An alternative to the failed method of semi-structured Interviewing in Business Storytelling Research: The self-correcting storytelling conversation

A version of this blog post has been accepted to appear in

Business Storytelling and the ‘Storytelling Science’ of Self-Correcting Research’. Accepted Aug 12 2019 LJRMB London Journal of Management and Business | Vol:19 | Issue:2 | Compilation: 1.

When it does appear, this post will be removed

 

Bury semi-structured interviewing as a failed business storytelling methodology and start doing ‘storytelling science’ of self-correcting storytelling interviewing

Antenarrative blogpost  by David M. Boje, Aug 1 2019

It is time to bury semi-structured interviewing as a failed business storytelling and social science methodology.The Hawthorne Studies were transformed, when in July of 1929, after 1600 interviews, they halted the project, and changed their interviewing method from semi-structured and structured interviews they had called the ‘direct approach to questioning’ to the new ‘indirect approach’ in which people told their accounts and stories, without interruption, without the interviewer trying to herd the [storyteller] back so some a priori topics and sub-topics (Roethlisberger, Dickson, Wright, & Pforzheimer: 1939: 203).  The indirect approach to what we (Boje & Rosile, 2019 in this book) now call ‘conversational storytelling’ was found to produce less social desirability effects. Instead of semi-structured interviews, the psychologists and psychoanalysts recommended a purposive conversation.

We (Boje & Rosile, 2019 in prep) propose an alternative to semi-structured interviewing. Our alternative a way of doing a ‘storytelling science’ methodology called, “self-correcting induction” rooted in the work of Charles Sanders Peirce (1933-1937, 5.580, which hereafter means Volume 5, section #580, boldness ours): “In an induction we enlarge our sample for the sake of the self-correcting effect of the induction.”  Just before (5.579) Peirce amplifies his enthusiasm, “So it appears that this marvelous self-correcting property of Reason, which Hegel made so much of, belongs to every sort of science, although it appears as essential intrinsic, and inevitable only the highest type of reasoning, which is induction.” (p. 50 Boje & Rosile in draft of this book you are reading).

What does all this mean to do storytelling conversational interviewing?

1. It has to be a back and forth, or its an interrogation
2. It has to be dialogical or it’s reducing of dialogism to monological narrative fallacy
3. It has to be dialectical, not just TAS narrative-counternarrative explorations in the interviews, if that is even possible, but the N of N dialectic of multiplicity ensembles
4. It has to be not just Induction, but include Abduction and Deduction.

In each self-correcting phase of storytelling science, there is a cycle of Abduction-Induction-Deduction. Each storytelling conversational interview begins with Abductions that are explored in the interview with Induction inference inquiry. Either form the getgo are after the first cycle, there is Deduction from theories and from theorizing, and adjustments and new Abduction, then second cycle, more Induction, and in each cycle of self-correcting.

It is important because it is in Volume 5 section 580 that Peirce actually uses the term ’self-correcting effect of the induction.”  That said, it is only one part of the triad that Peirce is developing in his writing. By that I mean the cycle of abduction-induction-deduction, and includes four tests. Self-correcting ‘storytelling science’ conversational interviews involve enacting from 1 to 4 tests: (Boje & Rosile, p. 10):

“1.    Refutation test of self-reflexivity conversations,

2. Critical cross-disciplinary conversations with others,
3. Understanding scalability processes of nature, and
4. Doing experiments and practice interventions to get closer to solutions to super wicked water and climate changes ushering in more and more crises are larger and larger scales.”

The four tests (as needed) are done in each cycle of self-correcting storytelling science. It is not the usual gather a bunch of interviews then transcribe them, and come up with a theme analysis to generate a typology. Rather, it’s a back-and-forth storytelling sharing, where you actually write down your Abductive hypotheses BEFORE the storytelling conversation (or participative immersion or experiment or intervention) and then do the Inductive inquiry of the co-sharing storytelling (back-and-forth), and Deductions from theory to local come BEFORE or AFTER each round of conversational interviews. It is therefore inadequate to stick to a protocol of semi-structured questions, since the theory assumptions (deductions), the inquiry (induction) and the propositional assumptions (abductions) change from round to round. The point we are making is to write it down, write out the abductions-inductions-deductions as you go, not post hoc, after-the-fact.For Popper what Peirce calls self-correcting is termed ‘trial and error’ of the scientific method, so we arrive closer to the truth (Popper, 1963: 318).

Keep in mind, semi-structure interviewing is not dialogical, it is interrogation, and it’s also not dialectical. To become dialogical and dialectic means doing ‘conversational interviewing’ where both parties are sharing stories, challenging stories, co-creating stories, in a back-and-forth, two-way exchange, not an interrogation ritual.

The dialogical (polyphony, stylistic, chronotopic, architectonic in Bakhtin, see Boje 2008 on this) is Bakhtin’s work. The four dialogisms are not separate. To have dialogical in a ‘conversation’ means recognition of the difference between what Bakhtin calls the narrative that he says is ‘always monological’ and the [living] story, which is always ‘dialogical.’ And there are the four kinds of dialogical relations in storytelling (polyphony, stylistic, chronotopic, architectonic).  They are entangled and inseparable in real life.

The dialogical is not independent or severed from the dialectical in storytelling conversation interviews, or in the semi-structured interviews.

The dialectical has several forms.  In all kinds of interviewing there are narratives in dialectical relation to counternarratives. This first dialectic is well known as thesis-antithesis-synthesis (TAS). The TAS interviewer has their starting narratives (implicit & explicit, many taken-for-granted) and tersely-told (Boje, 1991) in the questions posed, the inner dialogue, the body language, etc.).  The TAS semi-structured interviewer has an agenda of main questions, topics, follow-up, and probe questions. Each word, each terse construction of a question is embedded in the questioner’s dominant narrative (though much of it is unstated, yet constituted just the same).  The interviewee in TAS encounter with a questioner is trying to fathom the desired response being sought, and dodging the questions in order to embed their own counternarratives. Have you ever noticed people divert from the semi-structured interview protocol, and then the interviewer brings them back to the agenda topics. There is a grand assumption that synthesis between the interviewer and interviewer is resulting from effective communication. We know from the results of the Hawthorne studies that semi-structured interviews result in socially desired response, in interviewees withholding their truthing, their personal experience living stories, and instead obfuscate, dodge, deflect, and just keep silent about that so going on. That is why Hawthorne study brought in psychoanalysts and psychologists to assess all this, and recommended what we are now calling ’storytelling conversational interviews’ the back and forth.  My point in the first dialectic, is that it breaks down, and there is no synthesis, except in the mind of the interviewer, who writes up the transcripts, doctors the interpretation toward their own agenda, and tells a narrative different from the the interviewees (withheld) counternarrative. No synthesis as Adorno stresses in his book. Adorno, T. W. (1973). Negative dialectics, trans. EB Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1973).

The second form of dialectic is difficult to comprehend. It’s the ’negation of the negation’ (N of N) and is developed by Hegel, then redeveloped by Heidegger (1962, Being & Time) and by Sartre (1960).  Sartre, J. P. (1960). Critique of dialectical reason, vol I, theory of practical ensembles. London: New Left Review.  Notice that in the subtitle is the term practical ensembles. Sartre is critiquing Marxian dialectic (TAS) for ignoring the N of N dialectic processes.  Instead of splitting into a thesis and antithesis (or narrative and counternarrative) the N of N dialectic starts with ‘multiplicities’ and what Grace Ann and I call ‘ensembles of multiplicities.’  I try to develop this in Boje (2019). Boje, D. M. (2019). Organizational Research: Storytelling in Action. Routledge and in the text not yet published with Grace Ann. Boje and Rosile doing storytelling science with self-correction method (title not final) storytelling science of self-correcting storytelling conversations

Figure 2: Is from Boje & Rosile (2019, in prep) showing a sampling of a few of ways Sartre conceives of ensembles of multiplicities

If Hegel, Heidegger, and Sartre are onto something, then TAS dialectic by splitting thesis from antithesis and hoping for synthesis is too gross a move, and misses the N of N dialectic where I think that antenarrative processes are pre-constitutive of both narrative and story. Antenarrative works in the ensemble of diverse sorts of multiplicities. See above figure that gives a sampling of how Sartre uses ensemble in so many different ways.

Figure 1 is from essay Lundholt, M. W., & Boje, D. (2018). Understanding Organizational Narrative-Counter-narratives Dynamics: An overview of Communication Constitutes Organization (CCO) and Storytelling Organization Theory (SOT) approaches. Communication and Language at Work, 5(1), 18-29.

Above are dialectic (TAS) and dialogical processes together in the storytelling arena, without mention that negation of the negation (N of N) that is also part of the storytelling patterns.

Self-correcting ‘storytelling science’ is from work of C.S. Peirce and Karl Popper and several others listed below.  After a lot of reading of all the volumes of Peirce, I came up with this summary, which is extracted from p. 50 (Boje & Rosile):

“We propose a way of doing a storytelling methodology called, “self-correcting induction” from the work of Charles Sanders Peirce (1933-1937, 5.580, which hereafter means Volume 5, section #580): “In an induction we enlarge our sample for the sake of the self-correcting effect of the induction.” Just before (5.579) Peirce examples his enthusiasm, “So it appears that this marvelous self-correcting property of Reason, which Hegel made so much of, belongs to every sort of science, although it appears as essential intrinsic, and inevitable only the highest type of reasoning, which is induction.” (p. 50 Boje & Rosile book in process).

 

It is important because it is in Volume 5 section 580 that Peirce actually uses the term ’self-correcting effect of the induction.”  That said, it is only one part of the triad that Peirce is developing in his writing. By that I mean abduction-induction-deduction, and includes four tests. Self-correcting ’storytelling science’ conversational interviews involves enacting from 1 to 4 tests: (Boje & Rosile, p. 10):

 

“1.     Refutation test of self-reflexivity conversations,

2. Critical cross-disciplinary conversations with others,
3. Understanding scalability processes of nature, and
4. Doing experiments and practice interventions to get closer to solutions to super wicked water and climate changes ushering in more and more crises are larger and larger scales.”

 

For Popper what Peirce calls self-correcting is termed trial and error of the scientific method we arrive closer to the truth (Popper, 1963: 318).

 

“We propose, a self-correcting abduction-induction-deduction semiotics, to get closer to approximations of ‘true’, knowing we are never arriving at ‘absolute truth’ because of our own fallibilism” (Boje & Rosile,2019 in prep to publish,  p. 8).

 

Quoting Boje & Rosile, pp. 8-9, boldness ours): “Self-Correcting ‘storytelling science’ with several metaphysical variations of dialectic, anti-dialectic, dialogic, antidialogic, antenarrative, anti-narrative from these sources:

• Paulo Friere’s (1970/2000) oppositions of dialectical and anti-dialectical with dialogical and anti-dialogical
• David Boje’ (2011) ‘antenarrative’ and ‘anti-narrative’ and colleagues’ (Boje ed. 2011; Boje & Sanchez, Eds., 2019a, 2019b; Boje, Mølbjerg Jørgensen, 2018) antenarrative and anti-narrative notions and implications for ‘quantum storytelling’ (Boje, 2014; Boje & Henderson, 2014; Henderson & Boje, 2016; Boje, 2016a; Boje, Svane & Gergerich, 2016)
• Mikhail Bakhtin’s (1981, 1990, 1993) anti-dialectical approach to several dialogisms (Boje, 2008):

1. Polyphonic
2.      Stylistic

iii.     Chronotopic

1. Architectonic

• Charles Sanders Peirce’s (1933-1937) ‘self-correcting’ semiotics of triadic of Abduction-Induction-Deduction (Boje, 2014)
• Gilles Deleuze’s (1990, 1991, 1994, 1997; with Guattari 1987, 1994) anti-dialectics and retheorizing Bergson’s (1960, 1988) multiplicities as assemblages of intensive, extensive and virtual multiplicities (Boje, 2019b)
• Karl Popper’s (2008) ‘zigzag’ of scientific method in the dialectical (thesis-antithesis-synthesis) problem solving to get closer to correct solution without falling into inductive fallacy in a moral ontology of middle ground between pessimism (Marxism) and optimism (positivism), and ‘Metaphysical Realism’
• Henri Savall and colleagues’ ‘socio-economic’ approach of dialectics (triadic of Peircean ‘abduction-induction-deduction’ and qualimetrics (triadic of qualitative-quantitative-financial) in moral ontology of socially responsible capitalism (Savall, Peron, Zardet, & Bonnet, 2018; Boje, 2018a)
• Hannah Arendt’s (1978) series of dialectic cycles of thesis-antithesis-synthesis that become spiral of self-correcting
• Jean-Paul Sartre (1960/2004) dialectics of ‘negation of the negation’ in a practical ensemble of multiplicities as applied by Rosile, Boje, and Claw (2018) to ensemble leadership
• Judith Butler’s dialectics of ‘negation of the negation’ as a way of undoing gender, and as applied by Riach, Rumens, and Tyler (2016) to Boje’s (2001, 2008) ‘antenarrative’ and use of ‘anti-narrative interviewing method’ applied to Butler’s (2005) giving account of oneself and (2004) undoing gender

Slavoj Žižek’s (2012) dialectics of ‘negation of the negation’ as a way to resurrect Hegelianism in relation to the Lacanian psychoanalytic.”

