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Preachers and Teachers: Follow your brightest dreams

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Youth ReGenesis EcoMinistry Project

Doctor of Ministry Proposal, Hartford Seminary

Gerald Dillenbeck, M. Div., MPA, PDC

 

O Thou who created the universe

And all that we see on our planet,

We worship your pulsating presence

In all that you have made

And all you have made is in you.

M. T. Winter, p. 166, 2009

 

The 10-Story Elevator Speech Summary:

The Youth ReGenesis Project is

an inter-religious EcoMinistry retrovirus

with abundant sustainable intent

toward a deeply, and gratefully, and graciously prime rooted

PermaCultural Metaphysics,

with Positive Deviance natural/spiritual In/ExFormation Balance,

Open Whole System Group Theory

(0)-soul Vertex/Vortex Assumption,

with highly synergetic, and healthy, bountiful string-growth trajectory

toward what we have already absorbed through past generations,

with co-prehensile and comprehensively mindful gratitude.

 

Goal:

To join inter-religious youth EcoMinisters together;

to explore, discuss, discern, and comprehend more deeply

into a shared ReGenesis of spiritual and natural systems;

deep seeding a resilient and sustainable growth

toward an abundantly incarnated, inclusive, and equitable REcology of Gratitude/Grace.

 

Or, the Reverse Corollary: To reduce the dissonance between the Inductive (+e-frequency/function) Ecology of Grace (Right-brained message neural receptors) and the deductive (-e-frequency/function), Exegetical Economy of Law/Language/Logic (Left-brained DNA Codex receptors). Special Case Note: Only Physical Universe is available to metric/numeric systems comprehensive, transliterative, and predictive evidence confirmation.

 

ReGenesis Theory Vision:

 

Our nature-spirit Information System is optimally comprehended  through analogically transliterating the Ecology of Physical Material Values through the PermaCultured [permanently encultured] Gratitude-Values lens of Yang/Yin Balanced RE-ligious Information Codex: The Golden Rule and the Golden Ratio are restatements of +/-.50%Yang Self-Individuation = -.50%Yin Not-Polynomial “Other” Identity without  excluding Boundary [heuristically assumed to be infinitely inclusive]/2 =  0-soul Vertex/Vortex. (See Buckminster Fuller, Gregori Perelman, and Laotse).

 

First Stage: Urgent Need for a Climatic Trend Reversal AND Grateful-Mindful Leadership

 

The most gratifying attribute of cyclical and self-reproducing Living Systems is their permanence, their lack of ending. Their greatest weakness is the reverse view; there is no place in particular to begin to tell their story.

 

Connecticut is in disarray. Faith in the future evaporates with the aquifer, and healthy air and soil and lives. The sense of urgency, not for more random change, but for socio-economic and ecological transformation, emergently grows toward its own ominous conclusion; Business As Usual is dying.

 

The voluntary, and sometimes involuntary, exodus of the Millennial Generation from our places of formation–schools, temples, churches, farms, skilled labor guilds, extended families and small villages—leads to a healthy heuristic assumption that our need for urgency is sufficiently tilted toward a new “highest and best use” Search status.  As an emergent post-millennial community of (0)-Carbon Footprint Faith, perhaps we are ready to re-link (re-ligion) our PermaCultured Golden Rule/Ratio Traditions to our Left-Brain’s favorite child, Deductive Scientific Method.

 

The literature on organizing improvement within faith communities (and the term faithless community appears oxymoronic to anyone who has ever tried to live in the semblance of a sane community, so perhaps we can simply agree that any assembly of people deserving the appellation community also deserves to be thought of as a “faith community”) redundantly emphasizes two necessary ingredients for successful change, urgency and mindful-grateful leadership; leadership quality that is itself openly and inclusively responsive to constituents. While some emphasize urgency over effective leadership (Schaller, Macy and Johnstone, Gershon, Kotter) and others appear to emphasize  effective leadership over sense of urgency (McNeal, Bass, Schwarz, Dale, Atlee), probably we all agree that having both is optimal, and presumably necessary to sustain community spirit for revival into perpetuity.

 

The proposed D. Min. project topic, “Intentional ReGenesis: A Case Study in PermaCultured Youth Sustainability through EcoMinistry Formation,” is metrically and naturally rooted in Buckminster Fuller’s Theory of Regenerativity. However, it is spiritually and normatively rooted in an elaborate polycultural map. On this map, the Dalai Lama’s definition of compassion will point toward a collective sense of urgency to relieve shared suffering. Our Polyculture Map also uses the Dalai Lama’s definition of mindfulness as the necessary avenue toward an effective leadership of prehensile, enthymematic, and diastatically engorged gratitude.

 

Fuller’s Metaphysical metrics and predictions regarding “an eternally changeless definition of all understanding,” translated into Taoist, Buddhist, and Trinitarian terminology, offer us the heuristic assumption that the most regeneratively balanced ecology is the one that is most sustainable and resilient through transformative change. We will define this Prime Relationship Balance as:

Compassionate suffering Yin (purgative awareness) = -0 Prime-Linear Appositional Information about urgent disvalue (Ex-Formative sociopathology beliefs), AND

Mind/grate-ful mutual leadership Yang (sublimation is defined as mutual-exegetical synergetic understanding) = +1.00% Prime Binary Information System Value

In other words: Greatest Effect (Yang+e) with Least Effort (Yin-e) Balances PermaCulturally when assets/strengths are recognized as gratuitous resources to overcome our current socioeconomic pathology, or weakness. This is a Yang/Yin holistic feminist-inclusively-balanced teleological ecology.

When Yang and Yin levels within any one ecosystem, or community, are in balance, then we have an optimal environment for self-perpetuating and sustaining (regenerative) Deep Growth.  Harmonious Tao-Centered trends facilitate multi-species’ (and multi-religious Traditions’) mutual nourishment, health, and well-being. Permaculture Design and Positive Deviance (PD) principles provide a ubiquitous and deep learning ecology through the development of language steeped in natural system metaphor, metric-numeric reiterative system-pattern development, and feminist/holistic therapeutic communication paradigms (David Abram, Julian Jaynes, Laura S. Brown, Miriam Therese Winter).

Second Stage: Cooperative Symbiotic Growth v. Competitive Linear Progress Myths

The literature on effective models for managing sustainable development includes some diversity of thought about how to best measure success. Are we about the business of growing in size, perpetually, across time, continuing to grow in numbers until the individual community, or paradigm, or belief system, or language, or species has created a monoculture? This sounds uncomfortably akin to Dr. Seuss’s parable of The Lorax. Alarmingly rapid changes in climate are teaching us that this way of defining human success points toward its own ultimate demise, bringing down most of our other-species allies with us. Basic laws of thermodynamic balance remind us that if the resources we expend outweigh the resources we take in on a sustained basis, then entropy describes our future. Our community’s most sustainable growth with least dissonance to the larger ecology may best be informed by a Deep Learning read of Fletcher Peacock’s Water the Flowers, Not the Weeds.

