Creating Sustainable Communities

www.school-of-sustainability.com

2011-05-25T21:23:00.002+01:00

we have a completely new location for the sustainable commuity work, it is now part of a much more ambitious project which is slowly coming together and we hope you love it as much as we do!!!!!
come and have a look at .........

www.school-of-sustainability.com

see you soon!

new year - new website!!!!

2011-01-02T16:30:00.001Z

We have moved to a new address on the internet

www.school-of-sustainability.com

see you soon!!!!

HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!!!

2010-12-31T18:39:00.002Z

Big Bang Big Boom wall painted animation by BLU

2010-12-29T15:03:00.002Z

'tis the season to be...

2010-12-28T11:26:00.000Z

So I am back at the computer screen having had a jolly old holiday time.
The day is dark and clouds hover ominously, a warm fire is burning away, Sun Kil Moon is playing away in the background, Bruce my pet cockerel is sitting next to me pruning himself and I have my daily ration of a small coffee is next to me. It is a moment of holiday bliss.
I began to realise after day two of my break that life had got totally wired, it is so good to stop for a moment. In so doing I also realised that not listening to the news, not reading the papers, not watching television, was a huge liberation.
Not suggesting it is a recipe for my future activity, but it has helped me and Isaac and Hannah to shape up the school of sustainability webplans and we will be doing more today which will be fun.
Thanks for the suggestions for things you would like to see there, we have included them wherever possible.

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

2010-12-24T13:40:00.000Z

new paper draft 2

2010-12-23T22:03:00.002Z

Cultivating a future
Growing Sustainable Communities
Paul Clarke

Contact details
St Mary’s University College, Waldegrave Road, Strawberry Hill, London UK
email: paul.g.clarke@camb-ed.com
phone: 075-904-705-53

I think that there are good reasons for suggesting that the modern age has ended. Today, many things indicate that we are going through a transitional period when it seems that something else is painfully being born. It is as if something were crumbling, decaying, and exhausting itself – while something else, still indistinct, were rising from the rubble.
Vaclev Havel, President Czech republic, speech in Philadelphia, June 1994

Abstract
3.3 billion people now live in urban environments, by 2030 this is estimated to increase to 5 billion of a global population predicted to peak at around 9 billion mid-century . The dominant narrative of the modern urban world that forms many of the conditions in the cities we inhabit has emerged from the industrial era, and this narrative is promoted and maintained through an industrial and utilitarian mode of education. In 2010, the human race changed from being predominantly rural to being predominantly urban. Correspondingly, we can now claim to be an industrial, human centric, urban species. This industrialisation shapes our economies, our societies and our cultures, and its language of improvement and effectiveness largely determines how we collectively think and act. But its utility is showing signs of fatigue; simultaneously with this rise in human population, we are witnessing an unprecedented collapse in our global ecosystem and dysfunction in our existing human systems of education, health, politics, economics, and agriculture. The established linear capitalist model seems no longer sufficient to provide for a changing reality, it suggests that the way we relate to our world is outdated, destructive and unsustainable, our solutions are predictable and short term, and pathologically selfish.

What happens next? A narrative of despair, or a narrative of hope? Is it the best of times, or is it the worst of times?

In this paper I will argue that this largely depends upon how and if we can we learn to live more sustainably in our built landscapes and communities around the planet. That, I suggest, is an educational challenge, of how to respond to a crisis that is real and transparent for many, and opaque for others.

A measure of our action
What is the measure of our collective action? For many industrialised nations the sum of our activity boils down to Gross National Product (GNP), an economic value; in the Kingdom of Bhutan the sum of collective worth is measured as Gross National Happiness, a well-being value; in China the government have recently announced a national Talent Plan, an education and skills value.

I want to suggest in this paper that while all of these different forms of measure are of importance, they are trumped by one single overarching value that functions universally as a coherent measure and concern, that of ecological sustainability . The reasoning behind this suggestion is that all our technologies, sciences, arts and crafts are reduced to nothing if ecological systems upon which we depend cease to function (Berry 2006). It is therefore a significant, if not the significant educational question, how we educate ourselves as a species to establish the conditions which are conducive for life on earth. At the present time, I think this is not something we have established as a foundation for our actions, and consequently, our trajectory of development is fundamentally unsustainable.

The focus on establishing sustainable conditions has been an international concern for some time, under the guise of ‘sustainable development.’ Sustainable development is a term first used by the United Nations in the Brundtland Commission (1987) which coined what has become the often-quoted definition as development that "meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs." Sustainable development ties together concern for the carrying capacity of natural systems with the social challenges facing humanity. The field of sustainable development is broken into three constituent parts: environmental sustainability, economic sustainability and sociopolitical sustainability.
Despite its widespread use, the idea of sustainable development is not without its critics. James Lovelock’s (2006, 2009) recent work challenged the premise of sustainable development by arguing, ‘Two hundred years ago, when change was slow or non-existent, we might have had time to establish sustainable development, or even have continued for a while with business as usual, but now is much too late, the damage has already been done (p.3/4).’ Lovelock makes a compelling case of the failings of the scientific community to confront the practical realities of the evidence that they have gathered, suggesting that ‘as a cosy, friendly club of specialists who follow their numerous different stars, they are wonderfully productive but never certain and always hampered by the persistence of incomplete world-views’ (ibid).

We might apply Lovelock’s critique across every sector of our societies, but it would seem to have particular resonance when applied to educational policy and practice, and of our own ICSEI community. Education and schooling deal daily with uncertainty and incompleteness, but the education and schooling system could not be more differently conceived, based as it is upon certainties and business as usual despite evidence to the contrary. I suggest that it is this approach to education that is now causing us so many problems in our schools. Education is wedded to the industrial economic model, measured through GNP, it perpetuates the capitalist system through which we create citizens in the form of consumers, reliant upon continuous economic and industrial growth. This, the old order, has crumbled, its financial system is in tatters (Soros 2008), and its associated institutions are in varying degrees of crisis. We continue to operate schools in a way that suggests there is no alternative, yet we fail to see that the damage in many schools is already done, the old formula is redundant. Instead, we need to imagine a future beyond the existing order of things. This is the basis of a new set of measures, where the effort is focused upon a need to transform the whole idea of education as a preparation of our communities for sustainable living.

If we consider the role of education in this way, we can explore it on economic, cultural, personal and societal terms, through the lens of how we relate to our planet. Ecological Sustainability emphasizes metrics that establish the conditions to maintain the diversity of life as the basis of productivity, so:
• society must have the capability and resilience to solve and preferably prevent its major problems in a timely fashion (equity is one contributing factor) 
• society's aggregate use of resources and land must be ultra-frugal  
• material flows into and out of society must not systematically increase   (The previous two conditions require a closed-cycle economy, de-materialisation, and geographical containment/land efficiency) 
• the human population must be sustainable
• actions must be timely and at an adequate scale.

To establish these capabilities people need to be able to solve and prevent major problems in a timely fashion, so some formative conditions might include:
• honesty / not corruption
• participatory action
• diverse and constant experimentation
• inclusive, caring, cohesive, tolerant communities
• critical skills of analysis and reflection
• creative and skilled processes of socialisation
• anticipatory abilities, future scoping and pattern understanding
• conservation of valuable aspects of present and past
• commitment to the achievement of the social good and collective well-being
• ability to give adequate time to civic activity and community
• adequate resource and equipment to ensure that the civic infrastructure, knowledge and skills are maintained and enhanced
• A political system/s which can achieve these objectives.

This is a major educational undertaking, but as we can see, elements of our existing educational system are already present in such goals. What is perhaps different is the focusing instrument of ecological need, and it is this, as Joanna Macy (2010) argues, that can be understood as the essential adventure for our time - a shift from the Industrial Growth Society to a life-sustaining civilization. This is a re-evaluation of how we live together on a grand scale. She writes, ‘People are recognising that our needs cannot be met without destroying our world, We have the technical knowledge, the communication tools, and material resources to grow enough food, ensure clean air and water, and meet rational energy needs. Future generations, if there is a livable world for them, will look back at the epochal transition we are making to a life-sustaining society. And they may well call this the time of the Great Turning. It is happening now. Whether or not it is recognized by corporate-controlled media, the Great Turning is a reality. Although we cannot know yet if it will take hold in time for humans and other complex life forms to survive, we can know that it is under way. And it is gaining momentum, through the actions of countless individuals and groups around the world. To see this as the larger context of our lives clears our vision and summons our courage’ (ibid).

A climate of change
Both Macy and Lovelock argue that we need to establish the conditions for suitable human response in keeping with the environmental disequilibrium we face, and use this to equip ourselves for a very different kind of collective future, something I will return to later in this paper.
First it might be useful to briefly take note of the environmental context to which I am referring. John Beddington the UK Government’s Chief Scientific Adviser recently warned of difficult times ahead, to which government needed to begin to respond; where climate change, energy shortages, food shortages, water depletion all converge to create the ‘perfect storm of environmental and economic collapse’ (Beddington 2009). These observations are not reserved to scientific commentators, within the corporate world, Lloyds of London (2010) reported that the idea of business as usual is no longer a feasible way to respond to the set of global ecological challenges. In their annual analysis of risks to business, the Lloyds Group (ibid) specifically identified water, food, energy and population as themes that have to be tackled to be attended to over the next fifty years. They comment:
Water:
Only 3% of the world’s water is fresh and therefore suitable to sustain human life. As our populations continue to become participants in the global economy, one of the first resources that will peak, where demand outstrips supply, will be water. The combined challenge of urbanisation and climate change will increase the strain on water resources, we have to learn to reduce our water useage, and manage our water much more effectively.
Food:
It is estimated that there will be a further 70-100% increase in food production required to feed an expected population of 9.1 billion people by 2050 . Recent poor growing conditions and mass parasitic events in 2008 aligned to prompt a food crisis in the developing world. Between 2006 and 2008, the average world prices for rice rose by 217%, wheat rose by 136%, corn rose by 125% and soyabeans rose by 107% . The price rises meant people could not afford to buy their basic foodstuffs. The result was food riots and civil disorder on an unprecedented scale across many parts of the developing world.
Energy:
The demand for energy across the planet is expected to rise in keeping with the rise in population. This comes at a time when the supply of recoverable gas is expected to last until 2030 at the latest. In a similar way we have seen with water and food, the greater number of people participating in a global economy focused upon growth will substantially increase the supply shortfall. Added to this is the recognition that fossil fuels contribute to climate change, this challenges fossil fuels likelihood of being a sustainable source of energy in the future if we are to ensure that we reduce carbon emissions.
Population:
For the first time ever in human history more people live in urban environments than in rural . Since 1987, China has witnessed 400 million new urbanites through economic modernisation, and it expects a further 300 million people to move from the country to the city from 2005 to 2020. To accommodate this vast number of new city dwellers, a building programme of immense proportion has started, creating 400 new cities by 2020. There are over 220 cities in China with populations of more than one million and eight mega cities, with more than ten million residents . There are only 35 such cities in Europe. What this increase in urban living represents is uncharted territory for the human race, a whole new level of communal relationships, and a significant challenge to the already stretched logistical and management services that operate across our societies.
Transition: The Stone Age did not end because people ran out of stone
In such complex and challenging circumstances, an economy that is governed by desire for profit, rather than collective planning for human need is going to be increasingly unsustainable. What is perfectly clear (see for example Berry 1996, Brown 2004, Macy 2006) is that even if we are not just yet at the endgame, we are indeed in a significant period of existential and physical disequilibrium within our taken for granted systems of social and economic organization. As Havel’s quote at the start of this paper emphasizes, as one set of circumstances begins to fragment, a new set of circumstances begins to rise; such is the way of evolutionary change. The question is what might those be, and how well will they facilitate the required conditions for ecological sustainability?
What is also clear is an underlying assumption that we will find the appropriate mode of instruction to facilitate the move from one way of living to a whole new level of living. This signals a radical overhaul of how we modify the destructive tendencies of capitalist consumer society. As Tim Jackson from the New Economics Foundation observes, we need new models of learning that render the existing ways of seeing our complex reality as obsolete (Jackson 2010), primarily because the existing industrial models have generated the conditions that have created the global ecological crisis.
The connection between the natural story and the human story therefore come down to past, present and future measures of balance and new ideas of what we call ‘growth’. Instead of simply measuring economic output, an emphasis on ecological sustainability raises the bar for communities to redefine their presence on the earth. Our defining questions become questions of harmony; Do the human and natural narratives co-exist harmoniously? Or are they in crisis? Do we currently have the wisdom to make appropriate judgments to rectify any imbalance? Do we need to learn new things to move forward?
Scientific evidence over the last decade is increasingly converging on the view that climate change is evident across the planet , yet on its own, we have seen, people do not respond to such data. It is in itself, an indicator that our relationship with the earth is far from harmonious and at a sufficiently significant state of disequilibrium to consider how we might change track. These concerns are by no means wishful thinking, even putting aside climate challenges, as Lloyds (2010) indicate, the convergence of water, food, and energy challenges are sufficient to focus the collective mind to ask can we do this differently? Defining how to interpret what we might do, and how we might proceed are not simple responses to circumstance, they need reformulating on the grand scale (Berry 1996, Macy 2006).
My own take on this problem was first formulated in the early 1980’s (Clarke 1983). Since that time I have been interested in the ways that human community can connect through education for collective action, self-realisation and social change. A decade ago (Clarke 2000), the school-based learning community concept was formulated on the notion that its integration in the education system would stimulate a progressive and systemic redesign. Reflecting on the earlier work on the learning community I think that too much faith was put on the institution of the school as an agent of social change and too little recognition that school is in fact an agent of social conformity. Despite many valiant efforts, it is clear that the learning community concept was in this regard, fundamentally flawed. It remains too insular, too managerially conceived and too self-referential to modify the dominant narrative of reform.

Instead, drawing upon lessons learnt in formulating learning communities (Jackson 2006) I have been developing both practically and theoretically, the idea of Sustainable Community. This involves stepping beyond the constraints of the school environment and connecting to the wider community, service and business sectors, then reconnecting schools into these new configurations. In doing this I have become interested in the way in which we might use the metaphor of growing, literally and metaphorically, as a focusing idea to develop our communities. Growing community through place, relationship, action and interest (Clarke 2009) connects people, idea, place and action in ways that the earlier idea of single site based solutions seemed to inhibit. In turn, a multi-site set of activities provides a range of different ways for people to generate assets that enhance the capability (Sen 2000) of their communities to become more resilient to change. This includes responding to cultural, social, ecological, economic and spiritual needs, but in this particular example they have a specific connection to cultivating food within urban and rural communites and an examination of how such cultivation generates work, health and well-being. The idea of the singular community is less important here than that of the connected communities that pursue issues of interest, action, place and enquiry that are commonly held. The connection between these different communities of practice (Wenger 1988) comes through ecological sustainability, looking at new forms of building for sustainable living and of course, exploring how we educate all members of the community to begin to participate in what Senge (2000) calls ‘metanoia’ - a shift of mind and practice in response to a changed environment.

Underpinning the actions of the Sustainable Communities is the realization that that all the crises that I have described earlier, are the result of a schism. As such they are simply representations of symptoms of a deeper malaise, the fracture of the relationship between ourselves and our earth, the individual and the universal, brought about by industrialized capitalism. It is the factors caused by industrial production, and the system of ownership that has maintained and manipulated human society to collude with the violation of nature in the process of generating financial profit. But the relentless drive for this profit on a global scale is coming up against planetary limits now and perhaps this is best understood as the fundamental dissonance that is being recognized and responded to. The Sustainable Community experiments with the ideas of consciousness shift, from the ego-centric perspective we have at present which has accelerated as the industrial era developed to global proportions, to the eco-centric position we might adopt of we are to realign with our earth. This transition from ego to eco is our aide memoire, it enables us to define and then develop strategic responses in each and every aspect of our lives.
The shift from ego to eco is more than a series of developmental steps, it is the metanoia, from the linear to the holistic, from the instrumental to the emancipatory, from the singular to the collective. It signals the potential for transformation of education and educational systems from the managed to the living systems aligned within an ecological competence, what has been called elsewhere an eco-capability (Orr 1994, Capra 2010, Clarke 2009). This is at once an intensely personal issue, and a universal issue. It relates to what one might do oneself in response to climate related change, and it expands to what we might do as a species. As Swimme observes, choice of direction in this matter is both singular and universal, it has both personal and cosmological consequences: ‘Unless we live our lives with at least some cosmological awareness, we risk collapsing into tiny worlds. For we can be fooled into thinking that our lives are passed on political entities, such as the state or a nation, or that the bottom line concerns in life have to do with economic realities of consumer life styles. In truth, we live in the midst of immensities, and we are intrically woven into an immense cosmic drama.’ (Swimme 1996:60).
Grappling with immensity, whilst doing the day-to-day things, is at the hand, heart and mind of the problem in cultivating Sustainable Community. It translates itself into the practicalities of daily life, How do we organise our world? How do we educate our citizens, How do we feed, water and clothe ourselves? How do we keep warm or cool? And critically, How do we ensure the sustainable continuation of modern civilisation and pass it on to future generations in a better state than we received it? This is the gritty stuff of living together but doing so in non-destructive ways, it forms a new curriculum of life and for life, concerned with how we make our places work for our collective needs. In the past we have built these environments within an industrial mindset, and our schools served this agenda. Now we now have to make a move to incorporate the natural into the overall design so that our actions can build resilient communities, robust enough to cope with the changing climate on a warming Earth.
From Instrumental to Emancipatory
To establish an eco-capability, which is what I think this distills into, requires knowledge. For example, we already know that the consequences of climate change and pollution are going to span not decades but centuries in to the future because of the biological characteristics and behaviours of many of the pollutants we have created, and the expansive time frames that carbon science functions within. Similarly, it is predicted by the United Nations Population Division that at some point in this century, probably mid-century, the human population will peak, we also know that many of the resources we currently use in vast amounts are starting to become less easily available and we will have to begin to consider in the near future the prospect of radical new recycling methods if we are to maintain a viable supply of many of the vital component elements of modern life. We know that the genie is out of the bottle for a variety of particularly nasty ways in which we can poison, destroy and damage life on earth, including our own civilization. Knowledge of how to undertake mass destruction is now a permanent feature of daily news items, it is an embedded part of human consciousness, we have sown the seeds of what could become civilization collapse (Brown 2009) and we already have evidence of failing states (Chomsky 2006 ) places such as Somalia, Rwanda, and Iraq. Knowing that we generate structural conditions for failure begins to open us to the possibility of structural conditions for successful alternatives, by understanding unsustainability, we can develop capability to look at new ways of proceeding.
One example of this comes in the manufacturing industries. These are undergoing a radical overhaul as pressure to conform to carbon reduction schemes begins to modify their operational practices. As a result of revised design strategies we know how we might establish economically cyclical approaches to products, where waste from one part of the cycle becomes useful material for another (Cradle to Cradle economics and design methods – McDonough 2002), or establish conditions for a Zero carbon City (Malmo in Sweden is the closest example yet of a European city that is moving in this direction, and Tianjin in China is gearing itself to be the first eco-city in the world with a zero carbon status). We know that Permaculture serves as a tried and tested planning and growing system which can be established in almost any part of the planet and generates a high yield and a resilient and sustainable food source (Holmgren 2002, Mollison 1988). However, this knowledge needs to be more systemically available and integrated into the human infrastructure, and one impediment to this has been that until quite recently such solutions have been considered counter-cultural, they now have to adopt new means of connecting with the mainstream to convey their core messages.
This is particularly important when we come to consider the way that education might play its part in a transformational narrative from an industrial to an eco-economy (Kelly 2010). Fundamentally, the transition required is:
• a shift of hand (doing things sustainably),
• a shift of heart (feeling the need to do things sustainably), and
• a shift of mind (thinking things sustainably).
As education has increasingly attended only to the mind, and an industrial mind at that, it is clear that much too much emphasis is placed on human centric solutions. It is not enough to just facilitate change in behaviour, attention has to be given to values and consciousness as well.

