Winter Reflections: Engaging our Children
It wasn’t enough to observe and have a front row seat at issues I felt were important. The students had to care about what they were studying. It had to be relevant to their lives.
It wasn’t enough to observe and have a front row seat at issues I felt were important. The students had to care about what they were studying. It had to be relevant to their lives.
Focusing on compassion and personal transformation as a prerequisite for external, wider-world change, Commonland’s use of Theory U processes sets its approach apart from traditional landscape restoration projects, which typically focus on biodiversity alone.
Once we understood the intrinsic value of the natural world, not just what it contributes to our well-being, our economy and the local ecology, there was no going back.
But I like a scenario in which the heroic masses reach the end of their tolerance before that happens. They—we—rebel, withdraw, dismantle, and replace the evil practices with more ethical ones while the planet is still livable.
Since our civilization is not built on a foundation of sustainable principles, it is no surprise that we find it now to be utterly unsustainable.
Looking at the food system in a holistic manner and employing a diverse set of strategies is the best way to ensure lasting and stable change.
Rather than seeing food sovereignty as a destination, we see it as a pathway made up of everyday acts of resistance and reparation accessible to everyone.
Sustainability means living as nature lives. It means no depletion of the elements of the ecosystem humans have been treating as economic resources, and no waste. What we pursue is up that tree.
Only once we’ve given up on the belief that we must succeed can we truly hope that we succeed after all.
Transition Southampton used seed funding to work in three very different parts of the city. Rob Hopkins spoke to Clare, Liz and Si from the group to find out how they used enticing ‘What If?’ questions and built on existing connections to help local people imagine a different future for their neighbourhoods and what emerged from the project.
What if there’s another side to climate change, one less concerned with what we put in the atmosphere than what we do to the land, a side which, despite four decades of climate education, has yet to be explained to us?
How does low tech differ from high tech and what does it feel like to live a low tech lifestyle?