The Great Turning, PowerDown, Nursing, and LJ. And Viggo, of course.
A work in progress:
Yesterday, no, the day before, the Summer 2006 issue of Yes! Magazine came. Among other interesting things is the announcement that the Fall issue will be about Health Care. Reading that page over, I noticed very few references to nursing, which got me to reading the whole Summer issue over from the point of view of nursing. And that led to this little ramble because I realised, I've not heard anywhere in nursing the idea that the coming crisis in world economies will affect us all where we most often (in 'first world' countries, anyway) work: how will we function without all the electricity, plastic, and chemicals modern hospital care require?
JAMA reports that the US spends more than the UK but has higher rates of diabetes, heart disease, etc. A Google search for public health and prevention took me to Where There Is No Doctor which I read in its entirety, then ordered in Spanish and English along with its fellows about Women's health and dentistry.
I wonder: Should nurses be taught to promote this information in our own neighborhoods, whether in the bush or in the middle of the suburb or in the richest urban community? I think so. It's up to us to speak up, to be part of The Great Turning, to build lifeboats and help powerdown in a healthy compassionate way: this is the essence of Community Health Nursing, of Public Health Nursing, isn't it? Wouldn't this information being out there in your community, with those nurses who live near you available to you in time of need trained in it, make a difference to you in time of earthquake, flood, bombing, epidemic?
Other work that supports my contention that this is a major public health nursing topic:
Frances Moore Lappé on Hope's Edge (audio: streaming, or can be downloaded. Encouraging, really.)
and quotes from Joanna Macy's work on The Great Turning with hyperlinks to things I think illustrate these various points:
The Three Dimensions of the Great Turning:
1. Actions to slow the damage to Earth and its beings
Perhaps the most visible dimension of the Great Turning, these activities include all the political, legislative, and legal work required to reduce the destruction, as well as direct actions--blockades, boycotts, civil disobedience, and other forms of refusal. A few examples:
- Documenting and the ecological and health effects of the Industrial Growth Society;
- Lobbying or protesting against the World Trade Organization and the international trade agreements that endanger ecosystems and undermine social and economic justice;
- Blowing the whistle on illegal and unethical corporate practices;
- Blockading and conducting vigils at places of ecological destruction, such as old-growth forests under threat of clear-cutting or at nuclear dumping grounds.
- Work of this kind buys time. It saves some lives, and some ecosystems, species, and cultures, as well as some of the gene pool, for the sustainable society to come. But it is insufficient to bring that society about.
2. Analysis of structural causes and the creation of structural alternatives
The second dimension of the Great Turning is equally crucial. To free ourselves and our planet from the damage being inflicted by the Industrial Growth Society, we must understand its dynamics. What are the tacit agreements that create obscene wealth for a few, while progressively impoverishing the rest of humanity? What interlocking causes indenture us to an insatiable economy that uses our Earth as supply house and sewer? It is not a pretty picture, and it takes courage and confidence in our own common sense to look at it with realism; but we are demystifying the workings of the global economy. When we see how this system operates, we are less tempted to demonize the politicians and corporate CEOs who are in bondage to it. And for all the apparent might of the Industrial Growth Society, we can also see its fragility--how dependent it is on our obedience, and how doomed it is to devour itself.
In addition to learning how the present system works, we are also creating structural alternatives. In countless localities, like green shoots pushing up through the rubble, new social and economic arrangements are sprouting. Not waiting for our national or state politicos to catch up with us, we are banding together, taking action in our own communities. Flowing from our creativity and collaboration on behalf of life, these actions may look marginal, but they hold the seeds for the future.
Some of the initiatives in this dimension:
- Teach-ins and study groups on the Industrial Growth Society;
- Strategies and programs for nonviolent, citizen-based defense;
- Reduction of reliance on fossil and nuclear fuels and conversion to renewable energy sources;
- Collaborative living arrangements such as co-housing and eco-villages;
- Community gardens, consumer cooperatives, community-supported agriculture, watershed restoration, local currencies...
3. Shift in Consciousness
These structural alternatives cannot take root and survive without deeply ingrained values to sustain them. They must mirror what we want and how we relate to Earth and each other. They require, in other words, a profound shift in our perception of reality--and that shift is happening now, both as cognitive revolution and spiritual awakening.
The insights and experiences that enable us to make this shift are accelerating, and they take many forms. They arise as grief for our world, giving the lie to old paradigm notions of rugged individualism, the essential separateness of the self. They arise as glad response to breakthroughs in scientific thought, as reductionism and materialism give way to evidence of a living universe. And they arise in the resurgence of wisdom traditions, reminding us again that our world is a sacred whole, worthy of adoration and service.
The many forms and ingredients of this dimension include:
- general living systems theory;
- deep ecology and the deep, long-range ecology movement;
- Creation Spirituality and Liberation Theology;
- Engaged Buddhism and similar currents in other traditions;
- the resurgence of shamanic traditions;
- ecofeminism;
- ecopsychology;
- the simple living movement.
The realizations we make in the third dimension of the Great Turning save us from succumbing to either panic or paralysis. They help us resist the temptation to stick our heads in the sand, or to turn on each other, for scapegoats on whom to vent our fear and rage.
Dr. Macy gives us some guidance in facing The Great Turning without sinking into despair:
Personal Guidelines for the Great Turning
Come from Gratitude
To be alive in this beautiful, self-organizing universe--to participate in the dance of life with senses to perceive it, lungs that breathe it, organs that draw nourishment from it--is a wonder beyond words. Gratitude for the gift of life is the primary wellspring of all religions, the hallmark of the mystic, the source of all true art. Furthermore, it is a privilege to be alive in this time when we can choose to take part in the self-healing of our world.
Don't be Afraid of the Dark
This is a dark time, filled with suffering and uncertainty. Like living cells in a larger body, it is natural that we feel the trauma of our world. So don't be afraid of the anguish you feel, or the anger or fear, for these responses arise from the depth of your caring and the truth of your interconnectedness with all beings. To suffer with is the literal meaning of compassion.
Dare to Vision
Out of this darkness a new world can arise, not to be constructed by our minds so much as to emerge from our dreams. Even though we cannot see clearly how it's going to turn out, we are still called to let the future into our imagination. We will never be able to build what we have not first cherished in our hearts..
Roll Up Your Sleeves
Many people don't get involved in the Great Turning because there are so many different issues, which seem to compete with each other. Shall I save the whales or help battered children? The truth is that all aspects of the current crisis reflect the same mistake, setting ourselves apart and using others for our gain. So to heal one aspect helps the others to heal as well. Just find what you love to work on and take joy in that. Never try to do it alone. Link up with others; you'll spark each others' ideas and sustain each others' energy..
Act Your Age
Since every particle in your body goes back to the first flaring forth of space and time, you're really as old as the universe. So when you are lobbying at your congressperson's office, or visiting your local utility, or testifying at a hearing on nuclear waste, or standing up to protect an old grove of redwoods, you are doing that not out of some personal whim, but in the full authority of your 15 billions years.
Some other interesting sources:
Wangari Maathai and the GreenBelt Movement. I'm not sure I could be Dr. Maathai. But I am one of the women who plants trees.
Article about the study of The Prisoner's Dilemma, and a University of Toronto Interactive site that makes it experiential. It's much more important to me to concede 'winning' for 'joining'.
More on general living systems theory (Nursing students: sound familiar?)
one RN's LJ account of being at work when Katrina hit.
NBER on Health Care, especially this passage:
In a series of studies, Cutler and his collaborators have measured the benefits of specific medical innovations. For the most part, he has concluded, the benefits have been large and underappreciated. Much of the work is summarized in his book, Your Money or Your Life.(8) Extending work of Cutler and Mark McClellan on the contribution of medical innovations to changes in heart attack mortality among Medicare beneficiaries,(9) Skinner, Douglas Staiger, and Elliott Fisher examine Medicare costs and outcomes for Acute Myocardial Infarction (AMI) in the Medicare population during 1986-2002.(10) They find that the gains in mortality that Cutler and McClellan observed from 1986-98 did not continue subsequently, and that expenditures, after a brief pause, continued to increase. In cross-sectional analyses, they find that regions experiencing the greatest drop in mortality following AMI were not those with the largest gains in expenditures. Patients living in regions that had invested early in low-cost and highly effective care, such as beta blockers, experienced the largest declines in mortality with no adverse impact on expenditures. The factors yielding the greatest benefits to health were not the factors that drove up costs, and vice versa.
(emphasis mine.) Wonder what nursing care was in place in those areas?
And Viggo? Here, in his acceptance speech for an honorary doctorate from St. Lawrence University and the W. H. Auden poem he quotes in reference to the state of health care in America and to activism everywhere.
