ICHIOKA, SARAH. _FLOURISH: Design Paradigms for Our Planetary Emergency._ S.l.: TRIARCHY PRESS, 2021. --- # Progressive Summary Assembles an incredible array of thinkers and ideas in digestible portions. Argues forcefully for shifting from a "sustainability" paradigm to a "regenerative" paradigm, one that is uncomprisingly net positive in our impact. Tries to identify the paradigms and stories that are holding us back. We have known how to build zero carbon buildings for over 20 years, and the principles of a circular economy were formulated 40 years ago by Walter Stahel and Hermann Daly. Yet our pace of change is scandalously slow. Authors see themselves as interpreters and intermediaries, bringing forth the ideas of transformative thinkers to inspire a wider audience. Following [[Berkana Institute's Two Loops model]], they are illuminators. They have an inherently optimistic attitude, citing Chenoweth's study of non-violent initiatives that succeeded when 3.5% of the population was involved. They focus on what built environment professionals can do to change the paradigm. This fills a much-needed gap in the conversation. # Key Points ## Introduction Donella Meadows wrote a seminal essay in 1999: "Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System". Out of 12 leverage points, the most effective were: - The mindset or paradigm out of which the system - its goals, structure, rules, delays, parametes - arises - The power to transcend paradigms These are the leverage points the authors focus on. They reference George Lakoff's work on metaphors and stories as foundationtal to how we think. They reference C.S. Holling and Lance Gunderson's work on complex, self-organizing systems, which traces the evolution of a system through 4 stages: Growth, Consolidation, Release and Reorganization. They believe we are in the Release stage. ## Chapter 1 - Possibilism Key idea: "A possibilist approach uses our powers of observation to seek and interrogate the evidence - screening out the noise - and our powers of storytelling to amplify the signal". We often don't speak up about our beliefs and concerns because we misread public sentiment. This is called **pluralistic ignorance** - "the tendency for a majority to misperceive others' opinions on a topic, falsely believing that fewer people share their opinion than they actually do." A lot of research shows that we have a bias towards being optimistic about future events in our lives, but are pessimistic about the future of our society more generally. Jerome Bruner (an American cognitive and developmental psychologist) described two types of thinking: (1) paradigmatic - where we classify and categorise; and (2) narrative - where we organise our interpretations of the world into stories. An example of paradigmatic thinking would be evidence-based approaches. This would be exemplified by the work of physicist David Mackay, who did thorough calculations and what it would take to shift an entire country to sustainable energy, and wrote about it in his book *Sustainable Energy - Without the Hot Air*. Esther Duflo (*Poor Economics*), who pioneered the use of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) in MIT's Poverty Action Lab, is another example. Oceanographer Nadia Pinardi claims that we only know 5% of what is in the oceans. Astrophysicist Ersilia Vaudo Scarpetta says we only know 5% of the visible universe. Fear of the unknown often paralyzes us. Two methods of overcoming this fear are tactical urbanism and scenario planning. The first is a kind of improvisation, embracing solutions that are transient and ephemeral. The second is exemplified by Bill Sharpe's Three Horizons model. There's a great discussion of Jeremy Lent's response to Jem Bendell - ## Chapter 2 - Co-evolution as nature In [[Reference Notes/The Patterning Instinct]], Jeremy Lent argues that "culture shapes values, and those values shape history." A fundamental divergence occurred between Eastern and Western patterns of cognition: - Ancient Greece saw the rise of dualism in the philosophy of Pythagoras and Plato. This was reinforced by Bacon and Descartes during the Enlightenment. - In the East, non-dualistic thinking prevailed with Taoi-ism, Advaita Vedanta, and Indigenous "web of life" perspectives. The dualist of the West doesn't hold up to scrutiny. - Human cells in our body are outnumbered ten to one by microbial cells. The web of life: - Colin Tudge (Secret Life of Trees) points out that in the rainforests of Central America, there are 750 different types of fig, each with its own species of wasp as pollinator and each species of wasp with its own species of parasitic nematode. Difference between a system that is complicated and complex: - A clock is a complicated system, but every part can be isolated and described in terms of how it relates to the whole - A rainforest is a complex system, where everything interacts with everything else in ways that are impossible to fully describe Richard Dawkins emphasizes the mechanistic view of life by saying that "life is just bytes and bytes and bytes of digital information." Freya Mathew argues that whereas the mechanistic view seeks to extract the maximum output from any given input, organisms and living systems have evolved to optimise energy, and to thrive with less effort. Strong support for the idea of custodian cultures (aka [[Reference Notes/Sand Talk]]) ![[Nature is frugal]] ## Chapter 3 - A longer now The Earth's age was only established by Clair Patterson in 1956 - 4.55 billion years. Even as recently as 1946, the age of the entire Universe was thought to be only 1.8 billion years. James Hutton gave a lecture about rock formations in 1785 to the Royal Society of Edinburgh. He argued that the rock formations must have been formed over periods of time far exceeding the 6000 years of Earth's life as told in the Biblical story of Genesis. In doing so, he introduced us to deep time. At the same time, the Industrial Revolution was just gearing up, and by 1800, most clocks included a second hand. Time zones