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ReGenesis Project

It does appear we are all agreed that Earth and all inhabitants thereof are in a critical climatic and/or cultural transition. 
Within this transition, I see both degenerative and regenerative trends. These seem to ecologically and economically align along competitive v. cooperative optimization strategies, as these might appear in Systems Theory, Information Processing Theory and Praxis, and Ecological Sciences including Evolutionary Theories within NeuroSciences, Theoretical Physics, Positive Psychology, Multisystemic and Integral Therapy, Game Theory, and Mathematics–Group Theory.
Our optimal diapraxis as a Species would notice our currently emerging positive deviant paradigms; subcultures such as New Economics, cooperative politics, cooperative healthcare, cooperative vocations, intentional cooperative communities, cooperative residences, green-culture, Permaculture, Occupier, Gaia University, Food and Economic and Climate, Cultural, Earth Justice Advocacy and Investment/Divestment Policy Design.
It seems prudent to understand these shared core values as richly therapeutic seeds to plant strategically, within our more persistently dissonant and nihilistic, perhaps increasingly autistic-trending, culture.
Current pathological cultural, political, and economic trends:
  • continue under-investing in long-term lowest risk cooperative investments,
  • actively resist positive pro-life momentum, thereby turning away from Positive Deviant stories [because they are too dissonant, distant, frightening, dark, dismal to be believed while continuing to rest comfortably at night about our great-grand-children’s future prospects] with themes like Loss of Living Populations Diversity, trending toward flat-line, and, my personal favorite, Yes, Martha, The Sky Really is Failing.
So, we might respond to cooperatively positive opportunities presented by this Transitional Point/Era and Generation by mentoring cooperative investment in each other and those around us, culturally, politically, and economically.
And, we might sing and dance, share, design, develop, grow, fertilize, feed, harvest, regenerate more positive and polycultured narratives and gaming strategies within ourselves, our families, our communities, our ecosystems, cousin species, nations, and Earth.
A possible name that has been on my mind is ReGenesis Project.
Euler argued that our shared cognitive metrics evolve out of the primal dust of function, that a vector, a point, functions as a primal crossroad of two or more lines. In a tree’s primal architecture, and according to Julian Jaynes’ view of the relationship between our Left and Right hemispheres, the lower reverse-hierarchical root system provides the neural nutrients for what we productively deduce in our “above-ground” branches, and leaves, and flowers, pollinating regenerative potential for sustaining future generations.
 
I seem to be sitting firmly on a surf’s edge fence. On one side I am exhausted and want to retire to build a small eco-balanced forested habitat for myself and my diversely challenged, medically complex family, where we can grow each other’s therapy, as removed as feasible from competitive social and economic pathologies indigenous to weakened and limp ecological rationality within our not-so-humane natural culture.
 
On the other hand, I feel inspired to find out if NCDD, Tellus Institute, Gaia University, Work That Reconnects, Naropa University, BigBrothers-BigSisters, Kittering, Schumacher Foundation, Americorps/VISTA, Salvation Army, and/or the burgeoning U.S. cooperative network of technical assistance and loan providers might like to combine their wisdom in a council platform called Interhelp.com, that might allow us to prepare an interactive cooperative investment plan, including a mutual assets report and expense budget, to help reforest our habitat with a rich polycultural global ecosystem of diversely composted wealth for sustaining life with mutual gratitude, with grassroots leadership from those who are most marginalized, and at greatest risk of living without satisfactory fulfillment.
 
This surf’s edge fence sitting feels co-respondent to this Winter Solstice season. Maybe that’s why I feel inclined to hibernate my way through this particular crossroad.

Regenerative Systems indigenously share a Positive Teleological strategic assumption, which could also be framed as Reverse-Positive Tree-ological.

An obstacle, regarding hierarchical binary and ecological analogical tree design, to producing Win-Win cooperative strategic incentives, could be resolved by imaging the tree’s root system, rather than the above-ground branches and production end of a business that starts as the increasingly diastolically condensing of nutrients from diverse individual root “strings” if you will.

At the lowest level of our digital universal population are all the individual people, or individual households, which might be better if we want this game to include positive family values, which might include the value of working together so that everybody in the family feels heard, understood, and included.

