What if the real crisis is one of imagination?
It seems to me that, as a culture, we've become so constrained by the structuring assumptions of industrial modernity that many life-serving possibilities are now almost impossible to see — let alone realise. My thinking has always sought to free itself from these constraints, first moving upstream to a different ground, and from there opening to new possibilities.
The essays and provocations on this page are part of the upstream move: unseating inherited assumptions and piecing together viewpoints from alternative paradigms. My design proposals attempt something more constructive: exploring what a different set of structuring priorities might make possible in terms of lived practice at human-scale.
Essays & Provocations
If we think of culture as an emergent pattern of relationships, then we can start to look at what organising principles are currently shaping those relationships, and explore how a different set of priorities might start to shape them differently.
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Design Proposals
These proposals are attempts to design ways of living that embody a coherent human-scale response to the question of how to live well within ecological and social limits. They are offered as prototypes to explore rather than ideals to assert—models that seek to increase the resolution at which alternative patterns of life can be imagined, discussed, and, perhaps, eventually realised.
Design Proposals
How to contribute to the task of creating the conditions here on Earth in which both human and ecological flourishing remain possible? I believe that we each have something beautiful to offer this great work of our time.
I’m in awe of people like Helena Norburg-Hodge, Jeremy Lent and so many others who are working at the big-picture level of systems change to try to turn the ship from its current destructive course. But my own thinking shies away from that scale of response.
My part seems to be to try to bring into being coherent microcosms of the kind of world most of us would want to leave to our children and grandchildren — one in which human needs are generously met in ways that respect ecological realities — in the hope that these might start to influence what feels possible at larger scales.