Much of the literature on growth of communities places more emphasis on qualitative measurements of success, or effectiveness. We might think of these outcomes as the slow, natural, rooting growth toward depth; becoming embedded in sustainable root networks of diversity and mutual enrichment (Dale, McNeal, Schwarz, Macy and Johnstone). To grow as a person of faith is to grow as a mutual minister embedded in a polyculture of EcoMinistry (Eco conjoins Economy and Ecology). Effective leadership follows growth in compassion; compassion emerges through the mutuality of cooperative, mindful, grateful development and stewardship. This natural systems analogical paradigm lies at the heart of Fuller’s Metaphysics of gratitude, belonging to the Commons, Spaceship Earth, (rather than materialistic reductionism, the memes of property and ownership), and the symbiotic, precessive, relationship-co-designing/desiring, trend of self-regenerative ecosystems.

Buckminster Fuller was  interested, in his later years, in a Theory of Regenerativity. In his Synergetics and Synergetics 2 (1975, 1979), especially Synergetics 2, he may have anticipated Gregori Perelman’s proof of the soul conjecture (1994) in Mathematics’ Group Theory, assuming n-dimensional symmetric, elliptic, structural boundaries-as-Vertex/Vortex Janus-faced Relationship. Hierarchically staged (folding and unfolding) relationships in a 0-soul Core Vertex Universe are isomorphic, and therefore mutually holonic.

It is precisely this symmetrical/appositional Information Codex as normative that may have connected, for Fuller, with the issue of Special Case Information Systems as the land of Physics. Fuller defines our Whole Systems Universe as: “the integral of all metaphysical and physical phenomena.” (1075.22, 1979)  Universe as a mental place of comprehended relationship AND the Exterior Landscape of physical/natural thermodynamic laws, AND an iterative conversation of mutual teaching-learning. He summarizes the metric and rhythmic significance of Einstein’s, and his own, prehensile attraction toward an optimally satisfying Universal Field Theory as

Whereas the physical disintegrates entropically to a limit of velocity and disorder, the metaphysically operative mind displays a reverse pattern to that of physical entropy [ e.g. Not-Polynomial Time and Space mental-universe only; exclusive of Physical phenomena], wherewith to define lastingly the mind seeks the orderliness of the principles that are discovered.  As the human definitions can never be perfect [analogically holonic], the metaphysical mind of humans can only amplify and simplify the human statement of the comprehensive orderliness discovered and periodically reconfirmed by further experiences. (1052.60, 1979)

 

Third Stage: What is comprehensible (Polynomial Information-P) is appositional to what is proven to be Not-Polynomial Information-NP (confirmed not-real value).

Fuller believed that Polynomial Time and Space enjoy a self-perpetuating timeless P=NP equity balance. Information develops in ways that are normatively analogous to a Taoist description of Yang = +100% of Universal Natural Energy System and Yin = (-)100% of Universal Metaphysical System. Natural (Physical) systems thereby form the normative boundaries for (0) Balanced universal information system hierarchical-holonic structure.

Stored awareness of natural law boundaries within organic systems is Codex. Information Codex is bound by dimensional binary Information Balance structure, or staging, constraints of sequence and pattern, that we again discover in William Thurston’s 8-possible Prime Universes–spatial and/or temporal–in Group Theory. This Codex assumes that Polynomial Space/Time is indeed reversely equivalent to Not-Polynomial Metaphysical-Mental Codex Place/Moment Metric Systems. When that underlying assumption is supported and celebrated by our bicameral humanity, then Earth and her inhabitants improve our teleological pilgrimage trajectory toward consonant/dissonant abundant balance. Faith and hope flourish in a 4-Based Deep Econometric-Ecology, and blossom through Original Instruction Code to resist not-thriving, lack of string-resilience, increasing Problems of Incommensurability, in a bionic-binary-balanced In-forming Trans-Analogizing Metric/Linguistic Communication System.

Fuller often notes that the precessive/recessive patterns of space/time are redundantly expressed in the basic organic and sub-atomic structures of natural energy systems. Fuller’s Figure 203.09 (1975) predicts the underlying Codex expressed in the Higgs Boson, the tetrahedral 4-Staged structure of logic and trigonometry, laws of thermodynamic balance, analogy, communication, organic system regeneration (the life/death/fertilization/new-generation cycles of plants, and the 4-Season Earth-Sun Cycle Rotation,  for example), RNA, octaves, and double-bind-fractals.

Fourth Stage: Aha! Insight and Fractal Synergetic Rhythm Metrics

It is interesting to speculate that Fuller may have, at least implicitly, predicted that a Millennial Generation would PermaCulturally become aware of the implications of his Theory of ReGenerativity. Eventually, when the springtime of  human faith becomes ripe for Regenesis, we might find a successful resolution of Einstein’s pilgrimage of only relative-success, where P and NP remain winterized as not necessarily symmetrical; yet we hope they reflect Tao.

Earth, air, water, and bio-systems are overheating and moving toward entropic loss of Information organizing capacity, which will reverse after political, economic, and religious leaders recognize the abundant comprehensive power of  (0) Balanced In/Ex-Formation as both normatively and metrically balanced.[1] In other words, if it were not true that Polynomial equals Not-Polynomial Information in reverse linear, hierarchical, and fractal-staged Prime Relationship sequence, then human comprehension would not be possible.  When we comprehend (Fuller’s parallel to the Dalai Lama’s universal “mindfulness”)  that Not-Polynomial Ex-Formation, in any (0) soul Prime Rooted Information Universe, equals (-)100% of Polynomial Deductive Logic Information pattern sequence, and rhythm, humanly cognizable in the eternal/permanent inductive moment.

Fuller provides us with a reverse linear-time rhythmic projection toward our immediate Aha! Experience in Figure 1130.24, pp. 452-3, in which the Second Millennial Generation rather miraculously, maybe even heroically, embraces the fundamental laws of thermodynamically balanced gratitude, ethically and naturally and spiritually, normatively and inductively, even synaptically. An ergetic un-forming, unfolding, abundantly diastatic retrovirus reveals her “anti-matter” Not-Self=NP. Discovering her as the shy, virginal Yin Muse of GratitudeInfused Creative Synergy, the feminist, our shared Right-Hemisphere reveals -.50% of the Original Instruction Codex soul; it is Self optimizing to do no harm to Other. Yang/Yin ReGenerative dynamic equilibrium revolves a taproot back to our First Millennium’s Golden Rule, Ratio, and Elixir. Individuated-Self is to Other as Other has always been to our We-Self RNA Community String, Story, Song.