At the next level might be neighborhoods or smaller community deliberation processes which cannot achieve at least (0)-sum positive/negative ecological value balance until every constituent household has achieved at least (0)-sum positive/negative ecological value balance.

And so it goes, to the level of larger urban area or bioregion, also not able to “Win” (0)-sum positive/negative ecological value balance until each constituent community has done so.

We might next have a letter for nations, and then for all nations, no one of which will ever achieve (0)-sum positive/negative ecological nutrient well-being value balance until every nation has done so.

Competitive, egocentric characters and corporations have no place to hide in this strategy; we will all recognize each other in our desire to do our part to help us win, together.

“Ecological” refers both to economic and natural-systemic environmental “ground of all being” positive teleological values.

“Teleological values” are those that hold together Original Meaning of global historic evolution, ethologically translated through the multisystemic analogies of future purpose, Buckminster Fuller’s (0) Core Vector Synergetics, David Bohms’ Implicating Physical Frequency Order, Gregori Perelman’s (and friends) (0) soul universal theorem in Group Theory.

In other words, we tend to find our therapeutic future abundance by minimizing pathological cultural trends; which I think is probably true of any good conversation at any level of this reverse-hierarchical Win-Win Tree Game we are already playing through Co-Intelligence found in the plasmatic ground of our Being.

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Uncategorized

Positive Deviance

Positive Deviance may be more complex than gathering influential leaders with effective marketing, but Buckminster Fuller is not the only design expert who has advised us to encourage the demise of dysfunctional systems by building a more optimized, positive, better system. Building a permacultured cooperative deep ecology is effective marketing. It is being noticed.

 

There are two Positive Deviance efforts that I am aware of regarding the conversion of the public sector.  The Nellie Mae Education Foundation is currently implementing a strategy to inoculate Business As Usual in the field of public education with a turn toward a Deep Learning Ecology, sometimes called Creative Learning. An important part of their strategy is to contract with local models of Deep Learning pedagogy to speak directly with strategically targeted distressed urban (first priority) public School Board Directors, as well as school staff and students, and require at least 2 citizen research-type D&D events (there is also enough money to incorporate an on-line dimension to these events, to broaden participation in core iterative discernment stages).

 

The second is more industry-specific, in a way. I think that Permaculture Design is moving in linked-arm step with EcoVillages, cooperatively-owned businesses and residences, alternative energy technicians,  natural builders, organic growers and farmers to build cooperative demonstration networks.  These, in turn, are moving toward deeper cooperative network dimensions through tools like Local Economic Trading Systems (LETS), and BerkShares, community currencies, equity-as-capital-based Deep PermaCultured Ecology models of positive deviance. This emerging Transitional Generation PermaCulture “deviance” has missed opportunities to engage the public sector, while busy building our alternative universe model. I, for one, believe the permacultural emergence is mature enough to strategize more explicitly about how to engage public officials, perhaps borrowing a page from the Nellie Mae Foundation. 

 

We would do well to participate with more mindfulness toward our friends in the media, education, philanthropy, religious leadership, and political officials. Some specific allies who are better connected to these more public sectors than the permacultured guild of positive deviance might be NCDD itself, Habitat for Humanity, AmeriCorp Volunteers, homeschool networks, Cooperative Extension Services, which I believe are associated with land-grant colleges/universities in all 50 States, and inter-religious Eco-Justice networks, with potential global networking possibilities, inclusive of UNESCO as a “Greatest Effect with Least Effort” possible participant of interest.

 

Perhaps the ecologically sustainable educational system of positive deviance that David Orr, the Schumacher Center for New Economics, and many others are calling for is the emerging Gaia University (www.gaiauniversity.org) [I am not affilliated other than as a consumer of services, so this is not an advertisement; just an endorsement of potential value, where I believe there is already some form of UNESCO awareness, and maybe even some level of involvement–not sure about that]. Could NCDD partner with Gaia University’s on-line pedagogy, to extend the conversation toward a global cooperative economy and ecological awareness?  Maybe the Transition Network (www.transitionnetwork.org) could incarnate these global topics within their local public sectors; a resource for educating their local officials about the importance of their sustained, mindful, support, and their sense of urgency, as active facilitators for local cooperative sustainability.

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