Beavers bring life to rivers and the land.

They re-engineer the landscape to create safe habitats for themselves, where they can hide from predators and swim to where their food grows.

Beavers feed on bark and leaves in the late autumn or winter, then switch to softer wetland plants in the spring and summer.

They never travel far from water.

Life is easy for the beavers that live on big rivers. But when the best habitats are fully occupied, young beavers are forced away from them through vicious territorial disputes, and must make their homes along the narrow tributaries. Here they are more vulnerable to predators. So, millions of years ago, to avoid the big cats that preyed on them, they learnt to build dams. In doing so they radically changed the habitats in which they live.

Using stones, branches and mud with astonishing ingenuity, they construct first one and then a series of small dams. Wherever they find a leak, they stop it up. Before long, even small seasonal streams start to look like mountain rice paddies dammed up with wood: a series of stepped pools, surrounded by wetlands.

These are phenomenally rich habitats, that abound with life: harbouring an abundance of insects, and great concentrations of frogs, small mammals and waterbirds.

Beaver dams also regulate floods and droughts, cleanse the water of sediments, filter out poisons and recharge groundwater.

North American tribes revered the beaver. They knew that the landscapes beavers created are the ‘earths kidneys’, purifying water and regulating its flow. They noticed that beavers are highly social creatures who live in their lodges built of sticks in tight family groups. They saw that the adults go to great lengths to care for their offspring.

Aunts and uncles from earlier litters look after the youngest kits. They carry them away from danger, clasped to their chests with their front paws. They warn them of aquatic predators by slapping their tails on the water. They bring green food to the kits, when they are too small to leave their lodge. They cuddle them and call gently to them. For these reasons, Native Americans called them the ‘little people.’

In the late 1600s the Europeans came. For them, beavers represented something quite different: commercial value. Europe’s beavers, that once numbered in the tens of millions, had been almost eliminated because of the value of their scent glands. Beavers’ scent glads contain castoreum: a compound that’s rich in salicylic acid, from the willow bark the animals eat. This is a powerful pain killer. The combination of this valuable compound, the beaver’s fine fur and tasty meat ensured that one animal was worth as much as an entire year’s earnings for a medieval peasant.

While castoreum from American beavers was less valuable, as they ate more cottonwood than willow, their soft, thick pelts put a high price on their backs. Demand was insatiable. In particular, people wanted their fur for hats. Beaver hats made from felted underfur were water roof and durable. Trappers fanned out across the new world, scouring its wetlands for valuable pelts. By the time the geographers, map makers, photographers and settlers arrived in their footsteps, the beavers were long gone.

As the beavers disappeared, the water went with them. Rich ecosystems, especially in the southern states, dried up and vanished. Hunting grounds and fisheries collapsed. Forest fires raged through the shrivelled vegetation around the dried-out creeks. The range lands downstream turned brown. Cattle jostled to drink from the last of the old beaver ponds.

Eradicating beavers was a terrible mistake, causing harm that cascaded through our living systems.

But by bringing back the little people to the depleted lands of Europe and North America, we can restore our rivers and wetlands, recharge our groundwater, stop floods and droughts, and witness once more the abundance of wildlife that accompanies beavers, wherever they make their homes.

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What is it about this culture that makes so many of us unhappy, unkind to others, frustrated, alienated from ourselves?

There is one idea of human nature which is what this culture promotes. [It says] that human beings are by nature selfish, competitive, aggressive, out for personal gain.

Now, there is another view of human nature which is that there is no human nature, that it is just an empty slate which you can write anything you want. There is this idea of kids that you can program anything into them by behavioral programming so that basically we are empty, we are devoid of any internal nature so it is whatever we happen to learn.

There is a third view of human nature that we are actually wired in certain ways. We were wired for contact, for love, for connection, for generosity, for connection to the larger whole beyond the small ego. And then whatever conditions interfere with that is what creates the dysfunction.

From that point of view, if you have a society that promotes selfishness, that promotes competition, that promotes aggression, that promotes people feeling dissatisfied with what they have, that only says people are worth what they produce or what they own, or it is only matter that matters, it’s materialistic, “matter-ialistic.” So that our form whether you are pretty or handsome or toned or flabby defines who you are.

