Correlation, Causation, and Spirituality

I've been itching to share this story for a long time!

I entered one of the gardens in the homestead where I lived at Earthaven Ecovillage one morning last Spring, and I found a friend and roommate, Allie, about to move a flower from one bed to another.

As I walked up, she placed shovel a few inches from the base of the plant, paused, and said, "Dear beautiful flower, I'm SO sorry to move you from your home, but it's for your own good - it's so crowded here that you couldn't possibly grow up healthfully and share your gifts with the garden. I'll move you to where you can share your gifts! This is going to be hard on you, but I'll be careful and it won't take long, I promise!"

Now by this time at the ecovillage, I was quite used to people talking to plants as if they were people, so this didn't bother me in the least.

She carefully pushed her shovel vertically into the soil perpendicular to the plant and a few inches from it, and she gently rocked the shovel back and forth. Then she did the same thing 3 more times around the plant, forming a square around it. Then she dug into the ground where she first started and this time got underneath the plant, bringing it slowly out of the ground with a lot of the surrounding soil, keeping the roots intact. She carried the plant over to its new home in a nearby bed in a hole she'd prepared a little earlier and watered it.

After saying hi, I asked: "I have a question. Do you think that plant can hear you? Do you think it responds to what you say?"

"Yes!" she answered. She said it could, even without ears. Whether it heard the sound waves or responded to the intention or tapped into some shared universal energy, she wasn't sure, but one way or another she believed we are all connected, and the plant certainly responded to what she said.

I started to ask the sort of questions a civilized engineer naturally would: "How do you know? How does it receive and process the message?" Etc. And I didn't get very compelling answers, at least to me - as far as I could tell, she simply felt deeply emotionally attached to the plant and to life as a whole, and treated plants like she would treat a baby: as animate beings that have inherent value, even if they can't talk back or obviously demonstrate that they understand some particular message.

And then it occurred to me: maybe it doesn't matter if the plant can hear her or not! Putting aside the possibility that the plant could somehow actually respond to her verbally-expressed feelings, what if her deep caring for the plant, and her spoken promise to take care of it, and her spoken description of why she was moving it, all lead her to take REALLY REALLY special care when she moved it, much more care than a normal gardener who merely thinks a flower is pretty and would cost $0.95 to replace?

I bet her transplanted plants survive much more often than most people's! And I bet her gardens in general are much richer, producing more food, more beauty, and sustaining more nearby life.

This turned me on to a whole new way of looking at belief: that it's not necessarily the content of the belief that matters, but how that belief makes us behave. Allie's belief had a beneficial impact whether it was correct or not.

In correlation/causation terms, assuming the plant couldn't actually perceive her words, the cause of the plant's better odds of surviving the move wasn't that it heard her. The cause was Allie's feelings, and how they lead her to feel so connected to the plant that she treated it with the same care as she would a baby. So her belief system is highly correlated with successful gardening, even if she's wrong about the ultimate cause of her success.

Craziness! It's possible to mix up causation and correlation, but to our benefit. The more I looked, the more cool examples of this I found.

False Plant 'Beliefs'
Here's a non-human example of mixing up correlation and causation: I learned that some plants' stomata - the little pores on the surface of leaves that open in the morning to allow the leaf to take in water vapor and other gases, and then close later in the day - don't open in response to sunlight even though they open at dawn every morning.

A close-up of stomata, little pores on leaves that allow them to emit or take in gases. One is shown closed, the other open. (Source)

Instead, they open in response to bird song. That is, plants need to open their stomata at dawn when there's dew, but they don't depend on what you'd think is the most reliable indicator of dawn: the sun. Instead they depend on something highly correlated with the sun, bird song. As I mentioned in a previous post, birds have been around for 10s of millions of years, and the planet has been experiencing their song continuously the whole time as the sun is continuously dawning somewhere around the world. It's even easy to imagine that bird songs are more reliable than sunlight: clouds can block the sun, but what could block the songs of thousands of birds all over the forest every morning?

For any gardeners out there, here is a bird-song-simulator used to increase plant-growth.

So we see that the cause of the plant's behavior isn't actually what's good for them (i.e. bird song doesn't make plants better off in any direct way), but it's highly correlated with something that does help them (sunlight bringing the morning dew), so they do just fine responding to that.

The Natives' Rain Dance
We've all heard of the rain dance - a bunch of Native Americans gather in a big open space and dance around in funny clothes, making lots of noise praying to some deity to make it pour. And this is supposed to bring rain somehow, those silly injuns!

Actually, this worked.

The Natives didn't dance just anywhere. They would go up to clearings on mountain tops, and since it was dry, these clearings would be very dusty, and since they were high, there'd be plenty of wind.