were agreed upon in 1883, and Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) in 1972, when the second was defined as 9,192,631,770 oscillations of a caesium atom. Time was defined as "quantified, regular and linear". See the article Tyranny of Time: https://www.noemamag.com/the-tyranny-of-time/ Contrast this to Indigenous cultures, which tell time by what they observe around them. In her book Pip Pip, Jay Griffiths tells of people in the Andaman forests in India who have a scent calendar that uses floral fragrance to describe the time of year. Tribes such as the Natchez in the lower Mississippi name their months after whatever is most prevalent at the time - bison, bear, watermelon, mulberry, etc. > Colonialism is evident both in the way the West exported linear time to the world – destroying other perspectives on time in its wake – and in the way, as Roman Krznaric asserts, “We treat the future as a distant colonial outpost where we dump ecological degradation, nuclear waste, public debt and technological risk”. > As the mythologist Devdutt Pattainik explains, single stories perhaps have a greater hold on Western minds because “If you live only once, in one-life cultures around the world, you will see an obsession with binary logic, absolute truth, standardization, absoluteness, linear patterns in design. But if you look at cultures which [are] cyclical and based on infinite lives, you will see a comfort with fuzzy logic, with opinion, with contextual thinking, with ‘everything is relative’. Examples that challenge conventional notions of progress: - Great Hall of the Musikverein in Vienna, Austria was inaugurated in 1870. Desite 150 years of advances in our understanding of the physics of sound and countless music halls that have been built since, there is consensus among experts that its accoustics are unsurpassed. - We regard the human sacrifices of past civilizations as barbaric, and yet we our obsession with cars causes millions of deaths, and even more millions of lives affected by pollution, every year, all sacrificed to the myth of progress Andri Snoer Magnason's idea of a single person connecting to 250 years of time through our grandparents and our grandchildren. https://emergencemagazine.org/interview/on-time-and-water/ Finnish newspaper introduced a climate crisis font that changes over time to reflect changes in sea ice. We get 95% of our food calories from only 30 crops. A legacy mindset would preserve greater varieties of plants. Some key points from Good Ancestor - using the economists' oft-favoured discount rate of 3%, which values things less the further out they are in the future, a human life in 100 years is 1/19th of its value today - Derek Parfit describes how our actions on future generations is like firing an arrow into the forest. If we know our arrow is going to hit and injure someone, it doesn't matter how far they are, or the fact that we don't know them. It's no excuse. - Kenya's Wangari Maathai, who won a Nobel prize, started the Green Belt Movement, which has planted over 50 million trees since 1977. ## Chapter 4 - Symbiogenesis Lynn Margulis is the key figure here. She was one of the scientists, together with James Lovelock, who promoted the Gaia Theory, which is the idea that earth is complex, self-regulating system. In 1967, Margulis wrote a landmark paper showing how eukaryotic cells evolved by absorbing prokaryotic cells. This showed that species can evolve through convergence, not just competition, as Darwin posited. Challenges the "survival of the fittest" narrative promoted by Herbert Spencer. Talks about [[Symbiosis]] in nature. The importance of language. Shifting from "Anthropocene" to "Symbiocene". Introducing words such as "inter-being", "co-agency", "ubuntu", "conativity". I like the phrase "structures of cooperation". This makes me think of the projects at Burning Man, and Monique Schiess's comment that they are all monuments to co-operation. Opposes the *tabula rasa* of new-build or greenfield eco-cities, because it's hard to build a meaningful sense of place. Prefers urban eco-villages such as Los Angeles Eco-Village (LAEV). Monbiot's phrase "private sufficiency and public luxury". Mentions Sociocracy and nonviolent communication as improvements to "soft infrastructure" and governance. ## Chapter 5 - Planetary health Kate Raworth's Doughnut Economics and its model of planetary health anchors this chapter. Agrees with the degrowth agenda, but is ambivalent about its framing. Suggests using planetary health as a positive goal. Raworth says that because no country is currently aligned with this, all countries should be considered "developing countries". Reframe waste as "untapped nutrients" Hakima Abbas says we should imagine an economy that centers around care rather than around production. Kate Raworth says we should "nurture the connections of society, which is foundational" and "value the contribution of the household, which is core" Addressing climate change would cost 1.5% of GDP, which is about 15% of the net wealth of the world's billionaires. Prefers tidal lagoons to tidal barrages - the former can be built in open water with low energy materials, whereas the latter has the same negative impacts on ecology as hydro-electric dams. New Zealand, Scotland, Iceland, Finland and Wales formed a Wellbeing Nation pact. All are led by women. ## Conclusion Donella Meadows argued that it is a mistake to have a definitive plan for intervening in any complex system. (This is why I like the intuitive courage of Emergent Strategy and David Weinstock's somatic consensus.) 