently. It involves nothing more complicated than rejoining the conviviality of a collective life with other people.

The Way We Were

Like Siegel and Odell, James Suzman has been troubled for some time by the impacts of modern work on our lives and wondered, from his perspective as an anthropologist, whether humans are hard-wired “to work this way” or whether it was cultural imperatives (culminating in Hamsterdom) over-riding our essential natures. His research took him to hunter/gatherer communities where he could observe human behavior before “all of this civilization came along,” and it resulted in a series of books, most recently, Work: A Deep History from the Stone Age to the Age of Robots (2021).

Suzman discovered several things in the course of his research, among them that we are not, as humans, naturally inclined to allow work to take over our lives.

In fact, all the way back to our hunter/gatherer forebears, humans viewed their time and proceeded to organize it in ways that maximized the convivial zone of collective life while safeguarding its refuge (by, for example, ensuring that community members never felt devalued by someone else’s status or driven to distraction by internal competition). Indeed, hunter/gather groups like the Ju/’hoansi, some of whom still live in southern Africa, went to great pains to ensure that they only worked the amount that was absolutely necessary to support the time they spent together. Concluded Suzman:

Half of the value of understanding hunter-gatherer society is to recognise that lots of these things [about working] that we think we are hostage to are actually not a part of our nature.

For example, the Ju/’hoansi have a fundamentally different view of scarcity (or “enough”) than we seem to. In the course of his observations, Suzman found that the Ju/’hoansi rarely stored food that they had hunted down or gathered for more than a few days. Trusting that their environment would always provide for them, they worked to meet their immediate needs and then stopped, rather than worrying about shortages and planning ahead. (By way of contrast, we might ask ourselves: Is our modern view of “enough” programmed and encouraged by a perpetual consumption machine urging us on, or do we actually “need” all the stuff that we buy, especially when we might be doing something far more satisfying with our own “hunting and gathering” time?)

The Ju/’hoansi also go to great lengths to regulate their group dynamics to ensure a general harmony when they do what’s most important to them, namely, sharing in one another’s company. That means they don’t want any hunter in their midst to get too big for his britches. Whenever one of the hunters returns with a big kill, they told Suzman: “we always speak of his meat as worthless. This way we cool his heart and make him gentle.” It’s a practice that’s known among researchers as “insulting the hunter’s meat.”

According to Suzman, the Ju/’hoansi also “insisted that the actual owner of the meat, [that is] the individual charged with its distribution, was not the hunter, but the person who owned the arrow that killed the animal.” This helped keep the most talented hunters’ egos in check while, at the same time, allowing arrow owners like “the elderly, the short-sighted, the clubfooted and the lazy [to get] a chance to be the center of attention once in awhile.” Group harmony, not one-upmanship, was important to hunter/gatherers. (We, by contrast, live in countries where someone who is perceived as “the most successful businessman” can be elected president, where nearly everyone can name the richest man in the world [Jeff Bezos], and somebody like Elon Musk has millions of social media followers following his every utterance. Every once in awhile, wouldn’t we be a lot better off “insulting the hunter’s meat”?)

Suzman’s Work book, and his scholarship generally, has provoked a great deal of commentary among professional commenters, including Derek Thompson, who writes regularly for The Atlantic. In a piece from earlier this year, Thompson adds some heft to Suzman’s observations by noting some recent polling data and how the Ju/’hoansi differ from us when it comes to time. (I’d seen this U.S. polling data reported elsewhere, but it had a particular resonance in the context of this conversation.) Notes Thompson:

When a recent Pew Research Center survey asked about the secret to happiness, most Americans, of all ages, ranked ‘a job or career they enjoy’ above marriage, children, or any other committed relationship. Careerism, not community, is the keystone in the arch of life.

This finding is particularly striking since “it doesn’t have to be this way” given our hardwiring as a species. Our preferences today also tend to justify Jenny Odell’s conclusion that our commitment “to working all the time” has been so engrained in us that only “active resistance” will overcome it.

For me, Thompson’s most insightful paragraph related to our relentlessly future-oriented view of time and our unwillingness (despite the prompts of our yoga apps) to live, even for a few short minutes, in the present and leave our worries about the future behind.

[M]odern civilization is a shrine to the future. The shift goes back to the agricultural revolution, which subjected humans to farming cycles that separated planting and harvest by many months, and continued with the rise of finance. But a fixation on the future by now goes far beyond crop cycles and long-term loans. It is at the heart of our concept of education and corporate development, which presumes that young students and workers will gladly spend decades honing skills that they will be well compensated for only years later. The least controversial values in America today—the importance of grit, the hope for progress, the dream of social mobility—assume that the future is always changing and that our inclination is always to wish for better.

Thompson goes some distance towards explaining why we are where-we-are with our work, but he has little to say about what we can do about it beyond being aware that it doesn’t have to be this way. Suzman presents a longer chronicle of human labor in Work: A Deep History, but he “gestures towards” instead of “describing a way off” of the work wheel that’s endlessly depleting us today. For that, we need to return to the roadmap that Jenny Odell hands to us in How To Do Nothing.

A Way Forward

_{Getting back to the commons of a non-working life.}

Odell flat out rejects two of the most obvious reactions to the burnout of working today, namely: “temporary life hacks designed for increasing productivity once [we go] back to work” and “saying goodbye [to the workplace] permanently, and neglecting our responsibility to the world.” To her, there is essential work that’s always waiting to be done but it is equally essential to nurture our “non-working” lives.

As already telegraphed above, Odell’s “third way” involves active resistance to Hamsterdom’s forces so we can decide for ourselves—autonomously or outside the logic of the market—that:

Solitude, observation, and simple conviviality should be recognized not only as ends in and of themselves, but inalienable rights belonging to anyone lucky enough to be alive.