 

 Rain dance of a pueblo group from the US southwest. (Source)

The Natives' dance was very energetic, and the bright clothes and loud drums and singing and music would help maintain their energy as they danced. It included lots of scuffling and stomping, kicking up huge clouds of dust high into the sky where the dust particles would form nuclei where water would condense, eventually forming rain drops and bringing rain!

Now, I'm sure their dances didn't always bring rain, just like Allie's transplants don't always live, but their dances sure increased the odds of rain dramatically. Did it matter which god they worshiped? Or whether they dressed in the particular clothes associated with that deity? No, but what did matter is they had a belief system that caused them to act in their own best interest, especially during hard times like droughts. Essentially, they rationalized good behavior.

False-But-Beneficial Beliefs in Civilization
These false-but-beneficial beliefs are also common in civilization. Have you ever had a friend who stated emphatically, "I don't believe in luck!" or "I make my own luck."? Such people are usually independent, confident, and comfortable dealing with risks and bouncing back from failures.

Here's my definition of luck: luck is the degree to which events totally outside your control affect your life at a given time. Bad luck example: starting a mortgage company in Spring 2007, right before the housing bubble crash. Good luck example: starting a debt restructuring company in Spring 2007, right before the housing bubble crash (all assuming you weren't able to see the crash coming). Thus we see luck does exist - things outside our control can affect us.

So this hypothetical person is wrong - luck exists, and it can't be manufactured. However, many opportunities exist completely outside our ability to perceive them. We can influence the odds of finding these opportunities even while we're unaware of them - even before the opportunities exist! -  and this is where those positive qualities come in handy.

A personal example showing hidden or unknowable opportunities: I got bored during my first few weeks of college and decided to learn a programming language better by writing a little planner program. I could enter in appointments and it would spit them back out. During my one and only interview that semester, 3 weeks into college (fall 2004), I got interviewed by a company solely interested in freshman interns they could train up, and my doing that program 'just for fun' was enough evidence that I had a passion for the work that they hired me. I ended up interning there 3 times and working at the company for 3 years after college. In fall 2011, the same guy that interviewed me in 2004 invited me to lunch and offered me a spot at his new company, which I happily accepted.

And to think none of this would have happened if I hadn't gotten bored and written a silly little program back in the first few weeks of college in 2004!

I obviously believe in luck, but my point is that people can influence opportunities they can't perceive, and so having those qualities associated with false disbelief in luck makes those people more likely to find those hidden opportunities.

These false-but-beneficial beliefs occur at the level of whole countries or civilizations - take the western civilization belief in growth, particularly technological growth. The common, received wisdom is that our society may have problems, but it can solve them with economic growth - we can create more wealth, cure more diseases, reduce unemployment and poverty, and generally become more prosperous if only we can 'grow' more; practically speaking, if we can just increase economic production and consumption. And the way to achieve this growth is to generate better technologies or processes that improve our efficiency, allow us access to new resources, give us some new capability, or whatever.

And for a really long time, this has seemed to be true: economic growth has been staggering for a few centuries, and technological improvements have both enabled this growth and improved the quality of life of many societies that engaged in this growth.

The trouble is, this belief is only partially true: it was our technology combined with the incredibly energy-rich resources in the ground (oil, coal, etc) that enabled this growth. Nature gave us unbelievable returns-on-investment a century ago, when we could invest a barrel of energy in drilling and get 100 barrels out (a 100:1 energy return on energy invested, or EROEI). Now, projects like the Alberta Tar Sands require a barrel of oil to get just 3 barrels out (3:1 EROEI). Ethanol (using corn as an energy source) yields 1 barrel-of-oil-equivalent for every barrel-equivalent invested (1:1 EROEI, basically a waste of time, or a needless political handout to farming interests).

A chart showing the diminishing returns of our energy-extraction abilities over time. (Source)

For more details on this idea, see Peak Prosperity's Crash Course which ties together environmental, economic, and energy issues to describe how this energy cliff manifests.

These days, the culture maintains this faith in technology and growth even though we've used up all the easy-to-extract energy and are now seeing severely diminishing returns. No technology can possibly find energy-rich resources that don't exist - no technology can enable infinite growth on a finite planet.

Two centuries ago, societies that didn't believe in (or value) technology-focused growth got blown away by societies that did: the natives didn't stand a chance against the USA. Now this false-but-beneficial belief in our technology-driven growth and capitalist system is becoming false-but-non-beneficial: with less growth in energy available, and soon less energy available in in an absolute sense, meaningful economic growth is going to end, and our totally growth-oriented society is going to get really mad - consider that our monetary system is debt-based, requiring economic growth to stay solvent, and think of all the pensions and retirement systems that require economic growth (driving bond and stock market growth) to pay their owners, among many other examples.

Coming Up With Our Own Stories
So what should we believe? Another friend from Earthaven, Chris, described a narrative he hopes to encourage after civilization passes its peak energy usage and begins its energy descent: the story is that humans sinned in the past and that we are responsible for recovering from their mistakes, for rebuilding the beautiful life ecosystems they didn't sufficiently appreciate.

