Worldchanging: Bright Green: Community as Technology

Description

Community as Technology

By Andrew Outhwaite

With new options for collaboration, telecommunications and social networking coming online at a furious pace, it's worth pondering how society will continue to change as a result. Having the tools in place is, of course, only half the battle. The rest is learning to shift our ways of thinking and working away from models that favor segregated specialties and exclusivity to relationships that encourage and enhance co-creation.

I recently had an experience that underscored just how important our ability to work together will become. As a participant in the Hållbarhet2009 Learning Journey and Conference in Australia, I saw firsthand what climate change looks like. As my group traveled for ten days through southern Australia, we came face-to-face with the frightening signs of a warming world: charred landscapes from the worst bushfires on record , resulting in hundreds of human fatalities from vaporized towns, and thousands of kangaroos, koalas and other fauna dead from heat and thirst. Mighty rivers like the Murray, Darling and Snowy were reduced to a trickle in the south while the whole landscape becomes one swollen river in the north. In the midst of raging fires, alerting, helping and being helped by your neighbours was the difference between life and death for many Australians.

I traveled with 24 fellow alumni of the Masters in Strategic Leadership Towards Sustainability program , and we brought with us our own tools and technologies for making a bright green future. We encountered many other tools along the way: new engineering technologies (e.g. biochar from pyrolysis , organic solar cells and biodiesel plants ), new cognitive and conceptual 'technologies' and tools (e.g. The Natural Step Resilience ), new agricultural technologies (e.g. biodynamic agriculture , and permaculture community centres ) and new social technologies (e.g. Open Space ...

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http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/009494.html

http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/009494.html