To protect these “inalienable rights,” all of us need to create and protectively manage a zone where we can “resist in place” despite the 24/7 ubiquity of modern capitalism’s siren call.

Like the Ju/’hoansi, Odell asks how much work is “enough work” to maintain this non-working zone, but unlike these hunter/gatherers she recognizes that limiting the amount of work and “resisting in place” will be far easier for some than for others. Economic needs may be so great that some individuals will find her kind of resistance difficult to afford.

To this quandary, Odell finds hope for “a way out” in “collective refusals,” where groups of people join with one another to hold open a space for more resisters to join them, at least to the extent that they can. Odell’s “refusal, boycott, and even sabotage [would be] like a crowd of Thoreau’s [at Walden Pond], refusing [the unnecessary benefits of modern working life] in tandem.” Amongst these “Thoreau’s,” other resisters might be empowered to work at least somewhat less in order to better enjoy the company of friends, families, and nature, as well as their own curiosity, playfulness, contemplation and “un-marketable” creativity.

Tedd Siegel elaborates on the mechanics of Odell’s resistance even further:

[T]here is a kind of tipping point with respect to immiseration that… brings things out into the open. This is because some people’s misery counts for more than others on the terrain of public discourse. Once the middle class and the professional classes join the ranks of the miserable, it starts to become possible [for nearly everyone] to talk about the problem at the level of the system itself.

In other words, it begins by facing our exhaustion, appreciating that everything from sustainability to human attention is being turned into a commodity, and wondering about the essential pleasures we’re missing as a result because our world of work can’t figure out a way to make a buck off of them.

Isn’t enjoying those essential pleasures more important than working all the time? Then surely we should “make room” in our working lives for them by actively starting to “resist in place”–not tomorrow, but today.

Derek Thompson concludes:

Happiness means being just rushed enough [by all the work that’s waiting for me].

After reading Jenny Odell, I might change this to say:

Working enough to be happy means actively resisting work’s relentless undertow, every single day, in every job that I do.

(Would I be lying if I said that writing this newsletter to you is a fruit of that resistance instead of more of the same? Unfortunately, I may still be too enslaved by the demands of Hamsterdom to even be able to tell.)

This post was adapted from my June 6, 2021 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning and occasionally I post the content from one of them here. You can subscribe by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

The Giving Part of Taking Other People’s Pictures

June 14, 2021 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

It’s harder than ever to maintain, and then safeguard, our zones of privacy.

I’ve been thinking about it in terms of pictures that other people take of us or that we take of them—sometimes when those other people are friends, sometimes when they’re strangers, and sometimes when its companies or authorities who are taking them for their own purposes.

In these photographs, what is the line between a fair exchange (with mutual benefits) and an unwelcomed intrusion?

What exactly are we “taking” when we take a picture of somebody?

(When shown their photographs, tribal people often complain that the camera has somehow stolen their souls.)

Is there, or should there be, a “give” as well as a “take” with photography?

Two encounters this week sharpened that last question for me.

A close colleague of mine in counseling work stopped by unannounced with some cookies to end our just concluded school year on a celebratory note. We’d been meeting with our kids on Zoom and hadn’t seen one another in person for months. She was so glad to see me that she wanted to take my picture before leaving, but I waved her gesture off. I’d stopped mowing the lawn when I saw her heading my way and felt that my sweaty appearance would have made a poor souvenir (even though she clearly felt otherwise). “What just happened?” I wondered afterwards.

My second encounter came by way of reminiscence.

Three years ago this week, I had been in New Orleans and was remembering that unbelievably rich and flavorful time, eager to go back and dig in even deeper. Part of my return trip would be taking in a “second line” street parade, because every week of the year at least one of them takes place somewhere in the City.

*_{A “second line” street parade photo by Aeisha Palmer, May 20, 2007}*

As you can imagine, these parades (which are sponsored by New Orlean’s “social aid and pleasure clubs”) are a kind of paradise for professional and amateur photographers. While following a random NOLA thread last week, I came across a story about “the etiquette of making photos” of the performers at these parades. This story also speculated about the “taking and giving” boundaries of photographing other people. For example:

Are there different rules for friends than there are for strangers?

Several years ago, Susan Sontag explored these boundaries and expectations in a series of essays for the New York Review of Books, later published in her own book, On Photography. Sontag focused on the “acquisitive” nature of cameras, how they “take something” from whoever or whatever is being photographed, a sentiment that’s similar to those tribal member fears about having their essences stolen. She wrote:

To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed.

Sontag also commented on the vicarious nature of picture taking.

Photography has become one of the principal devices for experiencing something, [or at least] for giving the appearance of participation.

The way she saw it, we may not be marching in (or even watching) the parade, “but somehow we feel that we are” if we can capture a picture of it for savoring now and later on. Instead of “being in the moment,” we’re counting on the triggering nature of these pictures to approximate the real experience we’ve missed by “capturing enough of it” to still feel satisfied.

Of course, there are consequences on both sides to this kind of “taking.” A drive to accumulate photographic experiences can not only rob us of more direct engagement with other people and places (say, the actual smells and sounds of the parade, or the conversations we might otherwise be having with spectators and participants), it also raises questions about the boundaries that can be crossed when we’re driven by a kind of hunger to “take” more and more of them without ever realizing the impacts that we’re having by doing so. To our camera’s subjects, it can feel like violation.

As I’ve become more thoughtful about these impacts, it’s meant thinking through my picture-taking drive in advance.