For example, we cannot escape the fact that we live our lives in the cycle of birth and death, growth and decay. Facing up to this reality is going to have to become a part of the restored narrative of our century, a realisation that we are of the earth. If we are moving ever more towards living well in the built environment of the urban city, then we have to overcome the denial of nature as to fail to do so is likely to have catastrophic consequences for our shared urban futures, their distribution of wealth and their ability to ensure well-being, equity and social justice (Wilkinson and Pickett 2009). We have not made a great start in this regard, writing of modern life Michael Cohen observes, ‘We live stress-filled lives full of traffic jams, busyness, noise, artificiality, and substitutes for the real thing. Our culture is riddled with stress and stress-related pathologies: addictions, broken marriages, violence, and greed. More than 70% of our medical problems, costing $250billion, are believed to be stress related’ (Cohen 1993). The costs become ever greater, and the solutions ever more urgent.

Response?
We have known for some time that an approach that presupposes cause and effect is an oversimplification of our complex social reality, so any response to these types of challenge has to accommodate a range of possible forms of engagement. The commonly held assumption that there is a linear correlation between knowledge, awareness and behaviour (Hannigan 1995) fails to recognize the range of human responses we tend to adopt when confronted with new and challenging information. People do not act rationally; they act emotionally, counter-intuitively, and sometimes intelligently but inappropriately. Glasser’s (2007) identified a range of responses to sustainability, corresponding closely to their level of awareness of the issues involved.

Their responses can include;
• having no idea that a potentially serious problem exists;
• honestly believing that the “problem” is a not a problem;
• denying the existence of the problem by ignoring the information or pushing it aside as unimportant (this includes an educated incapacity, an acquired or learned inability to see a problem);
• accepting the existence of the problem, but seeing it as easily surmountable;
• accepting the existence of the problem, but seeing other problems or issues as needing to take a higher priority;
• failing to generate adequate support for action; and
• taking action, but the chosen action proves to be inadequate, mismatched to the problem, or is unsuccessfully applied (Glasser 2007, p55).

Given that this happens, what might we do? I think we can step back and ask why people respond like this and then start to design ways of connecting to new ideas formulated through the Sustainable Community concept. My view is that this arises from how people have been encouraged to learn in the past. For example, if we learnt through an instrumental approach, we might assume a system where a) the approach that is adopted is already fixed and decided, b) the sequence of interventions are assumed to be understood and coherent.

This contrasts with what might happen if we use an emancipatory approach to learning. This design, takes it as given that learners need to participate in a formative and unfolding dialogue, that the design is as yet unformed and uncertain, and that through an active and engaging process of learning together people will begin to generate co-owned objectives, develop coherent and meaningful strategies in the form of concepts and practices, and begin to generate self-determined plans of action to make changes they consider are both desirable, and which will contribute to a more sustainable society as a whole (Wals & Jickling, 2002).

There is an obvious difference between existing and desired practice, but to get to the desired practice requires action, and this action is rooted in existing reality. Therefore an intermediate response was required, one which enables us to start where our communities are, and then move forward from that position. To do this we have experimented with some far reaching ‘stretch targets’ and then defined them within a familiar instrumental framework. The departure comes in what we then do to try and achieve them.

Figure 1 Setting direction and action for ecological sustainability
Policy Objectives
(system conditions) Targets
(stretch goals) Actions
(generic strategies)
Society should be ecologically sustainable. • Ecological sustainability must not be undermined by systematic:
• increases in concentrations in nature of substances that come from the earth's crust or are produced by society
• increases in the manipulation or harvesting of nature
• failure to restore the ecological basis for biodiversity and ecological productivity.
• Society must make it easy to achieve system conditions 1-3 by ensuring that:
• society has the capability and resilience to solve and preferably prevent its major problems in a timely fashion
• material flows from nature into and out of society do not increase systematically
• society's aggregate use of resources and land is ultra-frugal
• the human population does not increase systematically.
• the speed and scale of responses is adequate. • Society should aim for:
• 'zero' extinctions
• 'zero' climate damage
• 'zero' soil degradation
• 'zero' waste
• 'zero' pollution
• a 90% improvement in resource use efficiency (Factor 10) (2)
• 'zero' net greenhouse gas emissions.
• 'zero' encroachment on nature.
• 75% of land for nature. • Society should take action to:
• contain human activity (for nature) - don't encroach, boost land efficiency
• tread lightly (for nature)
• restore habitat (for nature)
• dematerialise
• create a closed-cycle economy
• use renewable resources
• design for no toxicity (including eco-toxicity)
• protect people from environmental threats
• strive for sustainable population
• green up business
• green up lifestyles
• green up culture
• boost social and economic capability
• encourage 'ecological take-off' in the economy/society
• achieve results at a desirable speed and scale.

Recent work by Macy (2010) illustrates the possibilities of emancipatory learning as a form of community action, where the community is both localized, in the form of neighbourhood response, and collective as human community. She creates three areas of action.

One: Actions to slow the damage
Perhaps the most visible dimension of response comes through political, legislative, and legal work required to reduce the destruction. This can include direct action, blockades, boycotts, civil disobedience, and other forms of refusal. A few examples:
• Documenting and the ecological and health consequences and effects of the Industrial Growth Society;
• Lobbying and protesting against the World Trade Organization and the international trade agreements that endanger ecosystems and undermine social and economic justice;
• Blowing the whistle on illegal and unethical corporate practices;
• Blockading and conducting public awareness campaigns and vigils at places of ecological destruction, such as old-growth forests under threat of clear-cutting or at nuclear dumping grounds.
Work of this kind buys some time. It saves some peoples lives, and some ecosystems, species, and cultures, as well as some biodiversity, for the sustainable society to come. But it is insufficient to bring that society about on its own.
Two: Analysis of structural causes and the creation of structural alternatives
 The second dimension of response is equally crucial and engages people in greater knowledge of place, action and purpose. To liberate ourselves and our planet from the damage being inflicted by the Industrial Growth Society we have to understand its dynamics. Learning about the tacit agreements that create obscene wealth for a few, while progressively impoverishing the rest of humanity? Learning that an insatiable economic model uses our Earth as supply house and sewer? This is not a pretty picture, and it takes courage and confidence in our own common sense to look at it with realism and clarity; but people are making this happen, and are slowly demystifying the workings of the global economy. When we see how this system operates, we are less tempted to demonize the politicians and corporate CEOs who are in beholden to it. Instead, we begin to see how, despite its apparent power and dominance, our existing system is extremely fragile. This system depends upon compliance and obedience.   In addition to learning how the present system works, we are also creating structural alternatives through communities who are redefining themselves through their own actions. In countless localities across the world, like Havel’s quote, green shoots are rising up through the rubble, new social and economic arrangements are emerging. These are not waiting for the organized leadership of our national or state politicians to play catch-up with us, people are getting together, taking action in their own communities and making new sense of their own places. These actions may look marginal, but their global presence is notable and significant, they hold the seeds for the future.
Some of the initiatives that illustrate this are:
• Community growing projects – the single most radical thing communities might do is to grow substantial amounts of their own food because as they begin to do this they break their dependence on the established agribusiness and its associated services (I will return to this shortly).
• Strategies and programs for nonviolent, citizen-based defense
• Reduction of reliance on fossil and nuclear fuels and conversion to renewable energy sources at local levels through community energy companies and small scale community energy management.
•  Collaborative living arrangements such as co-housing and sheltered housing schemes for the less able. When integrated with community gardens, neighbourhood cooperatives, community-supported agriculture programmes, restoration and maintenance projects using restored and restructured buildings this can generate considerable adhesion and resilience to communities which were previously under stress and fracture (examples are globally based, from the USA – Wisconsin growers projects, Detroit City of Hope, to UK Incredible Edible, Project Dirt in London, to Asia Mai-Won Permaculture Community in Hong Kong, Australia CERES, Melbourne, Chennai City farms in India).
Three: Shift in Consciousness  
These structural alternatives cannot embed and survive without deeply ingrained values that become normalized in order to sustain them. This is a critical educational matter. Learning must mirror what we want and how we relate to Earth and each other. They require, in other words, a profound shift in our perception of reality.   The insights and experiences arise as grief for our world, giving the lie to old paradigm notions of rugged individualism, the essential separateness of the self from others. They arise in the form of positive response to breakthroughs in scientific thought, as reductionism and materialism give way to evidence of a living quantum universe. And they arise in the resurgence of traditional knowledge and wisdom, reminding us that our world is a sacred whole, worthy of adoration and service (Berry 2006).   The many forms and ingredients of this dimension include:
• Living/Natural systems theory: - encompassing deep ecology and the long-range ecology movement where environmental consciousness is a core aspect of understanding self and situation
• Emergence theory: the realization of letting go of old ways of seeing how we see are vital is we are to formulate new approaches to human habitation
• Spirituality: the connection of self to universal, not religious, but spiritual connectedness with other living beings
• Slow living movement, and other movements which are concerned with realizations that save us from succumbing to either panic or paralysis. They help us resist the temptation to stick our heads in the sand, or to turn on each other, for scapegoats on whom to vent our fear and rage (Macy 2010).

Other forms of response
To transcend the destructive cycle of the industrial mind we therefore need to begin to design learning that promotes the simple message of emancipation from the dominant pedagogic and consumerist model. The emancipation comes from the shift away from industrialised thinking in the form of Natural/Living Systems thinking. In Macy’s work it is defined through conscious resistance and consequent outcomes of practical action, however there are other forms of response which have taken different starting points and formulated alternative models of activity which could still be seen as forms of Sustainable Communities in that their shared point of reference is to understand how to proceed from the ego of industrialised mind, to the eco of the Natural world as mentor, design and measure.
Biomimicry
Why might we want to learn to mimic Nature? This is not just because it is not industrial, it is because it has immense practical value for us to do so, Nature has an impressive head start on us, it has been around for 4,500 billion years, and we are the new kids on the block having barely existed for more than 195,000 years. Nature can serve as our operating system and mentor as we toddle into species adolescence, we need Natures guidance, Natures design, Natures measure, and Natures balance if our megacities make the change to becoming sustainable habitats.
Biomimicry takes the simple idea of what can nature teach us, as mentor, measure and method. It has provides a structure through which;
• learners can come to view and value the natural world; to see Nature not just as something to learn about, but as something to learn from
• to present all of the school curriculum from arts to science and humanities,
• to enhance and express creativity through design, with hands-on, minds-on, project-based activities
• to connect school subjects to one another, and school subjects to the real world beyond classroom walls using the landscape of the city, the field, the forest all of which demonstrate how life creates the conitions that are conducive for life
• to think and learn about sustainability.

Biomimicry is now a rapidly developing field, established in engineering and design industries and increasingly featured in frontier science as we learn more about how nature operates.

Cradle to cradle
Taking a similar design-based approach, the concepts which have come to form the cradle to cradle model also mimic natures operating system. Cradle to cradle is a way of thinking beyond the existing industrial design models, its principal architect William MacDonough (2004) writes: ‘Imagine a world in which all the things we make, use, and consume provide nutrition for nature and industry—a world in which growth is good and human activity generates a delightful, restorative ecological footprint. While this may seem like heresy to many in the world of sustainable development, the destructive qualities of today’s cradle-to-grave industrial system can be seen as the result of a fundamental design problem, not the inevitable outcome of consumption and economic activity. Indeed, good design—principled design based on the laws of nature—can transform the making and consumption of things into a regenerative force."

Permaculture
The pioneering permaculturist David Holmgren adopted a different operational starting point, an important component of Holmgren’s theory for sustainable living is focused upon survival through energy descent (see also Hopkins 2008 and the work of the transition towns movement see footnote 8b p.6), built around an assumption that the age of cheap energy derived from oil is rapidly coming to a close, and that all of our essential systems are based upon an assumed supply of cheap energy from which we have to move to a viable alternative within a couple of decades.

Growing food in community settings
In my own recent work I have been looking at ways in which we might combine these formative ideas about sustainable living and use them to develop practical examples for school and community development. This activity focuses on enquiry based approaches to learning to inform a dialogue of change focused on our own place – this might be a school yard, a street, the local health centre, or a parcel of unused land which is redefined and redeveloped as community space.

It must be noted that while I see this as absolutely focused on education for sustainable community, it is not exclusively based upon action that happens within the school site. Instead, it gets people to participate in a conversation, leading to action, which asks what a Sustainable Community might be like? The objectives, targets and actions are then nurtured around connections between people (communities of kinship, new green businesses – local food purchasing, instructional programmes for cooking and baking), their ideas (communities of interest – treading lightly – looking at the local environment and redefining how it is used through new organizational arrangements such as community charities and land asset management projects, closed cycle economics), the way they go about doing what they are keen to establish (communities of action – restoring habitats, boosting land efficiency, community supported agriculture projects) and the way this enables them to redesign their relationship with the environment, built space around them (community of place, creating recycling and renewable projects, art and creativity programmes).

Our points of reference for the dialogues we explore are developed through observation, design, maintenance, evaluation, resources, implementation, and identification of boundaries. We use a project-based approach to generate questions of method, design and measure. What has become clear in this work is that any effort guided towards growing sustainable community requires a reflective consciousness, an acknowledged feature of both Macy and Holmgren’s observations.

The deliberate design of dialogue into the process of change enables participants to steer clear of the paralysis and apathy that often results from the prevailing ‘wait and see’ attitude prevalent among many citizens in response to climate change. This avoids the paralysis of waiting until we are absolutely sure, and until there is agreement among the scientists and policy-makers about what is happening to the earth. Instead, it encourages action and enables anyone, in any situation, to be a participant in a process of engaged change. Improvement therefore has a focus. It is defined for and by the community, and is used to overcome individual and systemic procrastination. It begins to generate examples of robust alternatives; that can diffuse and challenge the argument that we can afford to continue to operate under the conditions of business as usual.

As I have already indicated, this work is not one off, but widespread and internationally connecting. Around the world there are many such examples of innovative, transitional experiments and ‘next practices’ that are breaking free of the normative underpinning of the industrial growth model, and are replacing it with a broader and more inclusive agenda that is emerging around the Sustainable Community concept. Whilst it is understood that many of these projects and initiatives are still at the margins of mainstream society, they are beginning to be noticed within mainstream culture primarily because they are highly visible, they often demonstrate community regeneration where previous efforts from centralized planning have singularly failed to galvanise public interest. Part of the success is simply because they involve people in doing things that they are motivated to want to be involved with, and as such they are evidence of people ‘doing’ rather than being ‘done to.’

However, we must ask if this way of looking at global response to ecological crisis is going to have sufficient momentum to ensure change quickly, as what happens in the next two decades (Wilson 2002). A vital part of the change is participation from the grassroots level, but this poses problems for systemic practice if we conceive of their actions within the previous mindset of transferability, as the replication of a successful scheme from one place to another is not necessarily the motivational driver behind the interests to the participants.

However, if we think of systemic transferability as an idea of interconnectedness, where viral transfer of local action, and social networking on a local to global scale can easily occur through information technology, then the problem of artificially managing the emergence of multiple localized responses is less troublesome. In fact, the method of knowledge transfer and interconnection may, as an emergent process, spread faster, embed deeper and engage more people simply because it is not orchestrated. This demonstrates an important feature of the dialogic process, that relationships and community matter more in this process of redefinition, than predetermined and transferable content matter. Our objectives, targets and actions may be formed from the old mindset, but their development and realization emerge from the practices arising from new learning about community of place, ideas, interest and kinship. What the detail reveals of these small-scale localized projects is that each is uniquely configured, suited to a particular set of circumstances that cannot be easily supplanted, transferred or handed over with a ‘how to’ manual.

What we are learning as we cultivate Sustainable Communities is that there is a deeper learning process taking place amongst people, one that is grounded in the everyday reality of peoples lives in organizations, institutions, businesses schools and communities. It is centered around relationship, how people relate to each other, to their problems, and to the natural space around them. These examples of ‘next practices’ can be extremely illuminative, not only because they can inspire and inform, but because they can serve as a source of inspiration and equally important illustrate that what people do in their own settings matters. As Paulo Freire articulated so powerfully, hope has its origins in practice, it is rooted in what people do and feel they can do, it is in the struggle. If it is not, we find inaction, people begin to feel incapable of doing things in response to ever worsening circumstances and they generate hopelessness and despair (Freire, 1992). Freire described hope as an ontological need that should be anchored in practice in order to become historical concreteness. Without hope, we are hopeless and cannot begin the struggle to change. Our experience suggests this can begin with simple, small-scale projects which have to be participatory and dialogic in design.

Education for Sustainable Living as the hybrid school
So far I have suggested that it is possible to create the conditions through which people can learn to think and act in more sustainable ways. But I have also suggested that at present we mostly educate our young people as if there were no planetary crisis, and we place far too much emphasis in our curriculum on the assumption that technology of the future can fix what we destroy of the planet in the present. In perpetuating the myth that technology can resolve the human and natural condition we maintain and reinforce the dominant narrative of our institutions, that progress is only viable if we remain loyal to the industrial mind, and the schism between ourselves and the planet is an acceptable situation. My criticism of our education systems is that they are a formative part of the industrial epoch, shaping the collective mind to ways of thinking, acting and understanding that fit the mechanism of the time. However, I think that rising from the rubble of the old order, we can reframe curricula to educate, educe, ‘to draw out’ an affinity with life (Orr 2004).

This affinity with the natural needs to be nurtured as it can provide important indicators of a new ecologically informed capability as a globally responsible citizen. As it is further designed, measured and validated, it needs to be harnessed in such a way as to begin to provide people with working definitions of what it takes to grow Sustainable Communities, in effect it needs to become a way of living, of being.

There are a range of styles of learning that help us here. Trans-disciplinary learning, transformative learning, anticipatory learning, collaborative learning, co-constructive learning and, indeed, social learning are just a few examples of methods which formulate understanding beyond the linear industrial models. These styles of learning draw from the real world, a focus on existentially relevant or ‘real’ issues essential for engaging learners in practical, embedded experiential activity, where they view learning as inevitably trans-disciplinary and even ‘trans-perspectival’ because the ideas cannot be captured coherently by a single discipline or by any single narrative position. They regard indeterminacy as a central feature of the learning process, reflecting the reality that life is emergent, not predefined, in that it is not and cannot be known exactly what will be learnt ahead of time and that learning goals are likely to shift as learning progresses, they consider learning as cross-boundary in nature in that it cannot be confined to the dominant structures and spaces that have shaped education for centuries (Wals 2010).

The above characteristics make clear that the search for Sustainable Community cannot be limited to classrooms, the company boardroom, a local environmental education center, a regional government authority, or any single service provider. Instead, Sustainable Community becomes and needs to remain a hybrid concept. It generates synergy between the multiple participants in a community and it blurrs the boundaries of what we have traditionally recognized as formal, non-formal and informal education. Opportunities for this type of learning expand with an increased permeability between units, disciplines, generations, cultures, institutions, and sectors.

As I alluded to in the opening section of this paper, when we think about cultivating a new way of learning for a sustainable world there is a need to accommodate such transformational disruptions. As Macy indicates, these may be through direct action, or as Holmgren demonstrates they may arise through change in understanding, which in turn realigns life choices. I have learnt that transformation comes primarily through people changing their relationships with their life circumstances, and feeling different about how they live their lives. As such, it is more than just instrumental action, it engages emotional response to changing circumstance. Incredible Edible shows how the activity of people across a broad demographic of our community has begun to draw attention to the possible ways a community to re-imagine a future, and school plays an important part in this process.

