Three Cities: Seeking Hope in the Anthropocene

by Rod Oram, Pure Advantage: http://pureadvantage.org/news/2016/08/16/three-cities-seeking-hope-anthropocene/ 

With economies stagnating, politics polarising, societies shattering and ecosystems suffering, I felt an urgent need to go walkabout last September. 

It was my best chance of making some sense of the news from around the world. I travelled to Beijing, London, and Chicago, three cities that have profoundly shaped my life, as much so as Auckland has these past twenty years. 

I came home from my walkabout feeling in some ways more despondent. The damage being done is so rampant, the vital changes needed so radical, the time left so fleeting. Righting our utter unsustainability seems impossible. Yet if we give up we are already lost.

Thankfully, I also came home feeling more optimistic and purposeful, with a deep appreciation for the people I had met and the work they do.

They are recovering a sense of boundless opportunity, optimism, common good and, above all, values and moral purpose. They are keeping alive rationality, engagement, enterprise and freedom. They are creating political systems, social structures and business models that will help us achieve an unprecedented speed, scale and complexity of change.

They are giving us half a chance to work with the ecosystem, not against it. They all work in small communities of interest with deep knowledge and skills, while networking widely. These are strong, learning communities with the essential attributes of common sense (understanding what’s going on), common purpose (responding effectively) and common wealth (sharing the economic, ecological and societal benefits).

In such communities, individuals are valued, helped and encouraged. In return, they participate and change, and help others change. In my new BWB Text, Three Cities: Seeking Hope in the Anthropocene, I discuss three concepts that help show us how we can achieve this.

First, the Doughnut Economy situates the ideal economy between two circles, the outer one labelled ‘environmental ceiling’, the inner one ‘social foundation’. In between lies ‘the safe and just space for humanity’. Created by British economist Kate Raworth, this concept lays out the strong social foundation required for transformational change, and the environmental limits within which we must live.

The second concept is the Circular Economy in which the waste material from making one product becomes the raw material for making another. This guides us towards returning to nature everything we take from it, ensuring we work with the ecosystem, not against it.

The third is China’s long-term vision of Ecological Civilisation which involves wise use of resources, environmental protection and ecological preservation. This informs the values we need to achieve deep sustainability in environmental, social, cultural and economic terms.

While the concepts are new, some elements of them were once embedded in New Zealand society. We used to talk about equality of opportunity. But now we create growing inequalities in health, education and welfare. We used to conserve some of our local ecosystems. But now we systematically degrade all our land, water and air.

Now, though, we have to embark on deep change so we can achieve the biggest goal humankind has ever attempted. It is not to save the planet. It will survive the Anthropocene - even if we don’t. It will adapt as it has to previous geological eras. Over tens of millions of years a vastly different ecosystem will evolve, one shaped by prevailing conditions.

Our goal has to be to save ourselves. To do so we must give this ecosystem that gives us life the best chance it has to recover and to continue to support us. Achieving this enormous goal will take countless steps. The three most critical are minimising climate change, and making sustainable use of land and oceans. Each in turn will take myriad steps. This can be achieved if people are wise and effective, quick and committed.

Minimising climate change dictates we must drastically cut human triggered carbon emissions to net zero by 2040 - meaning, we reuse or capture and store enough existing atmospheric carbon to negate the new carbon we add. That requires radical changes to the way people design the built-environment and economy, the materials used to make them and the energy used to run them. Then we will have half a chance of keeping climate change to less than 2 ̊C.

We have to begin right now with communities, business and government working on ways to reduce our carbon emissions far more, and far more quickly, than the immorally minimalist target our government tabled in the 2015 Paris climate negotiations. Such transformation will create great economic opportunities for all.

Sustainable land requires equally radical change in the way soil and freshwater are used. For farmers, this means developing practices that improve the health of soil and water and increase biodiversity, while eliminating artificial fertilisers and chemicals. Deep science and technology are vital to helping people understand and work with the vast complexity and abundance of nature.

For city-dwellers, achieving sustainable land and water use means minimising urban footprints and bringing more of nature into our built- environments. This includes producing more food in towns, using natural processes to treat storm water, and greening buildings and streetscapes to enhance their biodiversity.