If there is a human nature that is quite contrary to that, then creating a society that goes against human nature is what creates the suffering. So I would say that what creates the suffering is we live in a completely unnatural society that actually tramples on what it means to be a human being, and that is the essence of suffering.

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The technological revolution that is taking place is threatening us with a unique phenomenon.

When robots and artificial-intelligence empowered machines pass the touring test, that is we reach a stage where we pick up the phone, you call a restaurant, and you cannot distinguish whether this is a machine speaking to you or a human being. Suddenly, you can imagine the impact this is going to have on employment throughout capitalism. For the first time in the history of capitalism, technology is destroying a lot more jobs than it is creating, so you are going to have a massive reduction in aggregate demand. Income will become even more concentrated in the hands of those who own the machines. But even they will suffer in the long term because the demand would not be there for the product of their machines.

We need to take the returns to capital, the returns to automation, and spread them throughout society. We need a universal basic income but not one funded by taxation. Because if you tax workers so that other workers don’t work and have a right to sit on their couch and watch television whereas others are working for them, it is going to turn one segment of the working class against another. So this is the fundamental distinction. Fund a universal basic dividend not from taxation, but from the returns of capital.

We must overturn the current narrative on life under capitalism. The current narrative is that we have private production of wealth which is then appropriated by the state for social purposes. In reality, our wealth production is collective. It is social and it is only then privately appropriated.

Take an iPhone. Unpick it. Open it. What do you find in it? You find a variety of technologies. Most of the technologies in there were provided by public funding. Every time you search on a search engine, you contribute to the capital of google. Their customers are producing value which is being sold to advertisers for exchange value to be returned directly to these corporations.

So basic income is a very simple way of ensuring that those who produce the value get a larger share of it. If you start thinking of it that way, then it is very easy to start thinking of basic income as a dividend – a dividend that goes to the collective that was responsible for producing the wealth.

The struggle we are going to have to carry hearts and minds will be an ethical one from those whose own sense of dignity responds against the idea of “something for nothing.”

We have to attack the narrative head-on. Basic income is about giving money to the undeserving. It is about giving money to the rich. It is about giving money to the surfers, the beach bums, the ones that we dislike. We must not be sidetracked simply by talking about good people getting money that they deserve. We should talk about undeserving people that get money courtesy of the fact that they are members of a society that is collectively producing wealth.

We will have to choose democratically and politically between a world in which the concentration of ownership over the newfound means of production is going to lead to a stagnating capitalism with intense inequality and a huge quantity of income for a decreasing, shrinking percentage of the population that lives behind barriers and electrified fences in privately policed communities and the rest in a cesspool of volatility, uncertainty, and social misery.

I have very deep belief in the capacity of human minds to work things out for themselves if they don’t have to live in terror.

Social democracy put forth the idea of a social safety net. Nets are good for catching people who are falling, but when you are caught in them it is sometimes very difficult to get out of them, sometimes very easy to be trapped. Think of basic income as a foundation, not a net. A floor on which to stand solidly and to be able to reach for the sky.

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My name is Greta Thunberg. I am 15 years old. I am from Sweden. I speak on behalf of Climate Justice Now. Many people say that Sweden is just a small country and it doesn’t matter what we do. But I’ve learned you are never too small to make a difference. And if a few children can get headlines all over the world just by not going to school, then imagine what we could all do together if we really wanted to.

But to do that, we have to speak clearly, no matter how uncomfortable that may be. You only speak of green eternal economic growth because you are too scared of being unpopular. You only talk about moving forward with the same bad ideas that got us into this mess, even when the only sensible thing to do is pull the emergency brake. You are not mature enough to tell it like is. Even that burden you leave to us children. But I don’t care about being popular. I care about climate justice and the living planet. Our civilization is being sacrificed for the opportunity of a very small number of people to continue making enormous amounts of money. Our biosphere is being sacrificed so that rich people in countries like mine can live in luxury. It is the sufferings of the many which pay for the luxuries of the few.