To comprehend the Commons as we would have the Commons sustainably communicate with Humans (certainly including Self), is to optimize nutritional and economic abundance, depth, and wisdom. The Commons, including metaphysically encultured pilgrimage Traditions back to our Original Instruction, teaches our teleological mission to ReGenerate Deep Ecology.

 

Stage Five: TrimTab Primary Continuous Quality Improvement (CQI) Principle of Greatest Effect for Least Effort: adhere to Golden Rule/Ratio

As mystics, polymaths, artists, architects, have been noticing from earliest shamanic proto-history to present, the greatest effect for least effort  fundamental design principle is a radically inclusive Golden Rule because we are all in this mess together (Macy and Johnstone). We literally and figuratively, normatively and metrically, nutritionally and bionically, naturally and spiritually, metaphysically and physically, are what we have absorbed from our progenitors; we absorb what is already potentiated (gratuitously prehensile, compelling, co-attracting) in the next Holonic Place/Moment.  When our Bicameral Species globally comprehends our eisegetical Internal Landscape of Graced Ecology and exegetical External Landscape are mutually reiterative[2], then Fuller predicts (and perhaps Teilhard de Chardin) a Cosmic Aha! Event. This diastatic cultural event follows the dramatic comprehension of sustainable and equitable abundance through balanced gratitude-mindfulness. Our mutual suffering emerges as the emphatic and obvious reverse of our optimized confluent wisdom. Socioeconomic pathology conjoins socioecological therapy.

Wisdom, then, recommends mutually other-optimizing intent and commitment to cooperate socioeconomically and ecologically with the Commons (these are Win-Win Game Theory strategies for outcome optimization), which is the Explicate-Order (David Bohm)  Exterior Landscape of our diverse polycultures, nutrient streams, communication systems. Grace-filled cooperative intent and practice evolves from our universally shared PrimeRoot Zero; a Deep Learning mutually-sustaining Core Vertex, liminally co-circumscribing a Feminist-Octave 4-Based Vortex.

We become abundantly sufficient, EcoMinistry balanced, when we practice our Species’ vocational trajectory back to the nutrient communication strings rejoining us to a future globally inclusive Gold-Standard Polyculture. This long-range, 8-generation, Original Instruction is now emerging through the moment-to-moment recognition of ourselves in grateful relation with Others, and SacredOther as the absorbed nutrients that In-Form “We-Self” identity.

 

Stage Six: EcoMinister as Dynamic We/Me Win-Win Facilitator

Christian Schwarz chooses empowering facilitative leaders as the first of his eight necessary qualities for Natural Church Development optimization. “These pastors equip, support, motivate, and mentor individuals,”…. “They do not use lay workers as ‘helpers’.” (p. 24) This is leadership operating in a cooperative transaction economy, and ecology. Capitalists and socialists, government regulators and “free” enterprise advocates alike need not apply for the role of Reverse-Millennial ReGenesis leader. Empowerment optimizes as grateful cooperation becomes equilateral, mutually initiated and received. This is a highly mindful and enriching cooperative value exchange—equal value for equal value. Enterprise is never free; there are always energy transfers in any endeavor, any change, movement, vocation, mission, business. Profit that only works one way is a distorted view; it lacks value-balance.

Leaders who realize their own empowerment by empowering others experience how the “all by itself” [TrimTab-post synergetic “gift” Yields derived from yoking GreatestEffect-TherapyStrength with LeastEffort-Pathology] principle contributes to growth. (p. 25)

Mutually empowering iterative loops are the economic-ecologists Positive Deviance way of advocating the benefits of designed-inclusion for optimizing cooperative transactions. Appreciative Inquiry (rooted in hope of mutual gratitude) within an intentionally diverse polyculture, is more likely to result in a long-term sustainably successful mutual-profit balance, than operating within a monocultural ecosystem. Positive Deviance selects for indigenous assets in response to urgent, and collectively shared, eco-pathologies. Cooperative value transfers intend win-win symbiotic value optimization—the emergent Ecology of Gratuitous/Gift all by itself Positively Deviant Evolution. This is the kind of reality that sounds like our most abundant purpose is to grow in mutual compassion and gratefully inclusive mindfulness, of “WeSelf” co-prehensile Awareness. The fruits of compassion are cooperative-oriented transactions, expressions of significant mutual gratitude relationships.

Schwarz further observes that empowering sense-builders appreciate bipolar balance between “goal” and “relationship” orientations. In his theological paradigm, too many of us are either imbalanced toward a technocratic Me-faith (YangSpirit) or a spiritualistic We-hope(YinSpirit).  It is the adept religious leader who is able to consistently self-and-other empower, keeping both her faith-in-self-optimization focus, and hope-for-prime-relationship development, in equipoised balance.

Our polymathic ReGenesis EcoMinister maintains an internal and external holonic landscape that compassionately reflects gratitude for self as part of other, through hope for other as part of self; a combination of the Golden Rule and the enthymematic solidarity-awareness that “we are all, most-gratefully, in this together.”  This is a solidarity that echoes the sacramental marriage bond, having a double-bind synergetic intent—but applied universally, radically, inclusively, embracing all species and all of nature.

Our millennial Positive Deviance facilitator transliterates the symbol-patterns within and between self and other during an inclusive pilgrimage toward a mutually re-discovered Universe of ultimate co-passion. This sounds like a good love thing. But, is this theology supported by what we discover in natural patterns of healthy development? This, after all, is the infrastructural analogy behind Schwarz’s thesis; we are an In-formation Bicamerally-Coded Language-string-reiteration Species of perpetually reincarnating nature-Events. He implies that  spiritual and/or metaphysical information is morphologically comprehended through recognition of incarnated natural elements, confluent and dissonant symbols, value exchanges, and their systemic relationship patterns, development sequences and stages. These natural elements are in dynamic evolutionary relationship, so we can notice nature’s patterns to improve understanding of our regenerating Universe, and perhaps vice versa.

 

Stage Seven: Deep-Rooting PermaCultured EcoMinistry

The ReGenesis Project vision is that we are already an emergent Species of quasi-cooperative EcoMinister wanna-be’s. This Turning Point Generation faces a uniquely critical opportunity and is potentiated for this socioeco-equity transitional moment. Our hypothesis is that grace-filled apprehension toward a holistic teleological self- and world-view is more prominent within the Reverse-Bi-Millennial-ErgeticCusp Generation, and their PermaCultured RetroPositive Deviant elders. Further, our Project goal is to accelerate and democratize this Deep Grace/Gratitude Ecology through a variety of Dynamic Facilitation interreligious and secular youth leadership development venues. If we model a regenerative, dynamically inclusive process of Appreciative Inquiry, then the medium of dialogue will naturally revolve toward a mutually-held plan for regenerative Self-People-Earth development, with diverse paradigmatic applications—economics, creative design information technology, neighborhood revitalization, holistic health care, Time/Space v. Moment/Place autistic bipolar-affective dissonance therapy, Deep Learning pedagogy, green technology development toward 0 carbon footprint, improved non-violent communication practice, child, youth, and family well-being CQI policy reform, and public discernment/dialogue choice-making.

The Positive Deviance (PD) concept is based on the observation that in every community or organization there are a few individuals or groups whose uncommon but successful behaviors and strategies have enabled them to find better solutions to problems than their neighbors who face the same challenges and barriers and have access to [the] same resources.

 

The PD approach is a problem solving, asset-based approach grounded in the fact that communities have assets or resources they haven’t tapped. 

Basic Field Guide to the Positive Deviance Approach, http://www.positivedeviance.org

 

Appreciative Inquiry (AI) is a method for studying and changing social systems (groups, organizations, communities) that advocates collective inquiry into the best of what is in order to imagine what could be, followed by collective design of a desired future state that is compelling and thus, does not require the use of incentives, coercion or persuasion for planned change to occur.

Gervase R. Bushe, “Appreciative Inquiry,” http://www.wikipedia.org

 

Both Appreciative Inquiry and Positive Deviance are community-improvement oriented systems models. Both easily fall within the Interior and Exterior Landscape vision of Permaculture Design, as well as Positive Psychology, and Fuller’s Holistic Teleology. AI and PD (which we will stipulate as a symbol for both Positive Deviance and Permaculture Design) actively search for the strengths currently indigenous to the community, or polyculture, to optimize these untapped  resources for sustainable Continuous Quality Improvement. This is precisely what Christian Schwarz recommends to strategically bolster the faith community’s greatest weakness. Respond to system weakness by strategically focusing BusinessAsUsual- Deviant strength-nutrient out-lyers.

Achieving the greatest effect with the least effort is, perhaps, the prime principle of Permaculture Design. Designing for synergetic development by intentionally working with natural systemic assets, positive deviance, is efficient, and the most sustainable option among those available at any given time.  Appreciate Inquiry and Dynamic Facilitation are public dialogue technologies designed to include affected, effected, and infected constituencies as diversely as possible in discovering the Positively Deviant resources already indigenous to the choice-making community.  These PD resources are the dialogue population’s most under-employed, most richly-potentiated, asset toward a consensus solution of value. Consensus is limited only by the sufficiency of listening deeply to the diversity within the polyculture.   The more diversity within the active polyculture, dynamically drawn-into the effective dialogue environment, the more sustainable the solution—rather like adding tangy yogurt to warm milk, to diastatically regenerate the milk into an optimized population of yogurt.

Schwarz (logically confluent with Fuller, and Macy and Johnstone) refers to the economy of grace, or gratitude, as the all by itself principle; the emergent outcome of system regeneration. Abundant fruition, or fertility, of a system is not only greatest effect with least effort, it is also the evidence of what Buckminster Fuller calls emergent precession. Metaphysical precessions and all natural precession trending systems comprehend, or culminate, in a fractal moment of regenerative intent, given sufficient urgency and an adroitly facilitated Appreciate Inquiry learning culture. Precession is positive trend toward syntropy, synergy, forming symbiotic, confluent, harmoniously intricate networks of patterned relationship. Positive Deviance may be what natural teleologists recognize as Original Meaning or Golden Rule-Original Instruction.  Regardless, the taproot of comprehension brings further nourishment to the Original Meaning of enthymematic gratitude—now, also the all by itself intuitive effects of grace, or teleological gift, bounty, extra, optimized abundance within any system, paradigm, universe. Grace is what creation adds to learning; new identity adds to authentic self-articulation; care-giving mutual intent adds to the norms of belonging and nutrition and therapeutic practice (see Brown).

A great deal of Fuller systems comprehension turns (literally and figuratively) on understanding his binary map for transliteration between the Interior Landscape (Metaphysical Universe) and Exterior Landscape (Physical Universe).

System insideness and outsideness means two congruent, concave-convex systems, four corner-defining ins, and their four opposite windows through which the omnidirectional out nothingness is revealed. The eight were there all the time. The fourness of self and the fourness of otherness = comprehension. Comprehension involves tuned-in octave resonance as well as omnidirectional and local angular integrity. (268.02, 1979)

 

Systems are aggregates of four or more critically contiguous relevant events having neither solidity nor surface or linear continuity. Events are systemic. (400.26, 1975)

 

PD ReGenesis, whether Physical or Metaphysical, is trending toward better balance, toward both increased consonance and her Non-Polynomial Corollary, decreased dissonance.

 

Stage Eight: Youth EcoMinistry Pilgrims follow our ReGenesis Metric and Economic Value Story

 

A world of peace and prosperity

For all inhabitants of planet Earth

Can

And will

Come to fruition

Through rock-solid relationships.

 

Cross-cultural and interfaith relationships,

Personal and social relationships

[Economic and ecological relationships,

Natural and spiritual relationship,

Yang and Yin relationship

Day and Night relationship

Prediction and Reverse-Membering relationship

Explicate and Implicate Order relationship

Diastasis and Metanoia

Seeing and Tasting

Deduction and Induction

Alpha-Based Deductive Reasoning[3] and Holonic Feminist, Creative Learning, Nurturant-PayItForward Cooperative, EcoMinistry, Intentional Community of Gratitude [and Song/Oral Re-Telling] Ecology[4]

Quantum and Ex-formation relationship]

Are ways whereby we replicate

Our relationship with

The Divine.

 

Relationship is a succulent and savory fruit

Of our quantum Spirit.

 

The proof is

In the experience.

 

Spirit

Invites us

To taste

And

M. T. Winter, p.167, 2009, with some analogically creative liberties

 

 

This Youth ReGenesis EcoMinistry D. Min. Project begins with two Core Teams: an Interior Landscape (Metaphysics/Math) Team and an Exterior Landscape (Physical/Ecology) Team.

Both Teams will follow a Deep Learning path that explores Synergetics, Positive Deviance, Appreciative Inquiry, Non-Violent Communication, and Permaculture Design Principles. A second generation of Youth-led Teams will follow the combined work of these Core Teams, folding core findings into additional religious spirit- and nature-based languages and paradigms. For example, in what ways do the Eastern meaning and context of gratitude v. material objectification parallel (and appear dissonant with) the Abrahamic Myth-ecology of grace v. law, female v. male, Yin v. Yang, Wisdom v. Word, GraceCreation v. Structured Codex balance-issues?

How might these confluence/dissonance trends be further analogically enriched, or questioned, by Fuller’s understanding of ergetic, gravitational, function within a dynamically repercussive Metaphysical/Physical, recessive/precessive, implicated/explicated, Ex-formed/In-formation, NotPolynomial/Polynomial Space and Time Universe?

What, if anything, does the ReGenesis of Self Care, People Care, and Earth Care as 3 sides of a (0) soul Center have to do with my WeSelf Individuation, our WeSelf EcoMinistry intentionally inclusive vocation toward positive gratitude-nutrition-thriving cooperative outcomes, and my Natural HomePresence [Physically In-carnated] future?

The Metaphysics/Math Team, from secular and religious schools, and youth groups, will explore the hypothesis:

The universe is optimally comprehensible, and valued, when (0) Soul Vectored, thermodynamically and informationally equipoised.

Fuller’s geometry, mapped onto the Group Theory work of William Thurston and Gregori Perelman, defines (0), soul, vector, universe, and regenerative system.

CQI Standards: Report responds to the Clay Math Institute’s Challenge: Does Polynomial equal Not-Polynomial?

2.  The Exterior Landscape Team will explore a teleological hypothesis, from http://www.neweconomicsnetwork.org:

The purpose of an economic system is to organize human activities in ways that support healthy and resilient…ecosystems for both present and future generations.

If both hypotheses 1 and 2 are True, then the 1st hypothesis may work as an analogical definition of :

•           integral mindfulness, personally, bio-ethically, and as a species; Beyond Religion, Dalai Lama;

  • an eternally changeless definition of all understanding; B. Fuller;

•           the Tao of Yang/Yin self-perpetuating and –defining Prime Relationship (0); Taoism;

•           the regenerative development of a Deep Learning Ecology, in Permaculture Design and Positive Deviance design/planning practice;

•           a new human species awareness of our universally recycled nature’s soul as Prime Relationship (0) = E/e² (Fuller, Euler) and 1/0 = Yang/Yin = P/NP = Me Individual-CoreVertex/We Identity-CoreVortex.

Impact

•           If Fuller’s belief that a comprehended metaphysical infrastructure, meeting his optimized TrimTab design specifications, is correct,

•           If the Youth ReGenesis Project is able to seed that comprehension through publishing a satisfactory response to the Clay Millennium Math Problem of  Polynomial Versus Not-Polynomial equity conjectural proof,

•           If Fuller’s Theory of Regeneration can be comprehended accurately as a (0) Soul Core-Vector Conjecture, then both Fuller and Stephen Cook predict globally transformative implications.

Then, Locally:

  • At least $1 million in cash award from the Clay Math Institute, to be reinvested in sustainability outcomes, potentially leading to $10 million in annual transaction values within 5 years, and $100 million flowing through a global PD cooperative financial investment stream, within 10 years.
  • Extensive lawn to organic edible landscape conversions; urban bicycle/pedestrian transportation infrastructure.
  • Sustainable and resilient, robust, ReGenesis Permaculture Design/Positive Deviance cooperative industry, vocations, formational and well-being strategies, financial support, regenerative evolution.

And Globally:

  • More dancing in circles; less marching in squares.
  • Holonic ReEco-Ligion: (0) Soul Teleological Original Gold Value Standard of PermaCultured Metaphysics and Mythology
  • Symbiotic Deductive/Inductive Deep Creative Learning Ecology of Gratitude/Grace
  • Unitarian Universalists embrace Buckminster Fuller in a more comprehensive way, and perhaps other religious traditions as well, the result of a universal field theory that conjoins (re-ligions) math, science, ethics, nature, communication, (+)in/(-)ex formation, and spirituality.

 

 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Abram, David, The Spell of the Sensuous, Vintage, New York, 1996.

Atlee, Tom, Empowering Public Wisdom: A Practical Vision of Citizen-Led Politics, Evolver Editions, Berkeley, 2012.

Bateson, Gregory, Mind and Nature, E. P. Dutton, New York, 1979.

Bird, Warren, (Ed.), Wisdom from Lyle E. Schaller, Abingdon, Nashville, 2012.

Brown, Laura S, Subversive Dialogues: Theory in Feminist Therapy, Basic Books, New York, 1994.

Dalai Lama, Beyond Religion: Ethics for a Whole World, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Boston-New York, 2011.

Dale, Robert D, Leadership for a Changing Church: Charting the Shape of the River, Abingdon, Nashville, 1998.

Fuller, R. Buckminster, Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking, MacMillan, New York, 1975.

Fuller, R Buckminster, Synergetics: Further Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking, MacMillan, 1979.

Gershon, David, Social Change 2.0: A Blueprint for Reinventing our World, Highpoint, W. Hurley, NY, 2009.

Kuhn, Thomas S, The Road Since Structure, University of Chicago, 2000.

Kuijsten, Marcel, (Ed.), The Julian Jaynes Collection, Julian Jaynes Society, Henderson, NV, 2012.

Lin Yutang, (Trans.), The Wisdom of Laotse, Modern Library, NY, 1948.

Macy, Joanna & Chris Johnstone, Active Hope: How to Face the Mess We’re in without Going Crazy, New World Library, Novato, CA, 2012.

Mann, Alice, Can Our Church Live? Redeveloping Congregations in Decline, Alban Institute, Inc., 1999.

McNeal, Reggie, Missional Communities: The Rise of the Post-Congregational Church, Jossey-Bass, SF, CA, 2011.

Norton, Robert & David Brenders, Communication & Consequences: Laws of Interaction, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Mahwah, NJ, 1996.

Peacock, Fletcher, Water the Flowers, Not the Weeds, 2nd Ed., Open Heart, Quebec, 2001

Pierson, Phillip M., The Metaphysics of Buckminster Fuller: How to Let the Universe Work for You, Phillip M. Pierson, 2014.

Ripley, George, Compound of Alchymy, 1471.

Schwarz, Christian A., Natural Church Development,  (7th Ed.), ChurchSmart Resources, Emmelsbull, Germany, 1996.

Thich Nhat Hanh, The Art of Communication, [which is also about the art of optimizing nutritional Yields in an Ecology of Gratitude], HarperOne, NY, 2013.

Winter, Miriam Therese, Paradoxology: Spirituality in a Quantum Universe, Orbis, NY, 2009.

 

[1] See Fig. 505.41, for a 4-Season view of In-Formation and Ex-Formation—temporal dimension reverse circuited, or implicate ordered, as per Bohm.

[2] Mutual reiterative feedback loops between Universe and Self, or any two or more variables, are what Fuller understands as a “precession” trajectory toward a synergetic event. Precession is co-prehensile, an attraction toward mutual gift, grace, gratitude, and, probably follows the energy metrics of gravitational pull, as compared to radiantly Ex-forming energy.

[3] See David Abram and Julian Jaynes on linguistic/logic/deductive Left-Brained dominance and the concomitant NotSoPermaCultural developments, starting just about 2,000 years ago.

[4] Please see Buckminster Fuller on the teleological significance of virginity and ex-formation in regenerative systems (e.g., #1076, 1979)

 

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The Wealth Economy: Turning from Competition to Cooperation

Toward a PermaCultured Cooperative Financial Exchange Ecoministry

Just because someone is religious doesn’t necessarily mean that that person, or corporate person, doesn’t have an embarrassment of riches.

I look back over my 30 years in community building, 20 years as a grants and contracts researcher, writer, and manager, and have a profound discomfort with our philanthropic economy, with how it works as an economic system.  It is highly inefficient.  It has learned nothing about cooperative systems development theory; and seems to show no systemic value for the cost-effective benefits of returning to the community the wealth from which the wealth originated, as effectively as possible.

 I could probably write a book about cooperative economic theory; which no one would read.  So, let me give a specific example of an alternative model that has merit for consideration.

Today, if you are graduating from high school in the U.S., you can fill out one master application form and submit it to a central network for consideration.  I believe every college and university in the U.S. can acquire access to that information (not sure about information confidentiality boundaries, but let’s assume that this now becomes public information).  If a higher ed institution is seriously interested in having you join their student body, then they may ask you for a little supplemental info.

If a networked application system can work for individuals seeking a social investment in their personal contributions to society, then why on earth do we need 10 to 20 separate on-line sites for cooperative neighborhood and community, and regional groups to post who they are, what they have done to assess their shared values for the future, what they want to do, and what outcomes they expect, and how much money they need to do that?  Maybe diversity is a good thing in that regard.  Assuming that it is, why wouldn’t we want the stewards of our wealth to proactively harvest this information, organized so they could search for their specific social investment priorities and service territories, and consider these postings as applications for funding worthy of being treated like any customized application sent specifically to their overworked, tired, exhausted, frustrated grant officers who have a stack of applications sitting on their desks, most of which have only moderate synergy with what their Board of Directors wants to fund right now? I wonder how many grant officers have told me they feel like screening editors in a Publishing House, wading through stacks of material that they have to read just because somebody sent it specifically to them; not because it necessarily has anything to do with what they are hoping to support.

Perhaps the wealth deposit stewards could form a Cooperative Philanthropic Network that would help them figure out who gets to invest  how much in our intentional community vocations? The Ashoka Foundation comes to mind as one that has tried to blend their grants with a social investment format, but it is cumbersome primarily in its isolation from a broader network of opportunity.  And, the underlying economic assumption continues to be a competition between value outcomes that would work more optimally, and sustainably, within a cooperative economy.

The main beneficiaries of the current philanthropic system are grant writers and managers, foundation grant officers and senior executives, and the financial institutions that are managing the wealth deposits without (as a general rule) any consideration of value other than the accumulation of more capital, so the foundations can invest the interest only back into the community. But God only knows what permacultural crisis their stock portfolio is supporting in communities across our overheated planet.

Meanwhile fossil-fuel based wealth deposit growth is starting to slow down and our kids are increasingly recognizing that their adult reality will be lived out in a major realignment of social and economic systems, trending toward becoming information and communication-based. They will either re-learn how to live in a cooperatively balanced ecology and economy, or their kids will face some serious survival yuck.

If we have a shared vocation as a species to fix this, it seems like the prophetic voices are those who are participating in these stewarded public conversations.  Is it appropriate for the D&D practitioner community to profile our wealth management system as a shared social investment values problem? Do communication facilitators inappropriately step out of their role if they speak collectively as a community that has been listening to regular people talk about what they want and don’t want for their futures and their childrens’ futures, and what that implies about a better, more efficient and effective, system for social investment than what we do now?

I’m not trying to bite the hand that has fed me so effectively during my career, but I do wonder if our wealth investment system is cancerously leaking our own life blood.  And, it seems like it would be fairly easy to fix, if we wanted to.

One week later:

I am currently trying out a prototype survey to use with individuals, families, and project teams.  I need to be a bit more sure that this will be viable as a format to begin what the Mondragon educators refer to as personal development.
 I am waiting for a book I just learned about that is something about spiral and integral learning and communication development process.  It sounds like there might be considerable confluence with sociocracy.
I had a highly resonant reaction to the Mundukide Foundation’s mission statement and what it sounds like they are trying to do.  I am wondering if it would be possible to gather religious sector philanthropists into a collaboration with cooperative and permaculture/ecological network agencies at  national and international levels to rethink our philanthropic economy as one that could be based on direct meme-value, rather than capital value. It seems like we might need an incarnation of this collaboration at a regional level to draw on as a resource for a more global aspiration. In other words, if a permaculture cooperative network were learning how to invest in shared social value enterprises and vocations in the CT River Valley (its only obvious advantage being that is where I happen to live right now–not that there is any infrastructure in place that looks particularly promising) and beginning to sync and develop more cooperative efficiency and economic inclusiveness for marginalized populations, then we could tell that story as a way of helping each other think about what that might look like globally.
Both the research and philanthropic grant sectors are increasingly drawn toward cooperative enterprises for learning, and for providing services. However, both grant sectors still use competitive processes to attract and process proposals.  Even as enlightened an entity as the Buckminster Fuller Institute’s Fellowship program uses this model (and if institutional culture should understand the efficiencies of synergetics I would think it would be the BFI).  I was reading through a list of their 10 finalists in 2013, of which they were probably only going to actively work with one.  That is their structure.  But, there were 3 of those 10 that were basically the same idea (something to do with a new design to bring potable water to villages with dysfunctional wells, if I remember correctly), but the focus was on three different areas of the planet, and their design concepts were probably not entirely redundant.  Even so, if I could take a cursory glance at their list of finalists and see how much more bang for their buck we could all potentially get by helping those 3 finalists work together, well, you can finish that sentence for yourself.
Imagine what might happen if we had 10 seasoned grant writers actively scanning the 10 most active social investment websites for cooperative potential between proposed projects with similar missions and compatible outcomes.  These grant “brokers” are acting as a collaborative team, sharing information about emergent trends and shaping potential multiple partners into effective cooperative partners with a shared revenue resource. If this Cooperative Research and Philanthropy Team was connected to a network of philanthropists, they could act as a communication hub between the wealth deposits and a portfolio of synchronized cooperative ventures needing grants and, possibly, loans.
There are a couple of advocacy dimensions to this cooperative economic development proposal.  One is that religious and other “we are all in this together” oriented wealth deposit managers really need to talk to their grantor and social investor colleagues about their investment portfolios; encouraging more and more of them to invest larger and larger portions of their portfolios in community-value-driven vocations/enterprises, rather than financial bottom-line corporations that may be using our capital wealth for purposes that are not sustainable, potentially doing far more harm with the philanthropist’s money than the interest that they spend on grants does good.  Most religious sector philanthropists have divested of investments that are ecologically counter-productive. If this trend became normative for wealthy foundations and individuals all across the planet, then a capital-accumulation valued economy might begin turning around toward a cooperative development valued economy and ecology.
The second area of potential advocacy has to do with tax structure. If wealth deposit managers took the lead in talking to government officials and other people in the top 1% globally about the havoc their accumulation is causing to the entire ecosystem, perhaps we could arrive at some consensus that the top 1% of earners each year (after taxes) could afford to either invest maybe 80% of that after-tax net income in cooperative/environmentally sustainable enterprises/vocations/habitations or pay that amount in taxes.  In this way, the top 1% (subtracting last year’s income from last year’s taxes/social investments) would cycle each year.  It would be only the most cancerously growing, self-isolating, wealth deposits that would pay the ultra-high pay-back tax, or social investment, rate in consecutive years.
Then maybe we could think about doing something similar, but at a lower rate, for the top 2 to 5%, then the top 6 to 10%.  Reverse-trending wealth deposits toward a cooperative and inclusive economy might mean that the meme, or Information, value of currency would self-balance, if done globally and incrementally.  Maybe we wouldn’t need Community Currency barter-exchange transfer records if we re-oriented our wealth deposits to actually serve our sustainable socioeconomic and cultural values.
But, this all needs to be talked about, especially by people who are already invested in permacultured systems-analysis and design, cooperative workers and residers, New Economy and Natural Resource and Whole Systems thinkers, and the religious/spiritual sector.
My personal paradigm is what is emerging under the label “EcoMinistry.” The difference between human service and ministry is that service is something a provider brings to a client while ministry is something that two or more people do together, from a position of solidarity. Eco is short for ecology, but it also works for economy; as an ecologically informed economy.  So, in my sometimes not-so-humble perspective, we are an emerging species of ecoministers. This is about how we live sustainably together under the assumption that the Golden Rule always and inclusively applies to all species and all systems and all paradigms and all traditions and all memes, and all communication. It is a philosophy of mutually-assured nonviolence and affinitive hope.
 I believe I know of a handful of foundation people regionally and nationally who would like to have this agenda spelled out theoretically and then described in terms of project activities, development trajectory, and budgeting. That is the direction I am taking and I am actively looking for a core design and consulting team toward that end.
None of this is intended to distract from the primacy of working directly with small groups of marginalized kids and young adults, more or less following the Mondragon pedagogical model of personal development, leading to social development, leading to shared vocational teamwork and intentional community-building.  I find myself drawn to “deep listening” and “deep learning” models that are confluent with nonviolent communication and lifestyle paradigms. My 17 year old son and I are taking a University of Stanford MOOG starting on January 20th on the Deep Learning pedagogical model. We are also both taking a Permaculture Design Certification class. We are planning to apply what we learn with kids and young adults failing to thrive in the transition from poor learning environments into employment.  Our emphasis will be on developing core healthy relationships to build shared, sustainable, vocations. (which I will choose to think of as ecoministry, but I won’t scare everyone with that concept, I think; at least not the first day). Our local headquarters is called the Auerfarm 4H Education Center, an independent non-profit, but part of the Cooperative Extension Service here in Connecticut.  It is also a cooperative farm and includes some ingredients of an intentional residential community, with potential for more of the same.
I am learning to trust the process and let a big vision unfold in its own time.  If it is not built together, then it is not worth building.  The valuable feedback I am getting (and not always accepted with grace) is that I get too far ahead of myself, too impatient with development process, and too unrealistic about deadlines for implementing good public discernment and engagement design.  To be less driven by grantor’s deadlines, and more in control of what has internal design integrity.  If the design and theory and inclusive process are meant to be permanently sustainable, and revolutionary, then I must trust that money and other needed resources (nutrients) will be there when we need them. Whether it grows legs or not will ultimately not be about cash flow; it will be about good inclusive sustainable, permacultured design.
This feels like a highly promising opportunity to globally improve the effectiveness for health and well-being by working with philanthropic leaders to develop a cooperative grant information exchange network.  This, rather than continuing to ask for cooperative proposals while setting up competitive application processes that are highly inefficient at a global scale, if our species’ goal is to optimize sustainable well-being by increasing the effective flow of our rather too calcified wealth deposits.  No biological system can optimize nutrient flow and health when fuel-resources are hoarded for self-selecting subsystem nutrition, leaving the remainder of the planet to scramble for the crumbs.

We, the big WE, might benefit from inventing a variation on the stock exchange brokerage model that would be rooted in well-being value, rather than capital value; the exchange would be in the form of grants and low-interest loans rather than stocks, and a broker would be someone who works within a cooperative social investment ecoministry team, scanning on-line, internationally for cooperative investment opportunities that show high synergetic value (using something like Hubbard’s Whole Systems analysis, Spiral Development Theory, etc.), looking for resources to achieve significant permacultural optimization outcomes all over the planet, packaging these independent projects, adding a budget using cooperative synergy assumptions, and sending out the umbrella grant/loan package to appropriate philanthropists, within a religious, cooperative, ecological, peace, and public discourse investor network. A network of ecoministry (I think ministry can work in the British secular humanist way here) philanthropists to consider the umbrella investment portfolio collaboratively, each taking the piece most appropriate to their individual priorities, usually geographic.

There is something in here not only about shifting from competitive capital values to cooperative well-being values, but also to re-framing religious/spiritual ecology into its permanently encultured, proto-religious economic system roots; a regeneration of planetary information-transfer development systems. Not a species capacity before  the current evolution-potential of the WWW.

From one guy trying to learn his ecoministry vocation, hopefully to another.
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The Global Cooperative Development Network: CQI PermaCulture Design Team Project

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I woke up this morning remembering my Time Traveling Math Historian dream, wondering, actually kind of obsessed about it, like a schizophrenic trying to see through his meds.