Next Table p. 31, from Boje & Rosile (2019, in prep):

Table 1: Conscientização and relation of anti-dialectical and anti-dialogical to their opposite with conversational storytelling

	Anti-Dialectical	Dialectical
Anti-Dialogical	Semi-structured interviews reduce concrete to the abstract confirmation of themes & subthemes.   It is the crisis Western Ways of Knowing (WWOK)	Not listening to the Other Polemical   WWOKers not entering space of co-sharing and co-inquiry   IWOKers remaining voiceless
Dialogical	Domesticated dialectic   Listening without co-inquiry Not braiding conversations between WWOK and IWOK   Disappearance of social structure and social conditions co-inquiry	Conversational storytelling Conscientização Co-sharing Co-inquiry Double movement of dialectical and dialogical Māori kōrero Indigenous way of knowing (IWOK) ‘Native Science’ Freeing the Pedegogy of both oppressor and oppressed

 

What does all this mean to do storytelling conversational interviewing?

 

5. It has to be a back and forth, or its an interrogation
6. It has to be dialogical or it’s reducing of dialogism to monological narrative fallacy
7. It has to be dialectical, not just TAS narrative-counternarrative explorations in the interviews, if that is even possible, but the N of N dialectic of multiplicity ensembles
8. It has to be not just Induction, but include Abduction and Deduction.

In each self-correcting phase of storytelling science, there is a cycle of Abduction-Induction-Deduction. Each storytelling conversational interview begins with Abductions that are explored in the interview with Induction inference inquiry. Either form the getgo are after the first cycle, there is Deduction from theories and from theorizing, and adjustments and new Abduction, then second cycle, more Induction, and in each cycle of self-correcting.

Actually it’s that there are both dialectic and dialogical relational storytelling discourses (interdiscursivities) in the phenomenon. Being dialogical is being conversational storytelling, by sharing your own accounts, not just interrogation. Both dialectic (Sartre) and dialogical (Bakhtin) have what Peirce has called self-correction, and can be done with triadic of abduction-induction-deduction in series of refutation tests.

We cannot arrive at absolute truth, but can get closer than the usual relative social constructivism of semi0structured interviewing by engaging in relational process ontology and the method of self-correcting storytelling science in doing conversational interviewing, in multiple rounds, recording our abduction-induction-deduction cycle understanding, as we go, instead of after-the-fact.

References

Adorno, T. W. (1973). Negative dialectics, trans. EB Ashton (New York: Continuum.

Boje, D. M. (2019b). Organizational Research: Storytelling In Action. London/NY: Routledge. has 10 Relational process ontology approaches All 10 are 4th wave alternatives

Boje, D.M and Rosile, G.A. (2019 in process). Doing storytelling science of self-correction as an alternative to semi-structured interviewing See draft at https://www.dropbox.com/sh/bd297r9f6lhgjeh/AAChF7KdZH7hvz3aGIySrTJwa?dl=0

Lundholt, M. W., & Boje, D. (2018). Understanding Organizational Narrative-Counter-narratives Dynamics: An overview of Communication Constitutes Organization (CCO) and Storytelling Organization Theory (SOT) approaches. Communication and Language at Work, 5(1), 18-29.

Peirce, C. S. (1931-1935, 1958). Collected papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. [Volumes I–VI, ed. by Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss, 1931–1935, Volumes VII–VIII, ed. by Arthur W. Burks, 1958, quotations according to volume and paragraph.]. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Popper, Karl R. (1963). Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Roethlisberger, F. J., Dickson, W. J., Wright, H. A., & Pforzheimer, C. H. (1939). Western Electric Company. Management and the worker: an account of a research program conducted by the Western Electric Company, Hawthorne Works.

https://davidboje.com/vita for more books and articles

https://davidboje.com/quantum for the ANNUAL STORYTELLING CONFERENCE IN LAS CRUCES NEW MEXICO

 

Dark Side of Business Storytelling Discourses: Implications for United Nations Actually Meeting Sustainable Development Goals

This is part II of my post on Dark Side of Business Storytelling Discourses.

I want to combine storytelling with discourse because they are inseparable, thoroughly entangled, and cannot be dissevered. My solution is to look at how storytelling (narratives & stories) are constituted by what I call antenarratives (what comes before narratives & stories, and the various ‘bets on the future’). Right now the business storytelling ‘bet on the future’ is that the status quo scenario of business-as-usual will resolve the situation of Sixth Extinction (Boje, 2019a) and there is some kind of magical Planet B from which to get more fresh water as the global warming on Planet A, leaves it too dry to support most humans, especially poor and minority humans, and most other species as well. So what if the 1% survives the rise in temperature beyond 2 degrees Centigrade, or even finds a shelter from 4 or 6 degrees. Most coastal areas will have sea rise, and their fresh water aquifers will urn brackish, with the rising temperatures, more evaporation, but are retention of it in the vapor atmosphere, which means less rainfall, and when it does its storms and flash flooding. I life in the desert and I hear we had 15 inches of rain a year when we moved here in 1996, but now there is 10 inches, and next year less than that as the global warming continues.

I am focusing on the water catastrophes that are entangled with global warming. Water is life, and we humans can only live threes days before our organs shut down, and then we die.  You might think that is the dark side of storytelling, buy you’d be wrong. The dark side is how business storytelling does not tell it like it is, and instead tells unrealistic stories of how economy growth can keep happening with various sustainability development scenarios. The problem is continued economy growth is incompatible with sucking the planet dry of its water and other natural environment capacities to support life on Earth.

There are three peak water crises (renewable, non-renewable, & ecological peaks)  that Circular Economy and Triple Bottom Line (3BL) are blind too. My storytelling discourse research finds this is because we in the business school have reduced deep ecology to a watered-down, shallow approach known as ‘corporatized environmentalism’ that promises continued economy growth is compatible with continued sustainable development. The fallacy of the circular economy is it does not account for the fact that the small gains in recycling and reducing in the circular economy are grossly insufficient to deal with the outcomes of growing and expanding the circular economy each year, thereby increasing the CO2 emissions making it impossible to meet the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Figure 1: The Three Peak Water Events that Circular Economy is Not Accounting for Adapted from Boje and Mølbjerg Jørgensen 2018

 

The fallacy of Triple Bottom Line (3BL) is it assumes that there is or can be equality between Profit, Planet, and People metrics (Boje, 2016).

The United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) have a narrative expectation of transformation, how the future of life on Earth will unfold, if and only if, CO2 emissions are contained so that global warming does not change the hydrological cycle. This overarching narrative of the UN SDGs is presented in gray.

Figure 2: The Overarching Narrative of the United Nations attempts to avert Apocalypse Doomsday Scenarios source https://swed.bio/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/2.-Introduction.pdf

To avoid the catastrophes of the Sixth Extinction, various turgets and indicators have to be met by 2030, or the capacity of nature’s systems to support life on Earth will deteriorate.

All United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are Not Created Equal.

We need to deconstruct the ways economy SDGs Trump (yes its a pun) the society and the biosphere SDGs. How to relate the 17 UN SDGs to Business storytelling discourses. First sort the 17 UN SDGs into Biosphere, Society, Economy, and Partnering relationships. You will notice without the Biosphere there is no society and no economy.

BIOSPHERE is telling a story of Earth’s capacity to support life

SOCIETY has problems and issues that are entangled with the life capacity of the biosphere. These are all important, but it takes Biosphere to support life.

ECONOMY growth is impacting not only society (the socio-economic nexus) but depleting the biosphere capacity to support life of all species. It’s not all about the economy. It takes a functioning Biosphere to support an economy.

PARTNERING between the biosphere, society, and economy is necessary to keep the transformation from exceeding tipping points

Yes, partnering between organizations is important to bring about changes in society SDGs and in Economy SDGs. However, without partnering with the Biosphere, living and doing economy within planetary capacity limits, it’s game over. There is No Planet B where we can draw more water, get clean air, and soil to grow food. Humans are not the only species. We are one among millions of species, all with rights to water.

References

Boje, D. M. (2016). Critique of the Triple Bottom Line. Pp. 181-198 in Grace Ann Rosile (ed.) Tribal Wisdom for Business Ethics. Bingley, UK: Emerald Group Publishing Limited.

Boje, D. M. (2019a). Global Storytelling: There is No Planet B. Singapore/London/NY: World Scientific.

Boje, D. M. (2019b). Organizational Research: Storytelling In Action. London/NY: Routledge.

Boje, D. M. (2019c, in process). Storytelling Interventions in Global Water Crisis.Singapore/London/NY: World Scientific.

 

What is the dark side of business ‘storytelling discourse’? Circular Economy, Triple Bottom Line…

Blog post by David M. Boje July 26 2019, revised July 30 2019, in preparation for keynote to the Dark Side of Communication conference, August in Denmark.

What is the dark side of business ‘storytelling discourse’? In this presentation I want to bring business storytelling and critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 1992, 1995, 2005) together in order to understand why there are inadequate preparations in advance to avoid the 97% consensus among climate scientists about what will happen by 2100 if major reforms to capitalism are not enacted in the next decade. Storytelling (narrative and story) have been treated as a mode or element of discourse (Keenoy, Oswick & Grant, 1997; Oswick, Keenoy, Grant, & Marshak, 2000). I would like to suggest that storytelling is inseparable from discourse (Boje, 2014), so I will use the term ‘storytelling discourse’. My purpose is to get at what Grove-White (1993) calls ‘moral discourse’ of environmentalism in technological society, in particular the corporatized environmentalism discourse of the business college, I propose has colonized universities, and the entire ‘sustainability development’ movement with they mythic notion, making the economy circular, will avert global warming and as planet heats up, water heats up, and the ecological peak water event happens (which I will explain as I go).

We are in an existential crisis, but being colonized and co-opted to be bystander storytelling discourse instead of taking the necessary climate action. In 1962 Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring, is a good example of the power of the dark side of storytelling discourse. She tells a story of the harmful effect of chemical, pesticides, including DDT polluting the land and water, resulting in contamination of the food chain, so there is a die-off.  The storytelling discourse brought about action, the Clean Water Act in 1972, the Clean Water Act in 1970, and the Resource Recovery and Conservation Act in 1976. But that was before the advent of corporatized environmentalism.

But something is wrong. We are not getting the climate action requisite to the climate science 97% agreement that global warming will be causing some major catastrophes if we stay on the business-as-usual course of inaction. We are colonized into inaction, distracted in 2019 by all the corporatized environmentalism, its storytelling discourse colonizes the ecological discourses, by quite shallow approaches to sustainability development, by conveying a growing number of climate myths that derail and deny the research results of climate science. Leading the way is the colonizing force of business storytelling discourses of the business schools I have work in 33 plus years, makes it seem as if continued economic growth is compatible with ‘sustainable development’ as if there is a planet B. I write about all this as Storytelling in the Global Age: There is No Planet B (Boje, 2019a, just published July 2019).

There is no planet B to bring freshwater to a dry planet. Business storytelling in the Global Age is how corporatized ‘fake storytelling’ of shallow sustainable development keeps the status quo fossil fuel industries, the plastic water bottle industry, and the water commodification and privatization industries from making the needed changes to avoid Sixth Extinction. Business schools’ ‘storytelling discourses’ have thoroughly colonized the university, resulting in rampant ‘academic capitalism’, displaced ‘real news coverage’ with ‘fake news’, turned public attention away from deep ecology, and co-opted the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), defanging them, so it is unlikely that CO2 emissions will be reduced in time to avoid Sixth Extinction, a prediction that most of humankind and most other species will die off from the global warming, its climate change, and of thirst in peak water crises (Boje, 2019c, in process).

With the predictable global warming, we are ill-equipped in business schools to prepare for when water is more valuable to business than oil. In other words, the neoliberal free market capitalism discourse and ideology of ‘business storytelling’ discourses (see https://davidboje.comfor Business Storytelling Encyclopediaproject), colonizes a Fake Storytelling (see https://truestorytelling.org) that has co-opted the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals  (SDGs) with Corporatized Narrative Promises of Triple Bottom Line, Tale tales of Circular Economy, Schemes of Cap-And-Trade in Carbon Emissions, Financed Myths of ‘Climate Denial’ to slow down ‘Climate Science’, all in-order-to keep ‘Fracking Oil’, and prepare for when Water is more valuable than Oil, by ‘commodifying and privatizing water as if there is a Planet B, and the Sixth Extinction is not already unfolding here and now. It’s not just peak oil, and fracking and climate denial to keep the fossil fuel industry from accepting its complicity and accountability.

There is another set of peaks happening besides being on the downslope of peak oil. We are not just in global warming, our business practices have created three peak water crises. Our renewal water is on the decline, so is our non-renewable water, and the ecological water in the water cycle itself, more evaporation occurs, but too much of it stays in the atmosphere in vapor, and less falls to earth to replenish our thirst and the thirst of all living species for water.