What is gained and what can be lost when I’m taking somebody’s picture? What is (or should be) the etiquette around photographing others? These are questions that seem impossible to ignore since cameras are literally everywhere today, devouring what they see through their lenses. As a result, going through some Q&A with myself by way of preparation—whether I’m likely to be the photographer or the photographed—increasingly seems like a good idea.

For instance, what if strangers “who would make me a great picture” are performing in public or, even more commonly, just being themselves in a public place when I happen upon them with my camera?

My most indelible experience of the latter happened at the Damascus Gate, which leads to the “Arab Quarter” in Jerusalem’s Old City. In arcs along the honey-colored steps that sweep down to that massive archway, Palestinian women, many in traditional clothes, were gathering and talking in a highly animated fashion against the backdrop of ancient battlements, but as soon as I pointed my camera in their direction to take “my perfect shot,” they raised their hands, almost as one, and shielded their faces from me. Was that ever sobering! I didn’t know whether they were protecting their souls or simply their modesty and privacy from another invasive tourist.

In the story about picture taking at parades in New Orleans, one photographer who is drawn by their similarly incredible visuals observed:

You really have to be present and aware and know when the right time is to take a photo. Photography can be an extractive thing, exploitative, especially now when so many people have cameras.

To her, knowing when to shoot and when to refrain from picture taking is about reading the situation,

a vibe. You know when somebody wants you to take their photo, and you know when somebody doesn’t.

Another regular parade photographer elaborated on her comments:

If you carry yourself the right way . . . people putting on that parade see you know how to handle yourself and will give you a beautiful shot.

I’ve also found that performers want you to portray them in the best light and will help you “to light the scene” when you make eye contact and invite them to do so. On the other hand, they will also tell you (if you’re paying attention) when the lighting is off and you should just back off.

*_{Here’s one where I got it right, at least about “working the scene together.”}*

Because everybody wants to look their best while being photographed, the same rules usually apply when the subjects aren’t part of a performance but simply out in public, being interesting by being themselves. For the would-be photographer, it’s about initiating a conversation and establishing at least a brief connection before asking: can I take your picture? If they don’t feel “looked down upon” by your interest, they’ll often agree. But as with those “on stage,” these preliminaries can also result in: “No, I’d rather that you didn’t right now,” a phrase that’s hard to hear when “a great picture” is right there in front of you if only you could “take it.”

Whenever you know in advance that taking pictures could be uncomfortable for those being photographed, one New Orleans parade regular talked about the need to deepen his relationship with those he wants to photograph before showing up with his camera. Because he takes pictures at NOLA’s legendary funeral parades, he brings club members photos that he’s taken of the deceased on prior occasions so that colleagues and family “have a record of that person’s street style.” It’s his sign of respect at what is, after all, a time for grieving a loss as well as celebrating a life.

We go and we shoot funerals and [then] it’s not a voyeuristic thing. You’re doing what you do within the context of the community

—a community that you’ve already made yourself at least “an honorary member of” through your empathy and generosity.

Then, what you’re giving tends to balance what you’ll be taking.

_{I didn’t give them glasses of lemonade or anything, but I did ask these two (whom I didn’t know) whether I could take their picture when they walked past my house and both agreed. I had to hope that they were old enough to consent to be photographed.}

So what about my cookie-bearing friend who showed up unannounced this week?

Should I have relaxed “my best foot forward” enough to permit one sweaty shot when she so clearly wanted a memento of our reunion after so many months apart?

Yes, probably.

But I’ve become so defensive about cameras taking my picture on every city street, whenever I ring somebody’s doorbell or face my laptop screen that sometimes it’s hard to recognize when “putting down my guard” is actually relationship building and for my own good instead of some kind of robbery.

Where zones of personal privacy are concerned, this is a tricky time to navigate either taking pictures of somebody or being captured by one.

It’s one more reason to try and rehearse my camera-related transactions before I find myself, once again, in the middle of one.

+ + +

(If you’re interested in a photo essay I posted after my last visit to New Orleans, here it is, from May, 2018. Another post, with photos taken at the Mummers Parade in January, 2019, can be found here. Taking pictures has always been a way that I recharge for work, although I’m still in the process of learning its complicated rules.)

This post was adapted from my May 30, 2021 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning and occasionally I post the content from one of them here. You can subscribe by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

The Spark of Getting Out of Your Head & Into Somebody Else’s

April 18, 2021 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

There are many voices urging us to bridge the divides in our society, but not nearly as many explaining why it would be good for us too if we learned how to bridge them.

Luckily, recent research in neuroscience has been proving that Perspective Taking—or making the conscious effort to stand in the shoes of people who are different from us—activates regions in our brains that make us more innovative and creative overall. In other words, Perspective Taking is not just a one way street. It also produces reciprocal benefits for whoever’s making the effort.

I’ve talked here several times about how toxic it is to “civic friendship” when we no longer bother to understand where “those other people” are coming from or what we still might have in common with them. Democracy relies on civility and common purpose in spite of our occasional differences, and yet we rarely hesitate before writing off fellow citizens who disagree with us about immigration or climate change or voting. Without even thinking, we ask ourselves: How can they be so wrong when we’re so right?

After the last presidential election, I waded into these turgid waters with two posts. They argued in favor of so-called Blue State Americans shutting down their knee-jerk reactions, shovling their class prejudices about “rednecks” and similar demonizations to the side, and being curious enough about where Red State Americans are actually coming from to make an effort to understand them. Not to agree with, but simply to consider the different priorities that are motivating them. These posts were “Stop the Steal” Throws a Match on a Dry Forrest and Healing a Divided Country Requires Understanding Others.

