Sunday, November 16, 2014

Call for Proposals - Women in Sustainability Handbook


This call for proposals just out from Marna Hauk, Ph.D. and Denise Mitten, Ph.D.
 

Women in Sustainability are like a stellar nursery, such as the Carina Nebula. Within the emergent processes of the living universe and the generosity of the planetary unfolding, women in sustainability are interweaving ecology, equity, culture, and economics into deep, ancient, innovative, and generative forms and processes for planetary liberation. We are molten, pushing out the borders and bounds of the fields of sustainability in relational connectivity and inclusion. We are pragmatic, grounded, and embodying action. 

We seek an admixture of insight, research, clarity, story-telling, art, and inspiration from women in the fields, practice, or transdiscipline of sustainability. We want to learn from eco-artist mavericks, women in sustainable science, women in collective endeavor; current day success stories; intersectional sustainabilities and sustainable solidarities; ecofeminist, matrixial, and material feminist sustainabilities; journeys into ancient, generative mother-cultures; group-authored visionaries breathing into the labor pains of the current era; love notes to the future. Articles, poems and brief writings, and a “recipes of sustainability” section including self-sustaining as well as mothering sustainable cultures. 

Send your 1-3 page chapter proposal with brief bio and CV by February 1, 2015
Email your chapter proposals or drafts to
womeninsustainability at gmail -dot- com by May 1, 2015
This call is also available at: http://www.eartheregenerative.org/wish/

Thursday, July 17, 2014

Climate Change Action - Catalyzing Community Engagement: We Can with the WE-CAN Program

Inspired by the idea that our communities are already well-resourced with brilliance, determination, and creativity, the Institute for Earth Regenerative Studies is innovating a certificate program to catalyze community-based climate resilience. The first cohort, targeted for a Fall 2015 start, will bring together a dozen women, including queer women, in an activist, experiential learning cohort to engage in mentored projects for climate change, climate action, and climate justice. The program is envisioned as a cross-collaboration of arts-based activists, ecopreneurs, and permaculture - regenerative designers. 

The program in Women Empowering Climate Action Network (or WE-CAN) will feature research-based and culturally responsive vibrant practices for learning and collaboration, including regenerative creativity inspired by biomimicry and fractal patterns from nature and bioculture as well as sustainability education, complex living systems, and ecoliteracy combined with approaches for environmental justice. Cohort members will also study and practice agile project management and collaborative leadership. The project hopes to nurture each learner with a project mentor, internships, and accelerator-style resources and micro-investments in project start-up. The Pacific Northwest women's community will be an amazing hothouse of support and social incubation for these practical visionaries.


We are currently soliciting project mentors, potential partners, internship sites, investors, and supporters, as well as prospective cohort participants. This program has already been honored with a training fellowship in community climate change action from the Cornell University Civic Ecology Lab, EE Capacity, the North American Association of Environmental Education, and the EPA.

The Institute for Earth Regenerative Studies is a learning organization for Gaian thriving at the intersection of creativity, ecological restoration, and the living wisdom traditions in the Pacific Cascadia bioregion. The living Earth system is our first teacher.


We look forward to collaborating with you to bring this and other amazing projects to life here in the heart of Cascadia. 
 

Monday, December 30, 2013

Incubating Social Creativity and Regenerative Creativity

T. Fisher photo of Stancell's Mural "We Who Believe in Freedom Cannot Rest"
The fields of social learning and social incubators are cultivating, I would suggest, the endeavor of incubating social creativity.

Social Learning. Wals and Leij (2007) in their prefatory remarks to a book on the topic of social learning and sustainability education (free downloadable ebook available) point out the spectrum of meaning for social learning --  from learning among deeply socially contexted inviduals to focusing on the learning processes of 'social aggregates' (pp. 19-20). They suggest that social learning involves facilitating dynamic contexts for richly socially contexted, diverse groups to engage with sustainability challenges along this spectrum. Complexivists have referred to this as extending the locus of learning to the learning community [and not (only) the individual] (Davis & Sumara, 2006) or as the learning of collective beings (Minati & Pessa, 2006). Sterling (in the 2007 volume linked above) imagines a "connective cultural consciousness" in which sustainability social learning can help cultures "ride the storm" of climate change by undertaking radical social learning at the scale of paradigm change.

Granted, these ideas of social collectives are not actually novel. To note, elder cultures (such as those featured by Bowers' scholarship on the learning commons and traditional cultures) have long understood that learning communities offer a deep connection, empowerment, and nurture than individuals operating in isolation or even individuals collaborating.  Educational theory is still catching up.

At the same time that learning theory is learning to jump scales and study aggregates, enterprise theory and incubation of entrepreneurship (and ecopreneurship even) is undergoing a similar shift from rugged individualism to .... social incubators.