An example:
In our community food project Incredible Edible , we set out to establish a facility whereby people could come to the project with ideas and practical activities which worked towards the notion of ‘growing a sustainable community’. To provide a forum for these activities we posed a set of questions to our community through the local newspaper and then in a series of meetings held in the local café’s, school halls and through regular articles and press and publicity events; What kind of place do we really want to live in? How can this place (our town) be used to demonstrate new ways of thinking about community, learning and business that are more ecologically sustainable? The resulting activities included participation from all the local service sector (police, fire, ambulance, health and education and social housing). More than 150 individual community food growing sites located around the town in public spaces growing freely available food, these were often found in streets, on wasteground and on embankments which were unused. Five new orchards have been planted across town with more than 2000 fruit trees planted in the first two years including school orchards and plans for extensive re-use of school land as growing space for students and community. Schools all taking part in redesigning their playgrounds as edible schoolyards, raising chickens and at the high school establishing a CIC (Community Interest Company in partnership with Incredible Edible to manage a community fish farm and hydroponics unit on the school site. This will include a part of the site which will be used as a base for food management training, catering courses, a cafeteria, demonstration events etc. The emancipatory design has been a vital part of the programme, as we have deliberately held back from forming fixed views of how the idea of a sustainable community might be grown. The consequence of the open design has been a rapid increase in community and service participation, the programme has more than 400 active volunteers who regularly participate in the activities often self-generated that make up the programme.

Our experience, arising from the expansion of the practice arising from the Incredible Edible (Clarke 2009, 2010, 2011) programme has taught us that the basic ideas of sustainable living need not be overcomplicated. Indeed, they resonate with the everyday and encourage creative engagement, but they have to provide routes for profound change in organizational and individual behaviour. In the case of our, and many other of these hybrid projects elsewhere, our focus has been based on growing food.

What is more complex, and remains a testing matter, is how to proceed and engage with a school community in a way that enables teachers to integrate ideas about sustainable living into the curriculum (Capra 2010). As I have argued here, learning and understanding about sustainable living comes from action, from doing practical activity based on real-life problems (this is where growing food becomes a practical route to other related questions, how to make a passive solar greenhouse, how to ensure that we capture rain water for the garden, how to make and maintain fertile soil through composting and planting strategies, what to do with organic waste matter form school, how to use the intergenerational knowledge that exists within any school community through parents, grandparents and children) and seeing how sustainable living can be easily undertaken.

What is clear in the development of Incredible Edible is the importance of method, but method which emerges, evolves and enables, rather than method which predefines. In making greater sense of many of these different learning community ventures, we are beginning to establish a ‘Pattern Book’ methodology, through which some of the critical components of many projects can be examined by a diverse number of people, used as generative material to further stimulate debate and engagement.
In our own case, a set of principles have guided the ideas of the project:
a) continuous public consultation and conversation, open access
b) modelling plans / master plans and emergent possibilities
c) sustainable core concepts – cradle to cradle, permaculture, biomimicry
d) local identity
e) local resources and services – schools, churches, health service, social housing, police, fire, traders associations etc
f) indigenous needs
g) relationship with place
h) environmental impact – a continual consideration of the environmental possibilities for learning and impact of the programme, the lessons that can be learnt and the ways that the programme can connect the hand, heart and mind of the ideas of sustainable living to the community
i) efficient land use – experimenting with land and monitoring yield potential and real to generate evidence to present to the wider public audience
j) viability and visibility – being able to do things which help people to make a living, and making sure that the activities are seen.
In cultivating Sustainable Community we learn to relate and reflect the reality of where we live, and in doing this, learners come to acknowledge that we are in the main, living in far from sustainable communities. This recognizes some of the dilemmas we all face in modern life, and promotes a way of thinking about our response. This seems to be a more productive approach to adopt than simply informing students of the ecological problems we all face, but it remains controversial within the school setting because schools fundamentally remain locked to transmission, linear narratives of learning.

Our central dilemma therefore, when it comes to mainstream education, concerns how closely to align with existing practice, and how far to push the boundaries to facilitate new thinking. Moving too far, too soon, can frighten people away from taking steps forward, but too much caution will not generate the necessary creative organizational turbulence to initiate any shift of mind or practice. Therefore how to position the sustainable living agenda in such a way as it maintains the vitality and creative impetus without compromising our radical ambition is a central concern for progressive eco-literate design. It sounds ridiculously simple, but defining some principles of action based around food, creating an edible education, makes the first steps on this learning journey much easier, we all eat, therefore we all have an interest. It promotes questions: How do we use our school land-space, rooftops, window ledges as connections to the natural world? Just where does all our school food come from and can we realign this so that it is more ecologically robust as a procurement process? How much food can we grow on our own school site in partnership with our community? Why not begin to think of our school as an urban farm, a place to learn about the diversity and abundance of life?

ICSEI as a receptacle for ecological transformation?
When we stop and consider the transitions that SESI has undergone in twenty five years it is evident that our collective intelligence is the most powerful legacy of our work. This organisation has taken our ideas from the development of the person, to the group, to the team, to the school, the network, the region, the national, the international and the global systems over this time (Townsend, Clarke and Ainscow 1999).

As such, ICSEI would appear to be an ideal ambassador of these new formulations. But the epistemology and ontology that forms the collective intelligence of ICSEI reflects the industrial rather than the ecological mindset. This is generally one of the most challenging barriers to overcome in establishing any ecological capability, ICSEI like so many other organisations, is self-referential rather than trans-referential, as such it suffers what Scharmer (2009) calls ‘organisational blindspots.’

One such blindspot has been any serious consideration to date, of ecological literacy. Education as we know it is has been singularly unsuccessful at educating us for sustainable living, proof enough in the fact I am standing here talking about this issue at an event like this in January 2011. As E.O.Wilson observes, we have both the ideas and the technologies that can transform our approaches to life across the planet, but at present education in the form of business as usual is a huge impediment. A point echoed by veteran environmental commentator David Orr (2004) who says, ‘its not education that will save us, but education of a certain kind.’

Searching for a certain kind of educational DNA has been a feature of the work of colleagues in the effective schools movement for more than two decades. This problem I think we have to address if we are to usefully engage with some of the ideas I am exploring in this paper concerns the way we might reconceptualise the science and metrics of our work.

Figure 2: Managed and living systems
Managed system Living system
A founding assumption taken from 19th and 20th century progress, that complex systems are predictable entities A founding assumption is that complex systems are not stable
An expectation of continuous human progress through a factory driven industrialized and technological world view where the system has to be organized and managed so that it can function Time and space are not discrete and independent and that living systems self-organise and change in response to feedback they receive from their environment but they still retain the integrity of their purpose and meaning
It requires predictable work systems and compliant, efficient workers who function within a similarly conceived workplace Work systems are emergent and networked, functioning across different time zones and different locations
It is a Newtonian view of reality where the universal truths are founded on objectivity, stability, regularity, and the world predictability It is a quantum view of the universe dissipative and chaotic in nature where the world is made up of a complex integrated system in which all aspects are interrelated, reciprocal and relational
The whole is nothing more than the sum of the parts and redundant or failing parts can be identified and replaced in order to resume effective functionality The character of the whole is dependent upon the quality and quantity of the sustaining resources and mediating conditions that are available in the environment
Human behaviour is prescribed, standardized and regulated within hierarchical or pseudo-hierarchical designed organizations that are rule bound, relational impersonal and compliant The whole is in a process of continuous change along with their constituent elements, the integrity of the whole grows form and is sustained by the organizing features that govern the way that the parts of the system relate and interact - it is not possible to understand them except in relation to one another

In many respects, our movement has established its working practices upon the managed systems model. However, as I hope I have demonstrated, much of the new conceptualization for where our communities go next is being formulated around the living systems paradigm, an emancipatory rather than predefined pedagogic approach. What is perfectly clear is that an education system operating within reform conditions will remain a managed system, but that approach will not be particularly helpful when we are attempting to realign human practice to a more transcendent, sustainable form of living, this requires a shift from managed (modern) systems to living (ecological) systems.
One possible way to move forward is to begin to study the school communities that are already well developed in this field. On the global scale, the global Eco-Schools Program is now embedded in countries around the world. The Eco-Schools program is an international programme for environmental education and management, with the aim of raising students' awareness of sustainable development issues through classroom study as well as school and community action. The programme encourages students and adults to take an active role in running their school for the benefit of the environment, and participate in the discussion and decision-making process to establish sustainable conditions for organisational practice. The Eco-Schools programme began in 1994 as a response to needs identified at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro, 1992. The programme was developed and piloted by FEE – Foundation for Environmental Education with the support of the European Commission and has seven stages of development:
• Establishment of the Eco-Schools Committee
• Environmental Review
• Action Plan
• Monitoring and Evaluation
• Curriculum Linking
• Informing and Involving the Wider Community
• Creating an Eco-Code
However, there has been remarkably little research in these places, and as a result they remain fragile and need further material to substantiate the case for how they might proceed.

New initiatives are emerging too. The Obama Government in the USA has recently embedded Environmental Literacy in the Department of Education budget through the "Well-Rounded Education" program. In China, the Green School Project is an initiative of the Ministry of Education of China (MOE) and is funded by the State Environmental Protection Administration (SEPA). In India, the Paryavaran Mitra Project, a sustainability and climate change education project is aiming to create 20 million Friends of Environment in schools across India, and in Australia the federal government programme for sustainable schools is well developed. In Denmark the new curriculum proposals include at the very centre the concept of sustainability and environment. Without going so far as to suggest we ensure that both awareness and action are mandatory, the general direction that these projects have pointed towards in terms of best practice suggests that some form of knowledge focused around ‘how to models’, may provide a framework for action and modification of curriculum to guide and inform a transition of basic practice. A vehicle perhaps for ICSEI to examine in more detail in the future?

Conclusion
I have suggested that in starting to formulate a substantive response to the ecological challenges of our time, we have to imagine and design a different educational approach. We know that projects and programmes such as Incredible Edible in the UK, or CERES in Australia, Eden Project in Hong Kong, Growing Communities in Accra, Ghana, Detroit City of Hope and the Edible Schoolyard in the USA, or the urban food growing programme in Havana, Cuba, are just some examples of the way that people can begin to function as a community of learners (Clarke 2010) taking the first practical steps towards sustainable living.
We know that any development of this kind requires us to live with uncertainty, as the jump to solutions is just as likely to generate further, unsustainable outcomes, than it actually resolves. In designing educational responses therefore, our efforts might best be guided towards those pedagogic approaches which enable learners to experiment with different dimensions of community, working within communities of interest (things that engage them), action (participating in hands on practices), kinship (working in teams, extended intergenerationally) and place (locally focused, that extend beyond the idea we currently hold of school).
In our own work I have described how an attempt to begin to cultivate Sustainable Community is greatly enhanced by the cultivation of food, focusing on the celebration and life affirming features that growing food can facilitate. Growing food enables us to connect to nature and to learn from nature as a mentor, design and measure. The knowledge being created is of local and universal value. We have learnt that our response has to be pedagogic, and that pedagogy must empower and emancipate, not restrict and inhibit. If our pedagogic experiment becomes enquiry-led, we know that the approach leads learners to think about real-time challenges, and this helps them to connect their concerns to local issues. We already know that local solutions, suited to the nuances of local knowledge of place and connectedness to place have proved to be a feature of Natures way of surviving. Nature is both global and local, and so we too must continue to make sense of the micro to macro-level narratives of global and local human systems, this work enhances the purpose of using technology as a connector of ideas across the world.
We know that school just happens at present to be one place where we can experiment with food growing and bring some of the ideas to fruition. In the examples I have used I have shown that growing food can open up all sorts of ways that human relationships need to function in order to succeed, from a direct relationship to the land in growing food, to the design and management of complex growing sites through permaculture principles, to the structural development of hydroponic greenhouses and the adoption of new governance models such as community interest companies which illustrate that schools can completely change how they use their public spaces, change their relationship with their local community, and play a significant strategic role in the form of a food hub to show people how to re-imagine their operation for a more sustainable form of future community. We learn that we have to know how to nurture our growing produce, we develop specific, contextualised understanding of our relationship to each other, and to the soil, water, plants, light, heat and the ways they all combine to ensure the conditions conducive to life.
These simple starting points provide our students with a direct link to their environment and offer them a route to redefine their urban environments based upon what they discover. This is the first step to an eco-capability of retrofitting what we have to suit new-found situations as this learning extends from school, to neighbourhood, to community to town, to city. Physical structures need not be an impediment to new ideas, they simply have to be re-imagined for new uses and that imagination has to be continually conscious of the need to remain within Natural system design. The point being that cities, neighbourhoods and streetscapes are not going to go away in a hurry, they will be the places we live – sustainably or otherwise in the coming century, and they will form the landscape which in turn will shape the mindscape of our future citizens for good or ill. As a result, we have to reconceptualise them so that they serve our needs and those needs of the planet. The small act of growing a seed, becomes a route map for this new literacy.
That is why growing sustainable community is all about the measure of our relationships, being civilised and intelligent no longer pertains to the nuance of localised needs, it is at once an awareness of the self, the place, the relationships with others, the community, the consequences of our choices on our immediate and our planetary presence. Small starting points matter, whether they are growing food in the school yard, or working as a neighbourhood to rethink the built environment as a living landscape in which we play a part alongside nature. It represents the first tentative steps on a journey towards full useage of the city as a naturally thinking place, and a direct link to the myriad of problems people face daily in their struggle to exist in cities at the present time as it enables and empowers, rather than deskills and disempowers the citizen. Schools can be the hubs of such dialogue, forming the conversations across a world of how to do the simple things which connect us all together through our affinity to life. This simple demonstration of the possibility of new uses for existing spaces has profound possibilities.
We should continue to ensure that this work remains Naturally focused. This is why, in my formative work in this field, I have tried to ensure that we have aligned our activity towards the simple act of growing food. Growing is such a powerful connector, it serves as a guide to the necessary capabilities of observation, nurture, maintenance, conservation of resource, attention to solar energy, the cropping and preparation of food as a life source, and the cyclical properties of resources once used to form waste to enrich and maintain the soil. It therefore enables us to initiate a curriculum that is guided through a model of learning aligned to living systems theory, and by doing this we begin to see how the first steps into eco-capability might flourish. The lessons are learnt through collegial activity, in a spirit of celebration and connectedness to life, it is done with a clear desire to begin to reconnect with our places, each other, and our world. As Braungart and McDonough so beautifully express:
Imagine what a world of prosperity and health in the future will look like, and begin designing for it right now. What would it mean to become, once again, native to this place, the Earth – the home of all our relations? This is going to take us all, and it is going to take forever. But then, that’s the point. (Braungart and McDonough 2009, p.186)
This should become the measure of our collective action.

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Sterling, S. (2005) Sustainable Education: Revisioning Learning and Change. Schumacher Briefings. Green Books. Totnes
UNESCO (1978). Intergovernmental Conference on Environmental Education. Tbilsi (USSR). 14-26 October 1977, Final Report. Paris: UNESCO.

UNESCO (2009). Learning for a Sustainable World: Review of contexts and structures for ESD. Paris: UNESCO

United Nations (1992). Agenda 21: the United Nations Programme of Action from Rio. New York: United Nations Publications.

Waal, F. de (2009). The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society. New York, NY: Crown Publishing Group.

Wageningen UniversityKellstedt, P. M., Zahran, S. and Vedlitz, A. (2008). Personal Efficacy, the Information Environment, and Attitudes Toward Global Warming and Climate Change in the United States, Risk Analysis, 28 (1), 113-126.

Wals, A. E. J. , Beringer, A. R. and Stapp, W. B. (1990). Education in action: a community problem solving program for schools. Journal of Environmental Education, 21 (4), 13-19.

Wals, A.E.J. (1994). Action Research and Community Problem Solving: Environmental Education in an Inner-city. Educational Action Research, 2 (2), 163-182.

Wals, A.E.J. (2007). Learning in a Changing World and Changing in a Learning World: Reflexively Fumbling towards Sustainability. Southern African Journal of Environmental Education. 24 (1), 35-45.

Wals, A.E.J. (Ed.) (2007). Social Learning Towards a Sustainable World. Wageningen: Wageningen Academic Publishers.

Wals, A.E.J. & Jickling, B. (2002). “Sustainability” in Higher Education from doublethink and newspeak to critical thinking and meaningful learning. Higher Education Policy, 15, 121-131.

Wals, A.E.J. and Blewitt, J. (2010). Third wave sustainability in higher education: Some (inter)national trends and developments. In: Jones, P., Selby, D. and Sterling, S. (Eds.) Green Infusions: Embedding Sustainability across the Higher Education Curriculum London: Earthscan, pp. 55-74.

Wals, A.E.J., Alblas, A.H. & M. Margadant-van Arcken (1999). Environmental Education for Human Development. In: Wals, A.E.J. (Ed.) Environmental Education and Biodiversity. National Reference Centre for Nature Management, Wageningen.to become sustainable places. The modules set out to describe the conditions which connect learning to energy, water, waste and land.

Worldwatch (2004) The cradle to cradle alternative. State of the world. WW.Norton.

this years words in a picture

2010-12-21T19:58:00.004Z

2010-12-21T14:08:00.001Z

http://www.thefec.org/

2010-12-20T12:55:00.000Z

ERON DOMINGOS DE ROCHA USED to work in a shoe factory in the Franca district of Sao Paolo. He earned 220 reales a month there (about US$110) -- not enough, he says, to "allow you to survive." Then he met an organizer with Brazil's Landless land·less
adj.
Owning or having no land.

landless·ness n.

Adj. 1. Workers Movement (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra -- MST See micro systems technology. ), who convinced him that there was a better way of life.

Soon Domingos, along with his mother and father, were involved in a land occupation. One early morning, hundreds of miles south of Sao Paolo, in the countryside of the state of Rio Grande do Sul Rio Grande do Sul (rē` grän`dĭ th s , Domingos and his parents, along with about 400 other families, entered and occupied the property of a local rancher. The families moved onto the farm at 4:00 a.m., Domingos says, and by sunrise hundreds of black plastic tents -- the signature structure of the MST -- were installed on the rancher's formerly fallow land fallow land, cropland that is not seeded for a season; it may or may not be plowed. The land may be cultivated or chemically treated for control of weeds and other pests or may be left unaltered. .

Now Domingos, 21, is an active MST member. He spends half of his time at a MST-run high school taking technical courses and learning the skills to manage a farming cooperative. He uses the rest of his time working in the settlement's own fields and, as he says, "practicing what I'm learning in school." He seems happy working in agriculture, "just like my dad," he says.

Hundreds of thousands of similar success stories explain why the MST is the largest, and arguably the most successful, popular movement against neo-liberalism in the Western Hemisphere Western Hemisphere

Part of Earth comprising North and South America and the surrounding waters. Longitudes 20° W and 160° E are often considered its boundaries. . Since its founding in 1984, the MST has won land titles for 250,000 families. The movement has founded approximately 1,000 schools in its settlements and formed an impressive network of profitable cooperatives. Combining savvy political strategy, creative non-violent direct action and pragmatic entrepreneurship, the MST has distinguished itself as a model for progressive citizen movements around the world.

DIRECT ACTION AND SELF-RELIANCE

According to according to
prep.
1. As stated or indicated by; on the authority of: according to historians.

2. In keeping with: according to instructions.

3. conventional GDP GDP (guanosine diphosphate): see guanine. figures, Brazil is a modestly prosperous country, one of the largest economies in the world. But Brazil also maintains one of the world's largest gaps between a wealthy elite and an impoverished majority.

The inequities are particularly stark when it comes to land distribution. The country's legacy of colonialism has left just 3 percent of the population holding nearly two-thirds of the nation's arable land. According to the Brazilian government, 30 percent of Brazilian farmers own just 20 acres of land or less. In contrast, the country's largest farms, those of 2,000 acres or more, comprise only 1.6 percent of all farms but sit on 53.2 percent of the usable land. Another 4.8 million rural families -- approximately 25 million people in a country with a total population of 167 million -- have no land at all and survive as temporary laborers.