Now, research is telling us about the rewards that are available when you make the effort to see your life or work from somebody else’s point of view. Whenever you encourage yourself to “stand in someone else’s shoes” out of curiosity or an acknowledgement of your biases, brain science is proving that your fields of imagination will expand, making you more creative and innovative in all of the interactions that follow.

Part of it is going deeper than appearances and ferreting out information that challenges your preconceptions. For example, Niccolo Machievelli (who’s often described as a “classical realist”) wanted to discover everything he could about his opponents before he was facing off against them. 500 years ago, he wrote:

“Men judge generally more by the eye than by the hand, for everyone can see and few can feel. Every one sees what you appear to be, few really know what you are.”

A deeper understanding of others applies to more than political adversaries, of course. It can be your customers and clients, the co-worker who’s always challenging you at meetings, the regulator who suddenly shows up in the workplace, the protestor who’s in your office parking lot. The more you know about where “these other people” are coming from, the more effective you can be when interacting with them. (What “hot buttons’’ of mine are they pushing and how do I turn them off? What are our shared objectives, where is our common ground?) By asking and answering such questions, you can gain a broader perspective along with the new options that it affords.

When I was still practicing law, Fran and I co-wrote an article about perspective taking, although we didn’t call it that back then. We titled the piece: “Why Didn’t My Attorney Call Me Back (and How Do Clients Feel About That)?”

Sure, lawyers are busy—shuttling from one crisis to another—but being unresponsive to your other paying customers says loudly and clearly, “my time is more important than your time,” and it’s one of the legal profession’s most persistent complaints. On the other hand, understanding client irritation to the point of changing the way you practice makes your work more valued by others, more profitable to you, and ultimately more satisfying too because perspective taking literally “hacks” your job. Once you understand a need that you failed to appreciate before, it forces you to become more innovative and creative in meeting it, leavening other aspects of your work at the same time.

In other words, your discovery that others see your priorities differently leads you—through a more creative application of your problem solving skills—to a broader perspective on your work than you had to begin with. In a burst of discovery, you’ve realized that you’re not the only one who is right all the time.

Today, brain science is providing us with a view of the neurological processes behind Perspective Taking. While there are technical descriptions of the brain’s functional areas in the following quotation, the gist of it should still be pretty clear.

When we are trying to solve a problem, the frontoparietal attention network activates, meaning that areas at the front and the side of your brain are at work. However, when we take the perspective of another person, we engage a different network, often called the “mentalizing,” or theory-of-mind, network. This has two key components: the temporoparietal junction, located just above and behind the ear, and the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, which lies just behind the middle of your forehead. These areas help us understand what others know, want, need or find important.
Importantly, the “mentalizing” network partially overlaps with the so-called default mode network. This term was initially chosen because researchers at Washington University in St. Louis discovered that this network became active when people took a break from active problem-solving. After years of research, we now know that this network is activated during exploration, imagination, innovation, thinking outside the box, and engaging in mental time travel by thinking back to the past or imagining possible futures. For those reasons, we often call it the “exploration” network. Thus, perspective taking engages both the mentalizing and exploration networks, perhaps because getting inside someone else’s head requires getting outside our own.

To summarize: the Attention network (or rational problem solving) plus the Mentalizing network (trying to understand others) in our brains also activates our Exploration network (thinking outside the box). Obviously, this is a richer and potentially more fruitful mix of brain power than relying upon the problem-solving function alone.

The description of brain coordination above was provided in an article called “Perspective Taking: A Brain Hack That Can Help You Make Better Decisions.” It was one of several offerings this week in the KnowledgeWharton newsletter from Penn’s Wharton School of Business. Intriguingly, the authors’ lab at Penn was “investigat[ing] what happens when we turn the [Exploration or thinking outside the box] network up or down” by improving perspective taking. Does it make people in the workforce more innovative and creative overall?

Their answer was a pretty emphatic “Yes.” .

What the Penn researchers concluded was that “practice makes perfect” when their study participants combined both perspective taking with problem solving and started appreciating the work-related benefits that follow. As neuroscientists, they might also describe their findings this way: our neural pathways become more fluid when we traverse them more frequently because of the advantages that we feel we are gaining by doing so.

In the course of their research, these neuroscientists also developed several exercises that improved the brain’s fluidity and the creativity and innovation that it unlocked.

They asked study participants to reflect on recent perspective taking and share the experience with colleagues. In a second study, they asked them to visualize future applications of perspective taking, paying attention to the details and writing them down beforehand. Other “muscle building” exercises for the brain included having more conversations with total strangers, trying out new things (like learning a new language or playing a new instrument), and reading novels that transport you into the minds of different characters.

By encouraging exercises like these, the researchers were taking advantage of the fact that:

the human brain is nature’s greatest statistical pattern learning device. This means that the more you exercise perspective taking (whether remembered, imagined or real), the more it will be reinforced. Over time, perspective taking is likely to become more automatic.

In sum, as you start to experience the value of this way of mental processing—by inviting the perspectives of others into your problem solving—you’re likely to keep repeating it.

Wishing to share their Eureka Moment more widely, the Penn researchers also developed something that they call The Nano Tool so that the rest of us can become more creative and innovative at work and outside of it. Despite the fact that its name conjures (for me, at least) a headset with beeping electrodes and matted hair, it’s actually more of “a hand-out” with additional exercises that can be used to activate more “problem-solving through perspective taking.” It’s well-worth checking out.

Finally, while perspective taking provides the kind of problem-solving boost that business school types are always eager to promote, I can easily envision some of its most transformative applications in our collective considerations of politics, race, class, religion and other social dividers. We might quickly discover that we’ll be benefiting ourselves at the same time that we’re strengthening our social bonds.