Yesterday, no, the day before, the Summer 2006 issue of Yes! Magazine came. Among other interesting things is the announcement that the Fall issue will be about Health Care. Reading that page over, I noticed very few references to nursing, which got me to reading the whole Summer issue over from the point of view of nursing. And that led to this little ramble because I realised, I've not heard anywhere in nursing the idea that the coming crisis in world economies will affect us all where we most often (in 'first world' countries, anyway) work: how will we function without all the electricity, plastic, and chemicals modern hospital care require?
JAMA reports that the US spends more than the UK but has higher rates of diabetes, heart disease, etc. A Google search for public health and prevention took me to Where There Is No Doctor which I read in its entirety, then ordered in Spanish and English along with its fellows about Women's health and dentistry.
I wonder: Should nurses be taught to promote this information in our own neighborhoods, whether in the bush or in the middle of the suburb or in the richest urban community? I think so. It's up to us to speak up, to be part of The Great Turning, to build lifeboats and help powerdown in a healthy compassionate way: this is the essence of Community Health Nursing, of Public Health Nursing, isn't it? Wouldn't this information being out there in your community, with those nurses who live near you available to you in time of need trained in it, make a difference to you in time of earthquake, flood, bombing, epidemic?
Other work that supports my contention that this is a major public health nursing topic:
Frances Moore Lappé on Hope's Edge (audio: streaming, or can be downloaded. Encouraging, really.)
and quotes from Joanna Macy's work on The Great Turning with hyperlinks to things I think illustrate these various points:
The Three Dimensions of the Great Turning:
1. Actions to slow the damage to Earth and its beings
Perhaps the most visible dimension of the Great Turning, these activities include all the political, legislative, and legal work required to reduce the destruction, as well as direct actions--blockades, boycotts, civil disobedience, and other forms of refusal. A few examples:
- Documenting and the ecological and health effects of the Industrial Growth Society;
- Lobbying or protesting against the World Trade Organization and the international trade agreements that endanger ecosystems and undermine social and economic justice;
- Blowing the whistle on illegal and unethical corporate practices;
- Blockading and conducting vigils at places of ecological destruction, such as old-growth forests under threat of clear-cutting or at nuclear dumping grounds.
- Work of this kind buys time. It saves some lives, and some ecosystems, species, and cultures, as well as some of the gene pool, for the sustainable society to come. But it is insufficient to bring that society about.
2. Analysis of structural causes and the creation of structural alternatives
The second dimension of the Great Turning is equally crucial. To free ourselves and our planet from the damage being inflicted by the Industrial Growth Society, we must understand its dynamics. What are the tacit agreements that create obscene wealth for a few, while progressively impoverishing the rest of humanity? What interlocking causes indenture us to an insatiable economy that uses our Earth as supply house and sewer? It is not a pretty picture, and it takes courage and confidence in our own common sense to look at it with realism; but we are demystifying the workings of the global economy. When we see how this system operates, we are less tempted to demonize the politicians and corporate CEOs who are in bondage to it. And for all the apparent might of the Industrial Growth Society, we can also see its fragility--how dependent it is on our obedience, and how doomed it is to devour itself.
In addition to learning how the present system works, we are also creating structural alternatives. In countless localities, like green shoots pushing up through the rubble, new social and economic arrangements are sprouting. Not waiting for our national or state politicos to catch up with us, we are banding together, taking action in our own communities. Flowing from our creativity and collaboration on behalf of life, these actions may look marginal, but they hold the seeds for the future.
Some of the initiatives in this dimension:
- Teach-ins and study groups on the Industrial Growth Society;
- Strategies and programs for nonviolent, citizen-based defense;
- Reduction of reliance on fossil and nuclear fuels and conversion to renewable energy sources;
- Collaborative living arrangements such as co-housing and eco-villages;
- Community gardens, consumer cooperatives, community-supported agriculture, watershed restoration, local currencies...
3. Shift in Consciousness
These structural alternatives cannot take root and survive without deeply ingrained values to sustain them. They must mirror what we want and how we relate to Earth and each other. They require, in other words, a profound shift in our perception of reality--and that shift is happening now, both as cognitive revolution and spiritual awakening.
