Cities are Evolving Climate Story

Humans and the cities we have created are permanently locked into a never-ending learning cycle, to create ever more complex adaptations to protect increasingly more complex cities.

In the Integral City 2.0 Online Conference (2012), five critical threats to human populations in cities were identified: climate, energy, water, food and finance (Hamilton et al., 2013; Hamilton and Sanders, 2013). These threats, are deeply interconnected and must be viewed within a systemic framework that considers all five sets of intelligences in cities – Contextual, Integral (Individual/Collective), Strategic and Evolutionary.

In keeping with my contemplation of the Nattrass article “How ARE we to go on together: Our Evolutionary Crossroads” I want to consider the story we tell ourselves about climate – and how that story may be increasing the dissonance we (as a species) are experiencing as individuals, organizations, cities and the planet.

I propose that the growing magnitude of this dissonance about climate change is exactly what we need in order to make a significant leap in our collective worldviews about climate change.

The Nattrasses bring this dissonance sharply to mind as they reflect on the increasingly anxious questions that have emerged since our early doubts about human relationship to Nature (a form of Collective Intelligence). They ask (as could our mothers too).

• Is humanity bankrupting nature?
• Is humanity on a collision course with the natural world?
• What is our ecological footprint?
• What are ecosystem services and how do we calculate their value?
• Are human activities causing climate change?
• What are the limits to growth on this planet?
• Is there a population bomb ticking?
• Can we meet our needs today and leave enough for future generations to meet theirs as well?
• What does it mean to overshoot ecological capacity?

 

However, the integral perspective on the cycle of human learning (well explored by Clare Graves) observes that why humans learn depends on precisely their encounters/relationships with dissonance. Without experiencing dissonance we essentially are not motivated to change and so we don’t change!

Many believe that the greatest dissonance the globe faces today is climate change. It is impacting all life forms, including ours. The disturbing situation is though, that we cannot definitively say what is causing climate change? But however, we define the causal equation it appears that human behavior is a contributing factor. And commensurately human intelligence is required to mitigate, adapt and if possible prevent it.

Climate is inescapably a prime element of the habitats in which we live – including and probably especially cities. As individuals we co-exist with our habitats from the smallest personal social scales (Map 2) to the largest Kosmic scales (Map 4, Map 5). Within these inner and outer spectra of human groupings (Map 2) and environmental contexts, we co-create and co-evolve with our habitats.

Earlier in this 21^st century cities became the habitats of 50%+ of humanity (90% in developed world). Cities are the most complex human system yet created. As social holons they are complex adaptive systems with potential for orders of learning that magnify the intelligence of any one individual, family, group, organization, sector or neighbourhood. The Nattrasses (2015) point out:

Virtually any [person, team and] organization of any substance has its worldview, its system of intelligibility, rooted firmly in the Old Story. Each operates, and succeeds or fails, within the underlying assumptions found in the Old Story. In turn, individual organizations must still operate within a global system that is also massively embedded in the Old Story.  And in order for any organization to be an influential leader of change for sustainability, it must continue to be successful within the existing Old Story system. Public companies, for example, must continue to show growth and profits, and report them to shareholders every three months, all the while trying to revision and recreate the company and its markets from a sustainability perspective. The task we face is like nothing that has ever taken place in industrial society—it is comparable to rebuilding a jet liner while in flight 10,000 meters above ground.  How do leaders help lead this transformation from inside the very systems that need to change, while at the same time avoiding major economic or social disruptions?

Cities are containers of holons, social holons, relationships, exchanges and emergents – at every scale. As a whole I have long considered them to be a massively complex meshwork. But in practice cities are actually meshworks of meshworks. [See the full definition of meshworking intelligence here.]

The operational values of meshworks in living systems is that they enable a continuous stream of natural, living complex structures to emerge – so that the living system can make the most efficient use of energy by capturing the structures (and infrastructures) that have enabled survival and sustainability; for example this is how all the structures that enable cities to function have emerged – from family hearths, to clans, kingdoms, bureaucracies, businesses social networks, communications systems and global alliances (Map 4). At the same time effective meshworks ensure that background activity never stops self-organizing – thus enabling creative adaptation and emergence (e.g. the activities of inventors, artists, researchers, entrepreneurs, developers, etc.).

