[Ed. Note: The Wind Horse Alliance had a deep and complex history, and in March of 2007 the WHA tasked its intern Dale Mason, a Master's in Institutional History student at Indiana University, to craft a short overview of that history. The following is the last draft available upon the dissolution of the WHA, and is presented verbatim.] The Wind Horse Alliance: A history: 1982-2007 The Wind Horse Alliance, like its namesake, has been a force constantly striving for impact. In its earliest forms, it used direct action; later, it strained to promote analytic study and academic engagement to educate the populace about "common myths regarding the true nature of future potential climate, resource, religious, nuclear, and biosystem meltdowns." In its most recent form, it is developing an interactive approach to education and grassroots galvanization, using the Web to engage the broadest possible audience, by way of its "Survival Aptitude Quiz," described later in this document.     This history was gathered by direct documentary examination of archival material, and by interviews of the principals of the Wind Horse Alliance themselves.     -- Dale Mason The founding members of the Wind Horse Alliance -- Mike, James, Omar, Beverly, Frank, Carl and Mitsu -- first fully came together in Bloomington, Indiana, in 1982. The road to their formation was filled with twists and turns, unexpected meetings -- Omar has even called them "synchronistic events." Central to the Wind Horse Alliance's early formation was The Wind Horse Emporium, a restaurant/coffeehouse on the edge of the IU campus. This charming eatery featured a 24-hour pastiche of greasy grill food and vegetarian delights, bad coffee and a plethora of fancy teas. It had, in short, something for everyone. Omar and Carl began to frequent "the Horse" in 1980. Carl, studying climatology at IU, was on the forefront of computer modeling of complex systems. Omar's discipline was more amorphous. His Geophysics pursuits combined geology, physics and, as he liked to say, "a Rosicrucian potluck of mysticism and whatnot." They quickly recognized intellectual chemistry, and began meeting at "the Horse" routinely. When Carl and Beverly began dating in early 1981, the three found in each other an easy sense of sympatico. At about this time James, with a diverse background in telecommunications, theater, media and, as he says, a "layman's appreciation of the sciences," was looking to form a comedy improv group. His recruitment poster caught Mike's eye, because he liked the name of the group: Amateur Taxidermy Theater. Mike called James, and the two hit it off immediately. Mike, an independent inventor/iconoclast, had already dropped out of IU in lieu of more entrepreneurial efforts. In James he found a kindred spirit, someone, like him, who listened to the spark of inspiration. Their improv group, which included a rotating crew of other performers, often showcased their newest works at the Wind Horse Emporium. Spirited discussion frequently followed the performances, regarding the nature of performance, the conflict of "message" and "medium," the requirement of art to confront social problems, and the rest of what you'd expect from callow undergraduates (or tenured professors). These discussions frequently included Omar, Carl and Beverly. One night in the summer of 1981, Frank walked into the Wind Horse not long after an Amateur Taxidermy performance had begun. Beverly and Frank had known each other in high school in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Frank says that they were "romantically involved" during that period. (Beverly acknowledges they "attended the Senior Prom together" -- but nothing more.) A student in the biochemistry department, Frank had spotted his former friend Beverly only sporadically since they had both moved to Bloomington. When the Amateur Taxidermy performance was over, Frank was pulled into the conversation, and soon became part of their community. They quickly discovered a previously unknown common denominator among the six -- the inspiration of a mentor that none of them had been quite willing to acknowledge as a mentor, because of the complexities of their individual responses to him, to his work, and to his and message. Dr. Eric Nolan was a professor in the Biology Department. Each of the group had taken his B101 Dynamic Ecosystems course -- and all had been surprisingly moved by this lecture course in fundamental biology and ecology, given in a huge lecture hall that Nolan managed to turn almost into a church. His sermons were about the delicate webs of interconnections that were being discovered in biotic systems. About dependencies in nature, and how easily balances can be thrown off. About carrying capacity in nature, and how species die off after they grow beyond the carrying capacity of their ecological niche. And how humans were just another species, and our species niche just happened to be the entire planet. Nolan ignited in each of them a commitment to further understand some of these seeming far-off possibilities, of humans exceeding the carrying capacity of the natural environment for it as a species. They formally invited Dr. Nolan to join them at the Wind Horse, and he began to be an occasional, if sporadic, visitor, seemingly uncomfortable with his role as mentor, but also clearly recognizing the importance of his engagement with these proto-activists. He would sit, listening, throwing out the occasional bit of wisdom, smoking his strange Pall Mall straights. The discussions naturally moved toward alarm at world conditions. Each had read important texts such as Silent Spring and the works of James Lovelock; during this period, concern over nuclear warfare and "nuclear winter" was at a pitch. Far too few were talking about the implications of the greenhouse effect, and nobody was worrying about species collapse, even though the evidence was already mounting that we were causing irremediable harm to the earth. Meanwhile, on a local level, the controversy over the PolyChlorinated Biphenyls contamination throughout the Bloomington area, and the opportunity for direct action, mobilized the group. PCBs are insulating oils contained within electrical capacitors, and as the capacitors were manufactured at the Westinghouse factory nearby -- and when flawed capacitors were dumped -- the insulating PCB oil entered the water supply and exposed people to potentially harmful carcinogens. Westinghouse, the producer of these capacitors, was at that time owned by Monsanto, and many Bloomington citizens began to feel like a bunch of Davids up against one of the biggest Goliaths imaginable. A dark-of-night City Council meeting to sign a "consent decree" absolving Westinghouse of responsibility caused intense consternation and radicalization. Into this volatile mix -- literally -- walked Mitsu, who auditioned for Amateur Taxidermy and rapidly became its star, and was discovered to have also taken Nolan's class. She also quickly became the star of Wind Horse Emporium, and her participation in the discussions of PCBs, population explosion, consumerism, and dominant social paradigms, took a decidedly dynamic turn. Her background in plant genetics and photosynthesis helped round out the intellectual capacity of the group. And it was Mitsu who, late one night, encouraged the group to formalize their interactions by starting a newsletter. The Wind Horse Alliance was thus born. As history shows, their efforts to alter the path of the "consent decree" failed. The one bright spot, however, that they would later acknowledge was that without a mega-corporation to fight against -- and thus a local cause to fight for -- the Wind Horse Alliance might never have been formed. The Wind Horse Alliance continued for over 18 months, before the pressures of impending grad school, relationships, and, simply, "the next thing," began to split them apart. The next fifteen years see Bev receive her Ph.D., Carl well-employed by the National Weather Service, Mitsu in Costa Rica at La Selba Biological Research Station for postdoc work, Omar designing analysis tools for the petroleum industry, and Frank to California, where he married and had two children. The 90s were quiet, with occasional email contacts on birthdays, or singleton visits while passing through a town. They would not reconvene as a group until 2000, in the same restaurant/ coffeeshop, now under the ownership of James and Mike, the only two of the original seven who had remained in Bloomington. The impetus for their return was the death of their mentor in the Biology Department, Dr. Nolan, that fall, which brought them together for the funeral. Questions around his suicide kept them talking, drinking, and bonding again for two full days. At that point, oddly recharged, they exchanged phone numbers, email addresses, etc., and stayed, in Mike's words, "in a bit more touch. Until September 11th, that is." All the former members of the Wind Horse Alliance were touched by 9-11 in varying degrees. Carl's brother died in NYC; Beverly's niece perished in the first plane. As citizens and scientists September 11th had a profound impact. Said James, "After a flurry of phone calls and emails, the path was clear." As one, they understood that they were among the few who recognized that the "war on terrorism" would soon suck all the oxygen and attention of the nation, and the world, from the real, much more terrible threats that they had been watching develop, as warned of years before by Dr. Nolan. They wanted to mobilize -- each was in a transitional moment in their lives or careers, and Mike volunteered to use the banked earnings from his Y2K patch patent to underwrite the first two years of a thinktank, to develop strategies for communicating the real threats to the population at large. By early 2002, the Alliance was fully reformed in Bloomington, and locked in discussions of strategy, mission, goals, messages, and theoretical underpinnings for implementation. Their plans included a Web site where "white papers" and other information could be disseminated, and the publication of an expanded newsletter/journal [Ed. Note: sample available via the WHA Archive Page], available in both print and digital forms. In addition, the Alliance agreed to generate op-eds, press releases, and organize public meetings and lectures. Among their most ambitious early goals was to develop a true discipline for post-apocalypse thinking, and embed the intellectual discourse within Indiana University, first by raising funds to support "The Eric Nolan Lectures" (which included talks by luminaries such as Al Gore, Lester Brown, and others, with hundreds in attendance), and then proposing to underwrite, for five years, a chair for "Post-apocalypse Studies," in the Interdisciplinary Studies department. This last effort was nearly attained in 2005, when it was summarily excised by a new administration at IU, much to the Alliance's frustration. Further, public response was not as great as they had hoped -- there was no groundswell of students demanding a course in post-apocalypse studies, even after exposure to predictive analysis and the abstractions of futurology. Education itself was clearly not enough. In late 2005 the Wind Horse Alliance reassessed its communications strategies. Given the failure to implement the Post-apocalypse Studies approach academically, they began creating the blueprint for a new, and much more ambitious web engagement strategy. Some bold, new initiative had to confront what they saw as a deficit of clarity and understanding of what could happen, if current trends continued. The real fight, they knew, was over human consumption behavior, and intentional ignorance toward the deteriorating effects of mass industrialization on the health of the planet -- and in fighting our primal species drives for status, territory, and offspring. The Alliance struggled mightily to develop methodologies for communicating "what-if" scenarios via models that "teach and entertain." More importantly, they endeavored to develop methodologies that they could all sign on to, as the Alliance were conscious users of Consensus for its governance. This need for consensus, while slowing down "progress," maintained amity and cohesiveness. The group agreed that an "interactive quiz" of some kind should be developed, to help the layperson learn whether they could survive or prosper in a post-collapse environment, as a way to understand the need for change. They developed that set of quiz questions over the next couple of quarters, resulting in the Survival Aptitude Quiz. As of this writing, plans are being finalized to launch an entirely new approach to the Wind Horse Alliance web site. Models are up and humming, and the interactive Survival Aptitude Quiz, while not currently functioning on the public site, are being tested in several formats internally. Their primary goals -- informing, educating, entertaining, and personalizing issues of global dimensions -- seem sure to be manifested in the new site, in exciting new ways. Though there remain lively disputes within the group -- what group of creatives doesn't have the occasional disagreement? -- the future of the Wind Horse Alliance looks bright, even if the planet's trajectory often seems dim. Draft 3, respectfully submitted by: Dale Mason Intern Wind Horse Alliance March 28, 2007 Bloomington, Indiana