Social Incubators. Social media, crowdfunding, honoring social good and values-infused endeavor, and open-sourcing as well as increasingly accessible organizational infrastructure through internet technologies have radically opened the field of enterprise innovation. The idea of separate "enterprises" are themselves melting as densely interconnected networks of creatives and service brocades transfigure entrepreneurship. The rise of social enterprise incubators (also these examples) and the generosity economy all reflect a parallel to the shift described in educational theorizing toward attending to the social dimensions of learning and social learning. 


Incubating Social Creativity. Without falling into the western tendency to reify the new (as is often the case in unconscious neophilia), the social evolution of our species involves attending to complex emergence. Our culture is evolving to attend to emergence, autopoiesis, and self-organization as signs of complex innovation and novelty.  Goldstein, Hazy, and Lichtenstein (2010) propose complexity-informed strategies for facilitating ecologies of innovation. 

Attending to innovation in a deep sense means attending to creativity. Csiksentmilhalyi (1999) noticed how the systems of field and culture contexted and vetted individual creativity. R. Keith Sawyer (2010) takes off from jazz improvisation to develop a complexity-informed social creativity called collaborative emergence. In collaborative emergence, creative collaborations by groups of people spark emergent phenomena at the group scale. Ecologies of innovation extend this emergent process to locality and cultural scales, even innovating public services (for example in Peterborough). At the scale of locality and neighborhood, the Transition Town movement exemplifies this shift; City Repair and Placemaking serves as another beacon. Social creativity has been credited with rapidly accelerating software innovation (Granof, 2013). Many other theorists have also explored social creativity (including John-Steiner, 2000 and Sawyer, 2008). Social as a descriptor in social creativity can function in two ways, either to convey that the phenomena is generated by social aggregate or that it is geared toward social good.

Researching Incubating Social Creativity. My original mixed methods research is surfacing methods and means for catalyzing social creativity. I research the "social" in creativity across both dimensions of meaning of social: (1) that it is generated by groups and systems of creativity and (2) that it has an intention toward social good, in this case sustainability and regeneration.

I am studying how to incubate multi-scale creativity. By generating processes, habits of curiosity, and cultures of individual and small group creative processes as well as setting up learning cultures favoring social creativity, we can facilitate and encourage the underlying practices, habits, and cultural matrix to nurture social creativity.

The research is surfacing how creativity, the seedbed for innovation and personal and cultural flourishing, can be sourced in nature and bioculture and aligned with increasing the integrity of culture, place and planet. This regenerative creativity emerges at multiple scales and produces empathy, connection, and earth-aligned action. Incubating social creativity catalyzed by ecofractal patterns from nature and bioculture develops what Bowers (2012) calls ecological intelligence and what Goleman, Bennett & Barlow (2012) name ecoliteracy, an emotionally and socially engaged ecological intelligence.  I would suggest that to incubate this kind of regenerative cultural and social creativity can source shifts not only in social learning and social enterprise, but also in multiple other domains and transdisciplines as part of the enlarging and interconnecting tapestry of cultural regeneration beyond sustainability to thriving.

In the coming months we will be sharing snapshots of the emergent findings from this research.

Resources
  • Bowers, C. A. (2012). The challenge facing educational reformers: Making the transition from individual to ecological intelligence in an era of climate change. In D. Ambrose & R. J. Sternberg (Eds.), How dogmatic beliefs harm creativity and higher-level thinking (pp. 112-122). New York, NY: Routledge, Taylor & Francis.
  • City Repair. (2013). Website. Retrieved from http://www.cityrepair.org
  • Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1999). Implications of a systems perspective for the study of creativity. In R. J. Sternberg (Ed.), Handbook of creativity. New York, NY:
    Cambridge University Press.
  • Dawson, J. (2012). Building an economy on gift and generosity [Blog post]. Retrieved from http://www.schumachercollege.org.uk/blog/building-an-economy-on-gift-and-generosity-jonatha-dawson
  • Goldstein, J., Hazy, J. K., & Lichtenstein, B. B. (2010). Complexity and the nexus of leadership: Leveraging nonlinear science to create ecologies of innovation. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.
  • Goleman, D., Bennett, L., & Barlow, Z. (2012). Ecoliterate: How educators are cultivating emotional, social, and ecological intelligence. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass and the Center for Ecoliteracy.
  • Granof, P. (2013, October 9). Social creativity: The engine of software development [Blog post]. Wired - Innovation Insights. Retrieved from http://www.wired.com/insights/2013/10/social-creativity-the-engine-of-software-development-in-the-social-era/
  • Sawyer, R. K. (2008). Group genius: The creative power of collaboration. New York, NY: Basic. 
  • Sawyer, R. K. (2010). Individual and group creativity. In J. C. Kaufman & R. J. Sternberg (Eds.), The Cambridge handbook of creativity (pp. 366-380). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
  • Stancell, P. Mural of "We who believe in freedom cannot rest." On Wikimedia Commons. Mural on the wall of row houses in Philadelphia, sponsored by the Freedom School Mural Arts Program.
  • Transition Network. (2013). Website.  Retrieved from http://www.transitionnetwork.org/
  • Wals, A. E. J. (Ed.). (2007). Social learning towards a sustainable world: Principles, perspectives, and praxis. Pays-Bas: Wageningen Academic Publishers. Retrieved from the publisher at http://www.wageningenacademic.com/sociallearning 
Image Credit: 