Figure 1: 3 Peak Water Catastrophes that Circular Economy is Blind to – Adapted from Boje and Mølbjerg Jørgensen 2018

My Storytelling Awakening in the Belly of the Beast Long long ago in a 1970s university far far away, I was an ‘organization and environment‘ major. In all the Ph.D. course I took, the ‘environment’ meant ‘other organizations‘ and had nothing at all to do with climate change and peak water shortages in the biosphere, or Gaia the living planet. I was unaware of how the discourses of natural environment, ecology, and biosphere had been purged from the business schools. My ‘organization and environment’ became combined with an interest in ‘storytelling’, as I moved to my first job at UCLA in 1978. There too, environment meant other organizations and had nothing to do with the biosphere in the Anderson School of Management. Then, at Loyola Marymount where I earned tenure and environment became a bit more, still pretty shallow, something to do with recycling, reducing, and reusing, but nothing about the living planet or planetary carrying capacity for living species. Students were amazing. They actually volunteered to in the university recycling program, turning plastic bottles starting to proliferate in the 1980s into T-shirts. The Academy of Management was a great bystander instead of heeding the call to do something about the current and coming eco-crises. The bright exception was becoming a cosigner for the formation of the Organizations And Natural Environment (ONE) division of the Academy of Management (AOM). It was an anchor for me, and place of awakening from the stupefied Business School reductionism of ecology to just ‘other organizations.’ I was also a co-signer to initiate Critical Management Studies (CMS) division formation. It gave space to faculty and students studying ecological crises such as Bhopal (2–3 December 1984) a disaster at Union Carbide India Limited. Here is where critical discourse and critical storytelling came together for me, in a critical storytelling discourse paradigm. The Bhopal gas tragedy of December 2nd 1984, brought out the need to change the bystander AOM paradigms. Bhopal killed 3,787 people. Sessions I attended in ONE and CMS in the 1980s gave me hope.  Here is an excerpt from the ONE constitution.To much of the AOM, ‘environment’ still meant just other stakeholder organizations.  It’s exciting to see ONE turn from ‘environment’ as just other organizations, to the ‘natural environment’:

“The Organizations and the Natural Environment Division is dedicated to the advancement of research, teaching, and service in the area of relationships between organizations and the natural environment … The pollution of air, water, and land, and the depletion of both renewable and non-renewable resources as a result of actions of formal organizations are the most obvious manifestations of these interactions and relationships” (ONE Division’s Constitution, AOM).

 

1979-1996, some 15 years in Los Angeles and with all its earthquakes, mud slides, fires, and smog, It dated on me that something weird was happening, but did not tie it to the courses I taught. 1996 I moved to the Chihuahuan Desert in New Mexico, which, where I live only gets 10 inches of water a year, Rio Grande river that since the 1990s does not have water in our lower reach during the hottest months, yet climate denial is in the storytelling discourses of the business school and the university. I have learned to appreciate the survival skills of the rattlesnakes, tarantulas, horny toads, scorpions, and centipedes of the Chihuahuan Desert.  I became part of the sustainability movement on the New Mexico campus, putting forward the senatorial motion for an Office of Sustainability and a Sustainability Council, I chaired twice. Our vision included developing a School of Sustainability. We got a Bronze, then earned a Gold Star from STARS twice.  Yet, I kept noticing that beyond a deteriorating, out-of-date, and stalled recycling of plastic bottles, aluminum cans, and some cardboard and paper, the bystander storytelling discourse of business school had infected, colonized, and dominated the academic capitalism of the university. Yes, pockets of climate science, but not enough climate action to slow the global warming or prevent the death by thirst from the peak water crises.

The Dark Side of Academy of Management Storytelling Discourses

I took a look at recent and current Management (Mgt), Organizational Behavior (OB), Organizational Development (OD), and Critical Management (CM) texts. I did a pilot sample of texts I had in my personal library. Clearly a random sample is needed. Here are my preliminary findings. I found in the Index of each book, there is still not that much about climate change or global warming, and nothing about the impact of increasing global temperature on the water cycle (see Table 1). Most mainstream texts in these disciplines do not address ‘natural environment’ at all, and some have a single or a few references to sustainability, ecology is here and there, but no full coverage of climate change or global warming in any of the texts I sampled.

Table 1: Comparison of ‘Natural Environment’ Coverage in OB, OD, OT, and Mgt textbooks

TEXTS	‘Natural Environ-ment’	‘Ecology’ ‘Environ-mental issues’	‘Sustain-ability’	‘Climate Change’	‘Global Warming’	All terms/ total pages %
Mgt: Exploring Mgt Schermerhorn & Backrach 5th ed. 2007	0	0	2	0	0	2/354 1.41%
OB: OB Robbins & Judge, 17th ed. 2017)	0	0	2	0	0	2/673 0.3%
OD1: Managing Change, Creativity & Innovation (Dawson & Andriopoulos 2011, 2nded.)	0	0	0	0	0	0/412 0.0%
OD2: Action Research Handbook (Reason & Bradbury 2008, 2nd ed.)	0	10	11	0	0	21/707 2.97%
OD3: Handbook of Organization Development, Cummings 2008)	0	3	2	0	0	5/676 0.74%
CM1: Mgt & Org: A Critical Text Linstead, Fulop & Lilley, 2009, 2nded.)	0	11	65	0	0	76/830 9.16%
CM2: Mging & Orgs, Clegg, Kornberger & Pitsis 2005)	0	0	3	0	0	3/540 0.56%

Key: Mgt= Management, OB= Organizational Behavior, OD = Organizational Development, CM = Critical Management

Looking at a count of the number of pages for all terms. One CM text (Linstead et al, 2009) had the most coverage in my non-random sample: 9.16% (76 out of 830 pages).

Figure 2: Comparison of Coverage of ‘Natural Environment’ and related terms in OB, OD, and CM textbooks

My interpretation (an abductive hypothesis for others to check out in a complete random sample), there is in  the mainstream texts in mgt OB and OD have less coverage than the Critical Management (CM2) text by Linstead et al. This is a skewed distribution, since with the exception of the CM2 and OD2 texts, there is hardly any coverage (a page or two, or none at all for OD1). Mgt celebrates Patagonia and Unilever for its sustainability goals.” Not in the index, I searched and found single sentence about water, global warming and climate change. Using online searches of the sampled texts needs to be done.  For example in the 2 pages on ‘sustainability’ in the Schermerhorn and Bachrach Mgt text: (p. 76) The BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is mentioned as a front-page issue, but Scherhorn and Bachrack explain” business practices pose risks, present and footer, to humankind and the natural environment. And it should prompt you to be concerned about the event to which we are abusing versus protecting, and consuming versus conserving, the world’s resources.”  On p 77 of the Mgt text, sustainability is presented “as a priority of the times, affecting all of us and all institutions of our society… the rights of both present and future generations as stakeholders of the world’s natural resources…”

“Water is becoming scarce and global warming and climate change are accelerating” (p. 77). While this is accurate, one sentence is not adequate to the challenges. The business Mgt and OB storytelling presents CEOs as the heroes, implementing sustainability goals.

It is presented is if it is possible to meet the “needs of customers and protect or advance the well-being of our natural environment” without any sense of contraction of how “harmony with nature” and “exploiting nature” can happen at the same time.

 

The OB text (Robbins & Judge) uses 3M corporation as a positive example of sustainability (1 of its 2 pages), but does not explain further. Nor is there any critique of 3M for its role in C8 (aka GenX) teflon pollution of the ground water near its plant, and the resultant medical health consequences of teflon chemical ingestion.

I will argue that Mgt and OB has much less coverage of global warming and the peak water crises unfolding, thereby preventing concerted climate action, and this is perpetrated by texts deploying the storytelling discourse of ‘corporatized environmentalism’ which puts students into a bystander role, rather than what Bakhtin (1993: 3) calls ‘moral answerability’ for being there in the once-occurrent eventness of Being with an ethical responsibility to intervene, to prevent tragedy (See Boje, 2008 for Bakhtin’s dialogism, and Boje 2008b for distinction between bystander [special] answerability and ‘moral answerability).

Has mainstream Mgt, OB, OD, and much of CM avoided its own moral answerability and complicity for climate change, global warming, and the hydrological cycle of planet Earth?  After all, none of the texts is tackling the topics of natural environment, climate change, or global warming, though there is critique of sustainability greenwashing in CM1.  Most (with the exception of CM1) are laudatory about corporate sustainability programs, or in Mgt text mention climate change and global warming as a sustainability goal of Unilever’s CEO.

CM1: Mgt & Org: A Critical Text Linstead, Fulop & Lilley, 2009, 2^nded.) Linstead, Fulop and Lilley (2009) in chapter 5 by Linstead and Banerjee  ask, “How does the natural environment impact a company’s business?” (p. 239). Linstead and Banerjee do some storytelling discourse, in a case of a transnational mining corporation. Rana Base returns from a European Union conference about some new environmental legislation that his mining company had worked hard to delay as long as possible. He returns to headquarters to find to his horror, the largest customer has returned $1.4 million product order because of ‘excessive packaging’ too much styrofoam and plastic. The customer wants to know about how much carbon is in the plastic and paper, and what is the company policy and strategy for natural resources, including an account of just where the wood for the packing crates is sourced. The case tells of Australian Aboriginal communities intensifying their protests of the mining operations, the discharges of effluents aristo the Pibara River are causing destruction of the water and will cost millions to create the waste water management, the emissions controls, to get the effluents under control. More and more environmental groups around the world are targeting the mining company, claiming water pollution, and asking tough questions about environmental strategies and practices. The case brings to the foreground the natural environment in which the transnational mining company is operating. It can no long play the bystander role, and its strategy of denial rhetoric is failing to persuade anyone.

In the next post I will address what can be done about business storytelling discourses colonizing the sustainable development goals of the United Nation’s attempts to keep humanity form dying of thirst in the Sixth Extinction.

References

Bakhtin, M. M. (1993). Toward a Philosophy of the Act. Written as unpublished notebooks written between 1919–1921, first published in the USSR in 1986 with the title K filosofii postupka; 1993 English V. Liapunov, Trans.; V. Liapunov & M. Holquist, Eds.). Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.

Boje, D. M. (2008a). Storytelling Organizations. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Boje, D. M. (2008b). 2008 Critical Theory Ethics for Business & Public Administration | Information Age Press.

Boje, D. M. (2014). Storytelling Organizational Practices: Managing in the quantum age. London: Routledge.

Boje, D. M. (2016). Critique of the Triple Bottom Line. Pp. 181-198 in Grace Ann Rosile (ed.) Tribal Wisdom for Business Ethics. Bingley, UK: Emerald Group Publishing Limited.

Boje, D. M. (2018a). Preface: “Global Capitalism is Unsustainable” for Savall, H., & Peron, Michel, Zardet, Veronique, & Bonnet, Marc. Socially Responsible Capitalism. London: Routledge. Citing from http://davidboje.com/vita/paper_pdfs/Preface Boje – After TLH editing Apr 14 2017.docx

Boje, D. M. (2018b). Seven True Storytelling Solutions to the Global Water Crisis. Proceeding paper for 8^thAnnual Quantum Storytelling Conference, December 13. Accessed Feb 9 2019 at http://davidboje.com/388/2018%20storytelling%20conference%20BOJE%20__%20True%20Storytelling%20of%20New%20Mexico%20Water.docx

Boje, D. M. (2019a). Global Storytelling: There is No Planet B. Singapore/London/NY: World Scientific.

Boje, D. M. (2019b). Organizational Research: Storytelling In Action. London/NY: Routledge.

Boje, D. M. (2019c, in process). Storytelling Interventions in Global Water Crisis.Singapore/London/NY: World Scientific.

Boje, D. M.; Mølbjerg Jørgensen, Kenneth. (2018). Making the future: the antenarrative challenge of sustainability for problem-based learning. Chapter for Learning Organization Handbook.

Fairclough, N. (1992) Discourse and Social Change. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Fairclough, N. (1995) Critical Discourse Analysis: The Critical Study of Language. London: Longman.

Fairclough, N. (2005) Discourse analysis in organization studies: The case for critical realism. Organization Studies, 26(6), 915-939.

Fairclough, N., and Wodak R (1997) Critical discourse analysis. In T. A. van Dijk (Ed.), Discourse as Social Interaction. London: Sage.

Grant, D., Hardy, C., Oswick, C. and Putnam, L. (2004) Handbook of Organizational Discourse.London: Sage.

Grove-White, R. B. (1993) Environmentalism: A new moral discourse for technological society? In K. Milton (Ed), Environmentalism: The View From Anthropology.London: Routledge, pp.18-30.

Keenoy, T., Oswick, C. and Grant, D. (1997) Organizational discourses: Text and context. Organization,4, 147-157.

Oswick, C., Keenoy, T., Grant, D. and Marshak, B. (2000) Discourse, organization and epistemology. Organization, 7(3), 511-512.

Parker, I. (1992) Discourse Dynamics: Critical Analysis for Social and Individual Psychology.London: Routledge.

Phillips, N. and Hardy, C. (2002) Understanding Discourse Analysis.Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Phillips, N., Hardy, C. and Lawrence, T. (2004) Discourse and institutions. Academy of Management Review, 29: 635-652.

Phillips, N. and Di Domenico, M. (2007). Discourse Analysis in Organizational Research: Methods and Debates.Chap 31 in David Buchanan and Alan Bryman (Eds.) Handbook of Organizational Research Methods 

Putnam, L. L., and Fairhurst, G. T. (2000) Discourse analysis in organizations: Issues and concerns. In F.M. Jablin and L. L. Putnam (Eds),The New Handbook of Organizational Communication: Advances in Theory, Research and Methods. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.

 

 

The Gaia PhD is about Storytelling Solutions to Climate and Water Before 6th Extinction is Inevitable

The Gaia PhDchangWebpage

Let’s create a new kind of university and a new society.  One that is about the living systems of living planet, ‘Gaia’.  Kenneth, Jens, and I are beginning the Gaia PhD.  Think of it as a different bet on the future than academic capitalism that has turned university education into just another corporatized commodity, and part of the climate denial machine. Think of Gaia PhD as a way to actually be interdisciplinary instead of insular silos. Or a way to work on solutions to global warming and changes to the water cycle. As the temperature of the planet warms from CO2 emissions, the water cycle shifts more vapor is held in the atmosphere, sea levels rise, ocean acidification takes place, there are both more droughts and more flash flooding.

