Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
In this hopeful and frustrating year, contributors to the Island Press Urban Resilience Project celebrated our collective progress, while highlighting how far we have yet to go.
What if, in trying to heal ourselves, we also begin to heal the planet? Because, in a wonderful turn of events, it turns out that what is good for us, is good for the planet too.
The end of growth and the ensuing long decline, which is already well underway in overdeveloped societies, will punch an enormous hole in the collective consciousness of the West.
All paths forward come back to the fact that democracy is not a spectator sport. The worst – but unfortunately not all – of the climate crisis is avoidable, but doing so will require system change with urgency.
Only rarely does a book truly change the world. In the nineteenth century, such a book was Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. For the twentieth century, it was The Limits to Growth.
But in his hands, we are slowly and carefully being carried out to full exposure in the fertile, fallow fields. And there we will set roots, awaiting the beginning of our next story — with digressions.
If we are to succeed, it seems we need to first come off our high horse. Now: how do we accomplish this feat of psychological counseling on a grand scale?
One might think that everything that could possibly be written on the subject of power already has been. There are thousands of tomes that discuss subjects related to power in one or another of its many manifestations, and hundreds with the word power in their titles. But no book that I’m aware of has systematically examined the sundry forms of power, and investigated how they are related, how they arose, and what they mean for us today.
Give that phrase free rein and see what it inspires: “A mosaic of local projects animated by a shared idea.” That may be a motto for the kind of healing that earth and society need today. Not a single solution that scales up, but an ecosystem of related solutions, each unique to its place.
The purpose of this text is to give a brief and accessible overview of how deliberative democracy can work at its full potential. This requires a specific formula, a way of designing a democratic system, which in this case is the Waldenia Model. At the heart of this model are citizens’ assemblies.
We find ourselves in the most consequential decade in the history of humanity. The choices we make now will determine what kind of future we’ll have, or whether we will have a future at all.
Tami Simon hosts the popular Sounds True podcast, Insights at the Edge, which has been downloaded more than 20 million times. With its guiding principle “to disseminate spiritual wisdom”, Sounds True has grown into a multimedia publisher that has produced over 6,000 titles. She addresses the question of “What Could Possibly Go Right?”