This “natural” meshworking capacity of human systems has never been successfully suppressed in the long run, by any governance system, technology or habitat – because the nature of earthly life has ensured that dissonance is always with us – challenging our hierarchies and demanding new solutions for life-threatening problems. But as the Nattrasses point out, the assumptions and worldviews in the Old Story of how cities work, have entrenched the blindness to the impact of human influence on climate change (whatever the cause) into the very organs (organizations) of the living city itself.

The bad news is that cities converge all the problems and potentials of humanity into a vortex of toxic threats. The good news is that cities converge all the problems and potentials of humanity into a spiral of dissonances that trigger the emergence of possibilities and intelligences. (In fact I have suggested that Integral Cities that are alive, resilient and optimized operate with a suite of 12 intelligences (in 5 sets).)

The dissonances caused by climate change challenge all five sets of city intelligences:  Contexting/ Integral – Individual and Collective /Strategic/ Evolutionary.

Integral City: 12  Intelligences

As we are waking up to the very real threats of climate change to our cities, our 4 city Voices act like clumsy children who are not yet effective managers of their bio/psycho/cultural/social capacities. As cities we are bumbling around – but, because we are noticing that the Old Story of the mechanical city does not answer all the questions that arise, our dissonances are thrown back in our collective face(s). In other words, our city habitats let us know in very real terms when our learning is not sufficient to the task at hand.

As Brian and Mary Nattrass point out, we have come to a place on this planet where we have never been before. As a species who has hardly reached our teenagehood, we long for parents who might give us another story to explain life.

Rio, Kyoto, Seattle, Copenhagen, Paris

But, cities as the most complex human system we have yet created are discovering that we will have to parent ourselves. One by one cities are learning the hard lessons and bit by bit, we are teaching the human systems within our cities the difficult learning lessons of climate change pioneers. By extension these cities on the early-change bandwagon are beginning to share their hard lessons with our planet of cities – as each becomes ready to learn (i.e. when the dissonance meter gets loud enough, such as happened in New Orleans and Sendai).

As the clarion call for climate change awareness has sounded now for more than a quarter century, the early storytellers of this New Story have despaired at what has seemed collective deafness. They expected nations and organizations to take the lead. But now we see that it is perhaps not surprising that cities have taken the lead, and continue to be at the forefront of storytellers of a different way.

Cities as convergences of human capacities have the most to lose by not addressing climate change. They sit at the nexus points of Earth’s greatest tectonic contractions, water flows, air sheds, food production, energy consumption and material production. And they also concentrate the greatest quantity of evolutionary intelligence to focus on the problems at hand.

Many early adopters have agonized over the apparent resistance of organizations to respond effectively (or at all) to climate change. But by definition successful organizations have not only been anchored in the Old Story – they have verified it, sustained it and perpetuated it (as the Nattrasses noted above).

But with the lenses of complexity, living systems and evolutionary wholeness, we realize that cities are a more complex order of human systems than organizations. Cities are effectively organizations of organizations. And that is why a meshwork (discussed above) is the (fractal) explanation of how they become effective at working together.

So now that our cities have woken up and see strategies for climate change, what role can cities play in changing the story of climate change? More precisely what roles can the 4 Voices of the city working together play in transitioning from the Old Story to the New Story?

Citizens can:

1. Ask the tough questions
2. Keep wellbeing in mind
3. Practise the Master Code

Civic Managers can:

4. Connect all the systems inside the city and between cities
5. Take Governance initiatives – defy federal/national/global resistances
6. Amplify governance initiatives (like Obama’s announcements of US/China Climate Change Agreement)
7. Emerge the new structure(s) by prototyping and experimenting. (Like Curitiba building the city for people not cars).

