Here is a selection of interesting papers for your summer reading:
- Is it time to unplug our schools? – Almost everything published in Orion is interesting. This article looks at what schools are doing to teach a deep relationship to nature.
- Altar calls for true believers – on the challenge of practicing what we preach with respect to sustainability. This is a good piece on why systemic change in general doesn’t necessarily correlate with necessity.
- Horse Power – Old technology for a new world.
- No coffee – A great piece on Jurgen Habermas, coffeehouses and the power of conversation.
- Modern Cosmology: Science or folktale? – I think the cosmic story is both. This article argues the same, but from the perspective of a skeptical scientist.
- World Bank economist Kirk Hamilton on the planet’s real wealth. – It turns out that the greatest resource the world has is “intangible capital” – people’s wisdom and labour.
- Garibaldi: Invention of a Hero. A review of a new biography about the Italian patriot Giusepe Garibaldi, for whom my local extinct volcano at the head of Howe Sound was named.
- Our Lives, Controlled From Some Guy’s Couch – Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom think it’s possible we live in The Matrix.
- Heretical thoughts about science and society – Freeman Dyson muses about the global warming crises. But he might be wrong. He’s been wrong before!
- The quandry of quality – a great blog post from Bob Sutton on what is hard to measure but essential nonetheless.
[tags]nature, sustainability, change, horses, Habermas, coffee, conversation, cosmology, big bang, human resources, Garibaldi, Matrix, Nick Bostrom, freeman dyson, robert crick, global warming[/tags]
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The Elders are with us.
Could we do this locally? We are building Elders into the work of the Vancouver Island Aboriginal Authority for child and family services. What if the Elders sat in Council for all of us here?
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“We all fight on two fronts, the one facing the enemy and the one facing what we do to the enemy.”
–Joseph Boyden, Three Day Road, p. 301
Three Day Road is about two Oji-Cree soldiers who fight for Canada in the first world war. They survive the fight with the enemy on the battlefield, but they lose the war to the other enemy, the one that lurks on the inner front.
It is only *I* that holds others as “enemies.” No one is born into this world as my enemy. I create that story. My prejudices are my own, whether they appear to be generated by others or not. How do I know this is true? Because not everyone treats everyone else the same way.
In my martial arts training, we speak of our “enemies” as opponents. We offer respect to our opponents by bowing to them because having an opponent helps us to discern our real enemies – our thinking. It is very difficult to best an opponent if you think of that person as an enemy. To fight and survive you must be clear. You must be engaged with what is happening, not your story of what is happening. The moment you forget this is the moment you stop fighting your opponent and start fighting your enemy and is the moment your opponent has beaten you. Truly, you have beaten yourself. A bout with an opponent, whether it is in dialogue or in the dojang, should lead us back to confronting our enemies and they, as Pogo said, are us.
There is no relationship between winning or losing on the mat and in the mind. You can lose a bout on the mat but overcome one more prejudice in the mind. And, like Boyden’s characters, you can win on the mat but what is unconfronted in the mind will destroy you. For me, peace is the when I eliminate my true enemies – the thinking that imprisons me. And so, I bow to my opponents for their helping me discover what it is I need to confront in myself.
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Ted Ernst pionts to an article on leadership in participatory culture. The artile contains the following list of capacities:
- trust others and trust in the collective ability of a group
- draw attention to commonality between participants (rather than dividing them with differences)
- demonstrate active conscious commitment to vision, values, and goals as example to others
- act responsively to feedback and help grow feedback loops among participants
- show their humanity, making them credible and proving their integrity regularly
- listen actively and deeply with distributed credit so decisions seem to come from collective
- instill a sense of togetherness, a sense of “we can do this if we each do our part”
- defend the collective to outsiders and represents their needs
- hold each participant to their greatness
- open to seeing how the pieces fit together–open to emergence
- willing and ready for new opportunities
- able to respond with compassion in times of stress and difficulty
This is a very interesting and relevant list, especially in light of the exploring some of us are doing around the Art of Governance.
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Some notes and stuff from my trips around the web:
- Passion bounded by responsibility is one of the tenets of Open Space. To see how powerful this is in action, you should go and visit WikiClock. Very simply, it’s a clock that shows the current time if you update it to do so. It’s a ridiculous notion, until you realize that it actually works. And if you still don’t know what a wiki is, Viv McWaters has come across a video that might help you understand it a lot better.
- Jack Ricchiuto has discovered something about appreciative leadership in Aboriginal communities that has long formed the basis of my practice: “he understanding is that childhood traumas cause our souls to fragment. The work of healing is to enable the reclaiming of these parts of our souls – like wisdom, love, and courage – that are ours to reclaim.”
- It still amazes me how intimate people can be in person after engaging with each other over time on weblogs. Since my lunch with new friends in London last weekend, Richard and Kevin have both posted interesting thoughts about this particular lunch on their blogs. If you still haven’t had the experience of meeting someone physically whom you have known only through a blog, I recommend it. It will blow your mind.
- One of the processes we used in Belgium for looking at ourselves was a systemic constellation. I’m quite interested in this methodology (here is a website for the community of practice) and would welcome anythoughts from those who have used it in organizations and communities about resources that are useful for understanding it in those contexts.
- Finally this week, a note on a great looking training offered by my friend Christine Whitney Sanchez in Colorado this summer combining Open Space, Appreciative Inquiry, World Cafe and Polarity Management. It’s just one more offering on the kinds of things we teach at an art of hosting. You can also explore these ideas through a workshop with Myriam Laberge and Brenda Chaddock, which they call “Wise Action that Lasts.” (July 9-11 near Vancouver, BC) and of course you could also come to an Art of Hosting training, several of which are going on in Europe and North America this summer and fall.