I am a storytelling researcher. To do something about global warming and avert the Sixth Extinction, we will have to change the storytelling.  “There’s anywhere from 97% to 99% consensus among the world’s scientists studying this problem, that climate change is real and human caused” (Michael Mann). The climate denial storytelling machine is managing the narrative, so the politicians and the public deliver the myths about climate instead of the climate science research findings.

I am not convinced that we can wait for the US government to change its ways. Exxon has known since 1977 that the fossil fuel industries were causing global warming (source). It has spent 30 million in adverts promoting climate denial (source). Add to this what the Koch Brothers have spent: “Koch Family Foundations have spent $127,006,756 directly financing 92 groups that have attacked climate change science and policy solutions, from 1997-2017” (source).

Despite Exxon and Koch brothers denial machine, the climate scientists are in 97% agreement about global warming, about climate change resulting from industrial activity, much of it from fossil fuel emissions since the industrial revolution (source):

” A Skeptical Science peer-reviewed survey of all (over 12,000) peer-reviewed abstracts on the subject ‘global climate change‘ and ‘global warming’ published between 1991 and 2011 (Cook et al. 2013) found that over 97% of the papers taking a position on the subject agreed with the consensus position that humans are causing global warming” (IBID.). The Top 10 Climate Myths that Fossil Fuel Industries and Koch brothers use to manage the climate change narrative.

 

	Climate Myth	What the Science Says
1	“Climate‘s changed before”		Climate reacts to whatever forces it to change at the time; humans are now the dominant forcing.
2	“It’s the sun”		In the last 35 years of global warming, sun and climate have been going in opposite directions
3	“It’s not bad”		Negative impacts of global warming on agriculture, health & environment far outweigh any positives.
4	“There is no consensus”		97% of climate experts agree humans are causing global warming.
5	“It’s cooling”		The last decade 2000-2009 was the hottest on record.
6	“Models are unreliable”		Models successfully reproduce temperatures since 1900 globally, by land, in the air and the ocean.
7	“Temp record is unreliable”		The warming trend is the same in rural and urban areas, measured by thermometers and satellites.
8	“Animals and plants can adapt”		Global warming will cause mass extinctions of species that cannot adapt on short time scales.
9	“It hasn’t warmed since 1998”		Every part of the Earth’s climate system has continued warming since 1998, with 2015 shattering temperature records.
10	“Antarctica is gaining ice”		Satellites measure Antarctica losing land ice at an accelerating rate.

See all 197 myths and what climate scientists are telling us.

Why is the climate denial myth-making happening? To manage the narrative about climate change, to keep it a debate, rather than accepting the consensus among climate scientists. Why? Follow the money. The longer Exon and Koch brothers delate politicians from making policy changes to the status quo, the more money they make.

You can watch this YouTube to get a sense of where I live in New Mexico. We get 10 inches of rain. There is drought and flash flooding.

 YouTube

To Change the Course of History, Change the Storytelling. We can make new bets on the future. We can learn important lessons from Mother Nature.  

Few people in my community are harvesting the rain water. We live in a county that is too poor to take care of its roadways. Yes, we pay our taxes, but we have to take care of our own county roads. Our horse ranch has an arroyo running through it.

In lower left is more vegetation because it’s the lowest area on the property. An arroyo flows diagonally from upper right to lower left, then crosses Dunn Drive and heads on towards the city of Las Cruces. Another arroyo (Arroyo Seco), also a county road that is not maintained by anyone but volunteers runs from higher ground (the Organ Mountains) and to the city catchments.  The city cares for Dunn Drive north of Aldrich, but does not care for Dunn Drive because when it hits our address, it become county road (and is not maintained at all). There once was a 90 plus man down Dunn that had a tractor and would smooth out the bumps, but no one has seen him. Aldrich road from our home going a long city block to the west is also not maintained. Some dude owns a property on the land, and is refusing the city access on Aldrich, so that road is not maintained (you have to live here to understand how complex the rights to which agency of the government can do what or not). Across Dunn to the east is the Bureau of Land Management land, and city and county have not quite figured out who has jurisdiction.

In the foreground are photo voltaic that I installed, and in the background are ones we had professionally installed. I welded up the frames and dug the post holes for ones I installed. The systems produce enough electric that El Paso Electric pays us 100 to 200 dollars each month for our excess capacity.

I set up an observation post using some aluminum for shade I recycled from an old solar water heater system that got struck by lightning, frying the pumps along with the PV inverter (which we replaced).

To get some understanding of the growing gap between Gaia and humanity, especially in the US, I have begun to do some detailed observations, to gather antenarrative material. Antenarrative is the ‘stuff’ before, beneath, between, becoming, beyond both narrative and story forms, and it’s all the bets on our future. The status quo bet of the US government is that  western capitalism and academic capitalism are going to save us by carbon credits, privatizing city (municipal) water services and commodifying freshwater around the world. Some put their faith in the narrative called triple bottom line, while others favor a circular economy narrative, will answer the challenge of global warming.

 See Critique of Triple Bottom Line YouTube

The problem with the triple bottom line (profit, people, & planet) narrative is it is really just a profit strategy exploding people and planet. The problem I see with circular economy narrative, is it ignores its own growth trajectory. Circular economy is defined as an economic system aimed at minimizing waste and making the most of natural resources. That sounds ideal, until you stop to realize, economic systems keep growing requiring more and more natural resources (oil, gas, water) to sustain them.  Sorry to inform you. More recycling and reducing waste in the circular economy, is a circular narrative, a circular logic that is ignoring the realities of growth and greed.

What is Storytelling in 90 seconds (YouTube)

To change the future we need to change the storytelling about water and climate, and what must be done about it now.

The Extinction Rebellion is happening (join). Water warrior vigils are happening (Join ). People are rebelling, using peaceful protest and civil disobedience to change the storytelling about climate change.

 

The Dark Sides of Climate/Water Storytelling is Our Own Complacency

Antenarrative Blog Post by David M. Boje, July 19 2019

Our orgnizaitonal storytelling has many dark sides. These dark sides make us complacent. Climate and water are entangled in the global warming shift. I will therefore use the term climate/water here. Shifts in global average temperature affects freshwater, sea levels, and water wars between upstream and downstream. This is because seemingly minor shifts in global average temperature impact the water cycle as water moves from surface and significantly more is retained in atmosphere, and as ocean acidification, chemical pollution intensifies, and so on. Science is in almost unanimous agreement that global average temperature warming threatens the well-being of future generations of people, and the rest of life on the planet. Science is also in agreement that our current actions are too little too late to avert Sixth Extinction. This inaction is related to the dark sides of climate/water storytelling.

The are many dark sides in climate/water storytelling

It is too easy to ignore threats to climate and water that are not immediate: This dark side of climate/water storytelling is about how the human brain works. After millions of years of evolution, the cortex is alert to immediate threats, quick to signal the limbic hormones, and instruct the brain stream to put the body into one of the four F’s: fight, flight, freeze, or faint (see https://davidboje.com/Gaia). This dark side of our storytelling affects the remaining dark sides.

The Storytelling Organizations of Denial have Malfeasance and Malpractice: Peddling climate denial is easy because of how our evolutionary brain works. “Conservative politicians, corporate interests and their think tank sycophants have knowingly peddled climate denial for decades. This is straight-out malfeasance and malpractice in terms of political and research ethics” (https://www.cfr.org/report/global-climate-change-regime).

Our Western Life Styles in Late Modern Capitalism make us blind to the changes needed to avert Sixth Extinction: We produce and consume in capitalism in ways that are distance from nature. We live in an artificial world of consumerism and work in production systems that are unsustainable. Given our evolutionary brain circuitry and the climate denial lobby, our western life styles are stuck in addiction to the status quo, rather than active intervention.

The Business Storytelling is Humancentric instead of Posthumanist: “The dominant rhetoric might decry what global warming will do to human societies, but it rarely speaks of what it does and will do to the creatures and ecosystems with whom we share the earth. Pope Francis’ Ladauto Si is a sterling exception in this regard” (IBID). Being human centric, the dark side of water storytelling is the impact of our industrial civilization lifestyles on other species. Our organizational storytelling is spiciest, more humancentric than about how climate/water cycle changes affect all living species on the planet.

Our Climate/Water Crisis is Exponential Change, but our Storytelling is Linear: Linear storytelling has a beginning, middle, and end emplotment, but the complexity dynamics of climate/water changes are a multiplicity of forces with threshold (tipping point) and multifractal patterns (Boje, 2016: Boje & Henderson, 2014; Henderson & Boje, 2016).

At a Nation level, the Dark Side of Climate/Water Storytelling is Blaming the Victim: “Historically, the global north of industrialized nations (the United States and western Europe) has contributed most to global warming … The rich, Western, industrialized countries should share the largest burden not only for historical reasons, but because they are wealthy enough to absorb the costs for the long-term well-being of themselves and the global south” (https://theconversation.com/the-ethics-of-climate-change-what-we-owe-people-and-the-rest-of-the-planet-51785). Global north blames global south, while not changing global north consumer and production habits. Developing nations negotiating position seems more focused on better positioning the economy for the global stage, than it is in meeting its common if differentiated responsibilities (IBID).

The 1%-ers wealth-accumulation is at the expense of climate/water justice” “Climate justice refers to the disproportional impact of climate change on poor and marginalized populations, while climate equity refers to who should bear the burden of responsibility for addressing climate change” (https://www.cfr.org/report/global-climate-change-regime). Eight multi-billionaires have accumulated over half the wealth of the world (Boje, 2019a).

What are the Antenarrative ‘Bets on the Future?’

Bet 1 on 100 Years: “According to the American Meteorological Society, there is a 90 percent probability that global temperatures will rise by 3.5 to 7.4 degrees Celsius (6.3 to 13.3 degrees Fahrenheit) in less than one hundred years, with even greater increases over land and the poles” (https://www.cfr.org/report/global-climate-change-regime).

Bet 2 on Ten Years: Extinction Rebellion is betting on making a change in 10 years, or tipping points will make extinction for future generations highly probable.

Bet 3 on Five Years: When two degree Celsius temperature tipping point in exceeded in next five years, and degrades the water cycle tipping points, the most probable impact will be Sixth Extinction by 2100 (Boje, 2019a, Global Storytelling: There is no Planet B).

In sum, our organizational and humancentric storytelling habits are underestimating the magnitude of threats posed by climate change on freshwater scarcity. and not aligned on the temporal horizon of acting in advance of nonlinear complexity dynamics.

Who has Moral Answerability to Curb Emissions?

There is a difference between being a bystander as the climate/water crisis that is preventable becomes Sixth Extinction, fait accompli. Bakhtin (1993) distinguishes between bystander (special) answerability and moral answerability (actually intervening in once-occurrent event of Being).

References

Bakhtin, M. M. (1993). Toward a Philosophy of the Act. Written as unpublished notebooks written between 1919–1921, first published in the USSR in 1986 with the title K filosofii postupka; 1993 English V. Liapunov, Trans.; V. Liapunov & M. Holquist, Eds.). Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.

Boje, D. M. (2016). Organizational Change and Global Standardization: Solutions to the Standards and Norms Overwhelming Organizations. London/NY: Routledge.

Boje, D. M. (2019a). Global Storytelling: There is No Planet B. Singapore/London/NY: World Scientific.

Boje, D. M. (2019b). Organizational Research: Storytelling In Action. London/NY: Routledge.

Boje, D. M. (2019c). Storytelling Interventions in Global Water Crisis. Singapore/London/NY: World Scientific.

Boje, D. M., & Henderson, T. L. (Eds.). (2014). Being quantum: Ontological storytelling in the age of antenarrative. UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

Henderson, Tonya L.; Boje, David M. (2016). Managing Fractal Organizing Processes. NY/London: Routledge.

Meditating on 6th Extinction with Desert Critters, Creosol and Mesquite

Blog post by David M. Boje, July 14, 2019 updated July 15 2019

 

I am part of Extinction Rebellion (ExR). We want politicians to engage to declare a climate emergency, then make the kinds of policy changes that will avert extinction. Global warming changes the water cycle. Raising average global temperature changes the water cycle. It also changes the vegetation existent in the water cycle at higher temperatures. Two specifies we in the southwest in the heat of the desert,  can learn from are the creosol bush and the mesquite tree. Two critters we can learn from are rattle snakes and tarantula. They live simply on less water. Here I am meditating on water, and the arrival of Sixth Extinction.

Storytelling Research of Climate Change, Water Cycle and Vegetation Colonies

The basic problem I want to address is how globally warming the water cycle, and Sixth Extinction are quite long term phenomenon, but our democracies are adapted to making short-term investments that benefit the surplus-value extraction by corporations, supplying election monies to political candidates.  We clearly are on a short-term path, a water binge, with no apparent way to avert Sixth Extinction. The 1% are oriented to short-term gains in their wealth, even at the expense of long-term preparing in advance to mitigate the climate change, including impact on water cycle and global water scarcity, water shortages, and day zeroes when tap water runs dry. We are in the throes of the Sixth Extinction, and there is no planet B to get more water that with hotter global average temperature is in the water vapor atmosphere rather than falling to nourish life on land (Boje, 2019a, 2019c).

