taking steps
(or at least writing about them)
I welcome suggestions and as always, would love to know about related resources or other people who might be researching this general topic. It seems like a gap, so I'm diving in. I did the same in 2000 when we started greenmuseum.org. Our hunch that environmental art was an emerging movement ready to dive into the mainstream worldwide proved accurate. Because of that, I was able to contribute to the field as a whole to some degree, which was fun/overwhelming.
I'm particularly interested now, in the lived experience of making regenerative culture, ultra-low footprint, carbon-capturing lifestyles attractive and resonant. I think the gift-ecology, off the grid, art, and farming satyagranjero movements might have some insights here, as well as Homefulness, urban freegan activists, integral nonviolence folks decolonizing white supremacy, patriarchy, colonialism, and other forms of oppression, people exploring traditional cultural roots and deep culture, engaged monastics and giftivists everywhere… For the bulk of human history, people have been living holistically within their bioregional means. There’s really no end to the possibilities if we focus on interconnections instead of things.
In a previous post, I listed:
“STEP 1:
Inspiration. First, research and communicate the concept and general approach to all this. The idea is as old as dirt. Before things were commodified and obsessively chopped up into categories, culture was a lot more embedded and interwoven with daily life and the ecosystems we depend on. What has been done before or is being done currently that we can learn from and celebrate?”
Then, STEP 2: Experimentation, STEP 3: Evolution, and STEP 4: Amplify.
I’m trying to do some Step 4 with this site already. It’s just a start and we don’t really have any art-systems on the ground being tested that I know of. For Step 1, however… “start close in…”:
i think we need:
Examples of articultural systems
Compelling examples from a range of cultures and time periods (in as much detail as possible describing how they work and how various components complement each other), preferably by people from those cultures, but other perspectives and analyses could be really helpful as well.
Examples from the world around us today. Things you're perhaps learning and practicing in your homes and communities. Can it be shared or reproduced?
Understanding useful patterns or mutually beneficial cultural practices across cultures. What interconnecting systems seem to work exceptionally well?
How do these systems emerge? What are the best conditions for emergence? What does the “layering” of systems look like and which might need to go first?
How might we evaluate an “effective” systems approach?
Models for understanding
To wrap our heads around these ideas and share them with others, it may help to understand or conceptualize them using existing models from ecology, systems thinking, anthropology, ethnomusicology, natural farming, spiritual traditions that believe in letting things emerge, decolonization, ecofeminism, Boal/Theater of the Oppressed, etc. What perspectives can we apply and what useful interconnections might they help us see?
How might we compare and evaluate these tools and under which circumstances might we want to use them?
Thoughts and examples of how to support or encourage more articultural systems
What can organizations, communities, and individuals do to help these systems spread or interconnect?
What do we see as impediments or challenges? Suggestions of what to do about structural, legal, financial, emotional/psychological forms of resistance.
What would it look like to build a movement around this idea?
Forming discussion groups to help move this forward in some way.
Network communities living simply -what challenges are they facing? How does "art" or articulture begin to fit in?
Aggregate resource lists: books, articles, videos, visitable examples, open source reproducible examples (and downloadable kits!), tools for interconnecting projects, etc.
Identify thought leaders and allies
Who else has already been studying this or related topics?
What resources or networks are out there to help enlist the support of more clever and experienced people internationally?
What values might we want to identify to help keep this movement anchored in lived truth and transformation?
What are we missing?
Someone asked me once what I'd do with a couple of dozen researchers who wanted to explore this topic with me. Perhaps I'd invite them to find some like-minded friends from different backgrounds and try to live really, really simply together for a couple of years (see Step 2). (Here’s something I wrote to that effect a while ago.) We'd stay in touch and talk about these ideas and see what emerged. Some would want to study, others to practice, others to share and interconnect, still others to systematize and build infrastructure for others. Maybe friends and family could help them out with the experiment. Maybe they'd find people who are already living in these ways and offer to help out. After the year was up, see what emerged as sticking points and challenges, unexpected and anticipated outcomes, cultural implications, and patterns. Then, we'd sit down together and go over what we learned and what we'd like to continue exploring (see Step 3). I'm hoping we could harvest seeds of cultural wisdom and beauty to scatter and see what sprouts.
I’m currently in a co-housing community in Oakland eager to try some of these ideas out in my latest context. What’s clear is that changing our lives is hard work. Plenty of brave people doing very interesting life experiments and working to preserve traditional knowledge but it’s not clear to me how our culture is supporting them. What support systems can we explore, glean, and try for ourselves, for the future?
The best way to develop cultural support and tools for a certain community is to deeply understand what that community needs. The more people can make the life changes in their own lives to get closer to what the Earth can afford, the more those insights from that lived experience can bubble up to shift policy and larger systems can begin to fall into place. It’s a classic example of “being the change you want to see in the world.”. Where might art-systems really begin to provide useful support? Even a reduction in emissions could be a useful place to start. What I’d like to avoid is a situation where people tell others what to do without being willing to test it out themselves. Even if the experiment doesn’t work out, at least you can get a better sense of why, and at the very least, perhaps you were able to cut your carbon footprint a bit in the process.
By testing and modifying things and sharing results (Steps 2, 3, 4), we can all learn from these examples and begin to support a larger learning community of practice. At least, that’s the idea.
