This blog is moving to our new website

Hi everyone

Exciting news!

We're creating a new website that will focus all our work in the one place.

It will contain auuthoritative information drawn from our books and on-going research, and regular blog posts on a range of topics.

Together with friends, colleagues and those who comment on our ideas:

• We seek to understand the root causes of the complex problems facing humanity
• We aim to develop strategies for creating a positive future for people and planet

 In future, all our blog posts will be published on our new site.

Please visit us soon, and

• Bookmark the site (URL  www.humansolutionsnow.com)
• Click the RSS symbol, top right, to be kept informed as the site develops
• Click the Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn buttons to spread the word

Best wishes

Malcolm and Christine

Facebook and the Samaritans team up

Trauma often leads to suicidal feelings. So ways of preventing suicide may also provide a first step towards therapy and trauma healing for desperate individuals.

30 million people in the UK, that’s half the population, are now registered with Facebook. And people often share intimate things on Facebook that they are unwilling or unable to share directly with friends and family. Last Christmas a British woman told over 1,000 Facebook friends that she had taken an overdose. But no-one raised the alarm until the next day.

Now, Facebook and the UK charity Samaritans have joined forces to prevent similar tragedies in future.  For many years, Samaritans have provided confidential non-judgemental emotional support for those in distress or despair, including those contemplating suicide. This new initiative enables Facebook users to report concerns about their friends’ status updates and wall posts to the Facebook Help Centre, who will put Samaritans counsellors in touch with the distressed person. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to work out how to do this. If you know, perhaps you could leave a comment here.

This link-up shows the potential power for good of social networks. Let’s hope Facebook expands this initiative to other countries.

Thanks to the Guardian newspaper for this story.

World's disasters bring a new degree of trauma to victims

On 26 February, the Sunday Age in Melbourne, Australia published an article by Karen Kissane on the above topic. It expresses well the impact of trauma due to natural disasters, climate change and war. I heartily recommend it as background to the messages of hope that I usually post.

Hope for the Sahel: The Great Green Wall

Ten thousand years ago, following the last ice age, North Africa was a well-populated land of savannah, woodlands, and wetlands. Then, over the next few millennia, the climate dried across a belt of latitudes circling the globe from Africa through the Middle East to East Asia and even to the Americas. This drying created most of the great deserts of the world that we know today, including the Sahara, Negev, Arabian, Thar and Gobi.

This desertification hit existing agricultural societies hard. Just as today we see refugees fleeing drought-stricken areas, our ancestors would have been faced with the choice of dying of hunger and thirst, or moving to new land. But unoccupied lands were scarce as the productivity of the land declined throughout this huge area. In order to survive, some hitherto peaceful peoples became aggressive, brutal nomadic invaders, forcing those living around oases and along rivers to raise armies to defend themselves. As this relentless process continued generation after generation, so civilization as we know it was born. Out of the trauma experienced by peaceful, cooperative, egalitarian farming cultures emerged the violent, warlike, hierarchical, male dominated states of Egypt and Mesopotamia. We still live with their legacy today.

In her classic book, The Chalice and the Blade, Riane Eisler characterised this process as the transition from partnership to dominator cultures. We tell the story of this transition in far more detail in our book, Hope for Humanity. There, we draw on many sources, including research on climate change, archaeology and anthropology, and books on the subject such as James DeMeo’s Saharasia, and Steve Taylor’s The Fall, as well as the work of Riane Eisler. (click the links on the right for further information)

For the last few decades, the Sahara has been on the march again, this time southwards into the nations of the Sahel - a region wracked by poverty and conflict. The reasons for this desertification are complex. They include decades of drought, population growth, the impact of misguided agricultural developments, and the breakdown of the traditional symbiotic relationship between farmers and nomadic herders - peoples who, over centuries, had developed a deep understanding of how to live sustainably and peacefully in this fragile region. Climate change due to global warming may also be a factor, but the extent of its influence is not yet clear.

What of the future? Are we about to see a repeat of the traumas of prehistory? Will further climate change bring more hunger and conflict to the peoples of the Sahel, or will the better rains of recent years continue? Computer models of global climate disagree on the answer. Some predict reduced rainfall for the region, while others predict an increase. (See UNEP report ClimateChangeSahelCombine.pdf) The reasons for these different predictions was investigated by Alessandra Giannini. She concluded that there will be drying if the effects of ocean warming dominate the climate, but there could be increased rainfall if regional land effects are stronger.

