"In the past week alone I've read four or five stern warnings, from people I
respect, that writing reports, proposing policies, and designing plans, is no
substitute for taking practical action in our daily lives. Otherwise stated: You
can't eat words."
*I hear ya, brother. Mind you, my grandparents used to grow food for a living, and the entire 20th century was one almighty popular struggle to escape that.
Doors of Perception Report
July-August 2010
From doomers, to do-ers
By John Thackara
This free monthly newsletter starts conversations on issues to do with design
for resilience - and thereby reveals opportunities for action. It also brings
you news of Doors of Perception encounters.
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THIS MONTH'S HIGHLIGHTS
Donate, and live longer - - Modern society 'at risk' says Lloyds - - Peak
Tantalum threat to green tech - - Financial crisis double dip - - How banksters
starve poor people - - Food revolution slowed - - Enough with reports - -
Transitioning Tales - - Local money online - - Schools for change - -
Dementia advice service - - Radical Efficiency Zones - - Where does that thing
come from? - - The power of micro-experiments - - Hacklab at sea – Secret
Garden Party - - Open Source biodiversity - - Piksels on Skjerjehamn
DONATE – AND LIVE LONGER!
A Swedish study has found that 'survival was 29 percent better in the donor
group'. The study concerned kidney donors, it's true – but we're confident the
principle also applies if you donate money to Doors of Perception and help us
develop the site. A 'donate' button is on the lower left of your screen when you
go here:
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] CRISIS OF CIVILIZATION ROUND-UP
PEAK OIL: MODERN SOCIETY 'AT RISK' SAYS LLOYDS
A new report from Lloyds Insurance and Chatham House warns of 'dramatic changes
in the energy sector... failure to prepare will be expensive and potentially
catastrophic'. Modern society has been built on the back of access to relatively
cheap, combustible, carbon-based energy sources, the report states, but 'that
model is outdated... We are heading towards a global oil supply crunch and price
spike (in which) energy infrastructure will become increasingly vulnerable'.
The Lloyds analysis is not new; its novelty lies in the fact that two
establishment bodies have 'come out' on the subject of peak energy and its
possible consequences. Yikes.
http://www.chathamhouse.org.uk/files/16720_0610_froggatt_lahn.pdf
RESOURCE DEPLETION: NOT ENOUGH RAW MATERIALS FOR GREEN TECH?
Many people assume that 'green tech' will save our high entropy lifestyles as
oil and gas become less abundant.. But rare earth metals essential to the
production of green tech - mobile phones, thin layer photovoltaics, lithium-ion
batteries, synthetic fuels, among others - are running short. The EU Raw
Materials Initiative says that we are approaching Peak Antimony, Peak Cobalt,
Peak Gallium, Peak Germanium, Peak Indium, Peak Platinum, peak Palladium, Peak
Neodymium and Peak Tantalum. Blimey.
http://europa.eu/rapid/pressReleasesAction.do?reference=IP/10/752&format=HTML&aged=0&language=EN&guiLanguage=en
FINANCIAL CRISIS 'DOUBLE DIP'
'Double dip' sounds more like an ice cream you'd buy at the beach than a
financial meltdown. A more somber tone was set at last month's Transition Towns
conference by Stoneleigh, the co-editor of Automatic Earth. In a clinical
presentation, she described the convergence of Peak Oil, and the 'collapse of
global Ponzi finance', as 'a perfect storm of converging phenomena that threaten
to sink our age of prosperity through wealth destruction, social discontent, and
global conflict'. The energy crisis and the financial crisis are feeding off
each other, said Stoneleigh. Describing the hydrocarbon epoch (the one we're in
now) as a 'fleeting interlude in history', she went on to anticipate a 'net
energy cliff' and an accompanying deflation. Phew.
http://sheffield.indymedia.org.uk/2010/06/453356.html
FOOD: HOW BANKSTERS STARVE THE POOREST PEOPLE
The most sickening of this month's reports is about food and finance. Jayati
Ghosh, a professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, has found that
the dramatic rise and fall of world food prices in 2007-08 was largely a result
of speculative activity in global commodity markets. At the height of the
financial boom, he reports, so-called 'index investors' were thought to own 35
per cent of corn futures contracts, 42 per cent of soybean contracts and 64 per
cent of wheat contracts. 'Cultivators and food consumers appear to have lost in
this phase of extreme price instability', he writes; the only gainers from this
process were 'financial intermediaries who were able to profit from rapidly
changing prices'. Despite the recent fall in agricultural prices in world trade,
food prices remain high and even continue to increase for vulnerable groups.
Yuk.
http://www.networkideas.org/working/dec2009/08_2009.pdf
SLOWED FOOD REVOLUTION
The food situation is not much better in the rich-at-the-moment countries.