This story accounts for all the poisoned and damned/dammed rivers, the infertile soil, the highly variable and changing climate, logged ex-forests, highly thinned or extinct populations of fish and large animals, higher-intensity and more damaging storms, huge amounts of trash, etc that future-people will have to deal with. In fact, eventually this degraded state will seem normal, with only the remnants of an incredibly energy-intensive civilization scattered around the landscape to make people wonder what happened. And so Chris's vision is for us to return to being stewards using a redemption narrative to see ourselves in a positive role, free of guilt or shame, but doing the most important work we can be doing: sustaining the life systems that humanity depends on for future generations of humans and non-humans alike.

In addition to making up stories from scratch or mixing-and-matching ancient narratives, I'm excited to learn first-hand what narratives current indigenous communities believe. In about 2 weeks, I'll be heading into the Amazonian Jungle in southeast Ecuador where I'll be living with an indigenous Shuar community. I'll be excited to learn their belief system, at least if my Spanish is up to the task!

I believe humans' need for narratives and our spirituality evolved because they caused us to behave in ways that benefited us even when we didn't understand why or when our belief was wrong. Ancient humans may not have had PhDs in ecology like some of us do, but they developed belief systems that caused them to treat their ecosystems with deep respect: we all know the story of the natives who used every part of the buffalo and prayed over it in thanks after the kill, for example. This belief system and this ritual behavior reinforced their emotional and spiritual connection to the things they depended on and ensured they didn't overconsume their renewable resource base. It caused them to feel mutually dependent rather than dominant, an attitude that lead them to protect what they depended on. Allie is another beautiful example: if we treat our plants with the same love we treat our children, they'll prosper and and we'll prosper with them. Regardless what you believe, this seems like a good thing!

Postscript
I was really skeptical of Allie's and others' 'connections' with plants when I first encountered them. It didn't take long for me to convert to feeling that same spiritual connection though, that same intimate bond that urges me to sustain life so that I can be sustained. Later that summer, Allie and I read a book called "Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm" which presented tons of evidence for the Gaia hypothesis and that all life, including plants, are sentient parts of a greater connected Whole. It describes the scientific evidence that plants can distinguish between other plants and themselves, between offspring and non-offspring of the same species, that plants within and across species can 'ally' to communicate about infections and respond to ward them off, that plants teach their offspring (meaning, they send chemical messages that cause their offspring to change their behavior, similar to how humans send verbal messages to teach/mentor their offspring).

This means that just as human orphans become impoverished without parents to care for them and mentor them, plants (and other animals) become impoverished when they're cut off from large chunks of their families and surrounding ecosystem! And the book described groups of plants cooperating and coordinating in various ways across hundreds of miles and even around the planet, all acting in their best interests and responding to changes in their environment intelligently - as sentient beings.

In short, I still don't think the plant heard my friend Allie but... I'm not as sure I used to be.

Learning the hard way to listen carefully during plant walks

Last Saturday evening, my new friend Ivan took me on a short plant walk and introduced maybe 12-15 plants pretty rapidly and in colloquial Spanish. Being new to plant-based medicine, he used a lot of terms I probably wouldn't have understood even in English without a dictionary. Still, I thought I followed along pretty well, but apparently I screwed up at one point and paid the price later.

Each blob at the end of a twig holds 3 nuts. I thought they were edible, but they were not - they're medicinal!

Here are a few pictures of plants we discussed.

These flowers are apparently used in aroma therapies to treat all manner of issues. The smell is quite strong and pleasant. Ivan forgot the name of the plant, so I call it the bouquet plant since each group of flowers contains a multitude of colors.

This is agave, which is common in the US southwest and is all over Quito. Processed properly, this plant can produce food, clothing, and a famous alcoholic beverage called pulque in Mexico. It looks like the plant is attacking passers-by with its sharp leaves (see below). But given that it's good food, it looks more like it's aggressively offering itself to anyone who appreciates it!

A close-up of the agave plant above. Those spines are as sharp as they look.

On to the story of Saturday night.

I had thought the nuts (first picture) were edible, as Ivan had eaten one and I'd eaten a few with him. After leaving Ivan for the night, I kept eating nuts for another 20 minutes - I guess I probably ate 30 or so before I got distracted by dinner.

About 2 hours later, I started to feel something like motion sickness. Drinking water didn't help, so I went to bed early hoping the illness would dissipate before the next morning's events with Ivan. I didn't know what to blame for the feeling - drinking bad water? Eating unwashed fruit?

I went to bed, and the feeling grew worse and worse until I had to vomit. I rushed to the bathroom, vomited 4-5 times, and then felt totally fine, as if nothing had happened. There was no residual sense of nausea at all. I went back to bed hoping it had passed.

It hadn't.