It is well-known that forests can increase rainfall across large regions by holding moisture in the landscape, and stimulating the formation of rain-bearing clouds. So one of the best ways to try to push the sahelian climate in the right direction is to plant trees. Enter the Great Green Wall project. The idea of planting a belt of trees across Africa to halt the advancing desert was first put forward in the 1980’s. But it was only recently that the idea received official approval and promises of international funding of up to $3bn under the UN’s Convention to Combat Desertification.

15km wide, and stretching 8000 km from the Horn of Africa in the east to the coast of Senegal in the west, the Great Green Wall will pass through 11 of the poorest countries in the world: Burkina Faso, Chad, Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, and Sudan. As well as planting drought-tolerant trees and shrubs, the project will create water retention ponds, new agricultural production systems and other economic activities, and social infrastructure. Besides stopping desertification and erosion it will protect water sources such as the shrinking Lake Chad, and restore or create biodiversity. It will bring economic development to local communities, helping to stem the tide of youth emigration, and providing them with energy resources, fruit, vegetables and other foods. And perhaps most importantly, it will foster political stability through cooperation at all levels from the international to the community. If it is to succeed, good science and technology are not enough. The project must also gain the support and involvement of local communities. The fact that this has been recognised at the highest levels at the outset augurs well.

This project brings hope to a huge region of fragile and degraded ecosystems, poverty and conflict. It offers hope of a transition to sustainability rather than the trauma of war, starvation, and displacement. It demonstrates how the challenge of climate change may be met in ways that foster the evolution of a new partnership society and an era of prosperity, peace and equality.

The Australian Canary

I try to bring messages of hope in this blog. But there are times when hope is hard to find.

A friend of mine calls Australia the canary of climate change. Just as dying canaries once gave miners warning of dangerous gas levels in coal mines, so Australia is giving the world warning of what we can expect as climate change continues. Australia has always been a land of flood, drought and fire, but recent events, beamed to TVs around the world, have been creating new records. These are consistent with predictions made by climate scientists for many years that extreme weather events will become more frequent as the planet warms. So, following a decade of drought, Australia has experienced unprecedented flooding over areas larger than France and Germany combined, one of the biggest and most powerful cyclones (hurricanes) ever seen, and devastating bush fires.

In rebuilding after these natural disasters, we might expect the government to look for ways to reduce the risk of similar events in future. Certainly, they are looking at protecting more infrastructure and communities from devastating damage. But the link to climate change and the need to reduce global carbon emissions seems to have been missed. In looking for ways to cut the budget to pay for reconstruction, the government targeted support for solar power, which has the potential to reduce carbon emissions. It took one or two far-sighted independent members of the Parliament, and the Greens to force a change in this short-sighted policy.

In just the last week, Prime Minister Julia Gillard announced a plan to introduce a carbon pricing scheme within 18 months, but so far she has failed to make the connection with extreme weather events. The government’s intention is not to take a lead in the world, but simply to make sure Australia isn’t left behind in the shift to a low carbon economy. In this regard, the decision reflects comments by Professor Ross Garnaut, author of an influential government  report on climate change. He recently called for Australia to stop being a drag on the rest of the world.

This modest step has created a political furore. Even before any of the details have been thrashed out, the opposition party has sworn to fight this new ‘tax’ every inch of the way, and to repeal it when they get back into power. It seems that conservative forces in rich nations around the world are intent on burying their heads ever deeper in the sand, and continue to place priority on short-term economic growth and the demands of large corporations, rather than on long-term sustainability and the needs of the community.

In a wider context, Australia has traditionally been a major food exporter, but production has been severely affected - first by the years of drought, and now by the destruction of bumper crops by floods and hurricane winds. It seems Australia may even become a net food importer. Meanwhile, the price of food is skyrocketing worldwide following crop failures in Russia, China and elsewhere, combined with surging demand for food as incomes rise, particularly in China. It only needs one more major crop failure to wipe out stocks of some basic commodities, and turn the fear of shortages into reality. Already, millions more have been pushed into absolute poverty, and the rising price of bread has been an important factor in the unrest in North Africa and the Middle East.