 

But, Ivy had a poopy diaper, and so did Daquan, and Sunday morning rudely returned to Business As Usual.  Which is OK, I think.  I rather like Business As Usual at home.  It helps when we are all here, rather than just some of us.  It helps even more when all of us work together, rather than choosing not to invest in each other, at the time, and in the ways, and amounts of time, that I prefer.  Although, of course, I have never bothered to tell any of them what those ways and means might be.  Anyway, Business As Usual.

 

Today I have to design a PermaCulture Development class for the global Cooperative Economy Network, started by a consortium of social investors, public facilitators and community organizers, new economists, permaculture and ecology-missioned groups, intentional communities, including research cooperatives and funders, some public sector, most of the grant-making entities. In a sense I guess each of these subgroups is an intentional community, with its own language and justice issues, priorities, concerns, specific missions and vocations on behalf of our planet. Yet it feels like they share a common value and active disvalue infrastructure. I can see why this social constellation wants to look clear-eyed at their shared mission: to optimize Continuous Quality Improvement, natural growth, re-establish a global permacultured economy and ecology, inclusive of all species, with this Transition Generation, and the 7 generations to follow.

 

So that’s why I told them I would write up a cooperative contract proposal with them (not for them) and that proposal begins with asking each adult participating in this PermaCulture System Design training to bring one person under the age of 25 with them, if at all possible one of their own children, or a younger relative, down to the age of 12. These are the people that we all need to listen to about how to design their PermaCulture Planet.  In Group Development Theory they act as a Lie Group, but that is certainly not appropriate for this event.  I don’t know.  For now, let’s just go with the “Shaman Team” and the “Observing Team.”

 

OK, so let’s see. 

 

 NSF, Division of Social and Economic Sciences: Science of Organizations

 

Organizations — private and public, established and entrepreneurial, designed and emergent, formal and informal, profit and nonprofit — are critical to the well-being of nations and their citizens. They are of crucial importance for producing goods and services, creating value, providing jobs, and achieving social goals. So, how do we improve the design and emergence, development and deployment, and management and ultimate effectiveness of organizations of all kinds?

 

The Cooperative Economy Network (CEN) is committed to our fundamental understanding of how cooperative systems develop, form and operate. The PermaCulture Design Project will develop and refine Regenerative System Development Theory, and  develop new measures and standards for Continuous Quality Improvement of community and global development projects. Educational, Communication, and Information Systems implications may be of value to the business practitioner, policy-maker, educator, parent, and research communities.

 

The PermaCulture Design Project will illuminate aspects of organizations as organic systems of coordinated diversity, self-management, and inclusive governance.

 

Germane theoretical paradigms include (but are not limited to) organizational theory, behavior, sociology and economics, business policy and strategy, communication sciences, entrepreneurship, human resource management, information sciences, geometrics and Group Theory, Synergetics (B. Fuller), managerial and organizational cognition, operations management, public administration, social and industrial psychology, and technology and innovation management.

Phenomena studied will include (but are not limited to) value and power structures, iteration frequencies, choice-making effectiveness, competitiveness, innovation, communication  and Binary Information System dynamics, change and evolution.

Levels of analysis will include organizational, cross-organizational cooperative relationships, and global implications, and will include individual and team value metrics.

Research methods  include archival analyses, surveys, simulation, comparative case studies, and network analyses.

 

Intellectual merit: The Cooperative Economy Network’s final report will further articulate a Cooperative-Appositional System Theory of Evolution.

 

This Cooperative Development Research Project has the potential to provide globally inclusive societal benefits, meeting sustainable value optimization standards for a socially, culturally, and ecologically balanced cooperative economy.

 

First Day:

 

Facilitator:

 

Welcome, and thank you for saying yes to our invitation to spend some time listening and speaking with each other. Those around the walls are our Observer Team. They are also your parents, aunts, uncles, grandparents, or maybe even that crazy adult who asked you to do this with them, as a partnership. You around this inner circle are members of a Transition Generation, ages 12 to 24.

 

Here is what David Orr predicted for your future:  “The generation now being educated will have to do what we, the present generation, [this was published in 1997, so you would be 22 now if you had been in kindergarten at age 5 in 1997] have been unable or unwilling to do: stabilize a world population that is growing at the rate of a quarter of a million each day, stabilize and then reduce the emission of greenhouse gases, which threatens to change the climate—perhaps disastrously; protect biological diversity, now declining at an estimated rate of one hundred to two hundred species per day, reverse the destruction of rain-forests (both tropical and temperate), now being lost at the rate of one hundred and sixteen square miles or more each day; and conserve soils; now being eroded at the rate of sixty-five million tons per day.” You must “learn how to use energy and materials with great efficiency.” You “must learn how to utilize solar energy in all its forms.” You “must rebuild the economy in order to eliminate waste and pollution.” You “must learn how to manage renewable resources for the long term.” You “must begin the great work of repairing, as much as possible, the damage done to the earth in the past two hundred years of industrialization. And, you must do all of this while addressing worsening social and racial inequities. No generation has ever faced a more daunting agenda.” (Hannum, ed. Environmental Literacy: Education as if the Earth Mattered)

 

I believe the life trajectory situation of your children and their children has reached a transition era of crisis. Those of us in this room are hear to listen to what your experience has been like so far, and what you think you might like to do as a Transition Generation before your kids arrive (if kids are in your future) and maybe even with your kids as you imagine your adult futures.

 

We begin today with three fundamental questions for each of you.  In the first round we will ask these questions in reference to what happens in this room, with and to these people.  Then we will talk about the same three questions in reference to what happens outside this room, with everybody else.

 

1.  What interests you most? What is the creative or learning scenario that feels most compelling to you? You would do more of what if you could?  If you had the resources, time, money, property, health, education? What seems most compelling to you right now, in this situation, that we might even be able to do together here?

 

[High faith power indicator.]

 

2.  What makes you angry, gets you really riled up? What is the specific scenario that is most likely to get you to erupt, that could conceivably happen to one or more people in this room, yourself included? What will really tick you off if somebody does it, or doesn’t do it, today?

 

[High hope for justice, equity, mutual respect.]

 

3. What makes you sad.  What is the scenario in which you are most likely to imagine yourself as lonely, isolated, incapacitated, depressed that could happen to you today?  What would really shut you down and out, and make it impossible for you to care to participate any further? Imagine yourself really sad and hopelessly bored by mid-afternoon today, what happened to get you into that mental space?

 

[High enthymematic reverse-resolution.  Compare to “1” above.]

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