Sustainable oceans are a still greater challenge, not least here in the South Seas. New Zealand is responsible for the fourth-largest oceanic zone in the world. It is more than twenty times our land area. Yet we know little about it. Given the great complexity of the marine ecosystem our fishery management practices are crude and probably not sustainable. Close to shore in places such as the Hauraki Gulf we are rapidly degrading the ecosystem by over-exploiting it and pouring urban detritus into it.

These ambitious goals can be achieved over coming decades if we commit right now to beginning the long adventure. Crucial first steps include the government making a much deeper international carbon reduction pledge than it did in Paris. 

Long-term, stable policies, devised collaboratively with companies and communities, would enable the country to meet that commitment. The policies would need strong cross-party and public support, based on a clear understanding of their benefits, and because of their intergenerational timeframe.

But treaties and policies are top-down. They alone can’t do the job. We must also have bottom-up complementary, voluntary measures to enable companies, communities and individuals to go above and beyond.

All of the above needs to be underpinned by a committee on climate change, like the UK’s, which gives independent, evidence-based advice to the government and parliament on carbon budgets and policies, while measuring progress on it.

New Zealand businesses need to play their part by following the lead of offshore corporates that are measuring and managing their carbon flows. This has become a fundamental business discipline, as much so as measuring and managing money. The London Stock Exchange, for example, requires listed companies to measure, report and manage their carbon footprint.

Likewise, carbon is increasingly a metric for company evaluations by investment fund managers. This helps them judge which companies will benefit most from engaging in the low-carbon transformation, and which are most vulnerable from not engaging. […]

All these projects would deliver substantial economic and environmental benefits. But at best only a few might happen, because society is so divided over how serious the current unsustainability is. And that won’t change until we understand how fundamental a transformation we need in our relationships with each other and with the ecosystem.

If we get them right, though, a galaxy of opportunities for our planet’s remedy and renewal will open up. 

About the author, Rod Oram

Rod Oram has forty years’ experience as an international business journalist. He has worked for various publications in Europe, North America and New Zealand, including the Financial Times and the New Zealand Herald. He is currently a columnist for the Sunday Star-Times; a regular broadcaster on radio and television; and a frequent public speaker on sustainability, business, economics, innovation, creativity and entrepreneurship, in both New Zealand and global contexts.

To Thrive, We Must Be In Touch With Each Other

by Sarah van Gelder, Yes! magazine: http://www.yesmagazine.org/happiness/to-thrive-we-must-be-in-touch-with-each-other-20160817

Imagine that instead of reading these words on a screen, you are sitting across from me over a cup of coffee.

You’re sharing your stories, and I’m sharing mine. As we talk, we notice many things about each other, because our words are just a small part of what we communicate. I watch your eyes, which may be focused or may be darting to a cell phone. The corners of your mouth might turn up slightly, or you might raise your eyebrows when you’re provoked. You might hear my breath change or notice a subtle shift in the pitch of my voice.

As we learn about another person in these many ways, we have a harder time dismissing them, because even when they say something we disagree with, we have these other indications that we are with a living, breathing, flawed yet miraculous being who struggles and falls short, just as we do.

On my road trip last year, I realized when I listened to the conversations I’d recorded how often they took place over coffee or a meal.

I stopped at a harvest festival at a small farm outside Louisville, Kentucky, about halfway through my trip, arriving just as people were lining up for a sumptuous meal of tamales, salads, and beans. Most of the ingredients had been grown just a few feet away from the front yard of the farmhouse, where we sat on hay bales as we ate and talked. A band played on the front porch, and couples got up to dance. Nearby, kids and adults picked up a game of soccer. Newcomers kept on arriving, filling their plates with food.

Nelson Escobar, an immigrant from El Salvador, and Elmer Zavala, originally from Honduras, started the farm. A dozen people of many backgrounds till the land, each raising three crops, each sharing their harvest with the others in the collective so all can have a varied local diet.

The food is great, but for Escobar and Zavala, the sense of community is key. “What I really love about this is the collective,” Zavala said when I asked why he helped start this farm. “I love sharing the harvest. And when we grow it ourselves, we don’t have to worry that our food was grown in conditions that exploit workers. Because we’re humans, doing work together is really satisfying,” Escobar added.