Australia is not alone in its failure to come to grips with climate change. The USA is at least as resistant, and the UK is often marked more by rhetoric than achievement. Why is it that governments often seem so short sighted? There are many reasons. Democratic governments are hamstrung by the electoral cycle, unable to do anything for the long-term that would be unpopular with an electorate that is hooked on the hip-pocket and consumerism. Often, too, they are heavily influenced by big corporations which bankroll their election campaigns, fund huge numbers of lobbyists, control the flow of information through media ownership, and foster the addiction to consumerism through advertising. Corporations focus almost exclusively on their share price, and short-term returns to shareholders - not to mention huge salaries and bonuses for directors. To them the long term may be no more than 5 years. Underpinned by unquestioned belief in the free-market, these factors create a powerful barrier to visionary action.

A second barrier comes in the form of psychological defence mechanisms. Many people are simply too caught up in the challenges of career, family, status, leisure and consumption to find space to consider issues that will affect their children and grandchildren in 20 or 50 years time. Many, too, are affected by traumas of which they may not even be aware that originated in infancy, or even with their parents or grandparents. As a result, they may suffer from relationship and family problems, or anxiety, depression, phobias, denial and other psychological defence mechanisms that prevent them from facing up to the reality of a future that is too terrifying to face. These limitations apply as much to government and corporate leaders as to members of the general public. Such denial amongst individuals creates a collective denial in which whole communities and nations ignore the disasters headed their way.

Given this gloomy picture, it’s sometimes hard to see the signs of hope. And yet Australia is home to many seeds of hope too.
•    Australia’s natural disasters stimulated an outpouring of generosity. Strangers helped each other through the hardest times. People came as volunteers to help clean-up. Donations poured in. These actions will do much to limit the trauma, and will create enduring community bonds and spirit that will outlast the events.
•    Australia currently has a minority government dependent on the support of a few independents and Green party members. The result is a more open, flexible and creative process that is undoubtedly producing some good decisions.
•    New forms of political action are emerging to support important values and long-term goals. Examples include GetUp! in Australia and Avaaz internationally. They are using the power of public opinion and thousands of small donations to influence governments on key issues. Similar methods are being used by many traditional campaigning organisations, including Friends of the Earth and Amnesty International.
•    Organisations and individuals are using the internet to wrest control of information from the media corporations, and challenge government secrecy, as shown by the publicity given to wikileaks. 
•    The web and cell phones are also being used to coordinate more direct actions against government and corporate policies, and to undermine the power of dictatorial regimes. In the UK, UK Uncut is campaigning against the government’s stringent budget cuts, and tax-avoiding corporations. Similar tactics are being used to coordinate public protests across North Africa and the Middle East.
•    Some corporations are recognising the reality of climate change, and are adopting forward-looking strategies that will give them a competitive advantage in the emerging low-carbon economy.

Earthing brings new hope

We’re excited. We recently became aware of the practice of earthing and its potential to improve our health and well-being. More research needs to be done, but it’s possible that earthing may be able to prevent, and even possibly cure, trauma.

When we walk barefoot on the Earth, we are in electrical contact with it. Electrons flow into our bodies to equalise the electrical potentials, thus automatically neutralising harmful free radicals and balancing other systems. But modern lifestyles insulate us from direct contact with the ground. We wear shoes all the time, mostly live in houses that isolate us electrically from the earth, sleep in wooden beds, and walk on insulating carpets. As a result, we become electrically unbalanced.

Earthing involves reconnecting ourselves to the Earth’s supply of electrons. There are several ways this can be done, but - apart from going barefoot - they all involve skin contact with a conducting pad or sheet of some kind. This is connected to the earth through a metal rod pushed into the ground, or via the earth circuit of the building’s wiring. A bed sheet with silver threads allows us to be earthed while asleep, and a pad under the desk can earth us through our bare feet while we work. More localised earthing to treat specific injuries or problems can be achieved with patches or bands attached to the body.

This sounds so simple, it’s hard to believe it can have any significant effect. But research to date and extensive experience shows that it does. Users report better sleep, less pain, reduced symptoms of autoimmune diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis and MS, and less stress, tension and anxiety. Wounds heal faster, and top athletes recover more rapidly from the stress of competition or intense training.