The same process repeated perhaps 5-7 times over the next 3 hours: I got increasingly nauseous, ran to the bathroom, vomited several times, and then felt perfectly fine. I estimate I vomited maybe 30 times. The next morning I had diarrhea once, and the whole affair was over. I not only felt fine, I had enough energy to tromp up and down steep hills for several hours on my plant walk with Ivan.

It turns out the nuts I thought were edible were actually medicinal - purgatives, specifically, used to 'clean the body out' through vomiting and diarrhea. You're supposed to take 3-5 for the desired effect, and I learned what happens when you take 10x that amount. Interestingly, there weren't any side effects at all: the main effect, vomiting, merely scaled up in proportion with the number of nuts I ate, and I still only had diarrhea once.

All in all, it was a pretty small price to pay for the reminder to be careful with these new plants, especially learning them in a foreign language. With experience they're as safe as any food or medicine can be, but until I've got that experience, I'll have to tread with more caution.

Leap and the Net Will Appear

Leap and the net will appear. - a Zen Saying

I don't know anything about the history of the above saying, but it was one of the first things I saw during my first visit to Earthaven in September 2013, and it's stuck with me: sometimes it's impossible to plan from a great physical or temporal distance; the only way to see what's possible is to jump in and make something happen. Interestingly, this was also the business advice of the CEO of my last company: when people came to him with business plans, he told them, approximately: "Don't show me your business plan; show me the business you started."

What I'm trying to do here in Ecuador - find an indigenous community to integrate with, learn from, and contribute to - demands trust relationships that I knew I couldn't make from afar. I had to get here and try to make them happen. And this past weekend, I had my first stroke of luck!

I was out playing harmonica in the woods, and on the way back into the city I stopped to poke around in some plants by the road to see if I could find any I recognized. A couple walked up and asked what plants I was looking for. Soon they were identifying all the plants in the patch and describing their medicinal and edible properties to me. It turns out the man is a naturopathic doctor who works with the indigenous and poor to bring free/low-cost medical care based on local plant-based medicines.

Then a whole bunch of crazy things happened - I described my goal for my time here (of integrating with an indigenous group to learn that way of life), and the couple recommended a particular community of indigenous down near Cuenca (southern Ecuador), including the names of particular people that could welcome me in. It turns out the wife is a 2nd or 3rd cousin of several families there, and said I should tell them that she sent me! So an indigenous woman just recommended me to her community! Whoa!

Not wanting to lose the connection, I asked if there was any way I could volunteer with them to help gather plants or make medicines, totally for free of course. They asked, 'What are you doing tomorrow?' "Nothing." "Want to meet us at 8:00 and join us in gathering plants?" "Ummm, most definitely!"  At least, I'm pretty sure that they planned to gather plants. I didn't quite understand, but I knew my answer was yes!

We parted, and after about 10 minutes the guy came walking back to change the plan slightly. Again I didn't quite understand the new plan, but it sounded similar and my answer was still yes. He invited me to join him walking towards his house, and on the way we identified another 10-12 plants, including several I could eat right then! Nuts, leaves, berries... We got to his home and the woman brought out a book called Plantas Cultivas, a visual dictionary of edible and medicinal plants of the Ecuador region. He took me through the book for maybe 20 minutes, and I'm excited to get my own copy. Finally we parted again, and I floated all the way back home.

I actually cried twice on the way home as it really sunk in that I'd been invited to live with an indigenous community by a member of that community.

A Day of Plant Walks
The next day, I met the man, Ivan, at his home at 7:30. We walked to a local cathedral which was quite breathtaking.

It wasn't until we got inside that we realized he was atheist and I'm... well, it's a topic for another post, but perhaps 'animast' is close. So we agreed that the Catholic Church was hypocritical for not using the millions of dollars of gold decorating the Church to help the poor as Christ would certainly have done, and then we left.

A Long Plant Walk
Ivan turns out to be a jack of many trades - his only commitment for the day was teaching a rock-climbing class at 10:30, but for 3-4 hours before then he and I hiked up and down mountains, occasionally bushwhacking, and he showed me tons of plants and their medicinal and edible uses, including some that locals heavily rely upon. He's also a mountain-climbing and local plant-guide as well as part time naturopathic doctor, having retired from full time medical work a few years ago.

A view of Quito from the north east. The city continues to roll over many more hills after the one you see.

At 10:30, Ivan and I met his wife and daughter and a dozen other people at the rock climbing spot, and by 12:30 it was time to go.  We passed some more beautiful places on the way out.

You can clearly see a waterfall on the right. If you zoom in, you can also see a bunch of smaller waterfalls in the dark brown area in the center and left of the picture. Far above this big chasm, there's a ledge you can just see in the foreground. It is a nice place to make music away from the noise and smog of the city.