Heather Rogers writes in American Prospect that 'the local food revolution
doesn't stand a chance' because President Obama's Department of Agriculture is
doing little to ensure the survival of holistic local farmers. Rogers continues
that 'the government continues to channel public resources disproportionately to
conventional growers – benefits that then flow to the corporations from which
they buy their seeds and chemicals and on to agribusiness processors in the form
of cheap grain'. This text, too, is grim - but Michael Pollan says it's a must-read. Gulp.
http://prospect.org/cs/articles?article=slowed_food_revolution
] THOUGHT OF THE MONTH: ENOUGH WITH REPORTS (AND NEWSLETTERS) ?
In the past week alone I've read four or five stern warnings, from people I
respect, that writing reports, proposing policies, and designing plans, is no
substitute for taking practical action in our daily lives. Otherwise stated: You
can't eat words. The most succinct, as so often, comes from John Michael Greer:
"Our time, as the media never tires of telling us, is the information age, a
time when each of us can count on being besieged and bombarded by more
information in an average day than most premodern people encountered in their
entire lives. Now it's important to remember that this is true only when the
term "information" is assumed to mean the sort of information that comes
prepackaged and preprocessed in symbolic form; the average hunter-gatherer
moving through a tropical rain forest picks up more information about the world
of nature through his or her senses in the course of an average day than the
average resident in an industrial city receives through that channel in the
course of their lives". Greer's post, and comments thereon,introduce a ton of
useful information sources.
http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2010/07/seeking-gaianomicon.html
] FROM DOOMERS, TO DOERS
TRANSITIONING TALES
Three hundred people met in South Devon in England for the fourth gathering of
the Transition Network. They were a modest cross section of the many thousands
of people now involved in 330 official Transition initiatives (up from 170 this
time last year) and many more less formal groups around the world that are
'mulling over' their participation. The transition model 'emboldens communities
to look peak oil and climate change squarely in the eye' and addresses the
question: 'for all those aspects of life that our community needs in order to
sustain itself and thrive, how are we going to rebuild resilience'. My full
report (and lnks to others') is here:
http://www.doorsofperception.com/archives/2010/06/of_apocalypse_a.php
LOCAL MONEY ONLINE
'Conventional money is created as debt by private financial institutions for
their own profit-making purposes, not as a public service. This is the root
cause of the economic, social and environmental problems that beset us'. So
argues South Africa's Community Exchange System. This community-based platform
provides the means for its users to exchange their goods and services, both
locally and remotely. I've long wondered whether local money is necessarily
hand-made and ultra-local, so I was intrigued (as I left the TT event) to meet a
hitch-hiking software designer, Matthew Slater, who is building customisable
digital barter money platforms in Drupal. Community Forge, as the platform is
called, is community currency trading software build on a social networking
platform. Versions of Community Forge are being piloted in Europe by SELs
(a European version of Local Economy Trading Scheme).
http://www.ces.org.za/docs/whatces.htm
http://communityforge.net/
SCHOOLS FOR CHANGE
We were thrilled during the Dott 07 Festival, in North East England, when dozens
of schools took part in our Eco Design Challenge. In Dott's second iteration, in
Cornwall, even more schools are taking part. But when it comes to engaging with
a lot of schools fast , Dott cannot match the viral growth of Design For Change
(D4C). Launched in 2009, this national campaign in India encourages
schoolchildren to participate in a one-week project to change a practical aspect
of life in their own communities. Kiran Bir Sethi, its founder, tells me that
more than 15,000 schools and around 200,000 students are involved in India. D4C
is now expanding globally (20 other countries at last count) and – a pleasing
connection, this one - has now teamed up with Eco Design Challenge in the UK, too.
http://www.ecodesignchallenge.co.uk/blog/dott09
http://www.designforchangecontest.com/
http://www.designobserver.com/changeobserver/entry.html?entry=13508
DEMENTIA ADVICE SERVICE
News of another happy outcome from Dott07 (Doors was responsible for programme
direction). Ian Drysdale at Thinkpublic in the UK, tells me that a prototype
Dementia Adviser service, which Thinkpublic began co-designing with the
Alzheimer's Society during Dott07, has been successful during trials and will
now be rolled out nationally, running in 16 sites across the UK. As one of the
pioneer advisors, Nicola Jacobson, told The Guardian, 'the full impact has not
yet been fully evaluated, but the feeling is that the advisers reduce hospital
admissions, care visits – and enable people with dementia to remain in their
own homes for longer'.