In particular, earthing has been shown to normalise the daily cycle of the stress hormone cortisol. Chronic elevation of cortisol levels is one of the effects of trauma, raising the intriguing possibility that earthing might reduce trauma symptoms. If used on a regular basis, it might increase resilience to potentially traumatic experiences. If applied after such an event, it might reduce or prevent the development of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). As there is an association between trauma and some other mental disorders, including anxiety, depression, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and Bipolar Disorder, we believe earthing might help sufferers of these conditions too. It’s certainly worth researching.

In our book, Hope for Humanity, we argue that almost everyone is affected by trauma to some extent. Our resulting behavioural and psychological patterns create powerful barriers to ending war, violence, poverty, social breakdown and environmental destruction. One of the greatest challenges facing us is how to heal so many people - clearly one-on-one therapy is not possible for more than a tiny fraction of humanity. So wouldn’t it be wonderful if something as simple as earthing could make a big difference?

Christine is finding that earthing herself as much as possible is helping her express her unique self. She is experimenting with a new trauma therapy that focuses on the interaction between the energy systems of the Earth and the human body. What better therapist to use for such a huge challenge than the Earth herself? She envisages a time when connection with the Earth will help us all to heal, and to find our own unique contributions to healing humanity. We are in the process of creating a website on which more information will be available shortly. 

Childhood trauma, mental health and family support

Hope for the future lies in reducing the impact of trauma on society. Te best way to do that in the long term is to reduce the number of traumatised children. This can be done either by cutting their exposure to potentially traumatic experiences, or by increasing their resilience to cope with such events. Both are aided by good parenting in a stable, loving family environment. Sadly, many families are under pressure and children suffer from the stresses of poverty, neglect and maltreatment, or have parents with poor parenting skills or mental health problems. What can society do to help?

There are several issues here. Parenting skills are seldom taught in schools, and training is not required for this most important of jobs. The majority of us were brought up in much the same way that our parents were raised, and go on to raise our own children this way too, regardless of whether or not it is good. This ignorance is compounded by the stresses of modern life and increasing mental ill-health.

Modern urban societies have fragmented the extended family, and emphasise the privacy of the individual and nuclear family. This often leads to isolation, and resentment of official intervention, particularly where the authorities have the power to remove children to foster homes. As a result, government support programmes may be resisted and treated with suspicion. Such programmes also are frequently split amongst various problem areas such as financial assistance, housing, employment, and child welfare.

These issues and solutions to them are discussed further in our book Hope for Humanity.   The most effective programmes integrate assistance with finance, housing, employment, mental and physical health, parenting, child welfare and other challenges. At best, a home visitor seeks to become a friend and mentor of the family, and draws upon resources of government, local charities and community organisations. To succeed, it is vital that this support person not become associated with regulatory and policing functions.

This approach is exemplified by the UK charity Family Action. Working with tens of thousands of disadvantaged and socially isolated children and families, they provide practical, emotional, financial and educational support. They tackle some of the most complex and difficult issues facing families, including domestic abuse, mental health, learning disabilities and severe financial hardship. By working with the whole family, they help them become safer, stronger and more optimistic about their future.

A particular focus of Family Action is parents with mental health problems as reflected in a recent blog by their head of policy and campaigns, Rhian Beynon. Children in such families are at increased risk of poverty and being taken into care, and are twice as likely as others to experience a psychiatric disorder. Thus, caring for children’s mental health starts with integrated support for their parents. Family Action works with parents in their homes to create a lifestyle that stabilises their condition. This often includes assistance to find suitable accommodation and claim social security benefits to which they are entitled. It may also include working with the parents to improve their relationship with their children, support their learning, and set boundaries and routines for them. Parents are encouraged to get involved in their communities, and to start training, find work, or become a volunteer.

Unfortunately, such services are often seen as too expensive, particularly in this era of savage cost-cutting by the UK government. This leaves the families struggling without support, at the mercy of an unsympathetic and inadequate welfare system. Family Action cites the cost of support services as £4000 (US$6500) per family. This may sound a lot, but what is the cost of the alternative - lifetime care for more people with mental health problems, and more violence, crime, addiction and other behavioural consequences of trauma?