+ + +

Post-script:

Along with you I suspect, I’m finding the transition period between a hard year and what I’m hoping will be an easier one a bit of a challenge. As my mother used to say, I’m feeling “betwixt and between” or “at 6’s and 7’s.” Anyway, I saw the picture below after the devastating floods in Australia recently, and thought it seemed an apt metaphor for today, but I’m not sure why. (Maybe I’ve just taken on Wally’s perspective.) If you have any ideas about why this picture of dogs in crates being rescued seems right for these times, feel free to send them along.

This post was adapted from my March 28, 2021 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning and occasionally I post the content from one of them here. You can subscribe too by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

Economics Takes a Leading Role in the Biodiversity Story

March 8, 2021 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Someone starts telling a story so that those who are listening can start imagining.

We need stories that challenge us with new ways to find political consensus, to confront climate change, to learn from the triumphs as well as the shortcomings of our common past.

Without the liberation of stories like that, we can be paralyzed when confronting the hostility of our politics, the inevitability of a rapidly degrading earth, and the unfinished work of our imperfect but often noble forebears.

And sometimes, as with this particular story, no less than Prince Charles, Boris Johnson and David Attenborough were invited to play bit parts on the story’s opening night (more about that below).

These very different men stood front and center for a few minutes because this story had already invited them into it. When a storyline is bold and surprising, curiosity often finds famous listeners before it blossoms into broader engagement and we’re sharing it with those that we care about too.

A report presented earlier this month begins to tell such a story, skillfully deploying economic theory to get our juices flowing in new directions.

– It admits what we already know: that humanity is taking more from the earth—extracting more of its minerals, fishing more from its seas, destroying more of its diversity, undermining more of its climate patterns, polluting more of its habitats—than the earth can replenish, correct or restore on its own.

– It wonders out loud—in a flight of real-world imagination—about what might happen if we treated Nature’s systems and productive capacity not as “free” for the taking (as we still do almost everywhere today) but as “economic assets” that we must start “investing in” (like we invest in the homes where we live) and managing, as we would any “portfolio.” We’d utilize concepts like “asset value” that acknowledge not only the price that a natural asset commands in the marketplace (its so-called “use value”), but also its “intrinsic value” as part of an ecosystem “that is greater than the sum of its productivities” and contributions. Similarly, we’d account for the “depreciation” of these assets so we could understand their diminishing value to us and their systems as we continue to rely upon them.

– It’s a story that begins to tie “the regeneration of the biosphere…to the sustainability of the human enterprise” (or our economic activities on this planet) in a way that’s never been told before.

– It’s a story whose drama comes from the uncertainty of our survival because, given the current rate of Nature’s depletion and imbalance, the Earth will be unable to sustain life as we know it into the foreseeable future.

This story, formally presented earlier this month by the U.K.’s Treasury Department, was written by Cambridge University professor Partha Dasgupta and is called The Dasgupta Review on the Economics of Biodiversity. You can read an abridged version of it (around 80 pages) or his full Review (at 600 pages) by downloading them here.

The Dasgupta Review begins with the simple observation that: “We are all asset managers.” Professor Dasgupta then describes how we all must learn to manage Nature’s limited and deeply-troubled portfolio of assets in ways that an economist might:

Nature’s goods and services are the foundations of our economies. They include the provisioning services that supply the goods we harvest and extract (food, water, fibres, timber, medicines) and cultural services, such as the gardens, parks and coastlines we visit for pleasure, even emotional sustenance and recuperation. But Nature’s processes also maintain a genetic library, preserve and regenerate soil, control floods, filter pollutants, assimilate waste, pollinate crops, maintain the hydrological cycle, regulate climate, and fulfil many other functions besides. Without those regulating and maintenance services, life as we know it would not be possible.
Biodiversity is a characteristic of ecosystems. It enables ecosystems to flourish and supply [this] wide variety of services… [J]ust as diversity within a portfolio of financial assets reduces risk and uncertainty, so biodiversity increases Nature’s resilience to shocks, and thereby reduces risks to the ecosystem services on which we rely.

As breathtaking a view of “a new world” as Tolkein’s (in fantasy) or Asimov’s (in science fiction), Dasgupta’s storytelling perspective invites us to imagine how governments, businesses, and individuals whose work depends on the vibrancy of Nature’s goods and services, along with the rest of us who enjoy the quality of our lives on this planet, can begin (at last) to sustain “the economic value” of the Earth’s biodiversity for everyone’s benefit. As surprising as it might seem, there has never been anything quite like The Review before.

Well into the 1970’s, we almost universally believed that human ingenuity could free us from Nature’s constraints and limitations. They were the days of “the Green Revolution” which brought rapidly increasing crop yields to smaller and smaller plots of land. They were the days when concerns about “over-population” (such as those voiced by Paul Ehrlich—a contributor to The Review) seemed grotesquely exaggerated. Until quite recently, we’ve acted like the Earth’s ability to fuel our continued “economic growth” and improve our living standards would be inexhaustible as long as human genius helped it along. Today, as we approach the environmental brink, we’re not only confronting our hubris but also beginning to storyboard our way out of the dead-end street where we currently find ourselves.

Even the abridged version of The Review will familiarize you with Dasgupta’s artistry when he identifies Nature’s asset classes and how they impact one another, how the planet’s stakeholders need to “re-invest” some of their profits into portfolio replenishment, and how all of us need to learn more about Nature’s “webs of interrelatedness” so that we’ll be more personally invested in managing these assets in our backyards and beyond them.