The insights and experiences that enable us to make this shift are accelerating, and they take many forms. They arise as grief for our world, giving the lie to old paradigm notions of rugged individualism, the essential separateness of the self. They arise as glad response to breakthroughs in scientific thought, as reductionism and materialism give way to evidence of a living universe. And they arise in the resurgence of wisdom traditions, reminding us again that our world is a sacred whole, worthy of adoration and service.
The many forms and ingredients of this dimension include:
- general living systems theory;
- deep ecology and the deep, long-range ecology movement;
- Creation Spirituality and Liberation Theology;
- Engaged Buddhism and similar currents in other traditions;
- the resurgence of shamanic traditions;
- ecofeminism;
- ecopsychology;
- the simple living movement.
The realizations we make in the third dimension of the Great Turning save us from succumbing to either panic or paralysis. They help us resist the temptation to stick our heads in the sand, or to turn on each other, for scapegoats on whom to vent our fear and rage.
Dr. Macy gives us some guidance in facing The Great Turning without sinking into despair:
Personal Guidelines for the Great Turning
Come from Gratitude
To be alive in this beautiful, self-organizing universe--to participate in the dance of life with senses to perceive it, lungs that breathe it, organs that draw nourishment from it--is a wonder beyond words. Gratitude for the gift of life is the primary wellspring of all religions, the hallmark of the mystic, the source of all true art. Furthermore, it is a privilege to be alive in this time when we can choose to take part in the self-healing of our world.
Don't be Afraid of the Dark
This is a dark time, filled with suffering and uncertainty. Like living cells in a larger body, it is natural that we feel the trauma of our world. So don't be afraid of the anguish you feel, or the anger or fear, for these responses arise from the depth of your caring and the truth of your interconnectedness with all beings. To suffer with is the literal meaning of compassion.
Dare to Vision
Out of this darkness a new world can arise, not to be constructed by our minds so much as to emerge from our dreams. Even though we cannot see clearly how it's going to turn out, we are still called to let the future into our imagination. We will never be able to build what we have not first cherished in our hearts..
Roll Up Your Sleeves
Many people don't get involved in the Great Turning because there are so many different issues, which seem to compete with each other. Shall I save the whales or help battered children? The truth is that all aspects of the current crisis reflect the same mistake, setting ourselves apart and using others for our gain. So to heal one aspect helps the others to heal as well. Just find what you love to work on and take joy in that. Never try to do it alone. Link up with others; you'll spark each others' ideas and sustain each others' energy..
Act Your Age
Since every particle in your body goes back to the first flaring forth of space and time, you're really as old as the universe. So when you are lobbying at your congressperson's office, or visiting your local utility, or testifying at a hearing on nuclear waste, or standing up to protect an old grove of redwoods, you are doing that not out of some personal whim, but in the full authority of your 15 billions years.
Some other interesting sources:
Wangari Maathai and the GreenBelt Movement. I'm not sure I could be Dr. Maathai. But I am one of the women who plants trees.
Article about the study of The Prisoner's Dilemma, and a University of Toronto Interactive site that makes it experiential. It's much more important to me to concede 'winning' for 'joining'.
More on general living systems theory (Nursing students: sound familiar?)
one RN's LJ account of being at work when Katrina hit.
NBER on Health Care, especially this passage:
In a series of studies, Cutler and his collaborators have measured the benefits of specific medical innovations. For the most part, he has concluded, the benefits have been large and underappreciated. Much of the work is summarized in his book, Your Money or Your Life.(8) Extending work of Cutler and Mark McClellan on the contribution of medical innovations to changes in heart attack mortality among Medicare beneficiaries,(9) Skinner, Douglas Staiger, and Elliott Fisher examine Medicare costs and outcomes for Acute Myocardial Infarction (AMI) in the Medicare population during 1986-2002.(10) They find that the gains in mortality that Cutler and McClellan observed from 1986-98 did not continue subsequently, and that expenditures, after a brief pause, continued to increase. In cross-sectional analyses, they find that regions experiencing the greatest drop in mortality following AMI were not those with the largest gains in expenditures. Patients living in regions that had invested early in low-cost and highly effective care, such as beta blockers, experienced the largest declines in mortality with no adverse impact on expenditures. The factors yielding the greatest benefits to health were not the factors that drove up costs, and vice versa.
(emphasis mine.) Wonder what nursing care was in place in those areas?
And Viggo? Here, in his acceptance speech for an honorary doctorate from St. Lawrence University and the W. H. Auden poem he quotes in reference to the state of health care in America and to activism everywhere.