Collectives can have their disputes. Sometimes conflicts tear groups apart. Still, we learn deeply when we tune into how others see the world, and that can help us make sense of the world and of ourselves.

When we try to work together at a large scale, it’s much more difficult: Issues get too abstract, and we fall into oversimplification. We stereotype each other, turning unique human beings into “illegals,” “soccer moms,” “thugs,” “suits.” And ideas become rigid ideologies. Nuance, tolerance, and empathy get lost. Fear of the unfamiliar creates the conditions for a mob mentality, racism, and violence.

Likewise, we’re more likely to feel isolated, powerless, disengaged, and worse - we’re more likely to die early. Isolation is as dangerous to our health as smoking, Judith Shulevitz wrote in The New Republic in 2013. Lonely people are more likely to get Alzheimer’s disease, diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, and cancer.

In order to thrive, we have to be “in touch” with others, to internalize their humanity. Otherwise, we spiral into illness, selfishness, self-aggrandizement, and a “me first” ideology, becoming insatiable consumers and second-rate citizens.

We evolved to live in community, and that seems to be the scale where we can best navigate the complexities of life - the experiences of people not like us, the fragility and resilience of the web of life that surrounds us.

When we live connected to a community, we are more likely to become champions for one another, not just for ourselves. It’s a small step from there to becoming advocates for the larger community, even for the community of all life. From there, the idea of the common good is not so hard to grasp.

Sarah van Gelder wrote this article for YES! Magazine. Sarah is co-founder and editor at large of YES! Magazine. Sarah writes articles and conducts interviews for YES!, and she speaks regularly about solutions journalism, grassroots innovations, and social change movements. She is the editor of several books and is writing another. Follow her on Twitter @sarahvangelder.

The Open Source School Redefines Education in Italy

by Alessia Clusini, Translation by Nicole Stojanovska, Shareable: http://www.shareable.net/blog/the-open-source-school-redefines-education-in-italy

Threading elements of the great educational experiments of Bauhaus and Roycroft Community models together with Pierre Levy’s modern definition of “collective intelligence,” La Scuola Open Source (The Open Source School) embodies the principles of the sharing movement.

Its success hinges on cooperative work, co-design, shared skills, and an open source culture. The school's 13 co-founders believe in the power of people's collaborative qualities. Their unusual constitution is testimony to this.

I believe La Scuola Open Source has the capacity to extend from its origin in Puglia on the southern heel of Italy and inspire the acquisition of knowledge and educational development on a global scale.

Recently, I talked with two of its co-founders - Lucilla Fiorentino and Alessandro Tartaglia - how digital artisans, creators, artists, designers, programmers, pirates, dreamers, and innovators are collaborating to create Italy's most important service for social innovation and community development: education. Fiorentino and Tartaglia answered my questions in tandem. 

What is La Scuola Open Source and what’s the idea behind it?

In the early part of the last century, as a result of the social and economic changes produced by the industrial revolution, an architect named Walter Gropius conceived a school in Germany aimed at creating new professionals to provide an answer to the demand of innovation generated by the changes in time.

That school was Bauhaus - a place that would become a legend. It was born from the union of an art academy, a technical college and a faculty of architecture. Within a few years, combining skills and working on real projects with the help of many internationally renowned experts, a pedagogical experiment of historic proportions was born.

We believe that, today, we live in a somewhat similar condition produced by the acceleration of technology and by the sudden economic slowdown. We’re in a crisis and struggle to see the light at the end of the tunnel. The reason for this, in our opinion, is that the path to be taken is not linear.

Not only should we know how to move forward and how to progress, we must also develop the ability to play on more dimensions with a cognitive agility. We also believe that the digital presence in our lives is changing more and more in our culture. All organizations are becoming cultural organizations and every product today is also product of culture.

This mutation makes the vision of the future a central issue to address and is the reason La Scuola Open Source was born. We believe that in the future there must be new kinds of professionals, new spaces for social gatherings, and new ways of learning and transmitting knowledge. 

How do you apply your “educate to emancipate" motto?

​We believe that greater knowledge implies greater awareness which is exactly what we need to free ourselves and be able to look at things from different points of views. We embarked on this path because we believe in people - in what they can do together and the surplus value that is created when knowledge is shared and exchanged.


