People radicalize to resist.

In so many ways it's a shame.

As much for the failure of other means of resistance as the for the radicalization.

What is good, level, earnest, well-meaning gets lost in it all.

The bright side of impending doom

Humankind is converging upon its collective annihilation. This is, unlike so many other things, an objective reality. As we come closer to realizing this reality, the intensity of it's felt heat may yet serve as a catalyst for effective pushback against its arrival.

People are fond of saying we are more conscious and enlightened now than ever before. I'm not sure I agree. But if there is one thing that sets us apart from historical humankind it is that we are being forced to organize collectively in the face of pressures we've never faced before, a process that is being facilitated by technologies that are equally unprecedented. Population pressure has forced us into uncomfortably close proximity - culturally, socially, nationally - and into increasing competition for increasingly scarce resources. To contend with this we are organizing collectively on an unprecedented scale, a scale that includes the whole of humankind.

I am not saying we should do this, only that we are. Even people that would rather have nothing to do with each other are being forced to come to the table. Globalization is a reality. The market has made us interdependent, while transportation and communication technologies have made our societies increasingly interpenetrating. These technologies are also serving to facilitate our collective organization.

With this convergence of pressure and means, we may yet be able to avoid final catastrophe. What we are in the midst of is a massive reorganization of our social realms toward a body capable of working as one in the face of certain necessities. I do not think there is any avoiding this. Things will be lost, cultures will be partially absorbed, but dominance will also be forever compromised. In order to organize collectively, we will NEED to respect difference while identifying the real non-negotiables and achieving real solutions. This is a promising predicament. As promising as it is frightening.

At Burning Man I was once at the center of 30,000 people converging around a quarter-acre bonfire. We in the innermost circle were so close to the fire that each one of us could be exposed for only a couple seconds before needing to weave back into the whirling mass or be burned. Despite the inward pressure of 30,000 people, none of whom could know how close we at the center were to imminent doom, we weren't driven into the fire. I believe it was the seriousness of our predicament that resulted in pushback sufficient to keep the crowd from pushing us in. Between pressure and pushback, an equilibrium was established. This was not engineered. It happened spontaneously in response to real pressures.

But it didn't happen until it had to. It held right there at the cusp, at the very limit of feasability before the people at the center burned.

Anti-colonialist architecture?

Collaborative Architecture in India

Are Biofuels a Social Work Issue?

"The stage is now set for direct competition for grain between the 800 million people who own automobiles, and the world's 2 billion poorest people. The risk is that millions of those on the lower rungs of the global economic ladder will start falling off as rising food prices drop their consumption below the survival level."

From Lester Brown's report to the U.S. Congress on ethanol, in which the agricultural economist and founder of the Earth Policy Institute as well as the Worldwatch Institute warns of an impending famine as competition stiffens for food and fuel.

Sustainability is complicated.

Crux

Why am I so caught up in thinking about both farming/gardening and social work/public administration; about they inform each other?

I think it is because both have been corrupted by the application of industrial ways of thinking and managing.

The education system is a case in point, as is petrochemical-reliant agriculture. We have turned the ecologies of people and plants into fragmented worlds managed by myopic specialistists. We have ceased paying attention to details, to effect, and lost our ability to respond creatively and locally in an empowered, informed, and effective way. Our vision for how the world should be has become uncoupled from how the world is. We think too small in some ways, and too big in others. We need to focus, be real, pay attention, do what works. We need to take responsibility for our lives, our livelihoods, the country and the world we live in. We have to depend on our land so we care for our land. We have to depend on each other so we care for each other. We need to work on a scale that works.

"Resilience" according to Rob Hopkins

"I think in many ways the idea of resilience is a more useful concept than the idea of sustainability. The idea of resilience comes from the study of ecology, and it's really about how systems, settlements, withstand shock from the outside; when they encounter shock from the outside, that they don't just unravel and fall to pieces.

"[Resilience] is about building modularity into what we do; building surge breakers into how we organize the basic things that support us."

From this TED Talk.

Fukuoka, Hayek, and the implications of "natural farming" for social work

To anyone who loves, appreciates, and values the natural world, Hayek's notion of a spontaneous order has a certain elegance, simplicity, and beauty to it, but it neglects the simple fact that such an order would undoubtedly replicate and extend current inequalities and injustices. I have been chewing this over, and found it wonderfully captured in this passage from Fukuoka's "One Straw Revolution":

"I settled myself on the mountain and everything went well up to the time that my father entrusted me with the richly-bearing trees in the orchard. He had already pruned the trees to 'the shape of sake cups' so that the fruit could easily be harvested. When I left them abandoned in this state, the result was that the branches became intertwined, insects attacked the trees and the entire orchard withered away in no time.

My conviction was that crops grow themselves and should not have to be grown. I had acted in the belief that everything should be left to take its natural course, but I found that if you apply this way of thinking all at once, before long things do not go so well. This is abandonment, not 'natural farming.'"

Similarly, to abandon people to the natural order of the free market is to allow the grotesque heirarchies and structures of privilege and oppression that humans have already created to flourish, to reach their "natural" conclusion - e.g., the primacy of certain groups of people over others.