Perhaps worst of all, much of Brazil's more than 1.2 billion acres of arable land lies unused. At least 40 percent of agricultural land -- the MST says 60 percent -- lies fallow fallow

a pale cream, light fawn, or pale yellow coat color in dogs. or, at best, is used only for cattle grazing. Among the largest farms -- those geared for the export market or held only for speculative reasons -- an estimated 88 percent of the land is permanently idle. The twin injustices of land concentration and idle farms are largely responsible for the poverty and chronic malnutrition that plague Brazil.

The MST battles these injustices through a novel fusion of direct action and self-reliance. First, it seizes unused land, then it uses that land to provide real, workable alternatives to the corporate globalization globalization

Process by which the experience of everyday life, marked by the diffusion of commodities and ideas, is becoming standardized around the world. Factors that have contributed to globalization include increasingly sophisticated communications and transportation sweeping the world.

The MST is best known in Brazil and internationally for its daring land occupations, the first of which took place in Rio Grande do Sul in October 1985. The strategy is fairly straightforward: identify idle farmland and then, armed only with farm tools, occupy the land, squatting there and cultivating it until legal ownership over the property is granted. An average land occupation will involve about 300 families. Although the 1988 post-dictatorship Brazilian Constitution explicitly states that land must be used for the benefit of all society and contains mechanisms for land distribution, it can take years for a settlement to obtain title to its occupied land. About 70,000 families are currently involved in MST land occupations waiting for land titles.

The MST's work doesn't end with the acquisition of land titles. The movement, which is at once decentralized and highly coordinated, also provides its members with basic social services social services
Noun, pl

welfare services provided by local authorities or a state agency for people with particular social needs

social services npl → servicios mpl sociales that the Brazilian government is unable, or unwilling, to supply. The MST's 1,600 government-recognized settlements, spread across 23 Brazilian states, boast medical clinics for members and even training centers for health care workers. The movement's educational programs are especially impressive. Twelve hundred public schools employ an estimated 3,800 teachers serving about 150,000 children at any one time. Adult literacy classes are offered to 25,000 people through a UNESCO UNESCO: see United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization.

UNESCO
in full United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization grant, and the MST also sponsors technical classes and teacher training. The landless workers have even established their own college in the southern town of Veranopolis. The MST gives some students scholarships to attend other universities.

Naturally all of this takes cash, and the MST has been very adept at making money and supporting its programs. MST enterprises generate an estimated $50 million a year. Most of this money goes directly to member families; a share is used to support the MST's $20 million budget for its social services and other infrastructure. The movement operates a wide range of mid-size agricultural cooperatives that provide jobs for thousands of members. Settlement co-ops process fruits and vegetables, dairy products dairy products dairy npl → produits laitier

dairy products dairy npl → Milchprodukte pl, Molkereiprodukte pl , meats and coffee both for MST consumption and sale to Brazilian and international markets. MST teas, rums, jams and preserved vegetables -- many of which are organic -- are popular throughout Brazil. The movement even has a clothing factory in Rio Grande do Sul.

These collective enterprises show why the MST is considered a leader in the international fair trade movement. Ideas that in other countries are only talked about in academic circles are actually being implemented on a large scale in MST settlements. The movement is supplying a real, workable alternative to corporate globalization, putting community values and environmental stewardship before profit-making. MST co-ops offer a glimpse of what environmentally sustainable and socially just commerce would look like.

THE BACKLASH

Not surprisingly, perhaps, the MST's success has come at a cost, as wealthy landowners and other elites use force to halt land expropriations. Attacks on the MST by the military police, as well as the landowner's private militias, are commonplace, claiming the lives of 1,517 rural workers since 1988, according to Brazil's Pastoral Land Commission. Hundreds of people are severely injured every year during police raids on encampments. In 2000, according to the land commission, 11 landless workers were killed and 258 arrested in clashes with police. Very few of the murder cases have ever been brought to trial.

Aside from attacks against rank-and-file landless workers, Brazilian security forces in the past have also targeted MST leaders in apparent attempts to weaken the movement. In 1997, Jose Rainha, a leader of several land occupations, was convicted of killing a landowner and the landowner's bodyguard in a 1989 clash. For years the MST protested that Rainha had been framed, and in April 2000 an appeals court finally set Rainha free, ruling that Rainha was nowhere near the scene of the crime.

The struggle of Brazil's rural poor is a microcosm of the battles being waged worldwide in the era of globalization. Not only does the MST often clash with local elites, but in recent years it has had to battle against the neo-liberal policies of President Fernando Henrique Cardoso Fernando Henrique Cardoso, pron. IPA: [fex'nãdu ẽ'xiki kax'dozu], (born June 18, 1931) - also known by his initials FHC and economic plans dictated by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.

"Currently our main problem is the neo-liberal policies of a government that isn't concerned with the social needs of the Brazilian people," says Delwek Matheus, 43, an elected member of the MST's national board. "In the six years of the current government, 900,000 families on small farms have lost their land. It doesn't help to make settlements if at the same time other families are being thrown off their land. It's clear that there's a political intention to not make agrarian reform agrarian reform, redistribution of the agricultural resources of a country. Traditionally, agrarian, or land, reform is confined to the redistribution of land; in a broader sense it includes related changes in agricultural institutions, including credit, taxation, a fact."

The Cardoso administration likes to boast that it has accomplished more land reform than any previous government, distributing more than 28 million acres. (Government officials concede that such distribution wouldn't have occurred without grassroots pressure from the MST.) But at the same time structural adjustment "reforms" have been devastating for Brazil's small farmers. Bankruptcies of small farmers skyrocketed in the late 1990s as the government boosted interest rates to stratospheric strat·o·spher·ic
adj.
1. Of, relating to, or characteristic of the stratosphere.

2. Extremely or unreasonably high: "money borrowed at today's stratospheric rates of interest" levels in an attempt to maintain investor confidence. Redistribution of land has been further undermined by the government's favoritism toward massive plantations that produce food for export. These sorts of policies have worsened the exodus of rural families to Brazil's already overcrowded and underresourced cities. According to government figures, between 1995 and 1999 an estimated 4 million Brazilians left the countryside for the cities.

The MST has also recently faced off directly against the World Bank. The Bank, in cooperation with the Brazilian government, is pushing a land reform project that the MST says will undermine the movement and the rights it claims under the Brazilian constitution. Under the World Bank's plan, land reform would be privatized: the landless would apply for loans from the Brazilian government with which they could purchase land from landowners at market prices. However, no landowners will be forced to sell, no matter how much of their property is lying unused. Also, the tough terms of the loans make it likely that many poor farmers will lose the land again within a few years. Under the Land Bank program, there is only a three-year grace period (an earlier government program had a five-year grace period), and little way to get credit for supplies or seeds. Interest rates on the loans will be as high as 18 percent.

AN ABUNDANT HARVEST

Still, in spite of such challenges, MST leaders and rank-and-file members remain confident of keeping their momentum. The movement enjoys a great deal of support from progressives in Europe, where the MST is well known. Brazil's Catholic Church is also an important supporter of the MST's work, with many leading members, including Delwek Matheus, coming from Catholic activist backgrounds. And recent electoral gains by Brazil's Workers Party, a traditional MST ally, bode well for the movement.

Most importantly above and beyond all other consideration; "above all, you must be independent"
above all, most especially , citizens continue to pour into the movement, where they gain an invaluable sense of empowerment and a lasting commitment to social change.

"From the moment in which you involve yourself in the struggle, you begin to acquire a bit of consciousness and you begin to fight not just for your rights but for the rights of all the exploited in Brazil and the world," says Domingos, the former shoemaker. "You find many friends, and this lets you feel powerful, and even with all the difficulties, you continue strong, fighting."

Jason Mark is the communications director at Global Exchange, an international human rights organization.

fleetwood mac play in our kitchen

2010-12-20T11:04:00.000Z

thoughts on cityscapes

2010-12-17T09:35:00.000Z

I think that whatever we do in our cities we have to ensure that we maintain a direct relationship with the natural world. The reason is pragmatic, but has aesthetic benefits too. Fundamentally, we cannot escape the fact that we are part of the earth, not apart from it, and we live our lives in the cycle of birth and death, growth and decay. Facing up to this reality in our cities will civilise them. This is going to have to become a part of the restored narrative of our century, a realisation that we are of the earth. If we are moving ever more towards living well in the cityscape, then we have to overcome the denial of nature as to fail to do so is likely to have catastrophic consequences for our shared urban futures. For example, we can never become post agrarian, as we are biomass and need to eat. Consequently I think that we need to make sure that people have a number of essentials ready to hand, in the case of my work it is designing into urban spaces the opportunity to grow food, or food with others to establish small neighbourhoods of food resilience across entire cityscapes. In doing this people can establish a connection and a sense of place. Their relationship with place and with each other becomes meaningful when the macro becomes the micro. So our cities have to nurture people, not treat them like economic units, this changes the way we might look at them as spaces from simply being places for work and leisure, into places where the metaphor of growing becomes the nornm, growing community,m growing an eco-economy where all products are sustainably designed and where waste is food for something else or is redesigned into something else (cradle to cradle), wherea substantial amount of seasonal food is grown within the locale of the city, where schools are engaged in ecological literacy founded on permaculture and biomimic principles of nature as guide, mentor and measure. If we enable cities to become self reliant, their infrastructure will be facilitative for good life enhancing qualities, it will enable people to self reliant, as well as interdependent in the communities they move within in their city spaces. I have seen all this emerge from the perspective of community food growing, as the needs of a grower are water, soil, space (vertical or horizontal) and light essentials for life. Using these as starting points makes city design / service design and community development very simple as it embeds the idea of eco within the ego of our places.

my christmas state of mind

2010-12-16T18:53:00.001Z

Cheshire cat: oh by the way, if you'd really like to know he went that way
Alice: who did
Cheshire cat: the White rabbit
Alice: he did?
Cheshire cat: he did what?
Alice: went that way
Cheshire cat: who did?
Alice: the White rabbit
Cheshire cat: what rabbit?
Alice: but didn't you just sat - I mean oh dear
Cheshire cat: can you stand on your head?
Alice oh!

enviromental crisis in pictures

2010-12-14T17:39:00.001Z

www.chrisjordan.com

Really nice project in London

2010-12-13T21:51:00.001Z

http://foodfromthesky.org.uk/

Every now and then you find great projects, this one came via Adrian, many thanks, and features an interesting permaculture roof garden on top of a supermarket - have a look.

Best political critique I've heard in years

2010-12-10T21:28:00.001Z

2010-12-10T20:38:00.000Z

"Things got a bit out of hand. We smashed the place up and Boris set fire to the toilets"

David Cameron, Oxford, 1986

Joyous stuff! Sometimes you can hang around for what seems like years to have one of those laugh out loud moments, and then they come alomg like buses. The BBC done us proud yesterday, as witnessed below - enjoy - and remember, we can't create sustainable communities without a few fuck ups. I got a bit carried away then and carried on...sorry!

2010-12-07T21:02:00.002Z

School of Sustainability news update ................

2010-12-06T18:59:00.001Z

isaac is working on the website - good - but it wont happen that fast so dont search for it yet as www.school-of-sustainability.com is still in development!

plans include
films and pictures
talks - little 5 minute things
how to examples etc
guest lectures
this blog stuff but organised a bit more sensibly
connections to cool things elsewhere

an edgy section which I hope will look at themes each month and do stuff with the themes

free stuff
a place out of which all this will happen that will be a real place and not a website - that bit is still under discussion but it should be brilliant
art and music pieces

and I think a mad project or two - keep sending thoughts it is very useful

lovely film - thanks Alys

2010-12-06T17:00:00.000Z

jam jar greenhouse - Desi does it again - great find!

2010-12-05T22:28:00.001Z

absolutely wonderful bbc film on plants

2010-12-05T19:26:00.002Z

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00p90d6/Life_Plants/ts/

from BRIGHT GREEN blog

2010-12-04T21:27:00.000Z

Something very interesting is happening, people are getting active again and they are making connections that previously have been left unconnected - the two stories below - this post and the one earlier document the recent disgraceful tax dodges of major high street companies - but this time they haven't gone unnoticed - it may be austere times, but clearly we are not all in this together as we are been told.

This doesn’t normally happen – Britain gets active.

Posted on December 4, 2010 by Adam Ramsay | No Comments

A couple of weeks ago, I went into a Vodafone store. I had an awkward 3 minute conversation with some I vaguely recognised about which phones we liked best. Neither of us really knew the differences between them. Then, it was 2pm. We pulled signs from under our coats, and sat down. A few other people in the store did the same, and about 20 more from outside, accompanied by a video camera, marched in to join us.

Customers were ushered out, and the store was shut, as another 30 people outside handed out flyers: “Vodafone, tax dodgers” and stuck signs to the window. We chanted, and waved our signs to passers by.

And then, something different happened. I am used to protesting at shops – I’ve spent hours handing out leaflets about sweatshops and child slavery outside branches of Topshop. I’ve organised stunts about oil funding outside RBS branches. Normally, people are vaguely supportive. They don’t like climate change, and they disapprove of child slavery. But mostly, they ignore you and get on with their day. But this was different. Passers by stopped, and joined our friends outside. Some helped to give out leaflets. Others passed food to us through the letter box. Most gave us a smile, a cheer or a thumbs up.

On Monday, I returned to Topshop, this time to highlight the tax they dodge at home rather than the children their suppliers enslave abroad. A reasonable number had turned up to the protest, and were sitting across the broad doorway of Topshop’s flagship store. I was taking a photo, and was approached by two teenage shoppers, who asked what was going on. I explained. “Well, I’m with them”. They sat down in the road, and donned the orange head bands we were all wearing.

And so, what had been a group of 60 or so students steadily grew. Passers by joined them. The police, without their commanders, politely asked us to move off the bits that were private property, but admitted that they too were worried about cuts. We told them that we wanted to defend their jobs, too, and moved as they asked. So they let us block the rest of the pavement.

This doesn’t normally happen. It never happens. In Britain, public protest is seen by most as an activity for political geeks and weirdo freaks. But people have a breaking point.

David Cameron smugly responded to the Millbank demo by saying the “every Government has it’s protests”. That’s true. But the level of support for actions against tax dodgers that we are now seeing is something new – something my generation has never known.

People are cross about cuts. And this anger will grow as austerity begins to bite. The message that there is an alternative hasn’t always got through – yet. But when it does, Oxford Street shoppers are willing to spontaneously blockade the shops they have come to visit. Oxford’s customers will interrupt their day to buy food for protesters, or spontaneously hand out leaflets, and people across Britain will join a growing and amorphous movement which has already changed the media narrative, and could just change the country.

Vodafone's tax case leaves a sour taste Richard Murphy o guardian.co.uk, Friday 22 October 2010 16.08 BST

2010-12-04T17:50:00.000Z

There's a flurry of tweets and a petition currently making rounds on the internet asking Vodafone to pay its taxes. That's the £4.8bn of tax that HM Revenue & Customs boss Dave Hartnett allegedly let Vodafone forgo when settling a longstanding tax dispute with the company. The dispute started in 2000, when Vodafone acquired German engineering company and mobile phone operator Mannesmann, in what was at the time the biggest takeover ever.

The details of this case are complex. Not all, of course, are in the public domain. Whether or not £6bn of tax was in total owed or not will never really be known. But what seems much more likely is that Vodafone had expected to pay much more than the £1.2bn it will finally settle. Reports suggest that they had put aside at least £2.2bn to cover the payment and they must, as a result, be laughing all the way to the bank.

I do, however, have sorry news for those who want Vodafone to pay up: if HMRC have really settled the case then the matter is done and dusted, and the opportunity to charge will have gone. This does not change the fact that this affair leaves a sour taste in the mouth, not least because days after it was announced, George Osborne was promoting Vodafone in India – a visit that must have been agreed before the tax announcement was made on 23 July. Of course, the coincidental timing may just be fortuitous and no one is suggesting Vodafone has done anything wrong, but the impression given is that HMRC rushed a deal through before the Indian visit.

If they did, that seems consistent with what many see as the "business friendly" and even "tax-haven friendly" attitude that seems to pervade our tax authority, especially faced with companies who openly admit they seek to minimise tax in any way they can – as Vodafone does when it says: "The maximisation of shareholder value will generally involve the minimisation of taxation."

But is that something HMRC and our treasury should accept? I have estimated UK companies avoid at least £12bn in tax a year – in no small part, I am quite sure, by the use of tax haven operations, which is widespread. When I and others surveyed the FTSE 100 companies last year, we found that only 33 published a list of where all their subsidiary companies are – although it is a legal requirement for all of them to do so. And without exception, those who did report had tax haven subsidiaries – using the definition established by the Tax Justice Network – with an average of 79 each.

This suggests something worrying. There seems to be a widespread dedication to using these places – so many of which are, after all, UK crown dependencies or overseas territories – for massive economic advantage. And we're losing as a result. Is that appropriate at a time when we're all supposed to be "in this together"? And is this honest, at a time when large companies are currently the only part of the UK economy enjoying the prospect of tax cuts?

These big companies' tax rate will fall from 28% to 24% over the next four years – a move that seems generous, but quickly becomes ludicrous when it is appreciated that the effective tax rate of the largest companies in the UK is now 21%. This means that over the next four years, it is likely that their effective tax rate (that is, the rate they really pay) will fall to 17%. That's a lower tax rate than small companies will pay. It's lower than our VAT rate will be. It's also lower than our basic rate of income tax.

Is this tax justice? Is this "fairness"? Angry people, upset by the prospect of cuts for the poor and vulnerable in society, are rightly asking this question of what seems like a bastion of corporate privilege – the right not to pay the tax that the state should expect seems to be just that. If Osborne and his colleagues are to be credible, and if they are to persuade us the burden of tax is being shared fairly, then they have to tackle tax avoidance. This must be evidenced by scrapping all cuts at HMRC so the missing money is collected. And they must show us that they aren't giving favours to big business while denying the same ones to small UK companies and the rest of us alike.

As of right now, they're failing miserably to send out those messages. No wonder people are angry. They've got a right to be so.

SOS - School of Sustainability

2010-12-04T15:42:00.002Z

We are pleased to announce that we will be setting up a website soon called School of Sustainability - SOS www.school-of-sustainability.com

it will probably host this blog amongst other things which we have in mind, but any suggestions would be welcome at this stage so we can include them in the planning.

so...

icsei part 1

2010-12-03T14:27:00.000Z

China's transformation from the BBC

2010-12-02T23:01:00.000Z

taken from BBC website Carrie GracieBBC News

Click to play

White Horse Village: The changing face of China

"I can't keep a pig or grow any vegetables, I have to buy everything from the shops," 70-year-old Jin Zhongzen complains.

Mr Jin is a man whose life has been utterly transformed.

Watch the previous episodes:

Three years ago he lived in a mudbrick courtyard house in White Horse Village, a sleepy village in a verdant valley in Wuxi County, western China.

He was one of several hundred million Chinese farmers still eking out a living on tiny plots of land, a way of life unchanged for hundreds of years.

Today, Mr Jin can still be found in the same valley, but home is now a sixth-floor apartment. The valley floor has been concreted over and White Horse Village has been demolished, replaced by a city - Wuxi New Town.

What has happened to Mr Jin and to White Horse Village is emblematic of one of the most important stories of our time, the story of whether Beijing can take an ancient brooding hinterland of subsistence farmers and drag it into the narrative of a rising 21st Century superpower.

Far away in Beijing the Communist Party decreed that inland China must be modernised and urbanised.

Five hundred million subsistence farmers were to be lifted from poverty and brought into the story of China's economic miracle by creating cities and jobs for them at home, rather than them being forced to travel to coastal China to get ahead.

It is easy to trot out platitudes about change in China and to reel off lists of staggering numbers.

But the scale and speed of China's transformation are best understood when you put a camera and microphone into one community and observe it over time. That is what we have done in White Horse Village.