We walked back into Quito and sat at a bus stop together for an hour just getting to know each other better - me, Ivan, Isabel, and their daughter Abigail. After an hour at the bus stop, I realized I was only 30-40 minutes from home and said I felt like walking home. They felt the same, so we left the bus stop together on foot. Eventually we parted and agreed to meet again soon.

I'm both excited and humbled that I may have found an opportunity to integrate with the sort of community I've been seeking. I may have other leads now as well, so I'm not sure where I'll go from here. Still, it's heartening to see theories and fantasies of an indigenous life turn into concrete options.

Seeing An Effective Political Group in Action

I arrived in Quito in mid November, and in early December I decided to seek out volunteer opportunities in Quito with any indigenous groups with offices here. There're tons of crap volunteer-tourist gigs ("Come save the indigenous for a week! And then go home and tell your friends how green you are!"), but I wanted to make meaningful relationships with any indigenous volunteer organizations, and if I could help support a good cause, so much the better. It turns out the indigenous tribes in Ecuador are pretty well self-organized and, although they've been shafted for centuries like indigenous everywhere, they've also had a lot of recent successes.

The group I started volunteering with is called CONAIE - Confederation of Indigenous Nations of Ecuador. And this year, they and others have had remarkable success blocking or discouraging the auction of oil leases on indigenous land. And what a coincidence: after 20+ years occupying their offices in Quito, the government has chosen now of all times to evict them, supposedly to make room for a gov't program to treat drug addicted youth.

The eviction notice literally hit the day before I started researching CONAIE, and instantly I knew I wanted to work with them - it was evidence they are effective, though it made volunteering a little more dangerous as a foreigner. Anyway, I rolled into their offices asking to volunteer. They didn't know what to do with me, since I'm guessing they don't get many volunteers. They asked, "What exactly do you think you could do?" I stumbled through a spiel in Spanish about helping with their mostly-empty website and fixing their broken email, and they said sure, come on in! I even got my own desk next in a room with several others whose first language is the dominant indigenous language here, Quichua.

Now, I've been hauling ass learning Spanish, but it's still only been 6-8 weeks total and the teachers at my school all speak reeeaaaallllyyy slooowwwlllyyyy. Well, not as slow as they used to, but they take care to enunciate. These folks at CONAIE, I ask them to slow down, and they only slow down long enough to say, "ok, I'll slow down" - and then they're off to the races again speaking at like warp 9 with a way different accent! Dammit!

It turns out CONAIE was planning a big reunion right before Christmas, inviting people from all over the country and other indigenous groups as well. CONAIE is actually a group-of-groups, formed out of 3-4 regional or indigenous nation-specific political organizations and all of them showed up at the reunion. As far as I can tell, it's 100% indigenous-lead, so there's no capitalist-funding leading them astray.

And I got invited to the reunion! The Friday afternoon before Christmas there was a big speechifying session as folks talked about the government suppression (eviction) attempt. It was neat to watch but I didn't understand much. Their spread was amazing though - this was the second meeting I'd been to in South America where the organizers plus many contributors put a huge spread of food in the middle as a reminder of the common values of the group - healthy abundant sustenance for all. I'd actually bought some strawberries and apples to share with my coworkers, so I was happy to be able to contribute too. After maybe 1.5 hours no one else had anything to say, so we broke into a social/eating period. There was tons of food! All the bread, cheese, and fruit you could want, plus onion-tomato-something else mixes, boiled potatoes, and cups of milk. It's like they planned it specially for me ;)

The Friday before the main event, there was a gathering with many short speeches and this beautiful spread. This gathering had far fewer people than the one the following week.

The Main Event
But the real meeting was the following Monday or Tuesday. The auditorium was packed with 200-300 people, and I learned how communities going back thousands of years work together to confront and solve problems.

Literally, for 3-4 hours starting around noon, there were continuous speeches. There was a much smaller food spread in the middle of the room, and part way through 2 women went to the middle, chopped up for the fruit and bread, and served it to the masses to keep our energy up. It was fascinating - one specially dressed up man kept some wood smoking in the middle, scenting the place. All sorts of people gave speeches. I probably understood 10% of what they said. I felt really bad about this at first, and then I realized many people were starting their speeches in Quichua, which is as non-European a language as it gets. Realizing that didn't help me understand any better, but at least I wasn't hating on my Spanish skillz as much.

And the speeches were fiery! I love fiery speeches, especially from strong women. These people were chin-up, chest-out, table-pounding righteous in their defense of CONAIE and their past successes defending clean, widely available water, preventing ruinous 'free-trade' agreements, and so on. Some speakers were quieter, but it was really inspiring to see their strength and their understanding of their situation - there were no euphemisms (that I could tell), no pulling punches.

And then it got even more interesting. The leadership got to work on a manifesto/declaration to become the reunion's public statement. A woman from the crowd got up and lead the group in a song (I think in Quichua). When they were done writing, she wound up and sat down. Then a woman from the leader's table started reading, and almost immediately a chunk of the crowd started booing! And I mean vociferously.