The Review is too rich in detail to summarize here and I hope you’ll to read it. But if you need more encouragement, an hour-long video-introduction to its findings, an overview teed up by the forenamed personalities, might convince you.

Why limit your exposure to Britian’s royals by watching another episode of The Crown? For example, I couldn’t remember the last time that I’d heard the real Prince Charles talk about anything important, but he puts himself garumphingly behind the findings of The Review in this film clip. Then, in a startling juxtaposition, there’s a wild-haired Boris Johnson putting his government behind proposals that have easily-imagined economic consequences for his voters (much like an American president announcing “exciting new taxes”), but here he is doing precisely that. And if you need even more convincing, the beloved naturalist David Attenborough writes the introduction to The Review itself.

As a storytelling exercise, here are perhaps the keys to how we can start imagining and then protecting the Earth’s biodiversity. In his video remarks, Professor Dasgupta says the Review’s contributions include:

[a new] grammar for understanding our engagements with Nature, how we transform what we take from and return to it, why and how in recent decades we have disrupted Nature’s processes to the detriment of our own and of our descendant’s future, and what we can do to change that direction.
What then is to be done to direct humanity to a sustainable mode of living, to reducing the gap between what we demand of Nature and what Nature is able to supply on a sustainable basis? It requires that we reduce our demand and help to increase Nature’s supply. It will require measured but transformative change for the task is to so change individual incentives that they direct the choice of our actions to actions that align with the common good.

This will require an implementation effort that easily dwarfs the Marshall Plan after World War II. Sometimes, the scale of The Review’s efforts to marry economic with environmental dynamics can take your breath away.

While economic incentives will be utilized locally to sustain the planet, an international equivalent of the WTO or World Bank will also need to be created to address (say) far-flung extraction practices in the Arctic and Antarctic, in the seas beyond territorial boundaries, and in places like the Earth’s rainforests, all of whose economic benefits are continental if not global in nature. As a piece in the New York Times observed when The Review came out:

International arrangements are needed to manage certain environments that the whole planet relies on, the report says. It asks leaders to explore a system of payments to nations for conserving critical ecosystems like tropical rain forests, which store carbon, regulate climate and nurture biodiversity. Fees could [also] be collected for the use of ecosystems outside of national boundaries, such as for fishing the high seas, and international cooperation could prohibit fishing [and other kinds of resource extraction] in ecologically sensitive areas.

New governance bodies that will monitor and value global assets while also collecting and re-distributing asset-related payments and fees in a kind of global clearing house are difficult–but still necessary–to start imaging, particularly at a time when competition among nations instead of international cooperation is on the rise.

The Review’s recommendations are also built upon a staggering number of economic checks and balances that will need to be administered locally.

A little more than a year ago, because I was unable to wrap my mind around a global model of this complexity without a “grammar” like Professor Dasgupta’s, I tried to imagine how economic incentives might support biodiversity closer to home. I looked at current research on lobster trapping in the Northeastern U.S., how the harvest impacts migrating whales, and whether the lobstermen could be reimbursed for changing their harmful trapping practices by monetizing the whales’ broader ecological value. A 2019 post called Valuing Nature in Ways the World Can Understand was my attempt to comprehend the economics of sustainability in a situation that had a smaller number of stakeholders and far fewer asset variables.

By contrast, the story told inThe Review is both top-down and bottom-up, envisioning at its horizons a dizzying array of parts that will eventually move in a synchronized fashion, but Professor Dasgupta ends his narrative with the same dilemma that probably led me to my post about lobsters and whales. We will never protect the Earth’s biodiversity until we understand the value of protecting it much closer to where we live and work. As he astutely notes, that’s because no international or local enforcement system can protect the diversity of life on this planet. That’s our job.

[U]ltimately, we each have to serve as judge and jury for our own actions. And that cannot happen unless we develop an affection for Nature and its processes. As that affection can flourish only if we each develop an appreciation of Nature’s workings, [my] monograph ends with a plea that our education systems should introduce Nature studies from the earliest stages of our lives, and revisit them in the years we spend in secondary and tertiary education. The conclusion we should draw from this is unmistakable: if we care about our common future and the common future of our descendants, we should all in part be[come] naturalists.

It’s a point that bears repeating. We will only treat the natural diversity that’s around us like an asset when we’ve gained “an affection” for it. Some of us gain that affection naturally but most of us—particularly in the developed world–have to learn it. A story like this one about imagination and survival invites us, both elegantly and engagingly, to do just that.

This post was adapted from my February 21, 2021 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning and occasionally I post the content from one of them here. You can subscribe too by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

Embodied Knowledge That’s Grounded in the Places Where We Live & Work

February 22, 2021 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

“Embodied knowledge” is a kind of understanding where the body knows what is happening, and sometimes even how to react to it, without really thinking about it. There is no need to verbalize or connect a string of thoughts. You just know or “feel it in your bones.” It happens via the neurotransmitters in our brains, as depicted in the striking image above by Arran Lewis.

Here are some examples of embodied knowledge:

– I’ve already learned how to distribute my weight on the seat of a bike, put my feet on the pedals, lean forward, so I no longer have to think about how to do it, I just know how get on my bike and ride.

– I know that when I get a certain kind of headache, a high-pressure weather front is moving in and I need a pain reliever. My head is like a barometer “automatically” telling me what to do.

– A farmer nearby might know from the way his chickens are acting or his kids are behaving that the run-off from a nearby plant has been getting into their water, whatever the township or elected officials are saying about it.

It’s the kind of knowledge that internalizes complicated experiences without the need for an elaborate thought process.

This last example of embodied knowledge—where a deep understanding of the land and the people and fauna that live there differ from what the authorities are telling you about it—has been Kate Brown’s preoccupation for much of the past twenty years.