Photograph by Tom Fischer, 2009, of a Mural on the wall of row houses in Philadelphia. Mural Artist is Parris Stancell, sponsored by the Freedom School Mural Arts program. Photo Creative Commons 2. Left to right: Malcolm Shabazz (Malcolm X), Ella Baker, Martin Luther King, Jr., Frederick Douglass. The quote above the mural is from Ella Baker, a founder of SNCC (Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee), a civil rights group that helped to coordinate "Freedom Rides" in the early 1960's (from Wikimedia Commons).

Tuesday, July 23, 2013

Complexity Conference to Include Everyday Creativity Scholar Ruth Richards

Creativity research has pivoted away from the "lone genius myth" (in the words of Montuori and Parser, 1995) and is moving towards what scholar Ruth Richards terms everyday creativity (Psychology Today article linked here provides background).

Saybrook creativity professor Ruth Richards will be the Friday keynote at the Society for Chaos Theory in Psychology and the Life Sciences 23rd Annual International Conference this July 25-27 at Portland State University.



Program available here:
http://www.societyforchaostheory.org/conf/2013/

An excerpt from Everyday Creativity highlights how we can miss the stunning beauty all around us.
We create the sight even as we become conscious of it. We do not simply see it. In our daily lives, who or what is doing the selecting? And why? Is this predetermined? Can we -- in the here and now – make a change?  Can we see further?  Can we see better?  Can we  even better our world? - Ruth Richards
Ruth Richards has also studied fractals and creativity as well as her research on everyday creativity. David Schuldberg, who is also active in everyday creativity and whose chaos-psychology contributions include "vortices of thought"will also be speaking at the upcoming conference.

A few citations for the curious: 
  • Richards, Ruth. (2001a). A new aesthetic for environmental awareness: Chaos theory, the beauty of nature, and our broader humanistic identity. Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 41, 2, 59-95. 
  • Richards, Ruth. (2001b). Millennium as opportunity: Chaos, creativity, and Guilford's Structure of Intellect model. Creativity Research Journal, 13(3/4), 249-265.
  • Richards, Ruth. (2010). Everyday creativity in the classroom. In Ronald A. Beghetto & James C. Kaufman, Eds., Nurturing creativity in the classroom (pp. 206-234). UK: Cambridge University Press.
  • Richards, Ruth. (Ed.). (2007). Everyday creativity and the new views of human nature: Psychological, social, and spiritual perspectives. Washington DC: American Psychological Association.

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons public domain, Forest path in Yvelines, France

Sunday, September 30, 2012

Joanna Macy and Active Hope

          Recently I heard Joanna Macy at the Unitarian Church in downtown Portland. This was my third time hearing Joanna in Portland, and I also had the good fortune to attend a weekend intensive with her while I was studying down in the Bay Area. Her 2012 talk was an introduction to her new book, Active Hope: How to Face the Mess We’re In Without Going Crazy (Macy and Johnstone, 2012).
Joanna talks about “the great turning.” We were in the great hall of the downtown Unitarian church, and before the lecture we were blessed to hear some really brilliant, integrative live folk music by a young man who’s studied with her. Songs such as “The Uni-Verse/The One Song” and an invocation for a time of global prayer tied to the Olympics, the organizer sharing “Each of us carries an essential thread of this rebirth of the tapestry for this holy Earth.”

Macy, the Clear View, and Redefining Active Hope

Joanna did speak of getting a clear view, seeing what is, even if painful. Macy’s work emphasizes how, in a culture of domination and power-over, even if it’s painful, even in the midst of highly developed brainwash, to choose to see. Then identify the values we’d like to see, and takes steps to move in that direction. She spoke of how our perception is affected by the stories surrounding us, whether it’s the story of business as usual, the great unraveling (in which the industrial growth society is shredding system connections in a way that is unreweave-able), or the great turning. She spoke of how she didn’t want to call the book “hope” – she doesn’t believe in it, has railed against hope for years [to which I was eternally grateful, I agree and was surprised when I saw the title. I’ve been meaning to change the earth empathy site from the beginning from "despair and hope" to "despair and justice," perhaps her words will spark me to make it so]. She described how, even though she did not prefer the language of "hope," her views did not come to fruition; the subtitle is her original desired title. So what she does in one chapter, with the co-author, is redefine active hope so it doesn’t really have to do with hope at all. Instead, it’s about seeing things as they are, being willing to, doing it, having the heart break open from it, and holding the clear intention and taking the action anyway. “The guiding impetus is our intention, not weighing our chances.” Joanna Macy clarifies: “This work does not require our optimism.” That resonated deeply with me. “It’s about stepping into a state of aliveness that makes our life meaningful.”
Dori Midnight, from Joannamacy.net