I first visited in 2005 and a year later we went back to begin recording the birth of a city.

Few people have heard of Wuxi County, let alone White Horse Village, and in a sense that is why we chose it.

Tucked in behind the mountain walls that rise to the north of the Yangtze River's famous Three Gorges, White Horse Village had always been a backwater, too remote to play a role in China's triumphs or its catastrophes.

In 2006, the valley was as it had been for centuries, maize fields and rice paddies stretching from the banks of the meandering brown river right back to the mountain. And on the lower slopes, farmhouses clustering among bamboo groves and ancestral tombs.

Beijing fashions

But like many other nameless communities, White Horse Village had to be sacrificed.

Click to play

Inside Jin Zhongzen's new modern apartment

In just four years, all of its emerald rice fields have disappeared under concrete. The houses the farmers built themselves, houses they were married in, that their children were born in, have all been demolished.

The valley floor is now laid out like a model city with neat apartment blocks, hotels, schools, and a grid of broad streets humming with government limousines, shiny new police cars and a musical dustbin lorry.

At first glance, the street corners could be any Chinese city. The girls are wearing exactly what they are wearing in Beijing this season - hot pants, black tights and tasselled ankle boots.

The shops are selling flooring, furniture, flat screen TVs, and real estate is booming.

Lack of community

From the beginning of this process, we have followed the local Communist Party secretary Xiang Caiguo, as he tried to persuade his community their lives would improve.

“Start Quote

It's natural for us to feel sad. I've worked on these fields for decades. It's the same land my ancestors farmed for hundreds of years. But we have to keep in step with the authorities”

Xiang CaiguoCommunist Party secretary

Now in his 50s, Mr Xiang has been the party secretary in White Horse Village for the best part of 20 years. It has been his job to act as a bridge between the villagers and the government.

"It's natural for us to feel sad. I've worked on these fields for decades. It's the same land my ancestors farmed for hundreds of years. But we have to keep in step with the authorities," he says of the change.

At 70, Mr Jin acknowledges there have been some advantages to change - notably a state pension and hot running water - but he feels isolated from the neighbours and routines which once gave meaning to his life:

"Now I have to climb up and down all these stairs and I have prostitutes and strangers for neighbours.

"And worst of all, there's nowhere for the family wedding parties and anniversaries - when I die, where are the family going to put my coffin when everyone needs to gather for the wake?"

He does not like to spend too much time in his modern apartment, preferring to spend his days in his old blue farmer's jacket and woolly hat selling cigarettes on the street corner and reminiscing about the old house.

Investment plans

The younger villagers are much more willing to embrace new city life, especially those who have been migrant workers and seen big city life on the coast.

Many have come home with capital and ideas, to open restaurants and hairdressing salons or to grab the opportunities created by the real estate boom.

The villagers' homes were demolished to make way for playing fields

Until this year, Zheng Jun and his wife worked in a factory in north-east China, but they have decided to try their luck in the new city and invested their savings in the latest appliances from Hong Kong - shower units with massage function, Jacuzzi hot tubs and self-cleaning toilets with heated seats.

"Everyone in this city is going to need a modern bathroom. In fact, most people are fitting two and tend to put a traditional squatting toilet in one and a Western style sitting toilet in the other," Mr Zheng explains.

If bathrooms are anything to go by, White Horse Village seems to be hurtling through centuries of development in the space of a few months.

Motorway network

Hua Zujun is deputy governor of the county and ultimately responsible for getting the city built. Spreading the blueprints on his large polished desk he outlines the main objectives:

“Start Quote

Everyone in this city is going to need a modern bathroom. In fact, most people are fitting two and tend to put a traditional squatting toilet in one and a Western style sitting toilet in the other”

Zheng JunWuxi New Town migrant

"We had four objectives - a civilised, hygienic, scenic city, with the focus on eco-tourism. Our economy will also depend on mining, commercial farming and hydropower.

"We're situated in the very heart of China between three huge cities, Chongqing, Xian and Wuhan. And when our highway network is finished in 10 years time, we'll be only five hours from any of them," he explains.

China is building 5,000km of highway a year, and planning to match the US network by 2020. Every tunnel and bridge is part of the bigger plan to open up the interior and shift the country's centre of gravity west.

"We want to be one of the most liveable small cities in China," Mr Hua adds, "and we've got one third of the project finished already."

Fine talk, but the highway to Chongqing is three years behind schedule. All through the night the lights are on up on the mountain as the tunnel builders try to make up for time lost in arguments over land confiscation.

All along the people of White Horse Village have been assured this change was to their advantage and their interests would be protected.

But over the years, we have seen them grow more sceptical and more defiant. They have sacrificed homes, farmland and ancestral tombs, only to watch well-connected outsiders turn a profit when the land is reclassified as real estate.

Mistrust

Where once everyone was poor together, now there are winners and losers. It is a moment of great opportunity, but also one of mistrust.

Some villagers are even refusing to move into their allocated apartments as they suspect the developers have cut corners on construction materials and they do not trust official assurances on safety.

Even Mrs Xiang, the communist party secretary's wife, doubts whether the new apartment block would withstand an earthquake like the one that killed nearly 100, 000 in the region two years ago:

"The government doesn't take the people seriously. If the building collapses, who cares? We let them demolish our homes so they could build the new school. And we still haven't got anywhere decent to live," she says.

But everyone knows defiance is only temporary. Experience has taught them that the authorities win all the battles in the end. Here the past cannot be permitted to stand in the way of the future.

2010-12-02T18:41:00.000Z

Buy This Bankrupt Satellite to Share Internet With the Poor

2010-12-02T17:53:00.002Z

Buy This Bankrupt Satellite to Share Internet With the Poor

A school bus-sized satellite—the world's most capable—is for sale, as its corporate owner goes under. But rather than let it slowly die, a non-profit is raising money to repurpose it as a free internet provider for the poor.
Buy This Satellite says it'll take $150,000 in contributions to place a successful bid on the orphaned Terrestar-1, at which point its orbit will be moved in order to supply a connection to countries in need—for free. The group also plans to manufacture and distribute cheap satellite modems to get people hooked up on the ground. A lot of financial and bureaucratic trudging will have to be accomplished between cash raised and internet unleashed, but it's a wonderfully daring plan, and a noble one at at that. Countries like Papua New Guinea—which has an open orbital "slot" which the Terrestar-1 could move into—has internet access for only 2.1% of its population. A bus-sized router for the world's poor and internet-less could do a whole lot of good. [Buy This Satellite via Boing Boing]

from NASA website

2010-12-02T17:49:00.000Z

NASA Finds New Life

Hours before their special news conference today, the cat is out of the bag: NASA has discovered a completely new life form that doesn't share the biological building blocks of anything currently living in planet Earth. This changes everything.
At their conference today, NASA scientist Felisa Wolfe Simon will announce that they have found a bacteria whose DNA is completely alien to what we know today. Instead of using phosphorus, the bacteria uses arsenic. All life on Earth is made of six components: carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulfur. Every being, from the smallest amoeba to the largest whale, share the same life stream. Our DNA blocks are all the same.
But not this one. This one is completely different. Discovered in the poisonous Mono Lake, California, this bacteria is made of arsenic, something that was thought to be completely impossible. While she and other scientists theorized that this could be possible, this is the first discovery. The implications of this discovery are enormous to our understanding of life itself and the possibility of finding beings in other planets that don't have to be like planet Earth.
No details have been disclosed about the origin or nature of this new life form. We will know more today at 2pm EST but, while this life hasn't been found in another planet, this discovery does indeed change everything we know about biology. I don't know about you but I've not been so excited about a bacteria since my STD tests came back clean. And that's without counting yesterday's announcement on the discovery of a massive number of red dwarf stars, which may harbor a trillion Earths, dramatically increasing our chances of finding extraterrestrial life. [NOS—In Dutch]

9 day traffic jam

2010-12-01T17:17:00.000Z

China’s mega traffic snarl strands thousands of motorists for 9 days and counting. If you thought commuting around LA is the worst in the world, think again. In Beijing there are motorists who have been stranded along a highway for nine days.

Imagine a large bottleneck caused by construction and increased traffic from excess cargo trucks making their way to a particular destination. Add broken down vehicles and minor traffic accidents, and you got the situation in China.

The scenario has a 62 mile long jam, which may not dissipate for days. The congestion is expected to continue, as construction is still underway.

Motorists get to combat boredom with area merchants arriving on foot to take advantage of the situation and sell items at an inflated price.

So the next time you’re stuck in traffic for a couple of extra hours, remember it could be worse. You could be in Beijing stuck on the highway for over a week!

Free - collection only - OL14 postcode

2010-12-01T16:15:00.000Z

Available immediately - as much snow as you want to take away - bring your own bags

From Ellen MacArthurs Bradford Conference today - text roll from the education session

2010-11-30T17:34:00.000Z

Moderator: Thanks for intros. Really pleased you could make it from where you are.

---------------------

DAVID GARLOVSKY: DAVID: SHEFFIELD - teacher, teacher trainer and inventor in renewable energy and energy edfficiency and manufacture a thermal and acoustic insulation from recyceld denim cotton.

---------------------

Jamie Saunders: Sustainability can't be solved...patterns in post-conventional age... ... "Sustainability is the possibility that humans

and other life will flourish on Earth forever.

Reducing unsustainability, although critical,

will not create sustainability." http://www.johnehrenfeld.com/

---------------------

Astrid: Agree, Jamie. It's a completely different mindset. It's the C2C's concept of 'being good instead of less bad'

---------------------

Gordon Keay: "Be excellent to each other" Bill & Ted

---------------------

Gordon Keay:

---------------------

Jamie Saunders: http://www.longnow.org/

---------------------

Gordon Keay: “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.” Aldo Leopold

---------------------

Jamie Saunders: Guidelines for a long-lived, long-valuable institution:

* Serve the long view

* Foster responsibility

* Reward patience

* Mind mythic depth

* Ally with competition

* Take no sides

* Leverage longevity

Stewart Brand - Clock of the Long Now - proper role of government and universities to 'serve the long view'... plus Illich 'de-schooling society' and opening up 'learning villages' (as in... 'it takes a village to raise a child')

---------------------

Moderator: Mind Mythic depth - explain?

---------------------

Jamie Saunders: Mind mythic depth..."Minding mythic depth means to consider the long-term connections between peoples and cultures" (looking back ... and forward...)

---------------------

Gordon Keay: casting fore, casting back...

---------------------

Moderator: Nice phrase - like it!

---------------------

Me: might be useful to conceptualise this as ecological literacy - otherwise the C2C 'brand' will dominate, what about permaculture for example as an holistic systemic approach for living? This is more than design, it is hand, heart and mind see blog www.sustainableretreat.blogspot.com where I have expanded on this at length...

---------------------

Jamie Saunders: When 'future considerations should dwarf the past' (we can't turn the clock back but can influence and shape anticipate and be better prepared for 'plausible futures'... what could we do with 500 years of effort? S Brand

---------------------

Becka: I'd be interested in getting in touch with people who, like me, are keen to move forward from a culture of fear and anxiety and therefore ultimately *control* to an envrionment of empowerment, challenge and change

---------------------

Astrid: I agree Paul. I have come accross many sustainable and holistic approaches we can draw from. Permaculture is one, Deep Ecology another. They all share certain principles though. It's finding the common sustainable principles (laws / ideas / concepts) which can be used as guidelines for the future.

---------------------

Gordon Keay: agreed

---------------------

Astrid: @Becka: do you have a Transition Town initiative in your area? Or listen tomorrow afternoon to Rob Hopkins.

---------------------

Becka: @astrid not sure, will ask Peter! And thanks for the tip to listen to Rob tomorrow.

---------------------

Caroline Walker: If schooling cannot remain untouched by the challenges and inevitable changes to come, then what will 'schooling' look like if it incorporates circularity rather than linearity?

---------------------

DAVID GARLOVSKY: Becka I am interested in your moving forward from fear and helplessness to one of empowerment.

---------------------

Astrid: @Becka; TT initiatives are all about empowering people to take action together and build a sustainable and resilient community.

---------------------

Jamie Saunders: Permaculture... 'whole systems thinking and whole systems action...with feedback...' ... 'closed loop/c2c' part of the 'toolkit'... maybe touches down into 'closed loop communities' and/or 'transitioning settlements' - those transitioning through time...

---------------------

Moderator: @Caroline - good point. It will be centred around the individual rather than the institution

---------------------

DAVID GARLOVSKY: David: and local cooperatives

---------------------

Jamie Saunders: Provocation: how might society 'learn' beyond the 'physical form' of a 'campus' ... campus dissolves...

---------------------

Becka: @ David would be happy to chat about it more if you wanted? My email is r.currant@bradford.ac.uk

---------------------

Becka: @astrid, sounds perfect Have been trying to build a closer comunity on campus for the last 12 months, with some positive progress.

---------------------

Astrid: Could it be centered around groups of people instead of individual people? A fantastic talk about education: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U

---------------------

henry liebling: Which teaching methods/pedagogical approaches might be easy to strengthen/introduce into the education system that might prove acceptable to the current system including OFSTED, TDA...... present gov't?

---------------------

Moderator: @Astrid - yes our model for our new Circular Economy course

---------------------

Becka: @ henry we also need to be leading and shaping the educational sphere.

---------------------

henry liebling: Suggest approaches such as "Learning to learn", "Building learning power", work in "Global YTeacher, Global learner" from 20+ years ago, role play and simulation, learning sets.

---------------------

Astrid: @Will; where can we get more info on this course?

---------------------

Me: its a detail/dynamic problem (self-universal) , our project Incredible edible is geared towards use of public space to connect people to the natural world, my main concern is we are deluding ourselves if we think that technology can fix the basic problem, it is a shift from ego to eco that is the rich territory to explore, particulalry in how we relate to built environment, live in our cities, retrofit them to ensure carbon reduction and generate a much deeper appreciation of relationship and community in the response to more sustainable ways of living

---------------------

Astrid: Suggest intergenerational learning as well.

---------------------

Moderator: It is in development - live early next year. Watch our website

---------------------

henry liebling: Addressing the content is trickier I think. Chaos theory, Catastrophe theory, looking closely at natural systems, going for mastery rather than coverage, being comfortable with what you know and how to learn, rather than filled with facts and overburdened curriculum.

---------------------

Jamie Saunders: As before... maybe a poly-cultural approach to 'education'... including 'social innovation', 'peer based behaviour change', 'collaborative consumption' etc...

---------------------

Astrid: @Will; will do, thanks.

---------------------

Caroline Walker: Can we not, in the words of Buckminster Fuller, build a new model which makes the old model obsolete? let's not ask what ofsted would accept!

---------------------

Moderator: @Caroline - that's the cunning plan.

---------------------

Becka: @ caroline agree totally! We should be leading the sector and showing how it can be done

---------------------

Me: absolutely - ofsted is only England - there is a whole world out there!

---------------------

Astrid: Good question, Caroline.

---------------------

Green Business 1: Is the Morrisons course based around C2C?

---------------------

Jamie Saunders: District primed and promoting 'sustainable and cohesive District'...Bradford District non-conventional past... post-conventional future... http://www.bradford.gov.uk/bmdc/BDP/the_big_plan

---------------------

Moderator: The old model has been obsolete for my entire educational life. This course is designed to reflect the C2C philosophy.

---------------------

Astrid: In all ingredients for a future sustainable society and likewise education, I would like to add poetry please.

---------------------

StellaDudzic: The problem is not so much what Ofsted will or won't accept; it is the perception (fear) among teachers of what Ofsed will accept

---------------------

Moderator: No fear - we can easily argue our case

---------------------

Jamie Saunders: Localism - shaping and securing the prospects of Bradford District (and other places as well)...

---------------------

Becka: that's exactly the fear and anxiety that Peter was talking about earlier. IT's easy for us to challenge the system but harder to get everyone else to do the same.

---------------------

Moderator: You're now live on the screen in the auditorium

---------------------

henry liebling: Glad to hear VISION in these responses. Try to canhge existing system&/or build a new one. Lots of exciting initiatives around, can they be linked. Believe only awareness is educable. esd.escalate.ac.uk

---------------------

Moderator: Let's have a few questions or reflections

---------------------

Becka: I'd be interested to know what one thing people are going to do differentl as a result of this event, once they leave the room. Can they find another technique to pilot, or assessment to design or project to facilitate to move more towards a circular system?

---------------------

Me: Home and conference all in two hours - still snowing in Todmorden! Question: Pedagogoc design = non linear or are we really exploring emergence theory? Paul Clarke

---------------------

Astrid: We may need to redefine what we want our children to learn. The wisdom versus knowledge concept. Will sustainability in eduction include social skills, cultural values, etc etc

---------------------

DAVID GARLOVSKY: David: My reflection it appears this talk and are academic in context - l was hoping for practical solutions that we can engage in now.

---------------------

mark hodgson: i think the open learning / emergence for innovation, working with universities is great, but universities can get access to funding, smaller businesses cant and sometime ideas are taken by the agregator! (uni) and applied for funding and the private business is left out. how can you make sure this happens fairly

---------------------

Moderator: @Paul - no we're really exploring authentic learning

---------------------

Jamie Saunders: Connection to place and community... viable, resilient, adaptive people in creating the conditions for 'thriving, flourishing settlements... 'post-disciplinary practice' vital...

---------------------

Astrid: @David: a lot of people are already working very practically too!

---------------------

Rich Hurst: I come from a schools focus, what is the learning for, sustainability is based on values, a moral purpose if you like. Young people need to be able to engage in change and appreciate they are global citizens. That will inspire learning

---------------------

DAVID GARLOVSKY: David:I have experienced an unwillingness of the RDA's to provide finance to SME's - prefer to fund University programme for example.

---------------------

henry liebling: In the 1980s we had movement towards "being a mathematician" BEAM across a number of subjects/areas. Worth re-visiting?

---------------------

Moderator: Please give our colleagues in Elluminate an opportunity to feedback

---------------------

Jamie Saunders: Thomas Homer Dixon proposed we need ingenuity... especially and more 'social ingenuity' over 'technical ingenuity'...

---------------------

Astrid: Not one over the other, but both!

---------------------

Me: Nice point Clive - isnt there a danger of creating message that we pursue ego over a need for rethinking our relationship as part of the eco?

---------------------

Me: perhaps the idea of spiritual is an examination of the relationship of self with universal - we are both part of the planet, and at the same time ourselves - the relatiosnhip matters and is important to explore - if spiritual isnt a word we like, we need to examine a new way of thinking about beyond self

---------------------

mark hodgson: totally agree with ellen lots we can learning from the majority world..

---------------------

Jamie Saunders: 'Closed loop communities' as a focus... neighbourhood scale - seems very, very timely ? with core focus on 'eco-effectiveness' and 'local' assets, flows, cycles, stocks and capabilities... at the heart of protecting and enhancing communities especially in and across the North...

---------------------

Astrid: A system's view allows for double-loop thinking too.

---------------------

Astrid: And asking the right questions.

---------------------

Me: This debate is highlighting a transformational and not a reform agenda for schools - connections between schools, communities, business and doing this internationally - not locked to a single schooling system is one way of beginning to act differently - its a global and local challenge the mindset has to be global and local perhaps?

---------------------

Astrid: Yes, think so Paul.

---------------------

Rich Hurst: In agree Paul, another issue is what is the motive? We can ask lots of questions but whay are we asking them?

---------------------

Astrid: To improve? Zen philosophy.

---------------------

Jamie Saunders: Can a 'closed loop communities' focus help re-frame and drive positive change in creating functioning and resilient places?

---------------------

Moderator: This conference has been both local and global. That's the way our young people live and learn.

---------------------

david corrall: paul, good point, henc my interest in Advaita and its application in 'real' life' fo ryhoung poeple. For example, the St James' school in London gives a holistic perspective on our lives.