The year 2078, I will celebrate my 75th birthday. If I have children maybe they will spend that day with me. Maybe they will ask me about you. Maybe they will ask why you didn’t do anything while there still was time to act. You say you love your children above all else, and yet you are stealing their future in front of their very eyes.

Until you start focusing on what needs to be done rather than what is politically possible, there is no hope. We can’t solve a crisis without treating it as a crisis. We need to keep the fossil fuels in the ground, and we need to focus on equity. And if solutions within the system are so impossible to find, maybe we should change the system itself. We have not come here to beg world leaders to care. You have ignored us in the past and you will ignore us again. We have come here to let you know that change is coming, whether you like it or not. The real power belongs to the people.

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Inside our bodies are chemicals that are trying to get us to do things that are in the best interest of us. They are endorphins, dopamine, serotonin, and oxytocin.

Endorphins. Endorphins are designed to do one thing and one thing only. Mask physical pain. If you’re a runner, you’ve heard of a runner’s high. Basically what’s happening is when that runner’s out there, pushing their bodies harder than they’ve ever pushed before, they feel good. And then an hour later, they’re in pain for damage they caused to their muscles an hour before.

This is what endorphins are designed to do. They’re designed to mask physical pain.

Dopamine. Dopamine is the feeling that you’ve found something you’re looking for, or that you accomplished something you set out to accomplish. The whole purpose of dopamine is to make sure that we get stuff done. This is is why you must write down your goals.

There’s a biological reason for that. We’re very, very visually-oriented animals. You have to be able to see the goal for it to biologically stay focused. And every time we achieve a goal that makes us feel like we’re making progress to the vision we can see, we keep going and going and going until we achieve something remarkable. You have to be able to see it. Dopamine.

Dopamine comes with a warning. Dopamine is highly, highly, highly addictive. Here are some other things that release dopamine. Alcohol, nicotine, gambling, your cell phone. We can also get addicted to performance in our companies when all they do is give us numbers to hit, numbers to hit, numbers to hit. And a bonus you get, and a bonus you get, a bonus you get. All they’re doing is feeding us with dopamine, and we can’t help ourselves.

All we do is want more, more, and more. One of the things we know about a dopamine addict is they will do anything to get another hit, sometimes at the sacrifice of their own resources and their relationships. Dopamine is dangerous if it is unbalanced.

Serotonin is responsible for feelings of pride and status. This is why public recognition is very important. We are social animals, and we need the recognition of others.

This is why we have commencement for graduation. You could get an email that says, congratulations. You’ve fulfilled all the requirements for graduation. Enclosed, please print out the PDF of your diploma. Wouldn’t feel so good, right? So instead, we have a big ceremony to recognize the accomplishment. And in the audience, we put our family and our friends and our teachers, all of those in our tribe who have supported us and watched our backs as we’ve made it through. And then we show up on that day, and we go up on that stage, and we take our diploma. It feels great. We feel our status rise. We feel our pride go up. And here’s the best part about serotonin. At the exact moment that you took your diploma and you felt that surge of serotonin go through your body, your parents sitting in the audience also got a surge of serotonin, and also felt an intense pride watching you graduate. And this is what serotonin is trying to do. It is trying to reinforce the relationship between parent and child, coach and player, the caregiver and the one who is grateful for the support they are given.

The problem is, you can trick serotonin. We live in a materialist society, so we judge status very often in our country based on how much money you make. So any conspicuous display of wealth raises your status. This is why they put the logos on the outside. No good on the inside. Nobody can see them. You can actually feel your confidence rise when you put on the stuff because it’s showing this display of status. It feels great. The problem is, there was no relationship that was reinforced because of it. You tricked the system. That’s why we keep trying to accomplish things and accumulate more and more material goods, and yet we never feel successful, because there was no relationship. We tricked it. We gamed it.

Oxytocin. This is the best chemical of all. Oxytocin is the feeling of love and trust and friendship.

Oxytocin is that intense feeling of safety that someone’s got your back. There are multiple ways you can get oxytocin. One way to get it is physical contact. Hugging feels wonderful. When women give birth to children, huge surge of oxytocin in their body. This is what’s responsible for the mother-child bond.

