I had a wonderful morning with [personal profile] prk and [personal profile] transcendancing. [personal profile] prk drove us out to John St Cafe in Cottesloe, which had been recommended by [personal profile] samvara and does an excellent breakfast in a pretty set-up. We then went and lay on the grass overlooking Cottesloe beach and dozed and chatted in the pine trees.

We covered a whole range of topics from ideal cultures and economies to the ways work is valued or devalued to [personal profile] transcendancing's theme for the year. I have Thoughts bubbling all over the place, but little coherency for the first two. I am developing a theme of my own, though, which is forming based on a bunch of things I've read recently, and how I want to live, and the sort of world I want to live in.

To that end, my theme for 2011 is Sustainability.

How I envision this looking (and what I'm already doing, in several cases):

Lots of these overlap, but I'll have a stab at categories, anyway.

Categories include environmental, relationships, money, health and creativity )

Also, while I remember it: I brought up in the morning's discussion my ideal culture whereby food and shelter were basic rights, rather than something a member of the culture ever had to seriously worry about, and what our culture would look like if that were true. [personal profile] prk suggested at one point that it'd be best suited to a culture like The Culture by Iain M. Banks, where there's no resource issues, at all (possibly this was more related to [personal profile] transcendancing's idea of creating money equality? It's all blurring together in my head).

I was thinking further on that, and remembered much later that the fourth largest city in Brazil, Belo Horizonte, declared access to food a right of citizenship in 1993, and has been providing food for its citizens accordingly for the last fifteen years (the above article makes my heart sing every time I read it). The city earned the Future Policy Award in 2009 (link is a 20 page pdf, and well worth the read).
Yes, I'm at work. Not caring, because a tutor asked me to download this stuff for a CD, so it nearly counts, right? Besides this is riveting and electrifying and people should see it.

Architect and designer William McDonough asks what our buildings and products would look like if designers took into account "All children, all species, for all time." A tireless proponent of absolute sustainability (with a deadpan sense of humor), he explains his philosophy of "cradle to cradle" design, which bridge the needs of ecology and economics. He also shares some of his most inspiring work, including the world's largest green roof (at the Ford plant in Dearborn, Michigan), and the entire sustainable cities he's designing in China.

Facinating 20 minute video here

With 3.8 billion years of research and development on its side, nature has already solved problems that human designers and engineers still struggle with. In this inspiring talk, Janine Benyus provides fascinating examples of biomimicry -- the way humans mimic nature in the products we build and the systems we implement. And because the champion adapters in the natural world are, by definition, those that can survive without destroying the environment that sustains them, biomimicry can contribute to the long-term health of our planet.

I haven't watched this 20 minute video all the way through, but it looks just as good.
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