Civil Society can:

8. Convene the intelligence/story challengers/researchers for ongoing forums of discovery (Rio, Kyoto, Seattle, Copenhagen, Paris have not been in vein – each convening has moved the story forward).
9. Create Metrics and Collect the Indicators – ISO Standard for Cities
10. Mediate smaller the effectiveness and capacity of all scales – both those smaller than cities such as organizations and those larger scales like nations and the planet itself

Developers, Researchers and Business can:

11. Prototype change
12. Align organizations of organizations – learn how to meshwork with intention
13. Keep the meshwork a living, intentional capacity building process.

A final word from Brian and Mary Nattrass:

In the thousands of years of remembered human histories, it has been expressed in many ways in many times among many peoples that we are that being who lives between Heaven and Earth—ever torn between the god-like qualities of our highest selves and the bestial qualities of our animal selves. Never in our history as a species have we been so urgently called to live and be inspired by the qualities of our better natures; and to grow beyond the tug of our weaker selves. This is a challenge for us as individuals just as much as for our organizations and our society—because ultimately, our organizations and our societies are only expressions of us. So we come now to our evolutionary challenge—the very real challenge of our time. It is the story we are still writing together. It is that socially negotiated story that will ultimately answer the question: How are we to go on together?

It is my contention that key cities are at the stage of evolution where the dissonances they are experiencing have awakened them to being proactive on their own behalf and on behalf of the planet of cities. These cities who are early adopters of the New Integral City story are creating the habitats that will enable us all to go on together.

 

References

Graves, C. (2005). The Never Ending Quest: A Treatise on an Emergent Cyclical Conception of Adult Behavioral Systems and Their Development. Santa Barbara, CA: ECLET Publishing.

Hamilton, M. (2008). Integral City: Evolutionary Intelligences for the Human Hive. Gabriola Island BC: New Society Publishers.

Hamilton, M., & Sanders, B. (2013). Integral City 2.0 Online Conference 2012 Proceedings: A Radically Optimistic Inquiry Into Operating System 2.0 M. Hamilton (Ed.)   Retrieved from http://www.scribd.com/doc/120713339/Integral-City-2-0-Online-Conference-2012-A-Radically-Optimistic-Inquiry-into-Operating-System-2-0

Hamilton, M., & etal. (2013). Integral City 2.0 Online Conference 2012 Appendices: A Radically Optimistic Inquiry Into Operating System 2.0 – 36 Interviews M. Hamilton (Ed.)   Retrieved from http://www.scribd.com/doc/123005653/Integral-City-2-0-Online-Conference-2012-Appendices-A-Radically-Optimistic-Inquiry-into-Operating-System-2-0-36-Interviews

Nattrass, B., & Nattrass, M. (2015). How ARE We To Go On Together? Our Evolutionary Crossroads. Integral Leadership Review January-February (Canada Issue). Retrieved from http://integralleadershipreview.com/12795-215-go-together-evolutionary-crossroads/

 

This blog is one of a series that explores the relevance and application of ideas to the Integral City, in the articles published in the Integral Leadership Review – Canada Issue, 2015, curated and Guest Edited by Marilyn Hamilton.

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Cities Will Turn Symbolic Climate Change Handshake into Real Action

What does the US-China handshake on climate change mean for our Planet of Cities?

When Eagle Shakes Hands with the Dragon

On the one hand it should give them confidence that they are the seed beds of global change – for it is cities who took the initiative on the climate file. While the US nation both denied and ignored the issue of climate change, over 600 US cities took action in support of the Kyoto Accord to reduce greenhouse gases. While China refused to take climate action seriously at any of the global tables assembled to address the issue, her cities became the stage for the undeniable evidence that denying this truth killed people and productivity.

It is in cities where the sciences of sustainability, resilience, eco-footprints have been enunciated, explored and extolled. Cities have always been Earth’s acupressure points, where evidence accumulates about the impacts and costs of living beyond our ability to renew resources, failing to understand the interconnection of planetary systems and refusing to accept responsibility for our out-sized energy eco-footprints.

The individuality of city life conditions coupled with the universality of the human condition has allowed us to see  that we have to value and evaluate the impacts of climate change in unique ways for each city – but with the benefit of a growing collective intelligence about geographical and ecological contexts, integrated (even transcultural) strategies and evolutionary foresight.