Another way you can get oxytocin is through acts of human generosity. doing nice things for people that require that you sacrifice a little bit of time, a little bit of energy, something you will never get back.

Remember, our bodies are trying to get us to repeat behaviors that are in our best interest. And it’s making us feel good when we see or do acts of human generosity so that we will do them. In fact, the more oxytocin you have in your body, the more generous you actually become. It gets better than that. Lots of oxytocin in your body inhibits addiction. It boosts your immune system. It makes you healthier. That’s why happy people live longer. It’s why couples live longer. It increases our ability to solve problems. It increases our creativity. It’s really good for us. And it’s not addictive. It just feels great.

There’s one more chemical I haven’t told you about. Cortisol. Cortisol is the feeling of stress and the feeling of anxiety. Cortisol is designed to keep us alive. It is the first stage of fight or flight. It makes us paranoid. It makes all of our senses hyper attuned to look for danger. It injects glucose into our muscles to make us stiff and ready to go in case we need to fight or flight. It increases our heart rate like crazy.

Cortisol, to get all of that extra energy, it needs to shut down non essential systems so it shuts off things like growth. You don’t need your fingernails to grow at that moment. Shuts it off. The other thing it shuts off is our immune system. Don’t need it in that moment. The problem is, you’re not supposed to have cortisol in your system all the time.

One of the things cortisol does, it inhibits the release of oxytocin. Biologically, if you work in a high-stress environment where you don’t feel safe, you are biologically less empathetic and less generous.

Alcoholics Anonymous has been highly effective for decades. Alcoholics Anonymous knows that if you master all 11 steps, but not the 12th, you will drink again.The 12th step is the commitment to help another alcoholic.

Service. Service to another. Oxytocin wins. Serotonin wins. The more we look after each other, the safer we feel, the more we feel like we belong, and the more we will work together to confront the dangers outside.

The post The Chemistry Of The Good Life appeared first on Chris Agnos.

I am a very devoted gardener and there was a day about seven years ago, I was planting potatoes, and the bees were working on this tree – bumble bees just making this thing vibrate.

And the question I asked myself that afternoon, “What did I and that bumblebee have in common?” Both of us were disseminating of one species and not another and both of us thought we were calling the shots. I was deciding what kind of potato I was going to plant and that bee no doubt assumed that it had decide I am going for tha blossom, I’m going to get the nectar and then I am gonna leave.

We have a grammar that suggests that we are sovereign subjects in Nature. I plant the potatoes. I weed the garden. I domesticate the species. But that day it occurred to me “what if that grammar is nothing more than a self-serving conceit?” Because of course the bee thinks he’s in charge but we know better. We know that bee has been cleverly manipulated by that flower. It has evolved a very specific set of traits – color, scent, flavor, that has lured that bee in. The bee has been cleverly fooled into taking the nectar, and also picking up some powder on its leg and going off to the next blossom.

The bee is not calling the shots and I realized then I hadn’t either. I had been seduced by that potato and not another into spreading its genes, giving it a little more habitat.

Looking at the world from other species’ point of view is a cure for the disease of human self-importance. You suddenly realize that consciousness is really just another set of tools for getting along in the world. So while we have consciousness, tool-making, language, plants have bio-chemistry, and they have perfected that to a degree far beyond we can imagine.

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Few institutions would dare to encourage self-trust. Instead, most authorities teach us to become placid participants in various systems. They do not teach us to be happy. If anything, they underline the dangers of freedom and the importance of control.

Because these notions are so common—in our schools and churches, at the dinner table, and on the evening news—we begin to learn what we think is a universal truth: we must hold ourselves together. We learn that if we let ourselves go, we will become evil, lazy, savage. We learn the importance of pressure and restraint. We learn to repress our genuine desires because they’re incompatible with society’s expectations. We learn that if we are not doing well in a school subject or a self-improvement plan, then we are not pushing ourselves hard enough. We learn that people who succeed are examples of this kind of pushing. We learn that those who stop doing something only because it feels wrong are lazy.

Even people who oppose one institution’s dogma often end up buying into another’s. It is difficult to escape these teachings because they are so ubiquitous.