My first thought was, whoa, that's harsh. Then some guy stood up, seemingly without being called to speak, and launched into this really high-energy, impassioned speech. Now, I'll admit I understood exactly 0% of it, even though I think it was in Spanish. But just observing it was amazing: no one got mad. The leadership looked slightly shell-shocked, but said thanks and went to edit the declaration. Then they read some more, and got a little farther before the booing started again! And then ANOTHER dude got up, seemingly without being called on, and gave an even MORE impassioned speech; this time the crowd started clapping and whooping support for him.  Again, the leadership waited 'til he was done, said thanks, and made more edits. This cycle happened  maybe 4-5 times, and then people started filing out of the room for a big dinner being served outside the auditorium.

Let me be clear about what didn't happen: no one gave or took offense during this. People gave very strong feedback and expressed strong emotions, but there was never in-fighting, bickering, nit-picking, distracting, etc. Speakers didn't hog the spotlight or get carried away, and they sat down when they'd spoken their piece. No one complained that someone was talking too much, or that they hadn't gotten a turn to speak. The degree to which they were united, and to which they trusted each other and worked together, was astounding to me, and I had such respect for them. What an experience to see it in person.

While people filed out, several reporters brought large cameras to the area just in front of the leadership's table, and maybe 30-40 people went to stand behind the leadership table in solidarity. The head of CONAIE gave a speech and then swapped seats with 3-5 other people so they could give speeches. I'm guessing they were presidents or representatives of the regional indigenous groups, but who knows.

A picture of the press conference which came immediately after the group of 200-300 collectively drafted a public statement. I've seen groups 1/10th the size take far longer to draft a public statement like that. The rainbow pattern represents the plurinational, all-inclusive nature of the society CONAIE is pushing for Ecuador.

And then I realized: after 3-4 hours of speechifying, this group of 200-300 had written, edited, and agreed on a public declaration in less than an hour! Holy smokes. That's an efficient group if I ever heard of one.

Eviction Date
The eviction noticed was delivered in early December, and the eviction date was January 6. On January 4th indigenous from all over Ecuador traveled to Quito to protest and prevent the eviction. On January 5th, the government delayed the eviction by 2 months. On January 6th, I went to the building and listened to speeches in the hot mid-day Ecuadorian sun for a few hours. Some pictures:

CONAIE's building in Quito, Ecuador.

A picture of the crowd at the gathering on January 6, 2015.

After the speechifying, a violinist played music from the balcony and there was dancing in the streets. This particular dance wasn't improvisational - you can see the woman crouching in a row on the left as the men walk through towards the right.

Postscript
The eviction issue has dominated CONAIE's time so much that I really haven't been able to integrate or help very much. Whether I end up being able to contribute materially or not, it's been special seeing the group in action and I'm grateful they've let me play a (small) part.

Whales: An quick example of supporting the things we depend on

One of my major goals is to live in such a way that:

1. I am aware of the things I depend on, and
2. I live in a way that supports those dependencies, living or not

I found a example of non-humans doing this. Below is a short video explaining how whales sustain the lives of the animals they eat - so much so, that as whales became heavily hunted, the populations of fish they ate actually decreased, even with fewer predators to eat them!

Rethinking childrearing and adult relationships

A friend and I were recently debating what the ideal marriage relationship is. He sent me this article as representative of his beliefs, and my response is below: http://drkellyflanagan.com/2012/03/02/marriage-is-for-losers/

Thanks for sending the article. It was an interesting read and definitely reflects my attitude towards marriage 5 years ago, as well as what my parents imbued in me.

If you're going to have a conventional marriage - life-long, single-partner, shared property ownership, high cost (financial, emotional, and on the children) of separation, no other sexual partners, no or few other partners with emotional connections as deep as your married partner, home life dominating your non-work/social life, kids only raised by you and your partner and possibly a parent occasionally, etc - then I agree, the third marriage type is the best you can probably hope for.

Still, as the author says, "The third kind of marriage is not perfect, not even close." Why settle for something that's still not even close to perfect? I believe that in order to do substantially better, we can't just hope to find a better partner - we have to rethink the cultural norms around partnership and child rearing.

The author doesn't say this, but the reason that being a 'loser' is so important is that the cost of break-up is so high, and that there's only one kind of break-up: permanent (excluding long-term separation I suppose), and it has huge impacts on both partners and the children.

Change a few cultural norms and see how this changes: what if we had....

a) multiple men and women who fully identify as parents? or a whole extended 'tribe' (30-50+ people) identify as parents?