Brown is a professor at MIT, interested in “where history, science, technology and bio-politics converge to create large-scale disasters and modernist wastelands.” She is a storyteller who has put herself into her stories so she can interview and experience the lives of people with “embodied knowledge” in places like Chernobyl and the Nevada dessert after terrible nuclear accidents. From their first person accounts and her reactions to them, she identifies discrepancies from the expert “investigations,” challenges the official narrative once politicians get involved, and shows how the embodied knowledge of those affected by disasters resonates beyond the borders that we usually place around them.

This week, I heard Brown speak about her work as part of a interview series sponsored by Duke University. That continuing series explores ethical responses to The Anthropocene, or the time in Earth’s evolution where human forces have matched (or overtaken) natural forces in determining the fate of the planet. The Series question to Kate Brown and others has been: What can we, what should we be doing about it?

Brown’s most straightforward answer would be: listen to the people with embodied knowledge. The people who are “closest to the ground of disaster” can tell us much that we need to know about how to deepen our own sense of place in order to survive in a world that has already entered a kind of death spiral. Their world of disaster is increasingly our world too. The ways that embodied knowledge have been gained in Earth’s disaster zones can become a kind of template in our own quests to survive in environments that have been degrading more rapidly than most of us would like to admit.

Kate Brown’s books have won a cascade of awards for history writing and non-fiction. They include: A Biography of No Place: From Ethnic Borderland to Soviet Heartland (2004); Plutopia: Nuclear Families in Atomic Cities and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (2013); Dispatches from Dystopia: Histories of Places Not Yet Forgotten (2015); and her acclaimed Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future (2019).

I found three things about Kate Brown’s life and research to be particularly noteworthy. First, why has she focused her work on the embodied knowledge of people in disaster zones? (My real question: how do people find their work priorities?) Secondly, as I’ve been thinking about deepening my own “sense of place,” I was fascinated by the role that specific environments and peoples’ deep-seated knowledge of their places play in Brown’s history-writing and storytelling. And lastly, because Brown has traveled to and reported from Earth’s calamitous edges—she calls herself “a professional disaster tourist”—I wondered some more about the message that she’s been carrying back for the rest of us.

What can or should we be doing in order to survive?

Why any of us gravitates towards the work we end up doing may itself be explained by a kind of “embodied knowledge.”

For Kate Brown, I wondered what it was in her experience that made her seek out people who were burdened by the nuclear catastrophe at Chernobyl or the plutonium incidents in Nevada where (according to her) the fallout of “radioactive iodine from atmospheric detonations of nuclear bombs dwarfed Chernobyl emissions three times over”? Clearly, it was not the origin story of someone who would automatically believe that Soviet propaganda is more misleading than the American variety.

Brown’s formative years were spent in a small Midwestern town that was gutted after its economy collapsed. She literally grew up among its ruins. As Brown recounts:

The year I was born, 1965, the Elgin watch factory [in Elgin, Illinois] shuttered, and they blew up the watch tower. It was a company town, and that was the main business. I grew up watching the supporting businesses close, and then regular clothing stores and grocery stores went bankrupt.
It was nothing near what I describe in wartime Ukraine, or Chernobyl, or one of [the] plutonium plants, but I finally realized I was so interested in modernist wastelands because of my own background.

Before she was born, Brown’s mother had already moved four times because of “deindustrialized landscapes,” and her parents “moved to Elgin thinking it was healthy, small-town America. So how many times do they have to jump?…What if you care about your family and [your] community” and didn’t want to abandon them? So she gravitated towards groups of people who stuck it out in the much the same way that her family did.

The drive behind Brown’s work made me think about naturalist and writer Barry Lopez, who has also chronicled our impending environmental disaster. Only in 2013, towards the end of his long career, was he able to describe how he’d been repeatedly victimized as a child in a Harpers magazine article. He told us that the “sliver of sky” in its title was what he was reaching for in his own work from “the edges of our throttled Earth,” an unwaivering attempt “to find a way to turn the darkness [he’d experienced himself] inside out.”

In her stories about other places that have been grievously injured, I was also reminded of Arlie Hochschild’s Strangers in Their Own Land. Not only do the Americans who live there deserve our understanding during this politically divisive time, but Hochschild’s approach as a sociologist to those who live in the most damaged parts of Louisiana, is startlingly similar to Lopez’s as a naturalist and Brown’s as an historian. Each of them put themselves in the stories they are telling, frankly acknowledging their personal perspectives as interviewers and interpreters, while (in the process) giving their audiences narratives that are intimate and involving precisely because of the personal roles they have chosen to play in them.

Brown, Lopez and Hochschild have been continuing to write their own stories as they invite the rest of us into them.

Many of you know that I’ve been thinking a great deal about “sense of place” recently. (Last week, I gave my reactions to the movie “The Dig” and its meditations on what any of us might want to preserve in the face of disaster, like these Englishmen and women were doing before the bombing of Britain in World War II. In mid-December, I ruminated about how the places where we live and work become more meaningful as we learn how to capture and retain their most vivid memories.)

Something about “sense of place” for Brown can be understood from the images in her book titles: No Place, Borderland, Dystopia. The places she’s explored have been the toxic waste dumps of industrial civilization. The area around Chernobyl is called Polesia, swamplands populated by a mix of Poles, Germans, Jews and Ukrainians that was either forgotten or dismissed by the urban centers of Kiev and Moscow, with few outsiders expressing any interest in what its people had to say for themselves. Brown did listen, recognizing their “embodied knowledge” when they described what was happening to them, introduced her to their “radiant children” (or those who’d been stunted by radiation), and told her how they continued to survive in a contaminated landscape that the “outside world” wanted everyone to believe had fully recovered.

