Act: Inspiration

Don’t You Know That’s Applied Cultural Evolution?

by

I often get pushback when making the argument that research in cultural evolutionary studies can be applied to real-world social problems at community scales. What I find fascinating is that the concerns brought forth — that there are unintended consequences, it might be perceived as manipulative or unethical, or simply that we don’t know enough about how to do it — all exemplify an incredible blind spot about how much applied cultural evolution ALREADY EXISTS as mature practices with decade-long track records of success.

Learning with our Senses

by

I wonder if the process of learning and discovering with our senses isn’t really what makes us human, what makes our life worthwhile.  Perhaps this is how as humans we evolved our ‘big’ brains, our specialized neural networks.  Maybe in exploring the word with our senses and trying to make sense of it all, we developed language in order to tell stories,  we developed writing in order to keep records, and in the process we advanced our social group from tribes into culture and from culture into civilizations.

Josiah Meldrum on Imagination and Getting the British to Love Beans Again

by

We want a business that’s sufficient that pays our wage, pays the wage of the people that we employ, allows us to do all the things that we enjoy, but there’s still a huge opportunity for lots of other businesses operating all over the UK, like Grown in Totnes, to flourish in the same way.  So yeah, it’s exciting.

Start Small – The Story of Bec Hellouin Permaculture Farm

by

You have to take the time to train yourself. You have to take the time to convince yourself or to test yourself in the profession, to dirty your hands in the soil and to really see what it’s all about. There is a lot of fantasy around these projects but there’s also a reality which is difficult. It can be absolutely incredible, but it can be a nightmare if it’s done without preparation, without a good human design, without a good design for the site.

Learning Resiliency from Disaster

by

Now the Wine Country fires are out and Richard is available to come back on Locus Focus for this episode, but instead of talking about the original topic we’re going to look at how all the disasters we’ve witnessed this year are highlighting critical lessons about what it means not only to build a sustainable future but one that is resilient as well.

Zen in the Art of Permaculture Design: Review

by

It is from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, that Stefan Geyer, an artist and hotelier with many talents, models his book Zen in the Art of Permaculture Design on. The book, a light, bright blue novelette, is Geyer’s meditation on a life of permaculture and meaning, and hints how to use permaculture design to shift one’s perception to both the natural world and our own human nature using the lens of Zen Buddhism techniques.

An Old Oak Tree

by

I’ve been enjoying reading one of Richard Rohr’s books, “Falling Upward, A spirituality for the two halves of life”.  He writes “Unless you can chart and encourage both movement and direction, you have no way to name maturity or immaturity.”   It’s made me think about how humanity is or is not maturing as a species, and how we need to move away from our current way of living.

How a Big Win for Native American Water Rights Could Impact the West

by

The Agua Caliente case was the culmination of a struggle over nearly two-decades by the tribe of more than 400 members to ensure that their sole water source remains as clean as it was when Europeans first came to the arid region on the borders of the Mojave and Sonoran deserts.

GDP, Jobs, and Fossil Largesse

by

The good news, of course, is that GDP is an insane metric for success, just as “giant stone heads” was (though to give the Easter islanders their just due, at the time they had no evidence their belief was nuts, while in 2016 we have demonstrable proof that the conclusions of neoclassical economics are refuted by basic science). If we decide that we value happiness, quality of life, and a healthy planet with uncounted thousands of human generations left, we could in principle jettison GDP and do things differently. It won’t be easy, only necessary.

As New Pipelines Get Built, More People are Standing in the Way

by

Yet even amid the companies’ growing use of scare tactics and secret maneuvers, citizens are ramping up direct action. People have braved the elements and matched the energy giants with their own brand of force, as residents nationwide turn to a mix of creative and traditional tactics to halt as many projects as they can.

Diet for a Small Polder

by

Traders have to communicate and mediate with all kinds of people. And we have a tradition of “polder politics” because we live in low-lying land (polder) that is always in danger of being flooded if the dykes don’t work. If you live with people in a polder, you have to work things out, or you’ll all drown. You need to talk with everybody. You need to get everybody on board.