What the US-China handshake on climate change may mean for cities, is that finally the national policy cloak that covers – and more usually chokes – city access to finances to act on the climate change file may be lifted and loosened. The natural competitiveness between nations, who have used the US-China reluctance to commit to a global climate change agreement, as an excuse for their own inaction, will be pressured both externally and internally to join the norming process that is finally emerging on the climate change file at a global scale.

The handshakes that cities may now make with each other on climate change can accelerate, deepen and expand city capacity to adapt, mitigate and prevent climate-caused disasters – even if it is only because the symbolic doors of global economic progress and energy supply chains have been kicked open by this bi-national handshake agreement.

It is now up to cities to act as if the symbolism of the handshake gives them license for real action on the climate change file across the whole planet of cities. This gives a radically new meaning to and potential for action on the synchronistic emergence of the ISO 37120 standard on city measurements.

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ISO Fast Tracks Standard for City Quality of Life

International \Organization for Standards (ISO) has announced a new standard for quality of life in cities.

ISO City Standard (retrieved from http://conference.cityminded.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Patricia_McCarney_PDF.pdf)

In London, UK on November 17-18, 2014, ISO in conjunction the World Council on City Data (WCCD) launches the  the first international standard for sustainable cities, ISO 37120: Sustainable development of communities — Indicators for city services and quality of life.

Working with cities who want a standard created by and for cities, WCCD and ISO 37120 have announced an initial suite of 46 indicators.  These indicators, enable the 4 Voices of the City, to access objective, verified (by auditors) vital signs (aka indicators) to to compare services and performance levels with other cities around the world. Civic managers (generally the policy makers in the city) can now be held accountable by citizens, businesses and civil society organizations by using the ISO 37120 standards as a tool that is  evidence based and annually updated.

ISO Comparative Analytics for Cities (retrieved from http://conference.cityminded.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Patricia_McCarney_PDF.pdf)

ISO lists the benefits of the standard for cities as providing:

• More effective governance and delivery of services
• Local and international benchmarking and planning
• Informed decision making for policy makers and city managers
• Learning across cities
• Recognition by international entities
• Leverage for funding by cities with senior levels of government
• Framework for sustainability planning
• Transparency and open data for investment attractiveness

The WCCD has identified 20 foundation cities who have agreed to adopt ISO 37120 and help build the WCCD, basing its initial set of indicators on 17 Themes.

17 Themes for City Indicators (retrieved from http://conference.cityminded.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Patricia_McCarney_PDF.pdf)

 

As we have written elsewhere, for an Integral City, key city indicators must be balanced amongst the four quadrants and based on the city as a living, complex adaptive system. While at least one of the key indicators we have been tracking since our Integral City 2.0 Online Conference is missing (Food) – we think this looks like a promising start with proxies for all the quadrants in place. Moreover, the 20 foundation cities are distributed around the world, so that they will seed the growth of the indicators in different geographies and cultures. (Bogotá, Guadalajara, Boston, Toronto, London, Barcelona, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Helsinki, Arnman, Dubai, Makkah, Minna, Johannesburg, Haiphong, Shanghai, Makati, Melbourne).

Kudos to the working teams at WCCD and all the cities who have participated!!!

Key information in this blog was gleaned from Meeting of the Minds, webinar on New Urban Indicators for City Services and Quality of Life  http://cityminded.org/cal/new-urban-indicators-city-services-quality-life

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Navigating Intelligence Enables Course Corrections

Navigating intelligence allows us to scan the environment and make decisions about our course corrections using Integral Vital Signs Monitors (IVSM). An IVSM is a reporting system whose design is based on an integral framework. It utilizes life-sustaining indicators and communicates its results in a universal language.

An IVSM system mines existing databases, gathers new data and reports observations in a global graphic language that is accessible to all (in multiple versions and multiple translations). Its purpose is for providing life-giving data for making decisions that develop, maintain and emerge the health of local and global systems of interest, for the current generations and the generations to come.

IVSM’s can exist on any scale of the human system, and are designed so that they can scale up and down from the individual to the planet.

