Finishing my First Book on Sustainability

Who are you?

Doug (dougM) May

What is your project?

I am finishing my first book on “True” Sustainability, focusing on recovering a united humanity, and living in partnership with all of Nature, and with the spirit of the home planet. It is a spiritual challenge, which will require a spiritual breakthrough, on top of all of the technical challenges, and technical breakthroughs. Most of humanity can just chill, for now, but it is critical that we provide an environment where those who are ready to work on the core issues, and figuring out the solutions to the 10,000 pieces of the problem, can get to work right away.

Can we see some photos?

A link to your work:

To get onto the waiting list for when I set up my email list, just send an email to dougmlist@intuedge.net with subject or message-body including “please add me to the waiting list for Doug’s writing.”

A preview, snippet, or glimpse of your work in progress:

Solving All 10,000 Pieces of the Problem

“True” Sustainability is complicated. It will require an elevation in the collective consciousness, and a shift in how we see the world, and in how we relate to each other, and to the world around us, especially the home planet. It requires subtle and not-so-subtle changes to our thinking, our practices, our institutions, our energy supply, our land use, our food chain, transportation, agriculture, and our use of natural resources.

This complexity is reflected in the estimated 10,000 separate challenges which must be solved in a sustainable way. The solutions must be diversified to be able to work for everybody, and we need to be able to layer and combine nearly any part of the solution with every other part of the solution.

We need to make it perfectly OK for most of the population to hardly make any immediate changes, other than getting on board for the collective to survive and thrive. As we establish and validate the new approaches, they will propagate and get adopted as it makes sense to do so.

Transforming Education

There is a lot to learn, to function sustainably. We need to make that learning accessible to everybody, and we need to put it into the forms needed so that everybody can learn in the way that works best for them. We must shift into a culture of lifelong learning, and ongoing transformation. We have learned a lot about transformation in the last 75 years, including how to help the changes stick. We need to make all of this available to our people, again in forms that they can successfully absorb.

These new systems and structures are needed early in the process, just to support the work of launching all of these projects, filling out the teams, and sorting out how to coordinate and bring everything together eventually. Having a coherent framework that supports all learning styles, and all self-management styles, sets our people up to keep absorbing all the changes and the new understandings, to whatever extent is appropriate.

What we need to learn will change a lot, but our learning approach and systems should evolve right along with everything else. This minimizes the psychic strain of all the changes, because it all comes through in familiar and workable ways, that support our lifestyle and our work, as all of it is changing.

The Red-Blue-Green Alliance for a “True”ly Sustainable America

Given that some kind of transition into “True” Sustainability* is inevitable (including the ugly default of a hard reboot of human civilization, if we fail to change far enough, fast enough), we should make it a national (and global) priority to find and implement the needed solutions.

The point of the Red-Blue-Green Alliance is to get past seeing our diversity as the problem, and start embracing it as part of the solution. We can intentionally generate better solutions by bridging and bringing together the wisdoms, perspectives, expertise, and technologies of the Red, Blue, and Green factions. Our only hope of a solution that is whole, workable, and agreeable, will be getting there as a team.

Call it our moon shot, if that helps, because it is most definitely a very big deal, that nearly all of us will eventually cheer across the finish line.

The RBG (Free) Alliance is a hoped-for movement among the people of the USA, making ourselves into (loud and proud) fans of Nature, and the home planet, putting “true” sustainability before party. The RBG Coalition would then consist of all of the RBG-pledged elected officials (without regard to their “home” political party), in every legislative body, at every level, with the goal of an elected supermajority by 2026.

Both groups are working to clarify, fund, enable, and enact the sustainability transition/recovery. We need to create the legal and fiscal operating bubble and resources for this work, as quickly as possible, and we must invest in being able to find, and then scale up and propagate, real solutions. That means collaborative R&D on a national, and eventually global scale.

We don’t have to leave our party, but if our party is doing stuff that is not in line with sustainability, they won’t have our support for those initiatives. This group would ensure the success of the whole endeavor, and make sure that it propagates naturally through the population, each of us on the timeline that makes sense for us, which is probably a combination of a few of our personal teams’ or communities’ journeys (much as starlings steer by a small number of immediate neighbors, producing the nearly incomprehensible grace and beauty of murmurations).

What will you ship at the end of 6 months?

Create a briefing for groups who are likely to include some of the leaders and/or team members for the 10,000 core pieces of the problem, so that they can recognize themselves and each other, and start getting to work from an awareness of the whole within which they will finish their work. Self-publish the briefing on Kindle, and present it to the Global Peace Tribe and others. Then next I would start to expand the briefing into the first book, and submit the manuscript to my publisher.