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Principles of Community Design

11/15/2014

Attended a great workshop today on Principles of Community design hosted by The Living Systems Institute (LSI).

It was a very open format discussion based day working off of 33 main principles. Everyone got 2 principles and we rotated around speaking what we thought that principles meant to us and what we were doing in our communities.

In effect, we became the power point!

Major points that stuck with me:

-The whole format was like a putting together a mosaic. Unlike in linear thinking where an idea grows from simple to complex, we instead assembled many concepts and let the bigger picture emerge organically.

-Outside of the financial market value system which is based on scarcity, another metric of value is in creating new interactions. Interactions where people can transfer resources, information, emotional support. Made me think of entropy. The natural system favors more interactions. More possibilities. More mixing. Just as John Warner said, we need to embrace the chaos.

-We may only need simple things like food and shelter to survive, but we need a few others to THRIVE. David Braden, facilitator listed 5 elements for human thriving :
        -Food
        -Shelter
        -Clothing
        -Healthcare
        -Education

A lot of these ideas come from the practice of Permaculture:

(From Wikipedia)
Permaculture is a branch of ecological design, ecological engineering, environmental design, construction and integrated water resources management that develops sustainable architecture, regenerative and self-maintained habitat and agricultural systems modeled from natural ecosystems.

I love these workshops because they help me to build new vocabulary to help address limitations in the current scientific paradigm. So much of facilitating thought-provoking discussions is about introducing new language. It allows us to be more concise in our definitions and more dynamic in our solutions. Feeling lucky to have the resources of such an insightful community.

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Front Range Bioneers Highlights

11/12/2014

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This past weekend I attended and participated in the Front Range Bioneers Conference in Boulder, CO. My impression of the vision of Bioneers is to facilitate new paradigms of thinking by fusing knowledge and language from all philosophies and cutures. In doing so, we can move towards a world where our life practices are regenerative, balanced and fulfilling.

A few talks really rocked my world. On Friday afternoon keynote talks from the National Conference were broadcast.

Eve Ensler, a performer and activist, gave an amazing speech about the power of the feminine intelligence.

Paul Stamets, mycologist, spoke about the profound role of fungi in our ecosystem and a potential link between bee immunity and fungi

And most poignant for me was John Warner's talk on Green Chemistry. Everything this guy said was resonating with all my ideas about the scientific community.

-The violence involved in industrial chemistry and semiconductor physics..."...there are no reactive collisions in nature"
-The façade of objectivity " ...are we removing the bias? Or creating a construct to pretend that the bias isn't there"
-The magic is in the entropy!! "...nature works with randomness"

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Not science for the sake of science
Science for the sake of us.

Principles of Community Design

Front Range Bioneers Highlights

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Not science for the sake of science​Science for the sake of us.

Principles of Community Design

Front Range Bioneers Highlights

Author

Archives

Categories

Not science for the sake of science
Science for the sake of us.