Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
What happens in the brain when we’re being imaginative? Neuroscientists are moving away from the idea of what’s called ‘localisationism’ (the idea that each capacity of the brain is linked to a particular ‘area’ of the brain) towards the idea that what’s more important is to identify the networks that fire in order to enable particular activities or insights.
Recently, I spoke with John Marion, the executive director of Common Cause Rhode Island, who, since 2008, has led the organization. He has successfully spearheaded numerous pieces of democracy reform through the legislature during his Common Cause tenure, including online voter registration, a law strengthening the state’s Ethics Commission, and more recently, automatic voter registration and risk-limiting post-election audits.
In our time of unprecedented interdependence and existential risk, we face a common predicament and an uncertain destiny. As the global quandary deepens and awareness spreads, the conviction that root-and-branch social change is needed to circumvent perils and seize opportunities draws more and more of us.
Over the past year, I have interviewed democracy reformers across the country. I have heard many stories of victories that have pushed state democracies forward, most of which were recorded in my book Daring Democracy, coauthored with Frances Moore Lappé. Since handing in the manuscript, though, there have been many more successes and emerging grassroots efforts.
When the average person thinks about technology, the first thing that comes to mind isn’t a family dog or cat. Nor would one likely consider a flock of chickens, a packet of seeds or a sack of potatoes to be examples of technology. But technology thinker Dmitry Orlov, in his book Shrinking the Technosphere, argues that that’s exactly what they are.
For some years now, we have been witnessing the emergence of relational, cross-over, participative power. This is the territory that gives technopolitics its meaning and prominence, the basis on which a new vision of democracy – more open, more direct, more interactive – is being developed and embraced.
The way ahead will be based on a combination of knowledge obtained remotely, using modern tools and devices, and ways of knowing that are local, experienced directly, contextual, and embodied. When we connect with living systems emotionally, and not just rationally, and focus on the informal, the local and the conversational – things will really begin to change.
What I am learning is that by seeing how the false starts, blind spots, transformative research tools, and foundational discoveries that made the complexity of biology accessible to scientific inquiry are replicated in the struggles to make sense of the human relationship to our natural world today.
I invite you to see with new eyes. Ultimately Guha’s definition of environmentalism is not wrong. It just doesn’t fit mine and many others’ reality of what environmentalism is: holistic; long rooted in time and space; for something and not only against; alive and based in the land, lives, work and bodies of those around me, African in and of their environments.
What matters is the effort to move beyond mere resistance and onto a more substantive engagement with rebuilding – to ask what comes next, and to harness the current disenchantment and loss of faith in a more productive manner. It is said that moments of crisis are also moments of opportunity. There is little doubt that we face a crisis of governance at the moment; this is also a chance to design a new and improved government.
Anyway, I have now read Dorling’s book and I want to share a few thoughts about it. They’re not in the form of a comprehensive warts-and-all review – rather, I want to highlight five themes of interest to me that anticipate some future posts, on which I think Dorling has thought-provoking things to say.
For those that aren’t aware, Dave Jacke is a world class ecological designer, writer, and teacher. Lead author of the acclaimed two-volume Edible Forest Gardens books, I have long respected Dave’s sophisticated and comprehensive grasp of design process. While he prefers the phrase ecological design process1 over permaculture design process, he unquestionably has helped / is helping permaculture lift its game in terms of a design process that not only starts by deeply tuning into people and place, but embodies the principle of starting with patterns and ending up with details.