2019 investigation by Mathew Taylor and Jonathan Watts revealed that 10% of carbon emissions since 1965 were by just 4 companies: Chevron, Exxon, BP, and Shell. Meanwhile, youth climate activist Vanessa Nakate has observed that the entire continent of Africa is responsible for just 3% of emissions. Quotes Martha Gellhorn: > People often say, with pride, "I'm not interested in politics." They might as well say, "Im not interested in my standard of living, my health, my job, my rights, my freedoms, my future or any future." Mentions Ayana Elizabeth Johnson's Climate Action Venn Diagram: - What are you good at? - What is the work that needs doing? - What brings you joy? Suggests that organizations are the most effective scale of change, what Santosh refers to as the meso-level. We need Transformation, not Reformation. We should Mourn, and then Rise and Regenerate. # Resonances ## Possibilism [[From What Is to What If]] - the Transition Town movement [[Reference Notes/The Web of Meaning]] [[Reference Notes/The Patterning Instinct]] [[Reference Notes/These Wilds Beyond Our Fences]] ## A Longer Now Abdullah Sharif's A World That Works for All - this is a book for Menders. Andy Goldsworthy's Time and Tides # Oppositions # Questions / Comments They mentioned Paul Hawken's Project Drawdown, but not Regeneration. Questions for BTS: - Can you imagine an urban eco-village established in Singapore? How would you start it? Fertility is decreasing by 1.4% per year. If fertility reaches its lower threshold by 2030, wouldn't this be one automatic brake on growth? Isn't there a tension between thinking about the Long Now, and the urgency of Martin Luther King's injunction that "tomorrow is today" and Ostrom's statement that "time is the natural resource in shortest supply"? # Quotes Lovely quote from Rebecca Solnit: > This is a time in which the power of words to introduce and justify and explain ideas matters, and that power is tangible in the changes at work. Forgetting is a problem; words matter, partly as a means to help us remember. When the cathedrals you build are invisible, made of perspectives and ideas, you forget you are inside them and that the ideas they consist of were, in fact, made, constructed by people who analyzed and argued and shifted our assumptions. They are the fruit of labor. Forgetting means a failure to recognize the power of the process and the fluidity of meanings and values. Brian Eno: > Humans are capable of a unique trick: creating realities by first imagining them, by experiencing them in their minds. When Martin Luther King said "I have a dream", he was inviting others to dream it with him. Once a dream becomes shared in that way, current reality gets measured against it and then modified towards it. As soon as we sense the possibility of a more desirable world, we begin behaving differently, as though that world is starting to come into existence, as though, in our minds at least, we're already there. The dream becomes an invisible force which pulls us forward. By this process it starts to come true. The act of imagining something makes it real. E.F. Schumacher (paraphrased - original uses "Man" instead of "humans"): > Modern humans talk of a battle with nature, forgetting that, if they won the battle, they would find themselves on the losing side. Eileen Crist: (need to find source of this quote) > “A diffusely shared belief system of human prerogative. An entitlement to kill, use, take over, to go wherever we please and build infrastructure. ...an unstated sense that earth belongs to humanity and ... (that) non-humans are resources. It’s a world view ... that covers that much territory and ... once you see it, there’s nowhere really that it cannot be seen. Human supremacy could be seen as ... the deepest causal layer ... for growth and human expansionism – the sense of the rightfulness to keep growing our numbers, our economies, our infrastructure.” Freya Mathews, *Towards a Deeper Philosophy of Biomimicry*: > Indeed, the most effective way of preserving one’s own existence is to weave one’s own conative ends into the conative goals of others: By making oneself integral to the existence of others, one induces them to do at least part of the work of preserving one’s own existence, thereby further conserving one’s own energy. The two principles—of conativity and least resistance—are beautifully orchestrated in living systems, and are particularly exquisitely exemplified in stable ecosystems. # Questions for Breaking the Spell 1. Do you remember the first time in your life when you felt that things aren't the way they should be? 2. How did you meet your co-author, Michael Pawley, and what made you decide to work on this book together? Which parts of the book do you feel closest to? 3. Your 5 themes are really well chosen. How did these themes emerge? Could you briefly summarise them? 4. What are the possibilities of creating urban eco-villages in a dense city like Singapore? 5. If you had $1 million to create a regenerative design project in Singapore, what would it look like? 6. In your Adaptive Cycle Model, we are at the period of consolidation where pace of change is slow before it will all of a sudden hit a phase of Release. How do we galvanise 3.5% of the national or global population to give us the political and social capital to enact the changes highlighted in the book? How do we help our fellow citizens to break free from the trance, slumber, spell and inertia of the status quo to awaken to the paradigm shift we need in our collective consciousness? 7. You end the book with some quotes from MLK: "tomorrow is today", and Elinor Ostrom: "time is the natural resource in shortest supply". How do you navigate the tension between this sense of urgency, and the mindset of the Long Now that you advocate for in Chapter 3? 8. Can you explain the shift from seeing ourselves as outside and separate from nature, to one in which we are very much part of nature, even the artefacts we create? Can we go so far as to think of computers and other technological gadgets as part of nature? 9. Let's end with the start of your book, which is this idea of possibilism: "A possibilist approach uses our powers of observation to seek and interrogate the evidence - screening out the noise - and our powers of storytelling to amplify the signal." If hope and possibility was the signal you are trying to amplify, what are the main obstacles, the noise, that we need to think about screening out? 10. How do we translate ideas into action?