“Seeing with New Eyes”

She named four stations in the truth mandala that The Work That Reconnects uses: She suggests we ground in gratitude, then bring our awareness to our great sorrow and outrage, and then see with new eyes so that fourthly we can go forth, bringing full presence to the work. The third station was “seeing with new eyes.” Macy suggests a perceptual move of seeing with new eyes, meaning that as we learn/believe/experience (a la the work of deep ecology and the ecological self) “that we are a living part of the living earth, a shift happens.” A wider view of time emerges. The synergy with the natural world also widens and strengthens us. We are closely related to all the other beings through space and time. Other life forms have so much to give and share. We shift toward a different kind of power, from power-over to power-with, from one-way causality to collaborative approaches, power as synergistic, our interactions working with others. Like grace, there is no limit when we work together. 
 Here's Joanna on the possibilities:
The truth of our inter-existence, made real to us by our pain for the world, helps us see with new eyes. It brings fresh understandings of who we are and how we are related to each other and the universe. We begin to comprehend our own power to change


and heal. We strengthen by growing living connections with past and future generations, and our brother and sister species.

Then, ever again, we go forth into the action that calls us. With others whenever and wherever possible, we set a target, lay a plan, step out. We don’t wait for a blueprint or fail-proof scheme; for each step will be our teacher, bringing new perspectives and opportunities. Even when we don’t succeed in a given venture, we can be grateful for the chance we took and the lessons we learned. And the spiral begins again.  - Joanna Macy

Friday, March 30, 2012

Earth Dreaming Research

Mariko Mori, "Dream Temple,"
photo by R. Learoyd
In a multi-scale world of imbricated (woven) co-arising and emergence, the Earth system continues to come alive and communicate in and through us. How can we design research with Earth as an active co-researcher/participant?

One recent initiative hypothesizes that certain kinds of dreams might represent "earth dreams" and constitute expressions of the earth system through humans. This is an extension of the concept of earth empathy, in which the planetary system and wisdom comes alive through human ways of knowing and being. As part of the research work of the Institute, this earth dreaming research is conducting mixed methods research with a cohort of dreamers who are incubating earth dreams. If you have what you believe to be "earth dreams" or encounter them in your readings or life experience, please contact earthdreamingresearch AT gmail DOT com. It might be that your earth dream could be considered as data for this research project in its initial or a future phase. We will post occasional information and ideas pertaining to these topics via this blog.



Image credit: Mariko Mori, "Dream Temple," photo by R. Learoyd From http://www.hubculture.com/groups/47/news/102/

Monday, January 30, 2012

Vandana Shiva Describes Earth Design in the University of the Seed in a Yes! Magazine Video Interview

In the January Yes! Magazine video interview "Vandana Shiva: Teachers for a Living World," Madhu Suri Prakash offers engaging questions and Dr. Vandana Shiva offers examples of how Bija Vidyapeeth (The University of the Seed) focuses on the earth, seeds, and grain as inspirations for sustainability education design.


Dr. Shiva demonstrates that by setting the school within a biodiversity reserve and embedding the learning in living communities, the learning honors the Earth as a sacred community and connects with Gaia as a universal consciousness.  "Teaching composting, all the forgotten foods and disappeared knowledges ... that are living around us" strengthens learning by embedding it in living and dynamic examples, surfacing the amazing traditions and knowledge of the place. 



She explains that the naming of the school was birthed from the name of the movement. In a field farmed continuously in older techniques, a peasant explained that the nine seeds grown there reflected the cosmic/universal balance -- the nine planets (related to each crop) -- and the health-giving, balanced nutrition of the contexted nine plants that grow from them- surfacing from folk traditions the connection between biodiversity, cosmology, and health. She wanted to avoid genetic reductionism of referring to seeds as "genetic resources," which is impossible to convey in indigenous dialects. 


Referring to the content that includes Gandhian principles she finds more relevant than ever in an epoch of accelerated globalization, she says "the seed became the spinning wheel for our times." 


Dr. Shiva has now been invited by the country of Bhutan to extend their orientation around the longer term metric of "Gross National Happiness" instead of GDP (gross national product) to move to exclusive organic agriculture practices. Highly recommended interview...

http://www.nationofchange.org/vandana-shiva-teachers-living-world-1327770383