Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
The Pattern Book for Regenerative Design is written for ‘engineers (and other humans)’ who want to “transform the built environment industry into a force for good.” Despite coming into the “other human” category here, I found its mental models and some of its thinking devices useful.
We have our greatest democratic possibilities in the communities where we live, and this is where we can begin to turn around the trend to concentrated oligarchic power that threatens democracy as a whole. We must build the future in place.
Authority, for materialist monists, issues from the universe as directly accessed, assuming matter is real (rather than imagined, as in idealism). Materialist monists do not presume that we know better: that the universe is incapable of producing all that we experience based on the constituents and interactions on full display.
We’d reap myriad benefits by deeply cutting resource use while ensuring that collective sufficiency and justice for all become the focus of our world.
Perhaps our long experience of sitting around campfires together and talking about what’s going on in the world around us, and what we ought to do about it next, can be recovered and put to good use again.
Moving forward effectively requires clarity about the limits of conventional finance – and the creation of new finance vehicles that honor the deep complexities of commoning and ecosystems at bioregional scales.
In a recent article I summarized arguments for reversing the trend toward globalization of economies and cultures, aiming instead for the flourishing of communities rooted in their bioregions (i.e., regions defined by characteristics of the natural environment rather than human-imposed borders). For readers receptive to those arguments, the fundamental follow-up question is, “How?”
In arid and semi-arid regions, retaining rainfall where it falls is not an ecological luxury. It is a prerequisite for long-term water security, climate stability, and social resilience.
Conversely to Hansel and Gretel who left breadcrumbs to find their way out of the woods, we find ourselves now stranded in our civilized, industrialized, digitized cage and needing to find the trail back into our Wilderness.
In this week’s Frankly, Nate shares reflections on what we take for granted in life at multiple scales: from personal health to meaningful work to relative ecological stability.
SMPLE-KOIN will be introduced in this essay as a spiritual ‘thought experiment’ with economic implications, one designed to facilitate a real-world revaluation of how important material and financial wealth is to human prosperity.
So the new year has arrived, and the world’s power dynamics are shifting in a new Cold War. A revolutionary U.S. government has revived the Monroe Doctrine, gunboat diplomacy and the primacy of oil. In so doing it has kicked old-fashioned notions of law and sovereignty in the shins with a Putin-like swagger.
