Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
At the PDC level the majority of students will be designing for themselves. Their individual plan will be their own site. The real challenge is to get these students to start implementing permaculture on the ground. I consider this my primary goal.
The Degrowth Commission invites you to re-imagine how our economy should work in a survivable zero-carbon future.It is part of Enough! which is a new experimental project responding to the climate crisis. We will be hosting large-scale participatory events to develop these ideas.
Now I understand that sustainable sovereign economies are needed to replace the system we support with our purchasing power, and our ancient teachings have all of those economies passed down in traditional families.
What a climate emergency would mean for Exeter University, and what a genuinely low-carbon, resilient, localised, embedded, civic, ‘anchor institution’ would look like is a huge conversation, one that will need to cultivate an imaginative culture where anything feels possible, but on the strength of this event, that process has, hopefully, begun.
If you’re not at the helm of a fashion company, it can be difficult to discern exactly how our individual actions are part of achieving progress and ameliorating the impacts of our second skin. In the Fibershed Clothing Guide, we share how the impact a garment is defined by three key elements.
Whether we manage to find our way through depends primarily on what goes on inside our minds – on whether we’re able to manage our mental and emotional states at a time of extraordinary turbulence; whether we reach for the right stories to explain what’s happening at this moment in history; and above all, whether enough of us can see ourselves as part of a larger ‘Us’ instead of a ‘them-and-us,’ or just an atomised ‘I.’
The classical university was based on the unity of research and teaching; the modern university has been based on the unity of research, teaching, and practical application. I believe that the current historical moment, with one civilization ending and dying, and another being born, invites us to reconceive the 21st-century university as a unity of research, teaching, and the praxis of transforming society and self.
People around the world are hard at work creating diverse, living versions of the farms of the future. As a way of life, it would be nice to think that it could really catch on, and one day be accessible to most of us.
The question remains unanswered: Do we — including future generations — have a legal right to a climate in which we can pursue our rights to life, liberty, property and happiness?
In September last year, I was very lucky and surprised to find myself in Taiwan for three weeks. I had two weeks free to travel wherever I wanted – so I put the word out for recommendations of permaculture projects, perhaps where I could volunteer and learn about the permaculture movement on another island (Taiwan is a bit bigger than Wales).
So how do we aim for appropriate participation by designing for positive emergence? How do we design for human and planetary health? To do so in ways that are elegantly adapted to the bio-cultural uniqueness of place will require us to pay attention to the qualitative aspects of interactions, relationships.
It was a delightful taste of what the climate emergency will look, feel, taste and sound like if we get it right. It was the future. It was common sense. And I can tell you, it smelt, tasted and looked absolutely fantastic.