• the change in relationship between one pair wouldn't affect the children much, since even if it got so bad that a pair no longer interacted and one parent totally left the community, the children would only have n-1 parents, not '1' parent
• without this fear of hurting the children by breaking up, healthy and needed break-ups might be more common: I know one woman especially who would have broken up with her abusive husband 10 years earlier but wanted to wait 'til her kids were out of school; if her kids' well-being hadn't depended on just one man and woman, she could have felt comfortable leaving much earlier.

b) shared extended family or community property

• the cost of splitting up would not involve 'financial' or resource losses since the partners would have nothing or little to divide up

c) non-jealous or non-exclusive relationships

• imagine you can relate in a healthy way to multiple lovers simultaneously. You're less likely to get tired or bored of your spouse after 20 years. And if the one with your primary partner does grows stale, you don't feel the need to seek out hidden sexual or emotional relationships with others: you just have relationships as they feel right to you
• since your marriage relationship doesn't dominate your life as much, the prospect of being without your 'primary' partner doesn't seem as lonely - you know you've got many other rich relationships that could take its place.

d) the child is raised by the mother's family

• in one culture in China, women from 12-13 on can have any relationships they want. Any child is considered part of the woman's family and is raised by her, her parents, and her siblings (brothers and sisters). Thus, men don't feel attached to the child they produce, they feel attached to the children their sisters produce. In this culture, the women only stay with men for as long as they feel comfortable, knowing their own and their children's well-being isn't dependent on picking THE RIGHT MAN and sticking with him forever come hell or high water. Men likewise don't feel trapped in bad relationships.This is just one example of a specific alternative cultural arrangement that doesn't make having a baby with someone so damn risky! There are many other possible arrangements.

e) there are a lot more possibilities, but you get the idea

In general, marriage as commonly practiced in the US really does feel like a straight jacket to me - the set of legal and cultural norms surrounding it make it very risky and extremely expensive to change your legal relationship as your actual relationship changes. I would prefer a culture that makes it easy to change your relationship as your feelings change, so that at every point, you're with the woman or man (or multiple) that most fulfills you, knowing your well-being and your children's doesn't depend on sticking with someone that doesn't fulfill you for the rest of your life.

Of course, you'd also need a culture with more emotionally mature people like the ones in 'marriage 3' in the article - humble, connected, emotionally open, loving, so that relationships don't just start and stop all the time, but grow in richness and love for as long as both partners desire.

 And to make this a little more personal, some anecdotes:

• I know a woman who stayed with her abusive husband for 10+ years after he started being abusive because she wanted to provide a stable home for her kids while they were in school. What if she could have provided that stability and removed him from her life?
• I know another woman who began to question war in the early 1990s, eventually becoming very stressed about it. She couldn't have reasonable discussions about it with her friends, family, or her husband, and as her stress built up, they started talking about divorce. Afraid that her career, stable family with children, and relationship with a man she otherwise deeply loved may be at risk, she chose not to go through divorce. She's been on anti-depressants since then, about 20 years now. This means her life has been clinically depressing for 20 years, and she's managed to remain functional only with drug-enabled denial and distraction.
•  I've known many people who grew up feeling very lonely, and so became very clingy - multiple cases, with both guys and girls, where the person chose to stay with one partner all through high school or through college. When they marry, they'll try to navigate that 'final' relationship after having very little relationship experience, or experience with very few people.
• I've been told many times, including recently by married friends my own age, that the 'fire' in a marriage changes after 1-2 years. It may still very much be a 'relationship worth having', but don't expect it to be the same.

And lets get a big-picture view to generalize:

• 43% of American women and 31% of American men have some sort of diagnosable sexual dysfunction as found by The National Health and Social Life Survey and cited at the Cleveland Clinic.
• If you want to know where our culture is, know where we came from:

[..]Until the 20th century, American and European men—including physicians—believed that women did not experience sexual desire or pleasure. They believed that women were simply fleshy receptacles for male lust and that intercourse culminating in male ejaculation fulfilled women's erotic needs. Women were socialized to believe that “ladies” had no sex drive, and that duty required them to put up with sex in order to keep their husbands happy and have children.

Not surprisingly, these beliefs left an enormous number of women sexually frustrated. They complained to doctors of anxiety, sleeplessness, irritability, nervousness, erotic fantasies, feelings of heaviness in the lower abdomen, and wetness between the leg. This syndrome became known as “hysteria,” from the Greek for uterus.

Documented complaints of female hysteria date back to the 13th century.[...]

I used to find this hard to believe, but I've met women in the generation before me who still believe it's the "woman's job" to serve her man sexually. It also reinforces how terrible women had it back when they were, financially, essentially the property of men a century ago.

• Pornography brings in $100,000,000,000 in revenue per year worldwide. This was confirmed by the LA Times. And given the amount of porn available free online, if all users paid for what they used, this figure would be much higher.
• According to the National Center for Health Statistics cited here, 1/10 Americans is using anti-depressants, in many cases more than 1 simultaneously.