AIR CONDITIONING & ENERGY FROM DEEP WATER - from a downloadable report - http://www.i-sis.org.uk/GreenEnergiesPreview.pdf

2010-11-28T21:24:00.003Z

AIR CONDITIONING & ENERGY FROM DEEP

WATER

Deep lake and ocean water and even ground water is being exploited for cooling buildings, providing drinking water, and generating electricity.

The cities of Toronto and Stockholm, and the Cornell University campus have been using cold deep water to cool large buildings and making big savings in energy and carbon emissions and cutting other pollution from energy generating plants.

Toronto, for example, draws cold water from the depths of Lake Ontario to Toronto Island where the water is filtered and treated with chlorine as it is delivered to taps in homes and businesses. After treatment, part of the very cold water flows to a city plant, and via heat exchanger, cools a closed water loop that circulates to the distribution network where more heat exchangers cool the water circulating through the air conditioning systems in the office towers. A total of 46 buildings signed up to the system, saving 85 GWh and reducing 79 000 tonnes CO2 emission annually.

Honolulu has been investigating the possibility of converting the energy of sun-warmed surface water to electricity (ocean thermal energy conversion, or OTEC). OETC systems include the closed-cycle system that uses a working fluid, such as ammonia, pumped around a closed loop with three components: a pump, turbine and heat exchanger (evaporator and condenser). The warm seawater passes through the evaporator and converts the ammonia liquid into high-pressure ammonia vapour. The high- pressure vapour is then fed into an expander where it drives a turbine connected to a generator. Low-pressure ammonia vapour leaving the turbine is passed through a condenser, where the cold seawater cools the ammonia, returning the ammonia back into a liquid.. The open-cycle system uses the warm seawater as the working fluid. The warm seawater passing through the evaporator is converted to steam, which drives the turbine/generator. After leaving the turbine, the steam is cooled by the cold seawater to form desalinated water. The desalinated water is fit for domestic and commercial use.

The hybrid system uses parts of both open-cycle and closed-cycle systems to produce electricity and desalinated water. In this arrangement, electricity is generated in the closed-cycle system, and the warm and cold seawater discharges are passed through the flash evaporator and condenser of the open-cycle system (i.e., the original open- cycle system with the turbine/generator removed) to produce fresh water. The first OTEC was deployed in Hawaii in 1979.

Japan began pumping up deep ocean water in 1979 to support fisheries that had been depleted by over-grazing of seaweed beds that support fish and marine mammals.

Pumping deep ocean water to air condition cities, produce energy and fresh water, and to fertilize the productive surface waters, appears a promising approach to mitigating global warming by reducing the consumption of polluting oil and coal and the impact of overgrazing on marine food production.

But is large-scale pumping of deep ocean water sustainable? The deep ocean is ventilated through a giant thermohaline circulatory system that moves deep waters from north to south as salt-laden cooled water sinks into the depths in the North Atlantic and energizes a global conveyor belt that sends nutrient laden deep waters naturally to the surface in the North Pacific, north Indian Ocean, and south- east Pacific. This circulatory system is already being seriously disturbed by global warming.

There is a potential threat to deep sea communities as food particles and organisms are sucked up with the cold water and hence removed from the deep water environment. Furthermore, the construction and maintenance of the pump and pipe system could damage the deep sea habitat and its wild life. These applications, if practised on a large scale could contribute to warming the oceans, thereby decreasing their net primary production and impacting on all marine life.

Many big projects have remained on the drawing board also because the technology is expensive. Nevertheless, small scale air conditioning projects are definitely sustainable, and there are increasing examples, including the use of ground water to cool the tunnels of the London underground in the UK, and deep-mine flood water for air- conditioning in Springfield, Nova Scotia in Canada, and Park Hill Missouri in the US.

REEF NOT BARRAGE TO TAP THE TIDES

The Severn estuary has the third highest tidal range in the world, and a barrage across the estuary to trap the high tide could contribute 0.6 percent of UK’s primary energy use and 2 percent of its electricity. The barrage, estimated to cost of £15 billion many decades back, had triggered widespread environmental concerns as it would lead to the loss of hundreds of square kilometres of mudflats and salt marsh, home to waders and other coastal birds and a host of migratory species. The powerful surge of water over the turbines when the barrage gates open will profoundly disturb estuarine life, including fisheries and salmon runs.

A possible solution proposed by Cornish hydraulics engineer Rupert Armstrong Evans is to build a reef instead of a barrage that would generate as much electricity and far more steadily than the big barrage. This would consist of a semi-floating set of box structures housing the turbines and stretching across the estuary riding over a fixed base on the estuary floor. By using a moveable ‘crest gate’ to track the tide level and therefore to maintain a small head difference, irrespective of the stage of the tide, the turbines would operate for long periods, at least double the generation period of the proposed big barrage.

The reef would minimise environmental effects, save on construction and costs and still allow big ships to pass. The UK government announced in 2008 it believes the Severn tidal reef to have merit and would consider it. In July 2009, however, a row broke out as Evans’ idea, entered in a Department of Energy and Climate Change competition, was rejected in favour of a similar design put forward by another engineering firm.

AIR CONDITIONING & ENERGY FROM DEEP WATER - from a downloadable report -

2010-11-28T21:24:00.000Z

AIR CONDITIONING & ENERGY FROM DEEP

WATER

Deep lake and ocean water and even ground water is being exploited for cooling buildings, providing drinking water, and generating electricity.

Japan began pumping up deep ocean water in 1979 to support fisheries that had been depleted by over-grazing of seaweed beds that support fish and marine mammals.

REEF NOT BARRAGE TO TAP THE TIDES

cutting carbon

2010-11-28T12:42:00.000Z

A few lines on carbon reduction. New Internationalist this month has an excellent set of articles exploring the issue. For example, an 80% carbon reduction would put us back at levels last seen in 1972, interesting, people were clothed, ate food, lived their lives, it wasn't disaster time. So it is perfectly possible.
In the analysis section there is a nice piece on eight steps to a lower carbon future. As follows:
Build the mother of all movements: social movements around the world are exploring alternative ways to live. The climate change issue can bring together people from across the planter with many different local needs but a common goal.
Stop the worst stuff first: we need to phase out coal entirely over the next 20 years and stop the hideous tar sands oil extraction process in Canada. Biofuel is a non starter as it is wrecking virgin forests, doing so immediately changes the options for the people in such places.
Get the alternatives going: we know what they are, lets get a huge expansion of alternative power so it becomes the normative power sources.
Clamp down on the climate criminals: People and governments need to clamp down on the oil industry which is pillaging the earth for its shareholders, global rules to eliminate destructive development are increasingly possible, and can curb the excesses of massive corporate powers.
Reclaim democracy and clean up politics: independent and fearless people and media are vital for democracy. There is a global network of people and organisations all gearing towards greater levels of public participation and engagement in their communitities, this can extend to all aspects of public life.
Fight the growth myth: aim for a balanced steady state economic model.
Stick a spanner in consumer culture: encourage art, music, creative writing to expose the failures of the culture of shopping, this is hearts and minds work as much as transport and energy.
Defened and extend local sovereignty over land and food and forests: the most effective way to protect forests is to protect peoples land rights - small scale sustainable farming locks carbon in the soil and enables people to live. It also equalises access to food sources, unequal access is a major contributor to food scarcity and famine.
New Internationalist December 2010

Incredible Energy film we made earlier this year - schools and energy

2010-11-26T09:16:00.000Z

student debts - work and no work

2010-11-25T16:52:00.000Z

A bit off the usual observations this one but I listened to Vince Cable yesterday complaining that students didn't get the fact that the system the ConDems were putting into place only kicked in on repayment when they earnt 21k or above.
It reminded me of my Nan and Grandad. They didn't do credit, not ever. The reason was pretty simple, work and no work. During the 1930's my grandad was unemployed, for a long, long time. He grew food, enough to keep the family ticking, it taught self reliance and resilience, and it taught him to be very cautious about credit. After that, he got jobs on and off, a life of work and no work. Having debt was culturally unacceptable, it was tough enough being poor, but the fear of debt was much much more frightening, as this was something that maintained a constant looming shadow over all aspects of life, threatening your home, and everything you did.
That is what I think Vince and his cronies fail to understand. It has nothing to do with not understanding the deal, it has everything to do with how money works - and it works differently for the poor than it does for the rich. People aren't dumb, they just look at the prospect of 21k (plus all the add ons - and of course they talk to their friends and know that this means a good 10-15k on top) and they see a mountain of debt, which they will have upon them for a long, long time. It isn't enough to argue that graduates will over their lifetimes earn more money, because a) that story could collapse entirely if, and it is an increasingly likely if, the economic growth we are all promised fails to materialise and b) What jobs? Flipping burgers is now a graduate level profession in many parts of the USA, as the poorest drop out of the workforce completely. We are witnessing the fracture point of a story that has run its course. Debt is debt. Credit based living is tough enough when you have money and a regular income, but put it in front of intermittent work, the NINJA generation (no income no job) are making a serious point to politicians who simply don't understand, and they don't understand because culturally they don't get it, they come from a community who has money, it is much easier to deal with credit when you have money behind you. Vince, David and Nick, credit is not the same as money in the bank, it is debt, debt plain and simple and that sucks the lifeblood out of you, makes you dependent on having to find work and often take jobs because there isnt anything else you can do, it is a desperate, predictable story that repeats and repeats, especially when our culture of fear keeps spilling out the rhetoric of economic challenge.

what would it take?

2010-11-22T21:00:00.000Z

Just sitting listening to JG Ballard on BBC7.

Wondering what would it take to suddenly shift people's attention and make a radical change of life?

Alien life?

A jump start for the planet.

Picture is of Mars.

or is it?

this Saturday 27th November 2010

2010-11-22T20:22:00.003Z

thanks to Desi - a great find!

2010-11-22T20:15:00.000Z

http://www.sustainableworldradio.com/Sustainable_World_Radio.html

Some of the slides from the Mott Environment Forum 20th November

2010-11-21T17:16:00.000Z

thoughts... a few thoughts on what I think we are learning from the project as yet not discussed!

2010-11-21T15:38:00.004Z

watch the impossible hamster

2010-11-20T21:00:00.002Z

The Impossible Hamster from new economics foundation on Vimeo.

desert island discs

2010-11-16T21:09:00.000Z

i thought I would begin a list of my records for the desert island
so...first of all

Big Rock Candy Mountain - with Harry McClintock singing it. Utterly irresistable, up beat and positive view of life. Wonderful.

More later.

co2 added to the graphics

2010-11-14T20:21:00.000Z

http://vimeo.com/11739091

with added co2

airspace rebooted

2010-11-14T20:19:00.000Z

http://vimeo.com/11205494

A visualisation of the northern European airspace returning to use after being closed due to volcanic ash.

one other thing...

2010-11-13T21:18:00.000Z

another thought from today which I want to get back to -

it was wonderful just to talk and hear people who are doing such fantastic things, and interested in such extraordinary things - ordinary people, extraordinary worlds - in particular I thought the messages it can explore about the future, not future with a little f, but Future as in not giving up on it, we live in an extrordinary moment, not to give up because things seem tough sometimes has always been such a big part of overcoming circumstances. I was reminded about the World of the Future magazine of my youth today - in between the bonkers imagery of the time, there was a huge optimism for what was to come.

now where has my robotic butler gone with that drink, and for that matter where is my all in one red romper suit?!

Top day at Interesting North

2010-11-13T20:53:00.000Z

Just back from a cracking day at Interesting North in Sheffield. Of the many highlights through the day was the oddest named books talk - (Including How Green were the Nazis? and How to Bombproof your horse.) A fascinating talk on industrial espionage in the early 1800s in Leeds, talks on bicycles in cities, fascinating talk on games and rules, setting parameters and then how we use the spaces, a whizz piece on lessons from lego, the volcano Eyjafjallajokull in Iceland.

Cake making - side saddle riding, design and evolving ideas, and the surreal interface of where we go next and where we are and have been.

Great fun! have a look at the pictures here http://www.flickr.com/photos/gulch

BIG thoughts to mull over -

spaces - shed technologies - adaptive forces and mutant design - structures that enable ideas to flow - how old ideas come around in new forms - deterritorised zones in urban places

draft paper slides - runs a bit fast but ...

2010-11-12T15:22:00.001Z

2010-11-11T22:56:00.002Z

This appears in the March-April, 1935 issue of Land and Freedom - Now called
Land and Liberty:

"The subject upon which I have been asked to address you is at
the root of every social and economic question. We have innumerable
organizations which are engaged in advocating specific social reforms
all most admirable. But they will all fail until the land question
has first been settled. There is no economic or social question which
is not at the bottom a land question. Land is essentially different
from every other material property. It is from the land that all
human needs are supplied, and if that original source is monopolized,
if there are a few individuals who can control that supply, then they
hold the destinies of the community in their hands."

LORD SNOWDEN in an address in London before the Women's
National Liberal Federation.

Green school Bali

2010-11-07T19:06:00.002Z

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEuwqmf1SDc&feature=related

booklet link for IET

2010-11-06T23:54:00.003Z

http://www.scribd.com/doc/37196855/IET-Booklet

vote for hannahs blog

2010-11-06T11:01:00.001Z

vote for hannahs blog!

WINNER OF 2010 BUCKMINSTER FULLER CHALLENGE

2010-11-06T09:14:00.000Z

INITIATIVE TRANSFORMING AFRICAN DESERT
NAMED WINNER OF 2010 BUCKMINSTER FULLER CHALLENGE

ALL SIX FINALISTS DEMONSTRATE SIGNIFICANT POTENTIAL TO
SOLVE SOME OF HUMANITY’S MOST PRESSING PROBLEMS

JUNE 2, 2010, WASHINGTON, DC — Operation Hope, a solution combating one of the major causes of climate change has been named the winner of the 2010 Buckminster Fuller Challenge. At its core the winning strategy transforms parched and degraded Zimbabwe grasslands and savannahs into lush pastures with ponds and flowing streams, even during periods of drought. Operation Hope was awarded $100,000 to further develop its work at a ceremony today at the National Press Club in Washington DC. (Watch video from the conferring ceremony on our homepage.)

The Buckminster Fuller Challenge is the premier international competition recognizing initiatives which take a comprehensive, anticipatory, design approach to radically advance human well being and the health of our planet's ecosystems. The 2010 finalists are providing workable solutions to some of the world’s most significant challenges including water scarcity, food supply, and energy consumption. View a movie of the finalists here.

The Challenge is sponsored by the Buckminster Fuller Institute, which is accelerating the development and deployment of whole-systems solutions which demonstrate the potential to solve some of the world’s most significant challenges. (Click here to watch Inhabitat feature video about BFI.)

Operation Hope is a project of the Africa Centre for Holistic Management in Zimbabwe and its sister organization the Savory Institute in Albuquerque, NM. Its successful approach to land management contradicts accepted practice and theories of resting land from animal grazing. Instead, Savory’s holistic management process re-establishes the symbiotic balance between plant growth and the behavior of herding animals, returning unusable desert back into thriving grasslands, restoring biodiversity, bringing water sources back to life; combating global climate change, and increasing crop yields to ensure food security for people. The approach is currently being practiced and producing results on over 30 million acres world wide.

“Our work proves that we do have the ability to simultaneously better mankind’s experience while bettering the Earth,” said Allan Savory, founder of the Africa Centre for Holistic Management and the Savory Institute. “We are thrilled that the Buckminster Fuller Challenge exists to recognize and support work such as ours, and thank the jurors for this honor.”

Berlin-based Watergy was named runner up of the Challenge. Watergy has developed and implemented a closed system greenhouse that provides extremely efficient farming capabilities in water-scarce communities. The approach, being demonstrated in Almeria Spain, allows a dramatic shift in resource efficiency for the supply of water, food and renewable material, and can be deployed across urban and rural conditions.

The other four finalists were:
• Barefoot College, which teaches illiterate, rural women in India and Africa to be solar engineers within their communities, providing energy to their communities, catalyzing their local economies and improving their quality of life;
•Brooklyn-based BK Farmyards, a leading model in the urban agricultural movement, which is creating a web-based crowd-sourcing platform to advance urban farming as a viable business and food source for local communities;
• UrbanLab, which has re-conceived the Chicago street-grid as a holistic Bio-System that captures, cleans and returns 100% of the city’s wastewater and storm-water to the Lakes, ensuring constant regeneration of that natural resource while producing added economic, energy, social, and environmental benefits; and
•The Living Building Challenge, which has developed the most advanced green building rating system in the world. Living Buildings are virtually self-sustaining, generating their own power, using renewable sources, and capturing and treating all their own water.

“My grandfather believed that we have the ability to apply transformative strategies based on whole systems thinking, Nature's fundamental principles, and an ethically driven worldview to better the world and our own experiences. He called this approach comprehensive anticipatory design science,” said Jamie Snyder, Buckminster Fuller’s grandson and co-founder of the Buckminster Fuller Institute with his mother, Allegra Fuller Snyder. “I’m proud that the Institute is supporting the creative pioneers who are bringing this vision to light, and thankful to our partners who sponsor the Challenge and work with us to fulfill our mission.”

The Buckminster Fuller Challenge originated in 2007 and awards $100,000 annually. Support for the program has been provided by the Atwater Kent Foundation, The Civil Society Institute, The James Dyson Foundation, The Highfield Foundation; The Jewish Communal Fund, and the members of The Buckminster Fuller Institute

Founded in 1983 and headquartered in New York, The Buckminster Fuller Institute is dedicated to accelerating the development and deployment of solutions which radically advance human well being and the health of our planet's ecosystems. BFI’s programs combine unique insight into global trends and local needs with a comprehensive approach to design. BFI encourages participants to conceive and apply transformative strategies based on a crucial synthesis of whole systems thinking, Nature's fundamental principles, and an ethically driven worldview. By facilitating convergence across the disciplines of art, science, design and technology, BFI’s work extends the profoundly relevant legacy of R. Buckminster Fuller. For further information visit: bfi.org

Great community food project

2010-11-05T22:30:00.000Z

This is a really lovely site that looks at the Rockaway community at Queens, New York.
Have a look - http://rockawaytaco.com/ and http://www.theselby.com/7_8_10_RockawayTaco/
Nice stuff.

Asking: Why does the ecological focus matter? What is the fuss about?

2010-11-04T18:02:00.000Z

Asking: Why does the ecological focus matter? What is the fuss about?

If we succumb to a dream world then we’ll wake up to a nightmare. But if we start with reality and fight to make our dreams a reality, then we will have a good life, a life of meaning and purpose. Jimmy Carter (1980)

I was recently asked why I keep talking about ecological sustainability when there are so many problems we have to deal with already in our schools. It was a good question, and I hope here to explain my preoccupation.

My simple response is that most, if not all of the problems we face as a species, arise from a profound realignment between human and Nature that has arisen over the industrial period of the past 200 years or so. It seems we have simply forgotten some basic things, we are part of Nature, we rely upon it, and when we turn back to learn the lessons it can teach us there are great benefits we can draw into our own lives, in terms of better well-being, better outlook, and better practices in our life.

On the more complex level, I think that ensuring ecological sustainability is the defining issue of our age. This is both selfish and practical, selfish because if we do not pursue this goal we will perish, and therefore practical because it demands we engage in substantive actions to ensure such a situation does not arise. For example, we need to maintain the existing wild spaces on earth, and systematically restore the damage we have caused in recent times in such places. This may seem a long way from our daily life, a rainforest after all, is not something we might encounter in an entire lifetime. However, if we visit the supermarket, there will be numerous products on the shelves which have a direct relationship with the destruction of such places, from beefsteaks, to palm oil, the clearance of the forests arrives served up on our plate for our convenience and as such, we are implicated. However, this is not an entirely tragic story, we can change the course of this destructive sequence because we choose what we consume, we can act differently, and markets respond to consumer decisions. In effect, our design for life, as a set of conscious choices, can and should be redefined, we are complicit in this process, for good or bad.