In one poignantly conflicted moment, Brown describes the tremendous generosity of a local family as they offered to share their homegrown feast with her and her reluctance to eat it and appear ungracious because she knew how contaminated by radiation the region’s entire food chain had become. With images like this, Brown argues that “what it means to be human” in places like this is different than anything we have ever seen before, and that as the climate and Earth begin to change in equally profound ways, what it means for the rest of us to be human is already changing too.

(For example, while Brown doesn’t recount them, think about how many weeks earlier the Spring will be coming this year than it did only a few years ago. Think about how much less snow there is on the ground or ice on the ponds in Northern states than we remember as kids during this time of year. Think about birds and animals you no longer see in your backyards. Think about how many more 100+ degree days there will be in Arizona this summer than there were only 10 or 15 years ago, or how many more deadly wildfires in California.)

How we experience the degrading nature of the “places” where we live and work profoundly affects us in ways that have much in common with the residents of Brown’s Polesia. But unlike many of us, Brown’s Polesians had gained an embodied kind of knowledge about what they’ve been experiencing. They’ve had to in order to survive. Farm animals became their Geiger counters (as in, “the cows have been acting funny”). Brown is astonished by how women at a local textile plant have learned how to attribute various aches and pains that they experience to particular isotopes lodged in specific organs of their bodies.

We will be gaining that kind of experienced knowledge too—knowledge that’s tied to the ground of our particular “places” as global warming affects them. We’ll need to deepen our sense of place in an embodied way too.

*_{Babushkas who are living near Chernobyl}*

So what does Brown recommend, what else does she think we should be taking away from (and perhaps applying) after her deep, long look into the hinterlands of disaster?

I believe she’d say that it’s the practical guidance we can take from people who have learned how to cope in profoundly compromised environments. It’s more of their kind of “embodied knowledge”–and maybe less of what the experts and politicians have to say about what’s happening around us– that needs to be our guide.

In the way she has approached her history-writing, Brown also offers a counterweight to the obliviating impact of “contested knowledge.” About the farmers and factory workers around Chernobyl she notes:

These people got cancer, these kids have cancer, but we don’t know for sure what caused it.’ I saw how those statements of scientific uncertainty drilled down, undermining the claims of people whose families were riddled with illnesses. Rather than report two sides of a controversy (there are always far more than two sides), I wanted to leave the reader with an informed judgment. As I write in the first person, it’s clear that this is my studied opinion.

Brown’s role in determining the credibility of those she interviews and telling us why she believes them, effectively validates the “embodied knowledge” gained by these victims instead of leaving them in a further hinterland of sorts—one that’s in the shadows beyond credibility—because scientists or government officials lack the time, the money or the commitment “to connect and prove” each toxic cause they claim to each damaging effect. In other words, experts and politicians don’t need to confirm what your experience at surviving tells you to rely upon; they don’t necessarily “know any better” than the folks who are aready doing the hard work of surviving on the ground.

An essay comparing various Chernobyl accounts to HBOs 2019 dramatization also discussed how Brown’s “putting herself in the story” allows her to involve readers and listeners in what she’s saying by provoking us to formulate our own perspectives on the events she describes. She tells us her opinion about what farm and factory workers are claiming as well as why she believes them by (for example) referring to records she’s uncovered, and by doing so, invites us to have our own opinions about their testimony.

Crucially, Brown’s interjections of first-person narration are not merely ruminative or speculative. Rather, they are constructed to prompt the critical capacities of a reader who is invited to think with the author through a literal and metaphoric journey that begins with and eventually goes beyond the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone.

By choosing this almost interactive approach, Brown’s storytelling method not only “prompts” our critical capacities involving Chernobyl, it also invites us to bring the same faculties to places far closer to home (like the Nevada contamination sites that are far less known but even more toxic) or to the negative impacts of impending climate disaster that we’re experiencing in our own backyards. We can become more like actors in (and less like the passive victims of) the place-driven stories that we’re in.

Barry Lopez–who also put himself in his stories–seemed less hopeful than Kate Brown that all of us can be mobilized in time to confront the unfolding climate crisis. Writing about his final book called Horizon, I described the smaller group of actors that he hoped to enlist, but it was never in doubt that he also believed (along with Brown) in the power of hard-won, localized wisdom to help us through the difficult days ahead.

Lopez seems less certain that he can reach the tourists in their lounge chairs around the pool and more reliant on networks of wisdom that still include his ‘family, friends, mentors and professional colleagues’ but now depends at least as much on the wisdom of traditional cultures that have found ways to survive in the face of war, environmental destruction and natural disaster. Unlike citizens of the developed world who act like children looking for heroes to save them, for thousands of years adults who know how to make decisions to care for everyone and ensure that no one gets left behind have guided [what he calls] ‘heroic communities’ of indigenous people across the world. Today, Lopez tries to counter his doubts by imagining networks comprised of all the different communities that depend on adults with the knowledge to survive so that we can claim our uncertain future together.

In the hinterlands of our civilization—where we’ve dumped our refuse and conducted the industrial experiments that help us support our consumer-driven economies and comfortable lifestyles—there are people who have learned and are continuing to learn how to survive in places that many of us would rather forget. As a contrary voice, Brown says loudly and clearly (along with Lopez and Hochschild): Come with us, use your imaginations to become involved in these frontline stories, and perhaps you can also figure out what you need “to know now” and “do now” in order to survive.

This post was adapted from my February 14, 2021 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning and occasionally I post the content from one of them here. You can subscribe too by leaving your email address in the column to the right.