Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
In the face of the growing uncertainty about the extremities of disasters, resident-led initiatives to build resilience in their own communities are gaining momentum in North America, and across the world.
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.
Flood mitigation is what you see on the surface in Duck Hill, but the tides of change in the community began well before the physical work, and are continuing to swell.
The practice of commoning, and the idea that we might hold and manage land and assets together in common, holds a lot of appeal these days. To help us think forward as we do on this show, we have two world-renowned experts on commoning in the house.
Sarah, Tim, and Nick will share with us in a live and interactive web video conversation what compelled them to act, why they chose to act in the particular way they have, and what lessons they’ve learned that each of us can apply to take meaningful action in our own lives.
The reason is simple. If we prepare, we stand a better chance of surviving than if we don’t. We need to survive these future shocks—up to and including civilizational collapse—if we are to build a greener and more just world on the other side.
While the subject of this story is what we may call biocultural, eco-culinary, or reciprocal restoration, it is quite often enabled through a social process that has been called either community-based restoration, collaborative conservation, or cooperative collaboration.
Life in the early phases of civilizational collapse is filled with absurdities that beg for artful satire. Where is Franz Kafka when we need him? Surely, he could offer a better metaphor than my hackneyed image of a house fire. But maybe it will do for now.
Transition US has teamed up with Post Carbon Institute (PCI) to provide easy and free access of our Transition Streets Handbook (a curated guidebook empowering neighbors with proven actions to conserve energy & water, reduce waste & save money) to winter 2019 Think Resilience course participants.
Like every other institution in our society, colleges and universities are affected by the changing climate. They face new threats to campus infrastructure, and to the safety of students, faculty and staff. But while colleges and universities grapple with these problems, they can also be part of the solution.
People are at last beginning to pay attention to localism. The idea behind the term is old—ancient even—but it appears to be “having a moment,” so to speak, in this fractured and divisive era.
Dr. David Murphy, a professor of environmental studies at St. Lawrence University, returns to the show to interview Chris about energy transition in this live event