So this agenda demands attention on a global scale, but has local consequences for all of us. It is far more than simply counting carbon emissions and ticking a green box, although that is at least a start. It represents a total rethink of our entire systemic game.

The more I have considered this huge and interwoven problem, the more I am convinced that the challenges I am referring to, and the context in which we might place it, are sufficiently significant to suggest that they represent a new epoch – a new age in the movement of planetary time. The ecological crisis is big enough to be considered as the defining feature of a new social, cultural and economic narrative. Our great work is to settle ourselves into a way of living on the earth in a minute frame of time (within the next thirty or so years), before we find that we have completely trashed the place. At the same time, we have to make sure that the remaining wild places, forests, grasslands, wetlands and oceans stay as such. Our moral purpose is clear, ensure we take ourselves and as much as possible of the biodiversity with us across the next century, through what E.O. Wilson calls the bottleneck of converging crisis of water, soil, population and biodiversity depletion.

The challenge comes to us in the form of action, or inaction. The suggestion is that we are at a decisive moment where the past is no longer sufficient to inform the present. There are occasions in human history when we can look back and recognise that the future was being formed in a beneficial manner. We might take as an example the moment that humans began to control fire, or when the first languages were spoken, or the first wheel was crafted, when we learnt to cultivate edible plants and created an alphabet through which we learnt to paint, read and write. Similarly, there were also moments when great visionaries lived, and they presented to people of the world a view that transcended the moment and put us in the context of the universal, longitudinal time frame of human history. We can think of the many prophets, gurus and spiritual leaders, we can think of the musicians, painters and storytellers. We can also think of the historians, Ssu-ma Ch’ien in China, Ibn Khaldun in the Arab world, and the Greek Thucydides in the West. All of these in their own ways represented ideas and insight of the human journey, each taking us to a higher level of awareness and consciousness. The sum of these contributions created great civilizations, cultures and dynasties. They were instrumental in assembling ways of governing the mind to connect the sacred with the practical; they were formative elements in generating the basic norms of reality through which people designed their lives. We can see that for many thousands of years, human beings have lived a relatively sublime existence in keeping with natural systems, in so doing; they sustained a quality of life, which connected directly with the natural world. These civilizations of our shared human past were sophisticated and cultured, they were founded on a practical understanding of the connection between spirit and nature that was often witnessed in their temples, cathedrals and sacred places. It was through an eco-literate (Capra 2005) agrarian consciousness that this connection between the human and the planet, the nature and the spirit, the self and universal was demonstrated and maintained across the centuries.

Despite the immense legacies and civilisations they represent, it seems clear they no longer on their own provide us with enough guidance, the lessons they give us of the past are insufficient to guide us into the future because our intervention in the world is so significantly different now from that past record. Whilst we cannot function without these lessons from our past, they are insufficient in themselves to generate a narrative of the present post-industrial society. We are out of step with ourselves and with our world upon which we depend. Something is happening that is profoundly different, apart from the lessons we have learnt from the past. We need to form the conditions to enable a new vision for the future to emerge.

Let us begin by suggesting that what connects us as a global human tribe to this time is the ecological crisis. I am taking it as given that this is a fact of our time and this alone distances us from our fellow human beings of the past^.. As Rees (2003) observes, ‘We still live, as all our ancestors have done, under the threat of disasters that could cause worldwide devastation: volcanic super-eruptions and major asteroid impacts, for instance. Natural catastrophes on this global scale are fortunately so infrequent, and therefore unlikely to occur within our own lifetime, that they do not preoccupy our thoughts, nor give most of us sleepless nights. But such catastrophes are now augmented by other environmental risks that we are bringing upon ourselves, risks that cannot be dismissed as improbable.’ (p2) Our presence here on earth is no longer benign; we are no longer ‘one species amongst many’ on this planet. Instead we are a dominant species exerting that dominance over all other forms of life. This is having a damaging effect on the environmental conditions upon which we, and other species depend in order to survive.

This change is historically and profoundly significant, brought about by disturbing the biosphere to such an extent through human industrial actions that we are now at an impasse in our relationship with the earth. It has no parallel in historical terms of ecological shift since the geo-biological transitions that occurred some 65 million years ago during the last great die off of species. At that time history witnessed the terminal phase of the dinosaurs, and a new biological age began with the Cenozoic age. This was age of life on earth, and so it has been until now. Evidence from all parts of the planet is suggesting that, through our wanton destruction of the natural environment there is a profound change taking place across the planet and it is sufficiently significant to be considered as the beginning of a new biological age, what Thomas Berry calls the Ecozoic era. This change is likely to take centuries for our species to respond and adapt, if we are able to do so at all (see Berry 1999, Lovelock 2009 and an extensive commentary by McIntosh 2008).

Over the years of growing industrialization, the general rule to continue a direct and clear connection with the natural has been lost. It seems to be that as industry spreads globally in both scale and power, our essential connection with the natural environment declines.

What defines this relationship and generates the conditions which in turn generate our action in response? One way of looking at this question is to consider the role of education to provide a platform of understanding about sustainability - our education systems define what we choose to learn, the reasons why particular things are selected as valued knowledge, and what their relationship is to the broader consideration. They also model our behaviour, the purchasing choices the school makes, the way the outdoor environment is nurtured, or all too often, ignored as a learning resource. Our capacity to respond to the global challenges of water, food, energy and population in no small part depend upon the way we make sense of these things in our daily lives and change our behaviour accordingly. As such, these ecological challenges are fundamental educational challenges, they require new learning, a new way of seeing our present problems, a new literacy for our time – an ecological literacy.

Development, growth and improvement

For many years now, industrialisation has been the mainstay of our economic certainty, it has been the basis of our understanding of how our world connects, and it has formed a definition of human progress, industrial growth, through which we have come to measure progress. It is now under serious question, can we continue to seriously believe that we can model our civilization on an industrial growth model and not be concerned about the consequences?

This common legacy, our industrial connection, is not just the result of one single set of intentions and outcomes, it has instead arrived as a result of layer upon layer of change and modification, and of the consequences and unforseen consequences of those changes. William MacDonough calls the consequences of this inherited legacy an ‘intergenerational tyranny’ (MacDonough 2008). It is intergenerational because the cumulative actions of the past influence and inform our present ways of understanding. It is tyrannical because we have little knowledge of why our ancestors decided to do what they did, when they did it. Perhaps all we can do is to continue to fumble away towards the next re-organisation, weaving our way in and out of the layer upon layer of the landscape of past versions of society as we navigate through our present world, but perhaps we might make some important choices along the way. These past versions of society are all around us, in our buildings, our public spaces, our institutions, our businesses, our cultures, they serve as pointers to these possible choices. No doubt our ancestors tried their best to deal with a world that they too inherited as a result of earlier solutions to earlier problems, just as we do today, no doubt they were left sometimes wondering if the approach was correct, just as we do today.

Today is also very different from the past because there are simply a lot more of us around to fit into the cities where we live and work, and the interconnection between ourselves and our environment is both local and global on a continual daily basis. If I call a customer helpline about my bank account, I speak to an operator in Bangalore India, who then connects me to my regional branch in Leeds, Yorkshire, England. If I take a look at the computer I am using to write this book, I see that it is designed in California, USA and assembled in southern China. If I eat a meal, the chances are that it will contain ingredients drawn together from many countries. This in itself promotes utterly new logistical, economic, cultural and environmental challenges compared to those faced by our ancestors.

The sheer abundance of commodities available to consumers generated by our industrial activity is at once the miracle and the nightmare of the modern world. It is miraculous that we are able to pull all of this together, when one considers the logistical demands that arise from almost any manufactured or processed product the interconnectivity of resource, construction and distribution is extraordinary, but the nightmare comes when we begin to scratch the surface and see the consequences that this lifestyle is having on habitats, human and natural on every continent and ocean across the planet.

The miracle comes primarily from the availability of cheap energy, and central to that cheap energy is the availability of cheap oil. Cheap oil has facilitated the greatest period of industrial growth in human history, it powers our economies and drives our lives. The nightmare of this legacy comes when we begin to understand that we are so dependent on oil, and then we recognise that oil is a finite resource, that many commentators are now reporting that cheap oil production has or will peak in the coming decade and the price of such energy will rise as ever more expensive extraction mechanisms have to come into use. It is a serious problem because we are all addicted to oil. Our oil dependent industrial systems feed us, clothe us, keep us warm and move us from place to place, but far more significant is the fact that by burning oil we are continually adding to the heating of the planet. Little wonder then, that the Chief Economist at the International Energy Agency tells the world government leaders that ‘we should leave oil before it leaves us’ (Birol 2008).

The industrial legacy and its oil hungry legacy is also playing itself over timeframes which were immaterial to our ancestors daily needs. In the past, when resources were plentiful, and populations were small, the need to conserve our physical material resources mattered little. But, as our resource hungry economies continue to expand, we face a stark reality that almost all essential resources are finite, our earlier economic and industrial models of make, use and dispose no longer suit our urban circumstances.

This is the fault line from the past to the present, it is the gap between how we used to respond to our problems of growth, and how we now need to respond to our idea of growth. This time around, if we aren’t conscious of what we are doing as we plan our next steps we will find that the results might be dire, it suggests that we need a new design for life. As Richard Registersays, ‘if we don’t explicitly recognise the role of conscience as well as consciousness in this process, we won’t be able to harness the process for anything close to what we generally think of as good. For our next step in the pattern of healthy evolution, the two modes of thinking - consciousness and conscience - need to be seen as whole.’ (Register 2006, p106) We clearly need to develop new learning to suit our time to accommodate these ideas, and begin to step away from our existing and inherited habits.

The parallel worlds of human systemic dysfunction and the natural systemic dysfunction both tend to suggest that there seems to be something profoundly outdated, destructive and unsustainable about how we live our lives in modern society, and our schools as part of these societies, are complicit in this process. However, our efforts to rectify this will remain fundamentally flawed if all they ever do is reform the existing order, after all, it was this order of things which created the problem in the first place. Our way forward is a new design, a design for living that connects the natural systems to the human systems, that models itself on the cycles of life, how to generate abundance without waste, and how to ensure variety and richness in all things without depleting the resources for the next generation, the essential building blocks that Nature uses, the durable, sustainable model.

If there is one clear message from the convergent crisis of water, energy, population, food and the environment it is that they are all just symptoms of the deeper malaise, our lack of connectedness to nature. If we realign our attention to the eco, and move off our obsessive belief in our own ego, we begin to establish the basic reconnection to the earth. This is the foundation of the new narrative, a narrative that combine the heart, hand and mind of change to an ecological consciousness, the new literacy for our time.

2920 words

Wallace and Gromit inspired by Nature

2010-11-04T09:14:00.001Z

http://www.bbc.co.uk/i/vt1xp/

reference list of recent key papers etc 2008-2010

2010-11-03T15:47:00.000Z

Recent Journal Articles

Clarke, P. (2010) Incredible Edible: how to grow sustainable communities. FORUM. Volume 52 Number 1 2010 

Clarke, P. (2010) Eco-Capability - preparing the ground for sustainable living SEED Conference South Bank University July 2010 Published in conference proceedings

Clarke, P. (2009) A practical guide to radical transition: framing the sustainable community. Education, Knowledge and Economy. Volume 3 Issue 3 2009 pp183-197

Clarke, P. (2009) Sustainability and Improvement: a problem of and for education. Improving Schools. Vol 12 no 1, 11-17

Recent Professional journal papers

Clarke, P. (2010) Future schools: the professional development challenge. Professional Development Today.

Clarke, P. (2009) Leading for education and the environment. Professional Development Today. Issue 12.1.17-18

Clarke, P. (2009) A practical guide to a radical transition: framing the sustainable learning community. Education, Knowledge and Economy. 3:3: 183-197

Clarke, P. (2009) Hidden Connections - know thyself. Professional Development Today.

Clarke, P. (2009) How to involve young people in reviewing the school. Professional Development Today.

Clarke, P. (2008) Education and Sustainability. Professional Development Today. Vol 11 no 1.

Clarke, P. (2008) Professional Development Today. Vol 11.3. pp18-21

Clarke, P. (2007) Colluding pragmatically? Does the Every Child Matters agenda. Professional Development Today.

‪Books

Clarke, P. in development - Sustainable schools, sustainable communities. Routledge.. London

Clarke, P. (2006) Schools Facing Extremely Challenging Circumstances. DFES

Clarke, P. with Harris, A. et al (2006) Improving schools in extremely challenging circumstances. Continuum. London

Clarke, P. (2005) Improving schools in difficulty. London. Continuum

Clarke, P. (2000) Learning schools, learning systems. Continuum. London

Chapters in books

Clarke, P. (2009b) Community renaissance. Chapter in Coates, M. (2010) Educational Futures. London. Continuum

Clarke, P. (2009) The application of an established school improvement programme into Hong Kong schools. In

Clarke, P. with Ainscow, M and West, M. (2008) A multi country programme of school intervention. In Chrispeels, J. and Harris, A. International perspectives on school improvement.

Recent speeches

Clarke, P. (2011) Keynote speech to be presented at the International Congress for School Improvement and School Effectiveness, Cyprus January 6^th 2011

Clarke, P. (2010) Growing sustainable places. Keynote address at the University of Bergen

Clarke, P. (2010) Incredible Edible: what we have done, are doing and intend to do next. Talk prepared for the debriefing session on the occasion of the visit of His Royal Highness Prince Charles to Todmorden. September 2010

Clarke, P. (2010) Incredible Edible – Securing Food at a community level. ESRC Seminar – Paper presented at Applying Sustainable Livelihoods Approaches: Food Security & Social Protection. Seminar convened by University of Bradford,  as part of the ESRC Sustainable Livelihoods Seminar Series 2nd June 2010, University of Bradford, UK. To appear in conference proceedings publications.

Clarke, P. (2009) Bath Transition Towns Conference: Incredible Edible and the Revolution that started with a finely dressed carrot. Keynote address.

Clarke, P. (2010) Incredible Edible: Growing a sustainable community. Keynote address at the Permaculture Convention.

Clarke, P. (2010) Permaculture Convention Sept 2010 3-5

Clarke, P. (2000) Learning Schools, Learning Systems. London. Continuum  

Clarke, P. (2008) Education and Sustainability. Professional Development Today.

Web-based material

Clarke, P. (ongoing) Creating sustainable communities. www.sustainableretreat.blogspot.com. Ongoing

Clarke, P. (2009) Schools as sustainable living communities. Education for sustainable development Forum. Yorkshire and Humberside.

interesting project in Peterborough

2010-11-03T14:59:00.002Z

http://www.citizenpower.co.uk/

Touching the universe - end piece of book

2010-11-02T20:53:00.000Z

Natures laws are beautiful, we have seemingly lost our sight of the mathematical beauty of creation, the whole idea of the world being a marvelous, colourful, beautiful place. At a fundamental level, nature is coded with an utterly mesmerizing beauty, it comes in its simplicity and it has within it a perfect clarity of purpose – the purpose of contunation, it is made to continue, to sustain, to live.

This is so perfectly configured that we perhaps have just missed the message, a deep and profound beauty. Instead we construe ugly and muddled worlds, it would be quite something to begin a new journey to reconnect ourselves with the Natural, and in so doing, to reconnect with beauty, and that, is to once more touch the cosmos, the universal, the infinite.

worldometers

2010-11-02T09:55:00.002Z

http://www.worldometers.info/

vegetable tourist encounter

2010-11-01T19:49:00.000Z

Its a funny old world. I was in town this weekend and a man stopped me on the way to the market 'scuse me mayt' (he was from Manchester and i can't do the accent) whurs yer vegetables?' I thought about this for a minute, assuming that he wasn't a mugger (after all he had a walking stick, a little backpack which carried a flask and screw on cup in the stringy bit on the back and he must have been at least in his seventies) I presumed he meant the saturday market. 'Follow me' I said and walked with him to the market in the middle of town, some twenty yards away. On arrival he looked at me in a slightly confused way, 'no, mayt, I mean your real vegetables, them's what's growing in the road.' The penny dropped, he was one of our new breed of tourists in Tod, the vegetable tourist, came all the way from Hulme to see our veg growing on the roadside. Incredible this edible thing.

halloween

2010-10-31T17:51:00.000Z

i cant let the occasion of halloween go by with out a little mention.

Halloween at our house has always meant finding the box of spooky things and hanging them up in the porch to serve as yet more stuff to fall over as you try and get to the door. This year is no exception but for the fact that there are glaring omissions - no kids at home, and NO BOX of spooky stuff! The kids are all way doing their stuff, and as for spooky things well I just cant find them, maybe they will turn up for christmas and we can combine the festivals into a psychadelic goth freak out. However, undeterred I carved a pumpkin, all those years of training have now i think come together and results this year are suitably ghoulish and clearly demonstrate that the houseowner has way too much time on a wet sunday to know what to do with. Made toffee apples, and made a spooky soundtrack - yes, too much time. Now sitting here and no trick or trreaters as they probably cant be arsed coming all the way up the hill to be freaked out by some wierdo listening to very loud prog rock (it has a certain gothicvibe - second hand - death may be your santa claus recorded in 1970 - well worth a listen but as rare as ghosts ghoulies and other things that go boo in the night. Have a good one!

new economics forum

2010-10-29T16:22:00.001+01:00

connect…

be active…

take notice…

keep learning…

give…

Intro and Chap one ...finally

2010-10-28T18:43:00.003+01:00

We hold an immense responsibility in our hands to pass on to our children the necessary knowledge, skills and understanding to ensure that they are both capable and competent to live their lives on the earth in a responsible and caring manner, confident in the knowledge that their actions ensure that their children will inherit a place that is better equipped to sustain and provide abundant facility for life. A critical part of this knowledge and understanding comes through a robust relationship with the natural world. An ecologically sustainable world is predicated upon the interconnection of ourselves with the web of life, if we lose our connection with the earth we forget we are of the earth, we begin to fabricate an illusion of our own importance alongside the larger presence of our planet.

I have written this book with the simple sentiment in mind that a revised form of education might play a transformational role in cultivating a cultural change towards a more sustainable way of living. I choose my words carefully, in Cultivating the Future I am exploring the way that the metaphor of nurture, the art and science of growing can have both physical and meta-physical connotations. The notion of growing from within has long been associated with the quest for learning, whilst growing in a physical sense concerns transitions from birth, to child, to youth, to adult and ultimately to death, but we transcend our own demise by passing on knowledge and understanding to the next generation, we extend our reach intergenerationally from cradle to cradle. This cycle of life is universal, it extends from every one of us to the entire biological community of which we are a part. As we grow we learn, what we learn therefore serves to define us. In this book I am interested in how we can learn to be self-reliant and at the same time interdependent, how we can learn to live sustainably, and be enabled to see the power and agency of our actions, the capabilities inherent in such ideas are important foundations for a sustainable form of living.

The book also pursues the idea that we are governed by powerful narratives. Narratives are important for our understanding, but they are not always consistent nor are they entirely coherent. In writing this book I have grown increasingly aware that this work is inevitably unfinished, there is such a vast arena of work to connect under the sustainable theme that any traditional sequential narrative is immediately engulfed in the wave upon wave of connecting narratives. To tackle this stylistic problem I have come to the view that this book is just a set of thought pieces. Bertold Brecht was famous for his montages, a series of divergent episodes which have some connection but in turn are in themselves coherent pieces. The aim here is not to claim overall coherence, as I am not yet in a position to suggest that what the book examines is in any way coherently conceived. Instead I want to indicate that there is a need to experiment, and to explore the possibilities that are currently in front of us to generate a new narrative, a new realism for our time.

Introduction

'Stories,' writes Ben Okri, 'are the secret reservoir of values: change the stories individuals and nations live by and tell themselves and you change the individuals and nations…Nations and peoples are largely the stories they feed themselves. If they tell themselves stories that are lies, they will suffer the future consequences of those lies. If they tell themselves stories that face their own truths, they will free their histories for future flowerings.'