Humans are pattern-seeking, storytelling animals. From the world around you, you have learned which patterns to seek and which stories to tell. Your unconscious inner conversation has helped you mimic the people around you rather than understand yourself better. When you learn, from a young age, to fear, ignore, and suppress parts of your experience, you can only tell half the story. You remain an acquaintance to your reflection instead of an intimate friend.

To live how you feel is right takes the same effort as to live how you’re told is right. The work is the same. What is different is the reward. No amount of approval and no size of achievement can ever fill the space reserved for your opinion of yourself.

Of course, in the real world, we need both. We cannot live only by our own expectations. I wouldn’t suggest driving on the opposite side of the road simply because you “feel that it’s right.” Self-trust is not about rebellion, and it’s not about hedonism. It’s about realizing that all your experiences—your thoughts, your emotions, your dreams—are valid. They exist for a reason.

Accepting this reality does not require you to believe each thought, act on each emotion, or fulfill each dream. Quite the contrary, embracing each part of your experience gives you the ability to understand it, explore it, and integrate it.

Instead of labeling your emotions as problems to solve, you can see them as signals to interpret. Instead of judging your desires as shameful aberrations, you can learn to meet them in healthier ways. Instead of calling yourself critical names when you cannot build or break certain habits, you can explore your motivations.

You can become a student of yourself rather than always seeking a wiser teacher.

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If I could reveal anything that is hidden from us, it would be to reveal something that we have forgotten, that we used to know as well as we knew our own names, and that is that we live in a competent universe, that we are part of a brilliant planet, and that we are surrounded by genius.

Imagine designing spring. Imagine the timing, the coordination, all without top down laws or policies, this happens every year. There is lots of showing off, there is lots of love in the air. There are lots of grand openings. And the organisms I promise you have all of their priorities in order.

I have this neighbor and he came up to me. And there was this wasp’s nest that I had let grow in my yard and he asked me how I had made the house for those wasps because he had never seen one this big. And I told him the wasps actually made that.

But it occurred to me, how had he already believed the myth that if something was that well done, that we must have done it. How did he not know that we are not the first ones to build, we are not the first ones process cellulose, we are not the first ones to make paper, we are not the first ones to try to optimize packing space, or to waterproof, or to try to heat and cool a structure. We’re not the first ones to build houses for our young.

People are beginning to remember that other organisms – the rest of the natural world, are doing things very similar to what we need to do, but in fact are doing them in a way that have allowed them to live gracefully on this planet for billions of years.

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They herd us into classrooms where our minds are pressed into uniform shapes learning lessons which organize clean-cut, authorized thoughts into neat little boxes, then they herd us into cubicles where we turn gears to turn millionaires into billionaires. We go home and our minds are herded into advertising that makes us want to consume, news media that makes us believe our government is virtuous, and TV shows where paid actors play out scenes which convince us that capitalism is working out perfectly fine. Try to get away from the phoniness by talking to a real person, and it turns out they’ve been processed through the same system.

But the rewards of moving inside their painted lanes are so great, and the penalties for stepping outside them are so severe. The closest most ever come to authenticity is learning how to fake their way through society while secretly knowing it’s all bullshit.

But we also can’t keep living like this. This machine we keep fueling is filling the oceans with poison and filling the air with greenhouse gasses while killing the trees and driving humanity toward nuclear war. The lanes they have painted for us have formed a funnel into our own extinction.

So those lanes are necessarily going to have to become moot. All the societal structures which have been put in place to incentivize us toward producing and consuming are going to have to fall away. Either because society collapses or because we changed our ways quickly and drastically enough to avert disaster.  Either way, this march away from our own authenticity is about to end.

So why not start now? Why not take off that tight suit and stop acting out this masochistic charade?

Stop marching inside their lines to the beat of their drum. Stop relating to life using dead ideas you were handed by other people for the convenience of the powerful. Start dancing your own dance in your own way.

I don’t know how to dance your authentic dance, so I can’t tell you how to do that. But you do. You know. Underneath all the societal impositions and expectations and pressures and demands and fear and aversion and uncertainties, you know. The instructions are written upon the core of your being, and if you get sincerely curious about them, they will show themselves to you bit by bit, as needed.