We will have to learn to care for water, reuse it, not pollute it, but the preparations to prevent the die-off of five billion humans, most of marine and land species, is inevitable without dramatic change in consumerism and production activities. To learn, I am using storytelling methods (Boje, 2019b) especially self-correcting ‘storytelling science’ methods, to study my own complicity in global warming, the degrading water cycle, and the kinds of vegetation that  colonize the Southwest desert where I live in Las Cruces, New Mexico.  I hope to learn how to regreen the desert, how to live more simply with less water, and leave water for others, such as desert critters, and bring back grassland from the cresol and mesquite, which we can also learn from. Before we get to creosol and mesquite, let’s be clear how global warming and the water cycle crisis of the southwest and globally, are related.

How does climate change impact the water cycle?

Climate change intensifies the water cycle. As air temperatures increase, more water evaporates into the air. Warmer air can hold more water vapor, which can lead to more intense rainstorms, causing major problems like extreme flooding in coastal communities around the world. As the southwest turns more arid, the creosol and mesquite tree invade, displacing the grass and other semi-arid species.

The water cycle is very dependent upon global temperatures. Put simply the water cycle is how water evaporates from land and sea, then returns to Earth as rain and snow. Climate change increases both droughts and heavy rains.  Global warming of air temperature is affecting things like water vapor concentrations in the atmosphere, precipitation rates, and stream flows. Warmer air holds more water vapor in the atmosphere, resulting in more intense rain storms and flooding in some areas and where I live in New Mexico, more dry air is held in the atmosphere as water vapor, and less falls to Earth. This results in more drought, as evaporation increases our soil dry out, and the desert transforms from semi-arid to arid. In New Mexico, we now get 10 inches of rain a year. So when rare rains do come, the soil is so hard, and cannot penetrate the ground, and evaporates even more rapidly. Rain water runs off quicker and quicker, taking with it the top soil. As water gathers speed, it cuts deep arroyos into the land, and water does not spread to surrounding ground.

Figure 1: Observing the Arroyo Near our Ranch on East Mesa just beyond Las Cruces New Mexico

This arroyo is a frequent walk I make with dog, Sparkles (and with Sparky & Honey till they passed). The arroyo has dug about 75 feed into the earth. Along the ridges creosote and mesquite grows. But in the basin, you get a sense of the grassland and types of vegetation that existed before Spanish contact, before the overgrazing, and if regreening the desert is possible, these grass and shallow-root plants could come back to the landscape above.

Here is another view of the same arroyo against background of the Organ Mountains.

Figure 2: Another view of the Arroyo with Organ Mountains

The  prolific creosote bushes in the foreground and not much some else anywhere is from the way the arroyo cuts deep into the land, so water does not spread out, and the topsoil has all run off. It is a downward spiral of climate change brought on by human activities, as a tipping point happened and invasive species out competed the grassland. 

How do we observe and interact with the water catastrophes of the water cycle?

To spend time observing water’s relation to vegetation in a changing climate is a form of mediation. It is mediation that sinks us into our own living story practices (See Boje’s What is Living Story Web at https://davidboje.com/Boje/What%20is%20Living%20Story.htm.

A living story has a place, time, and a mind. This is a mediation in silence and contemplation of the circle of life. Water has an aura that is shown in every living thing, even the creosote and mesquite of an arid desert.  Water energy can be quite violent, such as when the monsoon rain burst onto the land, and the water runs fast cutting arroyos deeper into the landscape. The wind manifest dust devils that will peel the paint off your car. Water descends in hail storms, that dent the cars, and create business opportunities for dent-removal. Water mediation is about entanglement with all kinds of nature.

Figure 3: Pond near Ranch, Full after Monsoon Rainfall

There is a pond nearby. I often walk there, and during the dry season, no water, only trash from the people using it as a shooting gallery or a place to try out their four wheel drive. There are amazing critters coming to drink, such as dragon flies. There are dormant creatures, like the spade foot toad and tadpole shrimpe that come to life when the monsoon fills the pond.

Figure 4: I see these all the time in the Pond when its Full

“The tadpole shrimp colonizes freshwater temporary ponds, such as dry lakes and vernal pools, throughout the Southwest. Females lay eggs that can survive in the sand or dried mud, dormant for several years. When placed in water the eggs hatch over a period of time and the cycle begins again” (https://newscenter.nmsu.edu/Articles/view/10495/secrets-in-the-soil-nmsu-scientists-research-desert-s-tadpole-shrimp).

After a week or so, of no rain, the pond water evaporates.

Figure 5: Pond empty in dry spell used a play area for SUVs and Shooters

Figure 6 A & B: Pond Trashed (top photo taken last year after rain; lower photo taken July 15 2019 8AM, not enough rain to fill pond)

It’s always sad when Sparkles and I walk to the pond and find it trashed. The county raised its landfill rate, so poor people are dumping more trash in the desert. You can see above the pond is about empty.  I think people with no reverence for water or life, just toss their trash here because the sense the energy. They seem to toss the trash in the most high energy places. It could be they sense the positive energy, and out of ignorance have to pollute it. My dad always told me, ‘leave a place better than you found it’ and ‘pack out whatever you pack in.’ Sparkles and I usually carry a canvas bag and collect the trash. This will take a few trips. Sometimes the boy scouts will come out and help. One of my students wrote the No Throw App. Download it and do the right thing.

The desert can be quite beautiful. Let’s keep it that way. Here we see a double rainbow, and the promise of rain to bring life to pond and all the desert life.

Figure 7: A Double Rainbow above the Desert Vegetation at our Small Horse Ranch in New Mexico

It begins with observation, meditation, and interaction with water cycle and vegetation, where we work and live. There is much beauty to observe, such as this double rainbow above the creosote and mesquite, and the drank rain cloud that bring life is water to the desert.

Take an inventory of our water and vegetation habits as individuals, community, organizations, and societies where we work and live. Climate and water scientists say that its our human activities of production and consumption that are changing since the Industrial Revolution, since World War II, since the introduction of plastic, since our life and work changed our water footprints again and again.

Figure 8: Shade I made on July 14 to keep the sun off when I meditate and observe

Shade from reused aluminum from recycled solar water heater. I added a chair frame I put a seat on from the county’s landfill. In the yellow bucket I am drying mesquite beans. Pick them when they turn golden in the sun.

Figure 9: Demi Lune (half moon) birm to harvest rainwater

Climate, Water and Vegetation Meditation

We can learn from desert species, such as the creosote bush and mesquite trees taking over the southwest desert. As the heavy cattle grazing escalated after Spanish contact, the desert Southwest turns the climate atmosphere hotter and landscape drier, the semi-arid grasslands,, those flowing carpets of grass (Muhly [Muhlenbergia porteri]) were slowly replaced by the two vegetative colonizers, the creosol bushes.mesquite trees. Projections of future climate changes, these plants and trees colonize the desert, how much water and carbon are we losing to these quite aggressive and tough species dominating the landscape (https://uanews.arizona.edu/story/mesquite-trees-displacing-southwestern-grasslands).  Once initiated by overgrazing, then propelled by global warming the creosote and mesquite trees benefit from higher temperatures and greater variability in rainfall, displacing the grassland, that had voluntarily, also adapted to hot and dry conditions. Creosote and mesquite roots reach much deeper than the grass roots, to access deeper water sources.  There are benefits of these colonizers, from shade, attracting wild life, and carbon capture, but it is encroachment at the cost of water regional ecohydrology, and water uses. 

Figure 9: A clump of grass growing beneath a Mesquite Tree in Southern New Mexico on our Small Horse Ranch

How does a clump of grass survive. Above this clump of grass grows in the shade of a mesquite tree. I am observing the creosote and mesquite tree activity before and after the rain, including the monsoon rains, and the dry periods between. Remaining rain water, deep underground cannot nurture the shallow-rooted plants.

Water has massing positive energy. All life needs water to survive. Living a simpler water life lets all critters and vegetation have water for life. Water stress affects all life. Interesting critters live in the desert heat, the sandy soil, among the mesquite and creosote.

Figure 10: Western Diamond back Rattlesnake on way near where we live 

I observed this diamond back headed to the pond near where I live Rattlesnakes colonize and survive in arid habitats. This is an amazing critter. Leave it alone and it leaves you alone. Rattlesnakes do not waste water by urinating. They have great water sensemaking andcan detect water from great distances with their incredible senses of smell and tasteI see one or two a year, so I observe carefully and remain vigilant. It tries to let you know when you get too close.

Figure 11: Tarantula in our driveway about to climb on my new book: Global Storytelling: There is no Planet Be

The Tarantula come out at night, in search of food or a mate. Some days, even during the day, they stroll by the hundreds. Amazing critters, they know how to live in the hot and dry desert. They dig holes in the desert and rest silently.  Tarantulas drink with their mouths, which is located under the fangs, and a pumping stomach, and store in the abdomen. if you notice a Tarantula’s abdomen is shriveled, make sure you give it food and water. This is a sign of under feeding and dehydration.

Mesquite trees have also mastered the art of living in the desert. They have photosynthetic metabolism at half the rate of shallow plants, regardless of hot and dry conditions (https://uanews.arizona.edu/story/mesquite-trees-displacing-southwestern-grasslands). Monsoon downpour will nature the soil, but most runs off, and evaporates quickly.  Water that does saturate the soil, the creosote and mesquite deep-roots access it. 

Figure 12: The ‘King Clone’ Creosote Rhizome in the Mojave Desert is 11,700 years old 

Enter the Creosote 

After a rain, I can snell the creosote. The creosote expands in a circular grown pattern, and can reach fifty feet in diameter.   Larrea divaricata is thought to be the oldest living thing on earth. King Clone, a creosote bush found in the Mojave desert is estimated to have grown from a seed nearly 12,000 years ago (http://www.factmonster.com/ipka/A0932544.html): “Each giant ring of shrubs comes from its own ancestral shrub that once grew in the center of the ring. Over time the original stem crown splits into sections that continue to grow outwardly away from the center, producing new branches along their outer edge. The center wood dies and rots away over thousands of years, leaving a barren center surrounded by a ring of shrubs”.  

The creosote bush is a very tough and aggressive plant, able to sustain in droughts and intense heat of the desert where I life.  The plant excretes volatile chemical comports, some have medical properties. When soils are not dampened, and slopes of the desert are well-drained into arroyos, this invasive species, the creosote bush (larrea tridentata, larrea divaricata  and hediondilia in Sonora; part of the Zygophyllaceae species family) takes roots. It has taken over the Chihuahuan Desert, of southern New Mexico, where I live. It is also called greasewood. Layers of caliche form in the hot deserts. C

Creosote is an aggressive competitor for water, and is winning, where I live. It grows from four to twelve feet high. The yellow green leaves are adapted to conserve water and dissipate heat (dessertusa.com/creosote.html). Creosote secures more water, preening growth of native plants.  Creosote secrets lots of waxy resinous compounds, poisonous to livestock. On the plus side the compounds are used in defense against wood rats (who lose more water through their urine & feces, & get less energy from their food, increasing risks of dehydration & starvation). Creosote in the Chihuahuan, Sonoran and Mojave Deserts of North America ecosystems  vary in chromosome counts (Chihuahuan has 26, Sonoran has 52, and Sonoran has 78 chromosomes). It thrives in deserts under 5,000 feet.

Creosote orients its branches mostly to the southeast to minimize water loss in as sun moves west across the sky, and maximizing photosynthesis. The clustering branches reduces overheating, providing shade during hottest parts of the New Mexico day. As the sun rises in the east, creosote opens its stomata commence photosynthesis during early hours when evapotranspiration is at its lowest. Yes, the southeast orientation means it misses the afternoon and evening sun (see http://www.indefenseofplants.com/blog/2018/3/26/the-wild-world-of-the-creosote-bush) 

The roots of creosote run deep, accessing water table that the shallow rooted indigenous plants of semi-arid desert (e.g. grasses and the Prickly Pear cactus [Opuntia]) cannot. In limited rainfall, the shallowed rooted species cannot reach water taken up by the creosote. The granting architecture of creosote accumulates silt and debris as winds blow dust around the desert landscape. This results in elevated nutrients, shaded by the canopy of the bush. Rodents burrow into the ground beneath a large creosote shrub, and make their den, nibbling on any shallowly rooted plants that try to root under that canopy shade. At the same time the roots of the creosote (the tender bits) run so deep the rodents cannot get to theme. Rodents are therefore aiding the spread of the creosote by making it difficult for neighboring species to survive. 

Creosote reproduces from seeds and from rhizomes. The roots radiate out in a circle from the original plant, sprouting clones. On the plus side creosote provides seeds for food and flowers support myriad pollinators. Creosote gives the desert it’s distinctive delicious smell after a rain! On the downside, creosote secretes allopathic compounds that inhibit other plants from growing nearby? The roots and the dropped leaves emit chemicals that prevents self-growth and growth of other flora. Creosote blooms flowers that turn into small white fuzzy fruit with five seeds. 