Our sophisticated post-modern civilization is not keen on grand narratives, it is suspicious of any single solution to the problems of our time and perhaps rightly so; recent history demonstrates the dangers of tyrannical obsessions and single solutions. At the same time in encouraging the multivarious we have created a context where nothing seems to have any value over anything else, where everything is relative. I think that this is the breeding ground for cynicism, so I am not convinced about the value of this situation either. Instead I think that there is a pressing need for a new narrative for the post-industrial world which challenges existing orthodoxy and presents a set of alternative visions of the future that are achievable and sustainable, the way to this is simple, we reconnect hand, heart and mind, something that the last two centuries have managed to dislocate.

One form of this dislocation comes in the way that our children are ill at ease with the natural world. Many children express fear and concern over the future of the natural world, much of this fear is informed by their observation of television images and messages, and from the conversations that they have with parents and other adults who in turn have observed over their own lifetimes a steady deterioration of the natural world. The result is a dismissal of the natural world as broken, a place which has nothing more to offer, and so they turn inwards, to their human centric solutions. This starts early in life and is then continually supported into adulthood. It crushes the connection, the story becomes ingrained in the collective psyche that the physical, emotional, intellectual and spiritual possibility of the natural environment are no longer a necessary part in our lives, no longer needed in our sophisticated world and no longer necessary for us, we turn away.

This book is written to challenge the sleep walking of our society, it is written to raise the profile of the importance of the natural in our daily practice, and how a re-culturing of this connection into the collective mind is a critical component of our realignment with ourselves as a species, and our relationship with other living creatures and the planet. The book is not founded on an idle day-dream, it is built on a disturbing set of facts. The prospects for life on earth at the end of the century on an equivalent scale to that of today are becoming extremely unlikely, especially if we continue to deplete the natural resources in such an unabated fashion. We are in what the renowned biologist E.O.Wilson describes as a bottleneck, where demand is continually outstripping supply across the planet. He writes ‘Everyone can, in theory at least, be housed and fed, but the pressures on the last remnants of wild biodiversity might easily grow fatal for a majority of the remaining ecosystems and their distressed plants and animals. The only way to carry biodiversity safely through the bottleneck of this critical period is by a combination of scientific and technological innovation, abatement of population growth, and environmental education, guided by redirection of moral purpose.’ (Wilson 2001:viii). it is in response to this crisis that we must fashion the new moral purpose, an educational challenge which extends from what we have achieved in our past narrative and moves us into a narrative of and for the Google-Age (Trippestad 2010). It could be a narrative where the singular and the collective are in a process of continual emergence (Scharmer 2008) and redefinition, a narrative of flow (Csikszentmihalyi 1990) where we are fully immersed at the optimal point of challenge and skill in our responses to the world around us, a narrative through which we begin to recognise our place amongst all species (Capra 1996). It could be a narrative of scale, reflecting both the large and small as a relationship between the micro in the form of community, and the macro in the form of the global or universal effects of our actions (Esbjorn-Hargens and Zimmerman 2009), but fundamentally it is a narrative of ecology, of nurture, of cultivation of an ecological mind which will see us through the bottleneck.

To break into such a narrative there is a need for simple starting points, in the case of my own work this starting point comes in the simple craft of growing food. I like to use food production as a metaphor for our reconnection with the local, and to demonstrate in turn, how that reconnection enables us to reinterpret our relationship with the whole, the earth. My practical source of inspiration and evidence for the whole of this work comes from a community food programme, Incredible Edible. I have been involved with this programme since it began in early 2007, and prior to that as an activist in environmental issues throughout my adult life. Incredible Edible is a deceptively simple project. On the one hand it maintains a determined focus on food, growing, cooking, eating, celebrating food. However, to get to and from this focus we have learnt that there is a need to encounter a whole set of relationships, of people, places, interests, activities that can be examined and these can be used to illustrate a new way of living, ‘treading more gently’ as Thomas Berry (1996) says, on the earth. Our mantra in Incredible Edible is ‘if you eat you are in,’ this profoundly connects with people, but also anticipates participation without pressure, simply by existing, we begin to reconnect with our own relationship with nature, through food, and with others through the communion of food that exists in every person, in every place on the planet.

For over a quarter of a century, there has been a slow and growing realization amongst people from many different social, economic and cultural backgrounds, that the way the human race is living on planet earth is not healthy, for us, for other living things, and for the earth itself. The urgency is examined in some of the chapters of this book, where I will point to the reasons why so many commentators are emphasising a clear need for local and global action. Added to this is the growing frustration of many people with established versions of participatory democracy (Sandell et al 2005), where freedom and choice are of secondary significance to the needs of commerce and we begin to see that the renewed interest in what is local is more than the stuff of life-style choice, it is the formative period of a new social and cultural movement. This diverse movement is challenging the consumerist narrative and presenting practical alternatives to the existing themes. These alternatives converge upon the critical questions of our time, how to learn to live sustainably and as one with our earth, using resources within our means and not depleting the very stuff we need to retain. In pursuing this idea, people construct a narrative of what it means to have a real connection with the world around us, it enables people to re-imagine a future where they play an important part, personally and in connection with others.

In this book I will suggest that both our personal and shared stories, serve as the carriers of our day-to-day realities and understandings. These narratives have over the past centuries carried the rhetoric of tribalism, feudalism, religion, communism, fascism, capitalism and democracy to name but a few. However, in recent times one dominant narrative has prevailed, the narrative of consumerism. This narrative carries with it values of affluence, individualism, wealth, lifestyle and industrial progress pursued without conscience or consequence within and between nations. This narrative transcends all of our established ideological boundaries. It restricts, inhibits and influences our capability to explore other ways of living by commodifying all aspects of our lives. It influences and informs how we see ourselves and how we relate to and live and work with others. However, in the end, it is just a narrative, a story we are telling ourselves about the illusion of certainty of endless resource, continued economic growth and freedom at any cost.

Clearly to move these ideas forward requires examples, and workable solutions so that they become an antidote to the mainstream narrative, and by making them real and practiced they do not fall victim to the accusation that the ideas are in any way idealist, elitist, factional, or illusory. That is why it has been a central feature of the Incredible Edible programme to show people ways of achieving simple sustainable living solutions. When people can see examples of sustainable living for themselves and build the moral purpose behind their actions, in the everyday and the mundane aspects of daily life we know that they begin to migrate from their previously held positions. They might begin being skeptical and hesitant, but with example comes inspiration and hope, and through hope comes a new perspective of the art of the possible. In Incredible Edible we have played with the architecture of mind and place. We deliberately provoke response through growing in urban spaces within the built environment. We have seen how physical examples can stimulate the broader debate on ideas of sustainable living, and how these physical examples slowly become the new landscape, which in turn influences the new mindscape of sustainable living and becomes the reality of daily living.

Our work as educators is therefore a work of cultural change driven by purpose, it is to use Michael Fullan’s term, the new meaning of educational change, the new agenda for the century. How we become accustomed to the many ideas associated with sustainable living will have to be established through the commonplace, through the landscape that surrounds us. We will have to learn to adopt sustainable practices in every aspect of our lives, some will come through choice, but much might have to come through mandate, such is the urgency to realign practice to try and counter the excesses of climate change. We are more than aware that at the moment our built environment, our economic action, our transportation, our energy systems, our food production systems, our health and education systems are insufficiently encultured with the sustainability ethic, but there is already some early evidence of change.

Despite the many problems we have created for ourselves, there is clearly a widespread interest among people from all parts of the planet, to take a stance which seeks to be part of a solution, a positive response to the way things are, and to see if it is feasible to redirect the dominant consumer narrative, to radically alter the direction we might take in the next stage of our collective experience of life on earth. As storytellers, each and every one of us contribute to this new narrative, a narrative of parts which combine in multiple ways to inform a broader whole, a narrative for the Google-Age. Exactly how we contribute, matters.

When I started to work on this book I thought I would revisit the ideas of a decade ago when I was interested in learning communities and the part the community within school might play to promote more sustainable forms of knowledge and understanding. I drew upon what I had learnt from working with networks of schools, in a number of different countries around the world. I was interested in the ways in which the symbolic nature of networks, of connection, and of emergent systems provided a powerful metaphor for our times and could foster conditions for a realignment of practice. But I also discovered that it represented much more. Enquiry into the idea of a networked, sustainable model of our world pointed me to a whole new, vibrant and emerging story, and not a revised version of my earlier text. I saw educators at all levels of the system, together with people from the high office of government to the individual citizen, all of whom were acutely interested in the pursuit of some form of enlightened truth through their work and through their daily lives, but at the same time they were struggling to achieve this because of the underlying fault that runs through the system.

Over the last half century or more the educational community has played its part in creating the next generation of young consumers. Our nations are getting better at educating our young people, as nations we are increasingly literate when we leave school, we understand the importance of education and its association with well-being and self-efficacy. We recognize that education is essential for our collective national needs, to participate in society and contribute to the workforce, to be good citizens and pay our taxes and share in the pursuit of the collective wealth of the nation. But we are still in our infancy on a wider scale, the planetary literacy, the role we all play in the global story. I would go so far as to suggest we are fundamentally illiterate when it comes to our relationship with the natural world. The curriculum we offer to our young people has completely failed to generate a literacy amongst the young of the ecology around them, within them and between them. This claim is easily substantiated. If it were the case that education prepared our societies for sustainable living, then our actions out in the world, in the workplaces and the choices we make in our daily lives would demonstrate this literacy in action, and clearly, our actions do not seem to be present in the majority of such environments and lifestyles. Some early examples of a move towards the formative practices of sustainable community are visible, we have discovered in the last decade that the idea of the learning community has both personal and collective value, but it is of restricted transformational potential when it remains framed by the same systemic problem of consumerism and industrial growth. I think that the true potential of the learning community if it is to liberate, emancipate, or truly empower has to be discovered in reinventing the entire notion of learning within, between and beyond schools. Our present form of schooling has become too closely aligned with specific forms of literacy, defined across the developed world in the form of reading, writing and numeracy. This has served us well as we moved from the field to the city and we embarked on the journey of industrialisation. However, as our people gathered their qualifications, their PhDs, MBA’s, MSC’s, their BSc’s and BA’s and the like, a parallel phenomena emerged, as it was not the illiterate and the indigenous people’s who have trashed the planet, but these very same literate, educated and successful people. As we step forward into the 21st century, it is worthwhile remembering this fact, and ensuring that whatever track we choose to take is cognisant of the need for intelligent sustainable design, and not a compromised version that ensures business as usual with a green wash.

This raises some interesting challenges for educators. How do we connect ecological sustainability into the fabric of our organizations? In exploring this question I have been drawn to the grounded and the practical. I have witnessed first hand how action in the form of hand, heart and mind defines the Incredible Edible programme, and how the simplicity of this enables people, from the diaspra of the community, to participate. It enables people to work together on ideas, put them into place, experiment and reflect, and refine and share, this is a simple learning process with profound effects. I will describe some of my experience of Incredible Edible later in the book.

We are also realising that the scientific and the technological solutions are vital in our response to the ecological challenges we face, but they are not enough on their own. There is something about ‘spirit’ that we have to acknowledge is a critical part of the mix, moving into a broader connection with what is beyond ourselves. As Swimme says, ‘unless we live our lives with at least some cosmological awareness, we risk collapsing into tiny worlds.’ (Swimme 1996:60). These tiny worlds are the reality of today, where our narrative is laced with the illusion of thinking that our lives exist simply on political entities, such as the state or a nation, or that the bottom line concerns in life have to do with economic realities of consumer life styles. Swimme suggests that ‘In truth, the narrative of sustainable living is one which confronts the reality that we live in the midst of immensities, and we are woven into an immense cosmic drama.’ (Swimme 1996:60). It is then, a matter of consciousness as well as action, a matter of individual and collective change of practice, and of mind. I will suggest in this book that we can create the conditions, through the way we relate and respond to the world around us to generate an ecological literacy, but we can also begin to ensure that this is more than just a technical response to a crisis, it has to establish an equilibrium between our hands, our hearts and our minds (Pestalozzi 1894).

This broad quest for how to act today, how to live, how to be, to think, to do, serves then, as a script for our time. It is through such questions that a counter-cultural narrative has emerged on a global level. This widespread and dispersed set of narratives are creating the fault line in the conventional story, busting the myth of consumer growth and economic progress, it opens us to the possibility of a new rhetorical position based upon a new reading of how to live. The conversations are both face to face and digital, local and global. Personally I find that it is immensely empowering to be a part of such a network. It serves as a support mechanism to see beyond the enormity of the symptoms and to see clearly the solution – the move from ego to eco. As all great challenges go, this one is both personal and collective, our time has the burden of making a critical contribution to the next stage of human progress and it is now reaching a point where it can go two ways, one, towards rapid self-destruction, or the other towards a new enlightenment, a renaissance of connection between ourselves and our earth. Ben Okri poignantly recognizes and tells of the symbolic significance of stories, as the secret reservoir of values. It seems to me that if we change the story we use to educate ourselves with, towards this new renaissance, we begin to change the stories we live by, we begin to tell ourselves a new set of stories, a new set of narratives through which we learn to become literate of our earth.

Finally there is something about action as choice that can be drawn into our narrative of a new literacy for the planet. We are all part of this world, we are all playing our part in the construction of now, and we all have our part to play in the direction that we take next. What we choose to do, be it to proceed with a version of the present which remains very much in keeping with the recent past, or a version of the present which moves us to a reappraisal of our place as a species amongst other species, a species that presides now over its own and its neighbours destiny through the actions it takes. We have the capability to eradicate poverty, to seek ways to stabilise the climate, to learn to live within our means and to learn to maintain and cherish the resources that are of the earth to provide support for us and for generations to come. We have the know-how to make this happen in our daily lives, today, we simply need to learn how to see that through to our new reality, our new story, our new literacy of ecological awareness, that is the cosmological legacy that we have to live up to, it is asking us as teachers to ensure we instruct wisely as we tell our stories, a theme I will explore further in these pages.

Independent Midwifery to be criminalised in Ireland

2010-10-27T21:38:00.000+01:00

Dear All

Please help our sisters in Ireland - birthing women and midwives alike.

I was sent the following...

THE NURSES and MIDWIVES BILL 2010 goes before the Select Committee on
November 4th.

This Bill massively restricts the rights of women to choose home birth
in Ireland and criminalises independent midwives with the threat of up to 10 years' imprisonment if
they do not comply with the HSE's new rules, which in effect make home birth a rare concession.

The Association for Improvements in Maternity Services (AIMS) Ireland
have planned a peaceful
picket at the Dáil on Nov 3rd to highlight this issue.

Contact AIMS Ireland chair@aimsireland.com
<http://mc/compose?to=chair@aimsireland.com> for more information.

Full details and a petition are at
http://www.gopetition.com/petition/39693.html
<http://www.gopetition.com/petition/39693.html>

Department of Sociology
National University of Ireland, Maynooth
Co. Kildare
Republic of Ireland

Tel. (+353-1) 708 3985
email: laurence.cox@nuim.ie <http://mc/compose?to=laurence.cox@nuim.ie>

check this out!

2010-10-26T23:41:00.000+01:00

http://www.georgiastreetgarden.blogspot.com/

letter from the The UK Russian Embassy 1943

2010-10-26T22:24:00.002+01:00

Arne Næss

2010-10-25T17:37:00.001+01:00

When I was in Norway with Tom we went up the mountains to Arne Naess's home, the Tvergastein hut, if you look to the right of me on the picture you can see it, nestled into the mountainside. Arne Dekke Eide Næss (27 January 1912 – 12 January 2009) was a Norwegian philosopher, the founder of deep ecology.[5] He was the youngest person to be appointed full professor at the University of Oslo.

Næss cited Rachel Carson's 1962 book Silent Spring as being a key influence in his vision of deep ecology. Næss combined his ecological vision with Gandhian nonviolence and on several occasions participated in direct action. In 1970, together with a large number of demonstrators, he chained himself to rocks in front of Mardalsfossen, a waterfall in a Norwegian fjord, and refused to descend until plans to build a dam were dropped. Though the demonstrators were carried away by police and the dam was eventually built, the demonstration launched a more activist phase of Norwegian environmentalism. In 1958, Arne Næss founded the Interdiciplinary Journal of Philosophy Inquiry.

Næss was a noted mountaineer, who in 1950 led the expedition that made the first ascent of Tirich Mir (7,708 m). The Tvergastein hut in the Hallingskarvet massif played an important role in Næss' life.

Councils plan for exodus of poor families from London

2010-10-24T19:48:00.001+01:00

This was the headline in The Observer today, Sunday 24 October 2010. Fucking hell. What exactly is happening to my country? Remember the Nazis? Remember the clearing of cities? Remember. Just remember.

Creating Sustainable Communities

www.school-of-sustainability.com

new year - new website!!!!

HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!!!

Big Bang Big Boom wall painted animation by BLU

'tis the season to be...

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

new paper draft 2

this years words in a picture

fleetwood mac play in our kitchen

thoughts on cityscapes

my christmas state of mind

enviromental crisis in pictures

Really nice project in London

Recent posts

Best political critique I've heard in years

School of Sustainability news update ................

lovely film - thanks Alys

jam jar greenhouse - Desi does it again - great find!

absolutely wonderful bbc film on plants

from BRIGHT GREEN blog

This doesn’t normally happen – Britain gets active.

Vodafone's tax case leaves a sour taste Richard Murphy o guardian.co.uk, Friday 22 October 2010 16.08 BST

SOS - School of Sustainability

icsei part 1

China's transformation from the BBC

“Start Quote

“Start Quote

Buy This Bankrupt Satellite to Share Internet With the Poor

Buy This Bankrupt Satellite to Share Internet With the Poor

from NASA website

NASA Finds New Life

9 day traffic jam

Free - collection only - OL14 postcode

From Ellen MacArthurs Bradford Conference today - text roll from the education session

AIR CONDITIONING & ENERGY FROM DEEP WATER - from a downloadable report - http://www.i-sis.org.uk/GreenEnergiesPreview.pdf

AIR CONDITIONING & ENERGY FROM DEEP WATER - from a downloadable report -

cutting carbon

Incredible Energy film we made earlier this year - schools and energy

student debts - work and no work

what would it take?

this Saturday 27th November 2010

thanks to Desi - a great find!

Some of the slides from the Mott Environment Forum 20th November

thoughts... a few thoughts on what I think we are learning from the project as yet not discussed!

watch the impossible hamster

desert island discs

co2 added to the graphics

airspace rebooted

one other thing...

Top day at Interesting North

draft paper slides - runs a bit fast but ...

Green school Bali

booklet link for IET

vote for hannahs blog

WINNER OF 2010 BUCKMINSTER FULLER CHALLENGE

INITIATIVE TRANSFORMING AFRICAN DESERTNAMED WINNER OF 2010 BUCKMINSTER FULLER CHALLENGEALL SIX FINALISTS DEMONSTRATE SIGNIFICANT POTENTIAL TOSOLVE SOME OF HUMANITY’S MOST PRESSING PROBLEMS

Great community food project

Asking: Why does the ecological focus matter? What is the fuss about?

Wallace and Gromit inspired by Nature

reference list of recent key papers etc 2008-2010

interesting project in Peterborough

Touching the universe - end piece of book

worldometers

vegetable tourist encounter

halloween

new economics forum

Intro and Chap one ...finally

Independent Midwifery to be criminalised in Ireland

check this out!

letter from the The UK Russian Embassy 1943

Arne Næss

Councils plan for exodus of poor families from London

INITIATIVE TRANSFORMING AFRICAN DESERT
NAMED WINNER OF 2010 BUCKMINSTER FULLER CHALLENGE

ALL SIX FINALISTS DEMONSTRATE SIGNIFICANT POTENTIAL TO
SOLVE SOME OF HUMANITY’S MOST PRESSING PROBLEMS