Learning To Work In Cha-Order

Some learning to share after my conversation yesterday with Charlotte Millar from WWF.

To foster innovation, creativity and emerging ideas, we must learn to work in the intersection between chaos and order. This means neither a free-for-all – as we are held together by a strong common purpose, but nor are we seeking to fully control precise outcomes and structure.

Movements can either be controlled, or they can grow. Currently, we do not have the size or strength to challenge the power structures that prevent us from building a sustainable, equitable world. That necessitates building our movement, and therefore allowing ourselves to work in cha-order.

500th Post

Dear friends,

This is my 500th post on this blog. Thank you for reading and being part of this learning journey.

Onwards.

Enough Activists, But Not Enough Convergence

Nathan Schneider has a fantastic interview with veteran civil rights activist James Lawson. Some choice quotes…

No social movement is going to take place if it doesn’t have roots in what’s going on in Cleveland, Ohio, or Washington, DC, or way across Georgia. That’s how movements take place, and that’s how movements have taken place in the United States—not by national policy, but by local groups assessing their own scene and trying to be real about how to start working.

I maintain that we have more than enough activists and activism in our country. What we do not have is a unity of understanding about how you go about putting that activism to work. We’re all over the ballpark. Very few people are playing the nine positions of the ball team that you’re going to need to defend, or have an offense.

A part of what nonviolent practice and activity has done for me is it has deeply escalated what I call my “confidence in the universe,” and my willingness to trust in its care. It has also greatly expanded my heart at the point of seeing people in a different light. I think that that’s at the fore of any kind of spirituality; it’s becoming more human. To become more human, your heart has to become more compassionate, more inclusive of other human beings.

Link Loving 07.07.11

•  Major leak sheds light on Chinese propaganda strategy. Edmund Downie.
• The Arab spring – satallite photos.
• I Heart Taxes. The beginnings of a pro-tax movement?
• Debating NGO accountability. Jem Bendell.
• Europe’s wake-up call: Don’t be ashamed to ask for the moon. Serge Halimi.
• There’s an (old?) campaign on Better Banking.
• The Institute for New Economic Thinking. Should I not be underwhelmed?
• PricedOut! The campaign for affordable house prices.
• The end of the White Man’s Burden? Shlomo Ben-Ami.

Three Way Street

Such a good ‘issue’ video – it looks and feels like a game, so even though it is essentially the same piece of information over and over again, it is highly compelling to watch. Relevance to climate communications?

The creator of this video writes,

By summer 2010, the expansion of bike lanes in NYC exposed a clash of long-standing bad habits — such as pedestrians jaywalking, cyclists running red lights, and motorists plowing through crosswalks.

By focusing on one intersection as a case study, my video aims to show our interconnection and shared role in improving the safety and usability of our streets.

Link Loving 06.07.11

• Could Google’s new social network actually improve our social lives? Nona Willis Aronowitz.
• Jesse Lichtenstein observes that the proliferation of open data initiatives around the world is not all rainbows and unicorns.
• The wisdom of crowds, revisited: When the crowd goes from wise to wrong. Maria Konnikova.
• Good training looks something like this. Kristen Dore.
• A day in the life of a drone operator. Megan Erickson.
• Which artist will dare break this deathly cultural silence? John Harris.
• The sandwich generation – what do we do? Rafael Behr.
• Leafleting: A liberty lost?

Liking Is For Cowards

Read this beautiful piece by Jonathan Franzen in the New York Times. ‘Liking is for cowards. Go for what hurts.‘

How does this happen? I think, for one thing, that my love of birds became a portal to an important, less self-centered part of myself that I’d never even known existed. Instead of continuing to drift forward through my life as a global citizen, liking and disliking and withholding my commitment for some later date, I was forced to confront a self that I had to either straight-up accept or flat-out reject.

Which is what love will do to a person. Because the fundamental fact about all of us is that we’re alive for a while but will die before long. This fact is the real root cause of all our anger and pain and despair. And you can either run from this fact or, by way of love, you can embrace it.

When you stay in your room and rage or sneer or shrug your shoulders, as I did for many years, the world and its problems are impossibly daunting. But when you go out and put yourself in real relation to real people, or even just real animals, there’s a very real danger that you might love some of them.

And who knows what might happen to you then?

Link Loving 05.07.11

• A lesson from Greece: you can’t run a government without taxes. Richard Murphy.
• The High Street spiral of self-harm. Ann Pettifor.
• How to spot a cheater. Penelope Trunk. Hilarious and true as always.
• The Dark Mountain Project releases the second anthology of Uncivilised Writing.
• Tom Baker on the wonderful Greenpeace ‘Star Wars/VW’ campaign.
• Shoppers Bite Back – Consumerist.com.
• The Arab Spring and the universal values we should all fight for and treasure. Mary Robinson.
• Playing politics over prison policy. Stephen Whitehead.

Andrea Pompilio

Beautiful designs from Andrea Pompilio.

h/t The Sartorialist

Incredible Edible Todmorden

I knew she was good. I didn’t know she was this good : )