Lucilla Fiorentino, La Scuola Open Source co-founder

What is the teaching methodology?

We work co-operatively on real projects. Teachers bring knowledge and drive the process and tutors facilitate the work by organizing it; they put the process into practice. Participants work together with teachers and tutors to realize tangible projects, whether they’re robotic, IT-based, crafted, artistic, or theoretical.

In this way, by attracting teachers from around the county (and, in some cases, also from abroad), we develop skills in our territory and simultaneously bring people together. Over time, this process will allow us to rely on new skills formed in Italy due to the influence it will have on graduates.

The teaching process is connected to this research and one produces resources for the other. Teaching modules can be parameterized depending on the number of teachers, tutors, participants, duration, number of hours, field of interest and the operating mode. 

How do you use Bauhaus and Roycroft Community models?

A model is something that inspires you and something you think of when envisioning all the possibilities. It is a kind of canvas on which to build your own personal history - a scheme for your reasoning, an image buried in your memory that you tend to complete through the process of interpretation. 

How much has the XYLAB experience affected La Scuola Open Source?

I think being able to prototype our idea twice (X in 2013 and XY in 2014) through Laboratori dal Basso (Bottom up Labs, a regional funding program) has been a great fortune. We identified and tried even the most problematic mechanisms with a view to improve the process. We engaged with people who taught us a lot and met new people who opened our eyes to worlds we had previously ignored.

This has all been crucial and allowed us to weave a large network of relationships and strengthen the outside perception of our work over time. At the same time, it's allowed us to focus more and more on our idea, all the way to the proposal document we presented to the Che Fare application (one of Italy’s most prestigious social innovation grants) a year ago and won. 

How can digital artisans, creators, artists, designers, programmers, pirates, dreamers, and innovators complete each other with a common vision?

In the institutional paradigm, many of these figures do not talk and do not relate, as it’s difficult for them to do that. According to our idea, though, they can share a dialogue, exchange pieces of knowledge, cooperate, engage with real challenges, and get their hands dirty together. This creates a fruitful opportunity where it’s possible through contamination to generate new professional figures, new ideas for products or services, and even new adequate technologies for this shifting global scenario.


Alessandro Tartaglia, La Scuola Open Source co-founder

How important is sharing in the Open Source School project?

Sharing is the foundation of contamination and the engine of everything. It is a delicate process, often regulated by empathy between individuals. Some days ago while talking with a friend we came up with the concept, "The project is the recipe, the people are the ingredients, we'll be the oil." 

What are the commons at La Scuola Open Source?

The commons are what we share, together and with each other. In sociology, we’d speak of “collective intelligence.” According to the French philosopher Pierre Levy, the spread of communication techniques for digital media has led to the emergence of new ways of social bonding based on gathering areas of common interests, open processes of cooperation and an exchange of knowledge. We keep saying, “Innovation is always social, otherwise it’s just profiting from people’s ignorance."

Sharing knowledge is the first and most essential common for us. It generates a real process of emancipation and civilization since it enables any person to serve their community. Simultaneously, it allows each individual to freely express and enhance their uniqueness, while giving them the opportunity to appeal to all the intellectual and human qualities of the community itself.

That's what we'll focus on, experimenting and developing the best practices, starting from the co-design of the school itself with the triple workshop XYZ. Of the commons, this is a very important field of research for the future of humanity, and we’ll play our part. 

How could you make the project sustainable and what is the economic/organizational structure?

Each module or teaching activity activated will have its own financial provision system (funding mix) such as fundraising, crowdfunding, access fees, sponsorships, project financing, etc. Research projects will be funded through agreements with companies, public administration and government agencies, as well as through EU-grant applications or any potential sponsorship.

The co-living and utilization of the space will be controlled by a membership system which will allow us to cover the running costs of the space, the consumables and maintenance. Besides this, the school will secure consultancy contracts in the field of social and technological innovation with any kind of interested subject. 

Describe the co-design process of La Scuola Open Source and how to participate in a project.

For 12 days during July, 24 internationally renowned teachers and tutors together with 60 participants (selected from 199 requests from Italy and abroad) took to the Old Town of Bari to work at the triple co-design workshop XYZ from morning to evening.

