Being Together

I first published this post to encourage others to learn more about David Korten and his vision of a new society beyond Climate Change.  As an after thought, I listed all of these other interesting folks who are saying the same thing.

The basic message I hear is that we all need to know more about one another's needs, talents, and interests, so we can begin working together again.  If we don't have fossil fuel and other ways of living far beyond our bioregions, we will have to rely on one another for sustenance.

We will have to learn to use our hands to make things machines and poor people make for us in far off lands.  We will have to grow our food, share it, and learn to preserve it.  We will have to learn to entertain one another with stories, music, and laughter when our gigantic TV's start to fizzle and we don't have the resources to fix them or buy a new one.  We'll have to learn about plants and plant medicine to cure one another.

If it gets hotter or dryer, we will need to understand how to direct water back into the ground or how to make cisterns to collect it.  There will be a lot of emotions around saying goodbye to our lifestyle.  We might feel sorrow for the way we have used things up, and dirtied the beauty around us.  So, to build strength and support, we will want to form deep and well connected communities that span out into numerous other circles of people and other living things.  Someday, we will recall living as caged birds, not knowing how to sing or fly.

• The International Council of 13 Indigenous Grandmothers: The medicine the world needs is to focus on reconnecting with all our relations and relationships to one another:  They are awakening people to the urgent need for change if we are to survive on this planet. But they are not using fear as a weapon. They are offering us hope. What many people see as a threat, they see as an opportunity. (For The Next Seven Generations-the movie) 

• Donna Maxey of Portland Race Talks:  How many of you know all of your neighbors three houses up, down and across the street?  I mean knowing them by their first name and having been in their house.  

• David Holmgren: Permaculture Principles:  Sustainable systems are about relationships 

• Watch a Youtube Video of David Korten, the co-creator of Yes! Magazine and author of several books.  His most recent being Empire To Earth Community. 

• Eco Faith Recovery, Portland, Oregon:  Reconciling a right relationship with all of creation 

• The Turning Point, by Fritjof Capra:  The new paradigm may be called a holistic world view, seeing the world as an integrated whole rather than a dissociated collection of parts. It may also be called an ecological view, if the term "ecological" is used in a much broader and deeper sense than usual. Deep ecological awareness recognizes the fundamental interdependence of all phenomena and the fact that, as individuals and societies we are all embedded in (and ultimately dependent on) the cyclical process of nature. Fritjof Capra, Gunter A. Pauli (1995) Steering business toward sustainability. p. 3 cited in: Elmer Kennedy-Andrews (2008) Writing Home. p. 13.

• Gaia Theory: James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis:  There is one Earth organism co-evolving 
• The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil