About my work
My work is an attempt to live into and try to articulate viable pathways into a post-extractive culture.
Ultimately, I’m interested in contributing to the emergence of the conditions in which life on Earth can once again start to flourish after this long period of industrialised assault.
By this I mean not only ecological flourishing, but the flourishing of human culture — of our innate capacity to live well and happily together and as participants in the wider community of life.
If we think of culture as the emergent pattern of relationships that shapes how people live their daily lives, my work explores how those patterns might be intentionally designed around more life-serving aims than those of our present system.
Many of the responses to the many crises we face focus on individual domains: energy, housing, food, transport, governance, education, or economics. Each of these is important, but none exists in isolation.
Rather than asking how we solve particular problems within an existing extractive system, I’m interested in unseating the assumptions that give rise to that system in the first place.
How do particular understandings of the world become embodied in our buildings, settlements, economies, institutions, and everyday ways of living? And what different forms of culture become possible if those underlying assumptions change?
I’m not anti-innovation. I just don’t believe that innovation without this more foundational work can solve our current crises. It will only amplify them, as is obviously what’s happening.
I’m more interested in integration — how existing knowledge and capacity from across many different fields might be most coherently integrated around life-serving aims. If that can be accomplished, life-serving innovation once again becomes possible and desirable.
Across many different fields, there are already well-developed approaches to living well together on a finite planet. The challenge is that they remain fragmented — or at least partially so. My interest lies in exploring how to bring enough of them together so that they might reinforce one another to form a generative coherence.
Settlements particularly interest me. A settlement of around fifteen households appears to be close to the minimum viable scale at which a culture can become legible. At this scale, it becomes possible to think simultaneously about homes, livelihoods, food production, governance, shared infrastructure, ecology, education, enterprise, and community life as parts of a single coherent cultural system. Below this scale, too many elements are absent or entirely dependent on the wider society. Above it, the complexity of implementation increases significantly.
This is why I think of settlements as prototypes rather than destinations. Their significance is not simply that they provide a different way of living for the people who inhabit them, but that they allow new cultural arrangements to become visible.
The aim is not to produce a perfect model, but to increase the resolution at which alternative futures can be imagined, discussed, adapted, and eventually realised: developing ideas, models, and places that expand the space of what people imagine is possible, and that help make alternative cultural futures more tangible.