On the plus side, creosote has been use as antiseptics and emetics by native indigenous peoples (deserts.com/creosote.html). The lives contain a powerful antioxidant – NDGA ((nordihydroguaiaretic acid). It has been used to sure fever, colds, stomach pains, and is a general pain killer, diuretic, helps with arthritis, skin problems, urinary track problems, tuberculosis, cancer, anemia and is an anti-diarrheal, and is antimicrobial in helping cuts, bacterial or fungal infections, but no scientific evidence to date validates any of this and is not sold in Canada as a health product (http://www.ethnoherbalist.com/southern-california-native-plants-medicinal/creosote-bush-uses/; and https://www.drweil.com/vitamins-supplements-herbs/supplements-remedies/cleansing-with-chaparral/). A tea tastes terrible, and may actually in rare cases, promote kidney and liver dysfunction, even hepatitis.  The tea is made form creosote waxy leaves, stored in the sun, then pulverized and steeped in boiling water.  You can smoke the plant to combat infestations of desert midge.

Figure 13: Creosote Gall Midge (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creosote_gall_midge). 

The Seri of Mexico smoked insect galls among the foliage twigs of the larrea divaricata species for pleasure. Each midge species  indices a different gall midge fungal growth. “She inserts her egg along with a fungal spore from a mycangia (a small pocket to store fungal spores). A gall forms and the fungal mycelium grows to line the inside of the gall, when the egg hatches the developing larva feeds upon the fungus” (IBID.). Gagné and Warren (1990: 649) describe “Fifteen species of gall midges of the genus Asphondylia that form complex galls on leaves, stems or buds of creosote bush (Larrea tridentata)”.  

North American Papago used smoldering larrea tridentata creosote species  branches to treat sore feet (Pennacchio, Jefferson, & Havens, 2010: 114).  On the plus side chaparral is good for topical uses. Mexican herbalists use it to treat eczema and other skin conditions. You can make you own chaparral salves and lotions by steeping the leaves in hot water until you can smell it, then soak on a cloth and apply to affected area. 

Joy and Crespi (2007) study the speciation of Larrea gall midge insect adaptation to host-plants parts (leaf, stem, flower) of creosote. Midge species are highly host-plant specific, often feeding on just one part of the single host-plant species. Rains are seasonal in New Mexico. Gall badges have short adult lives of 1-2 days. “The different species in this group are sympatric over a broad area and widely distributed across the Mojave, Sonoran, and Chihuahuan deserts of North America, and up to 10 species having been collected from a single creosote bush” (IBID.).

Enter the Mesquite Tree 

Some parts of mesquite tree are toxic and can cause death. Other parts of mesquite are medicinal and a food source. There are several species (Velvet Mesquite [Prosopis velutina], Honey Mesquite [Prosopis glanulosa] & Screwbean Mesquite [Prosopis pubescens]). Mesquite tress are deciduous, with the potential to lose their leaves during dry times. Branches have thorns. Mesquite roots are within three feet of soil, but can go as deep as 160 feet (https://arizonadailyindependent.com/2013/07/07/mesquite-trees-provide-food-fuel-medicine-and-more/). Around southern New Mexico, the Honey Mesquite is common.

Figure 14: Honey Mesquite Tree

The seed pods are not toxic, high in fiber, but can cause gastrointestinal upstate if consumed in mass quantities. Mesquite beans can be harvest after they turn hard and golden. The pods of mesquite beans are sweet, a fructose that does not require insulin to be metabolized. You can chew on a a pod to test its sweetness (https://arizonadailyindependent.com/2013/07/07/mesquite-trees-provide-food-fuel-medicine-and-more/). 

Native indigenous people sprinkled ground mesquite meal with water to form small, round cakes, that were fried like mush, used to thicken stews or eaten raw. Mesquite meal is gluten free and makes a flat bread. Mesquite seeds are 35% protein, and pods have 25% fiber. Mesquite flour can be used to make a refreshing drink, and allowed to foment (mixed with meters) produces a fizzy alcoholic drink.

Mesquite flowers can be collected and boiled to make tea or roasted and pressed into ball as a food course.

Spa from mesquite trees can be boiled and diluted with water for eye wash antiseptic for open woulds, lip sores, chapped skin, sunburn lotion,  and to treat venarial disease (https://arizonadailyindependent.com/2013/07/07/mesquite-trees-provide-food-fuel-medicine-and-more/).  Boiling the inner bark is used as a laxative and emetic. Mesquite tea from the leaves is good for headaches and stomach trouble, and to cure conjunctivitis and heal painful gums.

Mesquite wood was used as firewood, or for early blacksmithing. Prima Indians used mesquite black tar as a hair dye by covering the hair with the mud overnight. The resin from mesquite tree makes a glue to mend pottery, or when boiled and diluted, a paint for pottery. Inner bark of mesquite tree is used for basketry. Mesquite wood makes beautiful furniture. 

References

Boje, D. M. (2019a). Global Storytelling: There is No Planet B. Singapore/London/NY: World Scientific.

Boje, D. M. (2019b). Organizational Research: Storytelling In Action. London/NY: Routledge.

Boje, D. M. (2019c, in press). Storytelling Interventions in Global Water Crisis. Singapore/London/NY: World Scientific. Link to download Word file.

Boje, D. M.; Rosile, G. A. (2019, in review). Doing storytelling sciience with self-correction. Singapore/London/NY: World Scientific. Link to download Word file.

Gagné, R. J., & Waring, G. L. (1990). The Asphondylia (Cecidomyiidae: Diptera) of creosote bush (Larrea tridentata) in north America. Proceedings of the Entomological Society of Washington, 92(4), 649-671.

Joy, J. B., & Crespi, B. J. (2007). Adaptive radiation of gall‐inducing insects within a single host‐plant species. Evolution: International Journal of Organic Evolution, 61(4), 784-795.

Pennacchio, M., Jefferson, L., & Havens, K. (2010). Uses and abuses of plant-derived smoke: Its ethnobotany as hallucinogen, perfume, incense, and medicine. Oxford University Press.

Spirit and Quantum Science possibilities for Management and Organization Inquiry

PREFACE (continued)

Can Management and Organization Inquiry become Quantum Science?

Management and Orgnaizational Inquiry (MOI) can become a system expressed in SPirit that is developed, into Science.  Science for Hegel is the actuality of Spirit, but it is not something that happens without getting beyond the limits of the dialectics of sense making. Hegel calls this first stop on the journey sense-certainty of what one experiences in the five senses, which today we call (after Weick) retrospective sense making. There are seven dialectics Hegel points out that can move us beyond the current theory and method of retrospective sensemaking. First, the Here and Now, of sensemaking is in a seamless liquidity with other Heres and Nows that have passed on or are about to arrive. For a Science, it is necessary to be explicit about which Here and Now is being pointed to. For storytelling it’s more fluid, and we are lax in making such distinctions. Second, we in storytelling do not pay much attention to what is our own sensemaking, and what accounts of others’ sensemaking we fold into the storytelling. Finally, there is the forgetting, of the sensemaking experiences of many Here’s and Nows as we in storytelling are quite selective and forgetful, in our storytelling.

Beyond the first domain, the first stop on the Triassic, beyond the stop at sensemaking, is the Spirit, the World-Spirit where we have learned perhaps to suspend the limits of sense-certainty and sensemaking itself. At this second stop, Spirit immediacy transfigured, reflects into itself, in order to be the soil or ground, and be antithesis to itself.  Some Spirits are more advanced than others along the Triassic path.

“In a Spirit that is more advanced than another, the lower concrete existence has been reduced to an inconspicuous moment” and the trace of a spatial pattern is shrouded, a mere shodowy outline, that the predatory studies in MOI have not help us to understand.  If we stay in the predatory lessons of sensemaking, it’s doubtful we enter Spirit’s domain. Rather, MOI has been reduced to som facts, a few experiential exercises, and some games for students to tune out of their cell phones and memorize the MOI schematic, the monotony formulas, for the next examination.

 

The Downward Spiral of New Mexico Public Universities into the Abyss

Dear Carlos Mendoza:

reply to https://www.abqjournal.com/849573/secretary-outlines-challenges-for-states-colleges.html#  You have your strategy half right, let me explain.

Let’s explore your inference that “expensive old dog instructors” are better replaced by “hungry young bright instructors” and this in turn will “create an 18% reduction in the need for state funds.” Sounds like ageism to me. The problem with your strategic plan is as you purge the University of the professors doing the lion’s share of the top-tier publishing, the University will lose its research status, and NMSU will plunge in a downward spiral, right into being a teaching university (a definite second down-grading of Carnegie status).

NMSU has a strategy, Instead of a research university you will have something like an Eastern or Western NM University, and they have fine teaching there, but there is a something important to consider: NMSU’s Carnegie Classification is R2: Doctoral Universities – Higher Research Activity, and its sponsored award expenditures amounted to $126.5 million in fiscal year 2015. In addition, according to the most recently available statistics from the National Science Foundation, NMSU ranks fourth in research expenditures by Hispanic Serving Institutions. http://www.research.nmsu.edu/

Did you know we used to have the R1 rating, but lost most of PSL. NMSU has Arrowhead, but it once had one of the top labs in the state, called PSL (Physical Science Lab), and now its a shadow of its former revenue generating glory days, when it had lots of big grants, and visionary leadership. They actually renamed the building, took down the PSL sign, and now its Anderson Hall, with no reputation at all, another building.

At New Mexico State University, 120 positions were already cut (101 faculty lines, 19 staff lines) at New Mexico State University has been done, and another cut expected next month, and another cut expected next year, and another the year after. But we are not close to a solution. We are in a dust devil.

Will there be a Deloitte consultant’s report answering this question: Why are there so many administrators> We could save several million dollars, by putting all department heads on 9 month instead of 12 month contracts, several million more be doing away with assistant deans in six colleges, and several million more by eliminating assistants to the assistants of vice presidents. In this strategy, the University would become flatter, the old dog faculty (still expensive) would take up leadership of the curriculum to benefit the students. Still to bring in the kind of revenue needed, we actually have to have revenue building strategies. We would have to grow the kinds of programs that attract students to an R1, rather than an R2 university, on its way to being R-233.

Now, consider the current downsizing, rightsizing strategy. Transforming NMSU into a 21st Century University. I am not sure why, it is not aiming at a 22nd Century University.

Are we not in the 22nd Century? Perhaps its because the Deloitte Consulting (& EAB) consultants lacked the benefits of an actual Higher Education.

You’d think for a price tag of exactly $618,905, we’d get a “22nd Century University” planning model for staff reduction http://staffingstudy.nmsu.edu/activity-analysis-presentation/ or the price tag announced, https://business.nmsu.edu/krwg-news-report-highlights-organizational-challenges-for-nmsu/ Wonder what the price tag is for Deloitte Consulting reduction of expensive old dog faculty, such as myself. Besides Deloitte, what did EAB cost, and what is its role in the cuts and reorganization? https://www.eab.com/areas-of-expertise/enrollment-services. These are some young and hungry looking consultants.

As I read your comment, it would appear that expensive old dog instructors are about to be purged. That would be me. Though I did earn every cent of it. Who do you think puts the research numbers on the board? New faculty take years to build a research network, a reputation, and learn to make the big scoring points. Retire all the high paid old dogs on your sports teams. What ill happen.

What about cutting out the expensive studies, and putting those overpaid faculty to work. “The $618,905 study conducted by Deloitte consultants said that rather than being overstaffed, New Mexico State University is poorly organized. NMSU Chancellor, Garrey Carruthers says that the university is a high fixed-cost university so there are many things that need to be addressed.

“We have lots of buildings, lots of personnel, many of them tenured that you just can’t release; and as a consequence we have to restructure this university to recognize what’s going to happen in New Mexico in the 21st Century,” says Chancellor Carruthers.

Former Governor Carruthers knows how to get things done, how to get along with our current governor and legislature, but the game rules are changing. He is between a rock and a hard place, as are we all.

Here’s some insight. The buildings get built, like the Dominici Center, Skeen Hall, and so on, because the legislature gives money for that, and is cutting back on instructional funds to higher education (and operating money).

“Standard and Poor’s recently announced that NMSU ‘s long term rating was downgraded from an AA to an AA minus. The university has seen declining enrollment numbers over the last few years.”

AA minus is still a high rating. Why not invest in the future of Higher Education.

Maybe the Deloitte expensive consulting services (& EAB) should be cut, and we should pursue Carlos Mendoza’s other option, to cut the overpaid administrative bureaucrats. How many administrators does it take to administer each faculty member? I hear its between 1.5 and 3.5 depending on how you count them.

We at NMSU (& UNM) are in the eye of a Dirt Devil, and there is at center the budget cutting and purging of positions, but in my opinion, they are the wrong positions. A ‘real’ 22nd Century University would not be replacing each old dog Tenure-track faculty person with two or three adjunct faculty. Rather, the 22nd Century University would install Regents with graduate degrees, cut the administrative glut at the top, install grass roots faculty and student control of the curriculum, and any administrator left, would be building revenue streams, not cutting the people doing the work of teaching and research.

The two New Mexico Universities are spirally toward the abyss, squeezing out old dog tenure faculty, hiring lots of adjuncts, creates a void of research, a deadening of intellectual capacity, and in such a downward spiral degradation of Higher Education, the old 21st Century solution was more golf courses, more expensive football coaches, high paid athletics directors with their no-cut budget contracts. Is it sensible to cut faculty and staff, and make a bet that football programs will increase enrollment.

A university is built on the intellectual and research and teaching accomplishments of its faculty. In a Dust Devil of Descent into the destructive Abyss, it takes more than a Deloitte Consulting – reengineering study, and some task forces without a shred of faculty or staff participation – to turn the Dust Devil to another course away from the abyss.

These are my own public intellectual views and do not reflect the department, college, or University.