It was an event that drafted the three building blocks of the school (identity, tools, and processes) in preparation for the launch of its activities this October. A total immersion with a multidisciplinary approach based on cooperation and skills osmosis was the result of the direct creation of the school by its own open community.

As the school's key concept is one of trying to aggregate and prototype new open research, teaching, mentoring, and co-living models (the four axes of the school), this will occur in relation to the patterns emerged during XYZ.

XYZ began with the identity lab - X - which has produced the iconographic stock, the creation of an ad hoc font, a website, and a publishing system. Following this, the tools workshop - Y - targeted management software, hardware (such as Arduino and Raspberry) to manage and monitor a 24/7 access to school, and open data management. Finally, the processes’ lab - Z - focused on teaching modules and policies, research projects frameworks, and the use of space and equipment depending on whether the target is public administration, a company, or an individual category of users. We identified how to integrate with territory, stakeholders and partners. All the outputs are free and available on the slidesharechannel.

The remaining summer month following XYZ will be dedicated to developing and implementing the solutions to result from the workshops.

Still, the essence is that there will never be a final result, but only a continuous flow and a constant work-in-progress that will feed itself with mutations and implementations. We, therefore, envision to host periodical XYZ labs according to an iterative and evolutionary logic.

Alessandro Balena, La Scuola Open Source program director

How important are the making and hacking philosophies for La Scuola value creation?

In a way, from the time we are born, we are all hackers. We start our lives in a world we haven’t created and we learn to modify it over time with our actions. But there is a huge semantic battle around the very word “hacker.” Some would paint hackers as IT pirates who steal sensitive data, but there are those who wish to spread values of openness, freedom, and trust.

For us, the hacker ethic (as opposed to the protestant work ethic) is a key issue. In addition to the “open source” element which in its incremental logic (fork, versioning, etc.) represents the blueprint of a cultural system of new values by being collaborative, adaptive, and recursive, we should use this approach in all fields of knowledge in order to ensure new possibilities for everyone. The methodology and the goals of this project are themselves the subject of a reflection on social innovation which aim to "hack the educational system." 

How can openness and diversity be inextricably linked with the concepts of the Mediterranean and the south of Italy?

Being at the center of the Mediterranean, we are necessarily placed amidst profound issues such as the relationship with others, connection between worlds, contamination, social inclusion, and social innovation. We’d like to keep the Mediterranean ‘biodiversity’: a melting pot of people, cultures, food and nature. It's particularly crucial in a time like this when thousands and thousands of refugees land on our shores - each with their own story, skills, and desire to feel at home.

It is essential to be open, particularly to that which is different from us because there is a potential that would remain unexpressed in the event of closure. We, therefore, deeply believe in sharing and openness and are aware of the social and cultural role we could have. We must be open - open-hearted and open-minded. 

Who is your target? Who will benefit from La Scuola Open Source?

We’ll work with children, seniors, unemployed people, professionals, students, and researchers. For each category, we’ll elaborate teaching modules and research projects. We’ll try to mix multiple categories and different generations in order to foster mutual contamination. The school is primarily aimed at three main categories of users:

• Those who have something to learn - individuals and those connected to the school through a membership relationship.
• Those who require research/innovation - organizations and institutions connected to the school through counseling or research relationships.
• The whole society - that in the long haul will be the end recipient of our activities by openly accessing the outputs generated in the school and be able to take part in our activities as members. 

How was it to involve partners of social innovation such as Ex Fadda and Rural Hub, scientific projects such as Societing and Nefula, as well as sharing economy players like OuiShare and public institutions?

Ours is an artisanal weaving work. In the words of Italo Calvino, "We seek whom or what is not hell amongst the hell we live in every day by trying to defend and give them space." 

How can people be involved and participate to La Scuola Open Source?

By applying to XYZ via the online form, becoming part of our community, and through a membership system which will allow access to a range of activities as soon as la Scuola is ready to commence. Activities will go from basic making and hacking courses to recycle workshops, vertical thematic formats (singularity), lectures, access to technologies and networks, to XYLAB research and co-planning labs as well as humanistic activities related to different disciplines.

More channels:

FB: http://facebook.com/scuolaopensource
TW: http://twitter.com/LascuolaOS
YT: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCgyAMMIo39md4_dJ0DWKZRg
Slideshare: http://slideshare.net/lascuolaopensource