Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
The purpose of this text is to give a brief and accessible overview of how deliberative democracy can work at its full potential. This requires a specific formula, a way of designing a democratic system, which in this case is the Waldenia Model. At the heart of this model are citizens’ assemblies.
Apart from being a wildlife sanctuary and a permacultural model farm, the Refugio is an education and consultation center for reforestation practices and regenerative agriculture.
We find ourselves in the most consequential decade in the history of humanity. The choices we make now will determine what kind of future we’ll have, or whether we will have a future at all.
What is the proper label for a community of people who share a way of looking at life, a way of understanding who we are, a worldview that encompasses so much? The word “religion” seems like the most appropriate descriptor.
What we really need to do is seriously imagine a society with fewer vehicles and drivers — human-scaled technology.
The 1950s was arguably the decade that best matched a decent standard of living to a sustainable way of life.
Whether we ourselves want to develop these skills, or support others to do so, to ensure a resilient future we need to grow more community members with effective group facilitation skills and mindsets.
Tami Simon hosts the popular Sounds True podcast, Insights at the Edge, which has been downloaded more than 20 million times. With its guiding principle “to disseminate spiritual wisdom”, Sounds True has grown into a multimedia publisher that has produced over 6,000 titles. She addresses the question of “What Could Possibly Go Right?”
If you follow those steps, find a group of people, start dreaming together, start educating yourselves, start listening and identifying gaps in the community and assets in the community, then I think you’re at that point where you can actually start thinking seriously about, “Okay, which of these Community Economic Development toolkit strategies do we want to take on first?”
What would it mean for us to belong to the city rather than for the city to belong to us? And might changing this framework also change how we organize with our neighbours?
We have found that among climate scientists and politicians, advocacy for a direct fossil fuel phase-out with adaptation through resource allocation and rationing, is very rare indeed. That’s why we found the Oireachtas hearing so encouraging.
But what will the climate crisis mean for the relatively mild UK? To find out, we reconstructed the climate at a specific point in the distant past, an era when volcanoes had pumped about as much carbon into the atmosphere as exists today.
