Rediscovering Ways Of Understanding
Thursday, January 31st, 2008For those of you who are worrying or wondering about a lifestyle of health and sustainability…:
‘…Within this current benign and remarkably stable interglacial climate, humanity has developed agriculture, what we call civilisation, and finally global industrial culture. All of them have accelerated the pace and power of human cultural and environmental change, but all are dependent on the fragile stability of the interglacial paradise. While the adverse effects of global warming have created a reason once more to contemplate our dependence on larger forces and circumstances, any serious consideration of the next ice age (due any time in the next thousand years or so) would have us designing a modest, generalist, flexible culture, carried by a small global population able to make the transition into and through the long slow years of ice age. We need to break out of the delusion of apparently linear acceleration of human material and numerical progress to a world view in which everything is contained by cycles, waves and pulses that flow between polarities of great stability and intense change, all nested one within the other.
This cyclical view of time is not some new idea, but simply a rediscovery of ways of understanding that are embedded in human cultural history and our collective unconscious.’
Excerpt of: Permaculture / Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability by David Holmgren
You can keep digging in that context at www.art-ecology-education.org