Humans didn't evolve to be so sexually dysfunctional. We didn't evolve to get off to sex on paper and screens, or to try to counter chronic emotional trauma with drugs, or abuse our spouses or children, or raise children in single-parent homes, or leave children in day-care with strangers for 8 hours/day during very formative years, or any other problems that seem common in the US and around the world. Without changing the culture, or 'moving' to a different one, even if individual relationships can avoid the worst of the problems or misunderstandings noted above, it seems like the "still not even close to perfect" relationship is the best I could hope to end up with.

Books that helped shape my thinking on this:

• Black Elk Speaks
• The Enlightened Sex Manual
• Sex at Dawn
• The Continuum Concept

All 4 pretty much rocked my world actually.===

P.S. Interesting side note: the way we think of marriage reflects a cultural preference for making important life decisions once and relatively young: go into debt to select your profession at 18 and stick with it for 30 years; get a 30 year loan on a house, meet the one and only true love of your life and get married at 22 right after college, etc: the cultural and legal norms really don't support flexibility as a rule, especially if you don't have money to throw around.

Lots of precedents for joining indigenous groups

When I explain that I'm seeking out an indigenous or neo-indigenous tribe to live and learn with, I get a few standard responses: "Will they accept you?", "Isn't it dangerous?" etc.

I obviously can't give one answer for all groups at all times, but historically the correct answers have often been 'yes' and 'no'.

In the 1600s and 1700s, there was a significant tendency for white people to escape the colonies and join indigenous groups. According to "Lies My Teacher Told Me" by Loewen, some colonies or forts set up guards not to keep the natives out but to keep the white people from escaping to them.

Side note: I highly recommend "Lies My Teacher Told Me", which goes through 5-10 of the most common grade school history text books topic by topic and analyzes their propaganda value: what omissions, errors, unspoken assumptions, etc create the narratives they describe in different parts of American and European history which give our kids a false understanding of their heritage? It was unbelievably enlightening.

For an online reading about this 'white flight' phenomenon, here's a quote from "Forgotten Founders"; "Franklin" is actually Ben Franklin writing about the indigenous in the colonies:

   As they sought a middle ground between the corrupting overcivilization of Europe and the simplicity of the state of nature in which they believed that many Indians lived, Franklin and other Deists paid abundant attention to the political organization of the Indians, especially the Iroquois, who were not only the best organized Indian polity with which British Americans had contact, but who were also allied with them. "Franklin had the conception of an original, pre-political state of nature in which men were absolutely free and equal -- a condition he thought admirably illustrated among the American Indians," Eiselen wrote in Franklin's Political Theories (1928). Franklin himself wrote: "Their wants . . . [are] supplied by the spontaneous Productions of Nature" and that they did not at all want to be "civilized."
          This state of nature was eagerly sought by many eighteenth-century Euro-Americans. To understand how many Europeans left their own cultures to live with the Indians is to realize just how permeable the frontier was. To those who remained behind, it was often rumored that those who had gone over to the Indians had been "captured." While some captives were taken, more often the whites took up Indian life without compulsion. As Franklin wrote to Peter Collinson May 9, 1753:

The proneness of human Nature to a life of ease, of freedom from care and labour appear strongly in the heretofore little success that has attended every attempt to civilize our American Indians. . . . They visit us frequently and see the advantages that Arts, Science and compact Society procure us; they are not deficient in natural understanding and yet they have never strewn any inclination to change their manner of life for ours, or to learn any of our Arts.

While Indians did not seem to have much inclination to exchange their culture for the Euro-American, many Euro-Americans appeared more than willing to become Indians at this time:

When an Indian child has been brought up among us, taught our language and habituated to our customs, yet if he goes to see his relations and makes one Indian Ramble with them, there is no perswading him ever to return. And that this is not natural [only to Indians], but as men, is plain from this, that when white persons of either sex have been taken prisoners young by the Indians, and lived awhile among them, tho' ransomed by their Friends, and treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay among the English, yet within a Short time they become disgusted with our manner of Life, and the care and pains that are necessary to support it, and take the first good Opportunity of escaping again into the Woods, from whence there is no reclaiming them.

Franklin followed with an example. He had heard of a person who had been "reclaimed" from the Indians and returned to a sizable estate. Tired of the care needed to maintain such a style of life, he had turned it over to his younger brother and, taking only a rifle and a matchcoat, "took his way again to the Wilderness." Franklin used this story to illustrate his point that "No European who has tasted Savage Life can afterwards bear to live in our societies." Such societies, wrote Franklin, provided their members with greater opportunities for happiness than European cultures. Continuing, he said:

The Care and Labour of providing for Artificial and fashionable Wants, the sight of so many Rich wallowing in superfluous plenty, whereby so many are kept poor and distress'd for Want, the Insolence of Office . . . the restraints of Custom, all contrive to disgust them with what we call civil Society.