http://www.dott07.com/go/alzheimer100
http://www.guardian.co.uk/public-services/person-centered-services
RADICAL EFFICIENCY ZONES
A new report from Nesta in the UK proposes 'Radical Efficiency Zones' as one way
to enable improved public services at far less cost. 'Radical efficiency is
about enabling the right people with the right motivation and the right tools to
set their imagination free', states the report; 'success depends on central
government's ability to let go of the reins of innovation and liberate local
innovators'. Nesta's language here – a curious mixture of liberation theology,
and dressage – flatters central government too much. The main problem with
public services in the UK is that they address the wrong questions. Take health,
for example: in Cuba, total health expenditure costs per person are five per
cent of the cost per US citizen – and yet health outcomes (life expectancy, and
so on) are pretty much the same. That's real radical efficiency. UK central
government, in contrast, has been cognitively captured by special interest
groups (such as doctors) and medical services industries (think Big Pharma) who
have most to lose if health policy were to shift its focus from mopping-up, to
prevention. The Nesta report contains interesting ideas – but radical, it ain't.
http://www.nesta.org.uk/publications/reports/assets/features/radical_efficiency
WHERE DOES THAT THING COME FROM?
Every day 1.5 billion cups of coffee are drunk somewhere in the world - but few
of us know much about the 25 million families that grow and produce this
valuable bean. In a system that can involve as many as eight transactions to
bring the coffee to market, coffee farmers receive less than two percent of the
price of a cup of coffee sold in a coffee bar. Would a transparent supply web
change help reduce these grotesque inequities? Since 2006, the Fair Tracing
project at Oxford University has been exploring ways to is to support ethical
trade by using Tracking and Tracing technologies in supply chains to provide
consumers and producers with enhanced information. A new platform, Sourcemap,
also aims to give people access the information needed to make sustainable
choices. 'We believe that people have the right to know where things come from
and what they are made of'' says its founder, Leo Bonini. This free and
open-source project is volunteer-driven.
http://www.sourcemap.org/
http://www.fairtracing.org/
http://www.doorsofperception.com/archives/2008/08/post_26.php
THE POWER OF MICRO-EXPERIMENTS
A new blog called Civic Explorer chronicles the flowering of social experiments
in response to these new times. It's written by Sophia Horowitz, a recent
graduate of Masters in Strategic Leadership Towards Sustainability (MSLS) in
Sweden. This admirable graduate programme was created by Karl-Henrik Robert,
founder of the Natural Step. He states that "I don't believe that the solutions
in society will come from the left or the right or the north or the south.
They will come from islands within those organizations, islands of people with
integrity who want to do something". Civic Explorer is a promising guide
to the more interesting of these islands.
http://civicexplorer.wordpress.com/
] FORTHCOMING ENCOUNTERS
HACKLAB AT SEA
M.A.R.I.N. integrates artistic and scientific research on ecology of the marine
and cultural ecosystems. Short proposals are invited for those wishing to join
Hacklab at the Sea, an informal workshop on an island in the Finnish archipelago
that will combine tinkering and brainstorming of ideas on ways to explore
sensory the experience of marine environment and ecologies using DIY
electronics, low power computing, circuit bending for floating structures (radio
controlled boats, subs, floating sensor stations, wireless units), DIY
microscopy, water kinetic energy, non-conventional locating and mapping. 12-18
July, Naantali, Turku Archipelago, Finland (35 min from Turku + 10 min by boat).
http://marin.cc/seahacklab
SECRET GARDEN PARTY
The Secret Garden Party is 'a temporary community that is as free, irreverent,
friendly and engaging... we provide the Garden and plant the seeds, but you
nurture its life and allow it to blossom'. Your correspondent has agreed, with
some trepidation, to hang out at the Limina tent. We'll expore 'new ways to
create transition spaces and events between the rural and urban'. 22-25 July,
somewhere in Cambridgeshire, England.
http://limina.org.uk/
http://www.secretgardenparty.com/2010/html/
OPEN SOURCE BIODIVERSITY AT 1,800m
If I were not already going to SGP I'd head for the Art, Science & Hack
summercamp. It's held in the wild in southern France and there's no road access.
Sessions include 'Microbian biodiversity and Open Source Biology'; 'Open Source
hardware for agriculture and pastoralism'; 'Reinventing the Inventory';
'Psychedelics and geekness'. 'a mesh network without coordinator'. There is also
a mini astronomic observatory with researchers from Nice and Meudon. The lamb
méchoui sounds especially divine. 20 to 26 July 2010, at 1800 m alt., just near
the National Park of Mercantour on the Riviera (France).
You need to register in advance.
http://www.estivenumerique.org/montagne/inscription_rencontres
PIKSEL SUMMER CAMP
This international gathering of artists, developers and creators works with free
and open technologies on the idyllic island of Skjerjehamn outside Bergen,
Norway. A particular focus is hands-on development of tools and applications for
open video editing technologies. 2-8 August, Skjerjehamn [Norway]
http://www.pixelache.ac/helsinki/2010/hacking-and-farming/
LIVE LONGER: BECOME A MICRO-PHILANTHOPIST
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the planet, since March 2002 We've waited sixteen years before seeking your
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