David M. Boje, Ph.D.

http://davidboje/vita

Extinction or Rebellion in the Dark Side of Water Storytelling

Keynote talk for the ‘Dark Side of Communication Conference’ in Aalborg Denmark. My focus is on ‘dark side of water storytelling of extinction and my rebellion’.

The Extinction or Rebellion movement has been gathering momentum. Its symbol represents the Sixth Extinction, the topic of a book I wrote, released this year: Storytelling in the Global Age: There is No Planet B (Boje, 2019a).

I have a sequel (Boje, 2019c), how water and temperature are entangled in the Sixth Extinction now unfolding. The question I bring to this conference: Can humankind change its water habits fast enough to avert Sixth Extinction?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
Figure 1: Extinction Symbol created by London artist ESP in 2011

This is the symbol of a growing worldwide grassroots movement called ‘Extinction Rebellion’ that is mobilizing popular support for enough rebellion that politicians change climate policy and implement changes in political economy, in order to avert Sixth Extinction (Extinction Rebellion website). The circle represents the planet, while the hourglass inside signifies a warning that time is rapidly running out for 30,000 to 140,000 species, including most of humankind. The planet is undergoing its sixth mass extinction event, sicentists call the Holocene or Antrhropocene. This extinction event is not caused by an asteroid that wiped out the dinosaur and brought the Ice Age. The Sixth Extinction, its widespread ecosystem collapse, is caused by human activity changes since the Industrial Revolution, and in particular since World War II.

“The Truth. We are facing an unprecedented global emergency. Life on Earth is in crisis: scientists agree we have entered a period of abrupt climate breakdown, and we are in the midst of a mass extinction of our own making” (Extinction Rebellion website).

We are organizational communication scholars, and I will assert that it is our organizational storytelling communication that is answerable for this catastrophic loss of biodiversity, the widespsread collapse of ecosystems, and are consequent to planet Earth becoming uninhabitable for humans.

Extinction Rebellion (ExR) is another kind of civil disobedience, people willing to get arrested peacefully, accpting consequences for stopping traffic for seven minutes at a time (Episode 4 Looking Forwards, Extinction Rebellion Podcast).

Christiana Figueres, former executive secretary to UN Framework Convention on Climate Change is creadited with securing the 2015 Paris Agreement. Christiana says her boss is the ‘Atmosphere’ and ’she’ wants to see emissions controlled implemented. 42 or 43 countries have already flattened out or actually begun the decrease of thier emissions according to their Paris Agreement commitments. The global emmissions numbers we 2017-2017 halted increase of global green house gasses and it flattened, until last year went up 1.7 %. In the case of the United States, withdrawal from the Paris Agreement, our emissions are headed in the wrong direction altogether, increasing 3.4% in 2018.

When the Kyoto protocol went into force, Canada was not in compliance with emission reductions, and 24 hours before a fine of $14 billion in penaltie would be assessed, on Dec 2011 it withdrew (See CBC).

The storytelling claim of the Turmp administration: “The science is clear, under President Trump greenhouse gas emissions are down” (Claimed by Environmental Protection Agency). Deconstructing this claim, it is true US emissions decreased slightly between 2016 and 2017 more from momentum of President Obama’s initiatives than those of President Trump. But when Trump took office the rate of declined slowed, and month-to-month changes were modest, before rising sharply in 2018 (see Polifact.com). Emissions did fall slightly between 2016 and 2017. But the rate of decline slowed under Trump and the month-to-month changes have been modest.

Are we moving in the right direction, reducing emissions fast enough, to avert Sixth Extinction?

Christiana Figueres believes outrage and optimism are key communication strategies to achieve progress (Episode 4 Looking Forwards, Extinction Rebellion Podcast). The ExR strategy of civil disobedience is an important way of moving public opinion in order to accelerate public policy. She has no tolerance for the status quo strategy, for the mindset that says it’s too expensive, too difficult, too late, it won’t work, and we are not going to try anyway. This is precisely Mikhail Bakhtin’s (1993: 3) bystander (aka special) answerability. Contrast this with Bakhtin’s ‘moral answerability’ where we have an ethical responsiblity to intervene in the systems causing harm to others because we exist in the once-occurent eventness of Being. We don’t have the option to be a bystander, to just be negative, complaining about the dark side of communication, and doing nothing about it. The consquences of Sixth Extinction are too grave.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

March 15 2019, 1.25 million students took part in ‘youth strick to act on climate change’ demonstrations around the world. ExR groups around the world stop traffic for seven minutes, and some get arrested for their civil disobedience. Christiana’s challenge is to mobilize 10 million to get the establishment system to change its climate change policies and actions?

Can we mobilize 10 million for the next rebellion?

George Monbiot is a British writer and a columnist at The Guardian. You can read his latest columns here and hear (Episode 4 Looking Forwards, Extinction Rebellion Podcast). George is not confident that even mobilizing 10 million students to rebellion will be enough to change the systemic order. Climate science is demanding a massive shift in the political economy. There is a contest between scientific realism and political realism. Political realism is negotiable, but scientific realism means you can not argue with the physics of temperature or the hydrology of the water cycle. In Extinction Rebellion and the Youth Strike for Climate movements, the strong theme of their storytelling, listen to what th esicentists have to say, ’tell the truth about it’, follow where it leads, and build our politics around it. This is a major shift for the political and economic systems, from their ‘dark side of storytelling’, to a ‘reorientation of their whole ethical compass.’ This shift is what Kenneth, Marita, and I call ’terrestrial ethics’. Growth is the primary aim of most politics and most economics, but according the scientific realism, it is destoying our life support systems. In other words, ExR is a straightforward challenge to capitalism.

In storytelling terms, it is a dialectical opposition between the thesis of political realism and the antithesis of scientific realism, with ExR engaging in enough civil disobedience to privilege climate science in ways that challenges capitalism’s basic premise of economic growth. What is capitalism? The harvesting of surplus value. What this storytelling dialectic between the petrified narrative of political economy realism and the counternarrative of ExR alignment with climate science realism is calling for is not some kind of synthesis. Rather, its a different kind of dialectical movement, one called the ’negation of the negation.’

Can Capitalism by Adapted to Avert the Sixth Extinction? George Manboit’s answer is ’No!’ “Its hard to see how you can have an environmentally benign capitalism” — George Monbiot (Episode 4 Looking Forwards, Extinction Rebellion Podcast). It would mean decoupling growth by surplas value consumption of more resources from material resource planetary limits. Everything that mainstream economics is saying about sustainable growth is challenged. It is growth that is beyond planetary limits. We know that ‘green growth’ is a basic contradiction because if you grow, you consume more resources. Monboit’s position: “We’re already beyond the point at which the world’s systems can sustain the current rate of consumption.” Monboit is calling for an end to capitalism. There is no such thing as green growth. The economy is a subset of ecology. Ecology is not a subset of economy, as is preached in so called ’sustainable development.’

Here is my take on all this: We cannot survive with out freshwater. Life is water. We have to put sanitary, freshwater, and the water cycle first, and political economy second. We have to adjust political economy to the water imperative. We need to design a new political economy, and give up trying to do sustainability development of capitalism. US capitalism does not work. It will be interesting to see if New Zealand and the Nordic socialism approaches can present a way forward, in its state capitalisms.

Dare to declare capitalism dead – before it takes us all down with it

George Monbiot

“The economic system is incompatible with the survival of life on Earth. It is time to design a new one.” There is new thinking on how to design an environmental economy, that is a viable alternative to late modern capitalism.

“Part of it is provided by the ecological civilisation proposed by Jeremy Lent, one of the greatest thinkers of our age. Other elements come from Kate Raworth’s doughnut economics and the environmental thinking of Naomi Klein, Amitav Ghosh, Angaangaq Angakkorsuaq, Raj Patel and Bill McKibben. Part of the answer lies in the notion of “private sufficiency, public luxury”. Another part arises from the creation of a new conception of justice based on this simple principle: every generation, everywhere, shall have an equal right to the enjoyment of natural wealth” – George Monbiot.

Jeremy Len’ts (2019) proposal for a new political economy of ecological civilisation (in book the Patterning Instinct). “ Lent argues that the peculiar character of Western religious and scientific thought, that has come to dominate the rest of the world, has pushed both human civilisation and the rest of the living world to the brink of collapse” (Moinbot.com). Kate Raworth’s doughnut economicss means the needs of people are met without overshooting Earth’s ecological ceiling.

The status quo water storytelling contends that a curcular economy is humanly possible. However, we seem to be doing ‘circular economy rhetoric’ while engaging in growth of nonrewnable resource consumption, and destroying the natural water cycle’s ability to replenish the freshwater supply. We have to completely reset our expections of what a good life is, in ways we have not yet seen. We cannot go back in our retrospective sensemaking, to reclaim some capitalism form that was ecologically stable, because since the industrial revolution the model has been economic growth by ecosystem exploitation. At the heart of modern economics is the notion of sustaining a constant rate of economic growth. A 3% economic growth, means doubling the economy every 24 years.

In sum, Moinbot’s proposal is not to resdeisgn or to tame capitalism, but to actually replace it with a new political economy based on the premise every generation everywhere has an equal right to enjoy natural wealth. This means we can no longer deplete natural resources that are going to be needed by other people, or destroy ecosystems that are needed to sustian other people’s lives, and cannot any renewable resource beyond its replenishment rate. For water, we are using it up, contaminating it, and wasting it beyond the water cycle replenishment rate. We are now past renewable peak water, nonrenewable peak water, and are moving past the ecological peak water limit, yet be run capitalism as if there is a planet B (Boje, 2019c, in press).

Jem Bendell is a Professor of Sustainability Leadership at the University of Cumbria (UK). You can read his paper, “Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy” here and (Episode 4 Looking Forwards, Extinction Rebellion Podcast). Looked at sustainability and signs climate change is speeding up, and is now runaway climate change. A human catastrophe is happening now. Reforming the current captialist sustianability system is a form of denial. A societal collapse is on the horizon. Business colleges are arch-exemplars of climate denial becuase our whole existence is premised on growth can continue with sustainability. Jim thinks its too late to prevent societal collapse. Jem beleives that despair of going through the dark side of storytelling can lead us to realizations, and new way of being in the world by puttling love and truth first.

Bendell (2018) put the dark side of our water future this way: “Is it happen􏰀i􏰀ng? Worr􏰂􏰂ied, I looked at the latest 􏰄metha􏰀ne r􏰂eadi􏰀ngs f􏰂rom􏰄 satellite a􏰀nd la􏰀nd m􏰄easu􏰂resents. Mid-al􏰆titude 􏰄measur􏰂emen􏰀ts sho􏰇wed 􏰄metha􏰀ne le􏰏vels increasing a􏰃bout 1.8 percent over the previous year􏰂, w􏰇ith sur􏰂fa􏰁ce 􏰄measur􏰂em􏰄en􏰀ts ab􏰃out half of that. Both figu􏰂res w􏰇er􏰂e 􏰁co􏰀siste􏰀nt 􏰇qith a 􏰀no􏰀n-li􏰀nea􏰂r i􏰀􏰁􏰂ncrease – pote􏰀􏰆ntiall􏰅y e􏰉xpo􏰀ne􏰀􏰆ntial….The􏰀n I dis􏰁co􏰏ve􏰂red that s􏰁cienti􏰀􏰆sts at the Vi􏰂rginia I􏰀ns􏰆titute of Mar􏰂i􏰀ne Scien􏰀􏰁ec 􏰇were reporting data on􏰀 ac􏰁tual sea le􏰏vels that w􏰇as 􏰁co􏰀sisten􏰀t w􏰇ith sea-r􏰂ise 􏰃bei􏰀ng n􏰀o􏰀n-li􏰀near􏰂. That is a p􏰂o􏰉􏰅xy for􏰂 n􏰀on􏰀-li􏰀near􏰂 􏰁cha􏰀ges i􏰀 nour􏰂 􏰁cli􏰄mate. It m􏰄ea􏰀ns that esc􏰁ala􏰆􏰀ting feed􏰃a􏰁ck loops a􏰂re 􏰀no􏰇 w􏰇arm􏰂􏰄i􏰀ng the pla􏰀net fu􏰂ther􏰂. It 􏰇as har􏰂􏰂row􏰇i􏰀ng 􏰂research.􏰂􏰁”

Bendell (2019) “The climate emergency calls on us to explore what we can do, individually and collectively, to adapt to climate-induced disruption.” It means we are not going to avert Sixth Extinction by feel good storytelling, and trotting out more greenwash. We will need to look at moving beyond the status quo initiatives of sustainable development, beyond carbon tax beyond water privatization schmes, beyond reuse, reduce, recycle sustainable growth practices of late modern capitalism. Here I want to focus on the dark side of water storytelling, and what we might do if we take climate change relationship and entanglement with the hyrdrological water cycle, seriously.

Let me summarize my position on water capitalism. Global water capitalism is unsustainable. We in the US, have already exceeded planetary limits. If everyone in the world lived as United States do in the status quo, we would need 5 Earths to support humanity’s ecosystem consumption rate (Downstream project). The only way US and Washington Censenus strategy is water commodification by corporations such as Nestle, CocaCola, and PepsiCo, while Becktel, Vivendi and Suez privatize municipal water systems. This way US retains 5 Earth’s water consumption, while many nations with water shortage, pay or die. There is depletion of aquifers by agricultural water, by water commodifaction schemers, and by those engaged in water speculation, buting up water rights, globally.

Extinction or Rebellion? In action we have hope.