Once you move past all the voices telling you you mustn’t and you shouldn’t, you will find that your own inner truth is so much wiser and healthier than society’s dead ideas about how we all ought to live.

Trust yourself to be bravely and defiantly true to the truth, clear-eyed rebel. I trust you. Life trusts you. You can trust yourself. Climb up over that slaughterhouse rail and go live a life uninhibited by the painted lanes of a servile society, for the good of our species and for the honor of your own majesty. Leave the cage they built for you in a ditch by the freeway and stride out boldly into uncharted lands beneath the open sky.

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It sure does seem that people care more about being right than they do about changing the world or being happy. On one level, we could trace it back to schooling and the rewards you get for producing the right answer, but I think it goes even deeper than that to the way that we raise children in this society, controlling them by withholding approval and shaming them or rejecting them for doing things that we don’t like.

Basically, if you don’t do what I like, then you are a bad boy. What is wrong with you? How could you? That shame then gets internalized over time as self-rejection because what a young mammal wants the most is to be accepted by the parent. young mammals are totally dependent on the mother, so abandonment is a death sentence.

So to control a child, you can leverage that primal fear of abandonment. And it works for a while, but really what you are doing is training children to be slaves to their fear, to their insecurity and to have this internalized self-rejection which drives a life long quest to like myself.

Well, how do I give myself permission to like myself? One way is to be right or to be good, to have a code of ethics that I adhere to, unlike that person because they voted for Donald Trump, but me and a few people in my tribe, let’s form a little internet group together so we can tell each other how right we are and how good we are and how we are on Team Good in this global war against Team Evil. Ahhh. Now I get to like myself. Now I approve of myself because this is such a primal need.

This is all conditional self-approval. It is not intrinsic, fundamental self-approval. So it only lasts as long as the “let’s talk about how right we are” party lasts, and then you need more and more and more and more. So as long as that is there, the thirst for validation will be endless.

People who are highly conditioned into self-rejection will be easy to manipulate because all you have to do is find someway to associate their self-approval with something that you want them to do.

Someone carrying a lot of self-rejection will inevitable turn it towards other people in the form of judgement, in the form of violence, in the form of rejecting the other. On one level, it is about elevating the self by rejecting the other. You get to feel good about yourself if you are dominating somebody else, if you are ridiculing somebody else.

Its kind of new territory for us to let go of the formula of punishment and shame and reward and conditional rejection and approval. Like what do we do when we are not going to do that anymore. It’s not like we just totally step back and let the kid do whatever he wants. How do children learn behavior? One way is to experience consequences of what they do that aren’t necessarily coming from you.

When my son was boy, I gave him a knife. I said, this knife is sharp. If you are not careful, you will cut yourself. Well, he wasn’t careful and he cut himself. What did he learn? Two things. One, he learned knives are dangerous. You could cut yourself. The other thing he learned is that Dad is pretty smart. Maybe I should listen to Dad.

Now if I had said “Matthew, don’t you dare touch that knife or you will be in big trouble.” and he touched it maybe and I hit him, he would have learned, “knives aren’t dangerous, Dad is dangerous.” And then in the future when he maybe used a knife and did not get cut, that second thing he learns is Dad full of shit. Just like when Dad said don’t climb up the slide backward, don’t climb on the jungle gym, don’t do this, don’t do that, its dangerous. Smoking pot will rot your brain, whatever. And then he he smokes pot, he does this, he does that, he’s ok, unless I caught him, unless he gets in trouble.

What our parenting does is it conditions people to think that if they don’t get in trouble, if they can evade the surveillance of authority, then there are no consequences.

One thing that my children learn is that they are trustworthy. Yeah, I trust you with this knife. I trust you with this bicycle. I trust you to go outside by yourself unsupervised. If you are constantly trying to prevent them from doing those things, your signaling you are not trustworthy.

To heal this wound of self-rejection is really a profound undertaking and, as it heals, you become less able to be manipulated. You become better able to serve a mission that is not the mission of looking good to yourself and others, but it is the mission of actually creating a change in the world.

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