I am in rebellion against the Trumpland government of the US that sleepwalking into Sixth Extinction. ER has affinity groups organizing worldwide, but none in New Mexico. So I joined ExR and am organizing a local nonviolent rebellion. My rebellion is to use ’storytelling science’ (Boje, 2019b; Boje & Rosile, 2019 in press). The US federal government is not doing its duty to avoid ecological collpase. The state government is not doing the job to avoid the further desertification here. The city and county governments are not changing policies away from the dominant order to change policies. There is growing awareness, but it is not translating into climate action. My rebellion begins with my own watershed, the part of it where I live. As I reflect on the relaiton of organizational storytelling and capitalism in the Sixth Extinction, I want to face the ‘dark side of storytelling’ all the manipulaiton of the storytelling in late modern capitalism. At the same time, I want to do something to set a new direction. The storytelling mindset has to be that ‘we’ are complicit, and ‘we’ are going to make change to a new political economy possible. Not capitalism, not circular economy modification to capitalism, but something entirely new and different.

This is a Google satallite picture of 4700 Dunn Drive in New Mexico where Grace Ann and I live on about 5 acres, we got rezoned for horses.

Figure 2: Our Horse Ranchete at 4700 Dunn Drive Las Cruces, New Mexico
This is a picture of our small horse ranch. I am beginningmy personal rebellion against Sixth Extinction with changes to my own water actions, with permaculture and water harvesting principle. I have run out of excuses and time because the extinction is coming, whether I like it or not. I am engaging in a constructive approach. I don’t know exactly how I am going to regreen the New Mexico desert, but I am going do self-correcting storytelling science, and make it happen. There is no alternative because the federal, state, county, city governments are not on course to avert catastrophe. There is much that has been done, and pople who have devoted years, to making renewable energy possible, to make freshwater possilbe, etc. The direction set by the UN running by traditional structures and the political economic order, is not changing fast enough. We all know this.

 

Figure 3: Water Harvester Principles

1. Begin with Long and Thoughtful Observation
Water storytelling beings with long and thoughtful observation of the accessible watershed.
I live in the desert of New Mexico at 4700 Dunn Drive, Las Cruces New Mexico. This 4.7 acre watershed receives on average, 10 inches of rain each year. Most of the rain falls are sands and run down the arroyos. Arroyo water runs too fast, cutting deep into the desert landscape. On the few moments when there is substantial rain the water flows so fast it carries the top soil with it.

 

Figure 4: Water Observation Post
My long and thoughtful water observations have just begun. I want to understand my virtual water footprint. I realize humanity is on the way to Sixth Extinction and virutal water in our lifestyle is an important consideration. It is also important to llk at the entire supply chain of the places we work. How can I make a difference and develop a better virtual water existence?

My freshwater lifestyle needs to foreground water harvesting. I cleared away some of the greasewood bushes, and then trimmed back one of hte large mesquite trees where I constructed the temporary water observation post. I put up a tarp, and repaired a salvaged chair to sit on. I noticed a clump of grass, growing in the shade and shelter of the Mesquite tree.

 

Figure 5: Clump of Grass Growing under the Mesquite Tree

The mesquite tree and greesewood brush make high mounds of silt from the runoff during the few times it rains. I was disappointed July 12 when dark clouds formed, but just to the north of our land, so we did not get any downpour. Amazing how the rainfall can just pass us by. I noticed that where mesquite had about a foot or so gap between ground and canopy, more green grass was growing.

 

Figure 6: Grassy Area in lowest part of the Property

Figure 7: Ditch to move gray water from house to a Demi-Lune

The land slopes and the arroyos deposit the water into it. This is where there is no greasewood, and in spaces between mesquite, there is taller grass, now dried out by the sun and lack of recent rainfall. My plan is to bring more water to this area. One way is to make a cut out in the road to the south, to bring the road water into the basin. Another way, is to puddle the water in swells along the arroyos, so that it slows the water, and there is less runoff from the wetter basin into Dunn Drive to the east. A third way is to transfer gray water from the house to some demi lunes (half moons).

I moved the graywater about 100 feet with some extra hose and a pump, and the rest of the way in the above ditchwork. It flows to a demi-lune, with about three days of greaywater. The old pump we installed when we built the house about 12 years ago, no longer works. I bought one I can plug in.

Figure of area where Arroyo spread out

Demi-lunes are half circles, where you dig it out and birm, to harvest water runoff. I traced the arroyo across the property, and made gradations to move some to an outlying area near my observation outpost.

More later
 

 

References
Bendell, J. (2018). Leadership beyond denial of our climate tragedy. In: The Poetics of Leadership Conference: Creativity, Art and Story in Enabliing Meaningful Change, 7-8 September 2018, University of Cumbria, Ambleside, UK. (Unpublished). Accessed July 12 2019 at http://insight.cumbria.ac.uk/id/eprint/4165/1/Bendell_LeadershipBeyond.pdf

Bendell, Jem (2019) Because it’s not a drill: technologies for deep adaptation to
climate chaos. In: Connect University Conference on Climate Change, 13 May
2019, DG Connect, European Commission, Brussels, Belgium. (Unpublished). Accessed July 12, 2019 at http://insight.cumbria.ac.uk/id/eprint/4776/

Boje, D. M. (2019a). Global Storytelling: There is No Planet B. Singapore/London/NY: World Scientific.

Boje, D. M. (2019b). Organizational Research: Storytelling In Action. London/NY: Routledge.

Boje, D. M. (2019c, in press). Storytelling Interventions in Global Water Crisis. Singapore/London/NY: World Scientific. Link to download Word file.

Boje, D. M.; Rosile, G. A. (2019, in review). Doing storytelling sciience with self-correction. Singapore/London/NY: World Scientific. Link to download Word file.

Monbiot, G. (2018a). You Want It Darker?. the Guardian. Nov, accessed July 12 2019 at https://pm22100.net/01_PDF_THEMES/97_ARTICLES_DIVERS/50_DECEMBRE_2018/181210_Want_it_darker.pdf

Monbiot, G. (2018b). Enough of Carillion culture. Make bosses pay for the carnage they cause. The Guardian.

Raworth, Kate. (2017). Doughnut economics: seven ways to think like a 21st-century economist. Chelsea Green Publishing.

 

The Dark Side of Water and Climate Storytelling by Multinational Corporations

Blog Post by David M. Boje, July 8, 2019

I have a keynote to do in August for the ‘Dark Side of Communication Conference’ in Aalborg Denmark. My focus is on storytelling. The dark side of storytelling is how it is manipulated to keep the public, and the politicians to make policy changes that affect the pocketbooks of billionaires and their corporations, because they fear changes in in structural conditions of late modern capitalism would affect short-term profits. Business storytelling is manipulated. This despite predictions of every scientist of any credibility of a Sixth Extinction, now underway in the Anthropocene. If we are all now participants in the Sixth Extinction, why aren’t we doing anything to keep under a 1.5°C increase in global average temperature? I will argue it’s because of the ‘dark side of storytelling.’

Corporate and political leaders are part of the problem, and stopping the solutions.

There is something else that is fundamental to understand about storytelling. People have evolved storytelling as a means of survival, over hundreds of millions of years. The frontal cortex identifies potential immediate threats in the environs, then synopses trigger hormone bursts in the limbic, and transmit fight, flight, freeze, or faint commands to the body’s brainstem. Climate change and water shortages are long-term, not in the brain’s programs for immediate survival. The storytelling human brain, focuses on immediate survival, so not getting a cell phone signal is more critical to attend to than the future average global temperature.

Organizational Storytelling is Also Being Manipulated We shouldn’t underestimate the consequences of ways billionaires and their multinational corporate and using the power of ‘storytelling’ to shape public views and opinions, and what to do about water crises and climate change. There are several possible answers to why we are doing too little too late to avert 6th Extinction.

Why aren’t we changing the system if the system is threatening our survival?

First Answer, maybe most people just don’t understand what scientists mean by an increase in ‘global average temperature’ by the end of the century. With each degree of global average temperature, thresholds are crossed, that magnify consequences.
“The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5ºC — that’s 2.7ºF for Americans — on October 8, 2018, laying out the swift action that needs to be taken to avoid catastrophic warming and how the half-degree difference between 1.5ºC and 2ºC will actually have devastating consequences” (Paul Marx, Oct 2018).
“The glaciers are melting faster than even the direst expectations of the most pessimistic scientists… We’re in the midst of history’s first human-caused mass extinction — we’ve killed off something like maybe half the life we know of anywhere in the universe” https://eand.co/is-this-going-to-be-a-nother-dark-age-f5fece033c51

Second Answer, powerful corporate interests manage the narratives of climate change and freshwater crisis, spinning the narratives into a ‘climate debate’ to eek out short term profit by keeping the public in a state of confusion, and preventing structural system changes by blaming the victims. Paul Marx’s (2018) message ” individual action cannot properly address climate change… By focusing on individuals, at least in the dominant English-speaking countries, governments and corporations were let off the hook.”
Third answer: Billionaires in charge of multinational corporations spend millions lobbying politicians to downplay climate change, and stop them from implementing freshwater policies.

I think it’s all three! A small power elite group of multi-billionaires that own or control multinational oil, plastic, chemical, and water corporations find it profitable to hijack the storytelling conversations around water and climate change, reframing ‘climate science’ into a ‘climate debate’ and using social media to steer public opinion into ‘confusion’ and ‘climate denial’.

The power of corporate ’storytelling organizations’ to frame global warming as a ‘ debate’ to confuse the public, downplay its importance in freshwater shortages around the world.
Eight multi-billionaires now control half the wealth of the planet (Boje, 2019a, Global Storytelling: There is No Planet B). Multinational water corporations (Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, and Nestle) are privatizing freshwater sources, while other multinational water corporations (Bechtel, Suez, Veolia) are commodifying water by taking over municipal water systems (Boje, 2019b, Water Storytelling).
Can the wealthiest 1% escape the consequences of 2ºC, or 3ºC, or 4ºC global warming? In a 6th Extinction, the predictions are half of humanity will die-off, and the migration from collapsing ecosystems to water and land controlled by the walls of the 1% will not keep out starving people. The 1% will not be able to escape the consequences of global warming because starving people will band together.

 

Do Nothing Scenario: “Without any effort on our parts, if we were to allow the temperature to rise at the current rate, then we would see an increase of 4.1-4.8° Celsius at the end of this century”https://eco-intelligent.com/2018/04/29/why-is-an-increase-of-2-celsius-such-a-big-deal/

Status quo business-as-usual scenario: “According to current trends, with all our mitigation efforts, the temperature of our Earth is expected to rise by 3.5° Celsius at the end of this century”
“As reported by The Guardian: At 1.5C the proportion of the global population exposed to water stress could be 50% lower than at 2C, it notes. Food scarcity would be less of a problem and hundreds of millions fewer people, particularly in poor countries, would be at risk of climate-related poverty” (cited in Paul Marx, 2018).

The radical change scenario: If powerful multinational corporations are controlling the global warming and freshwater narratives, confusing science as a ‘debate’ in order to increase corporate profits while engaging in practices that are warming the planet, leading to the extinction of most humans by end of century, especially in less developed nations, increasing their migration to developed nations, then a more radical change scenario is called for.

Paul Marx Oct 8 2018 https://medium.com/radical-urbanist/climate-change-requires-more-than-individual-solutions-6770844b423a
Paul Marx’s (2018) message ” individual action cannot properly address climate change… By focusing on individuals, at least in the dominant English-speaking countries, governments and corporations were let off the hook.”

“”Just think for a minute of all that’s done to stop politicians from implementing policies that would accelerate the transition to renewables and make our societies more sustainable; and stop citizens from demanding it.”

“The billionaires in charge of these companies spend millions lobbying politicians to get them to abandon their plans, or at least water them down to make them ineffective. They own media companies and influence those they don’t through ad buys to ensure the news media doesn’t pay much attention to climate change, and when they do the network brings on ‘both sides’ of the ‘debate’: a representative of the scientific consensus and someone paid by fossil fuel interests to produce material aimed at confusing the public.””If that’s the case, why aren’t we changing? Because powerful interests are standing in the way.””It isn’t a coincidence that this keeps happening across the world. There are powerful people who benefit from the status quo and do not want to see a transition to renewable energy, an end to automobility, and other changes that will free us from our dependence on fossil fuels.””Consider this: a mere 100 companies are responsible for 71 percent of global emissions since 1970, and when we consider lifestyle consumption emissions — essentially what would be reduced through individual decisions — 49 percent are generated by the top 10 percent.Remember when Leonardo DiCaprio took a private jet from New York to Cannes to accept an environmental award? That’s how rich people live, and it’s not going to change without a radical reimagining of what our societies should look like.”

“The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5ºC — that’s 2.7ºF for Americans — on October 8, 2018, laying out the swift action that needs to be taken to avoid catastrophic warming and how the half-degree difference between 1.5ºC and 2ºC will actually have devastating consequences.”

“Climate change has left cities beginning to drown” https://eand.co/capitalism-isnt-going-to-survive-the-21st-century-will-we-c62639827528
“This is capitalism, in the real world — outside the fairytales and fantasies of American economists and libertarian pundits. In the real world, capitalism devolves to a system of exploitation for profit — and what’s exploited is everything, from the planet to minds to bodies and democracy.”
This world is made of three things : a dying planet, destabilized societies, imploding economies.

Capitalism cannot work in a world whose resources are depleted, corroded, burned through, violated (unless by “work” we mean plunge us back into the Stone Age).