Navigating intelligence develops a vital signs monitor with indicators and benchmarks that recognize :

• climate systems that affect natural and human sustainability (eg. rainfall, water tables)
• the limits of carrying capacity for the basic resources of air, land and water
• bio-psycho-cultural-social health indicators for individuals, families, workplaces, neighborhoods, and city systems
• sustainable economies
• sustainable infrastructures for transportation, health, education and commercial development
• congruent and incongruent neighbours that affect the health of the natural and human systems (eg. air shed, water quality, transportation systems, human movement,communicable diseases, etc. )
• physical, psychological, cultural and social boundaries

Navigating intelligence that uses IVSM adds value in four ways:

1. The essential design elements of the IVSM provide a framework, indicator organizer and common language to communicate results across cultures. We can see the investment of resources that we have made in each quadrant and level; ie. we can track energy, matter and information.
2. We can translate the investments into terms of traditional financial management; strategic financial investment; density of social networks; or sustainability vectors such as carbon-based resources (or all).
3. By the use of hyper linking, we can see the linkage between realities (four quadrants); levels of complexity (eight plus levels); time (development/evolution); and scale.
4. It allows us to compare results internally within urban systems and externally between urban systems.

From an Integral Vital Signs Monitor is designed, the Integral Scorecard can become the reporting vehicle for informing all the stakeholders of the city. It tells us whether we are achieving the purpose and objectives of the city in a sustainable way. It reveals to us if we are amassing the energy, matter and information that we need to sustain ourselves. It is a way of mapping capacity and potential and has the power to reveal imbalances that indicate unsustainable practices.

Navigating intelligence using IVSM works hand in hand with Meshworking intelligence to design new governance systems that research, plan and manage the city.

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This blog is a prologue to the Integral City webinar conference  City 2.0 Co-Creating the Future of the Human Hive . We are inventing a new operating system for the city.  Click to get more details re the Free Expo and eLaboratory membership  scheduled September 4-27  2012. You are invited to attend and participate.

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Navigating Intelligence Discloses Wellbeing of the City

Navigating intelligence monitors and discloses the wellbeing or general condition of the city.

Many city information officers are now developing versions of vital signs monitor for monitoring and reporting the health of the city. From an eco-regional perspective the indicators should track what Jared Diamond noted every society must pay attention to for long-term survival:

• Climate change
• Environmental health of the eco-region
• The city’s responses to environmental problems
• Positive economic relationships with other cities and/or eco-regions
• Incongruent neighbouring cities and/or eco-regions

Vital Signs Monitors become Integrally (IVSM) framed when they serve as community indices to measure the quality of overall health and wellbeing.  This becomes owned by the whole community when community partners (like the education institutions, health care systems, justice system, economy, recreation facilities, city hall)  contribute core data so that a composite picture of the whole community emerges from the integral map.

As a result, each community partner has a stake in the success of the IVSM and together the community of partners gains insights how their interconnections contribute to the wellbeing of the whole city.

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This blog is a prologue to the Integral City webinar conference  City 2.0 Co-Creating the Future of the Human Hive . We are inventing a new operating system for the city.  Click to get more details re the Free Expo and eLaboratory membership  scheduled September 4-27  2012. You are invited to attend and participate.

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Cities Are Vital for Organizational Sustainability

Are economics and technological factors sufficient to incubate innovation and sustainability? At least they are a start to consider the importance of cities to organizational success.

That was a recent focus of Greenbiz forum where the growing recognition that the wellbeing of cities is an underlying condition for the success of organizations. Drawing from a recent report on the SustainAbility that identifies the States of Cities the discussion explored cities through the lenses of:

• Personal Values
• Decisive
• Connected
• Collaborative/Competitive
• Visceral
• Adaptive
• Experimental

What is really encouraging about this identification of city qualities is that they appear to align with the four capacities of an Integral City:

UL: Psychological Capacity

• Personal Values
• Decisive

LL: Relationship Capacity

• Collaborative

UR: Embodied Capacity

• Visceral
• Adaptive

LR: Systems Capacity

• Competitive
• Experimental

Furthermore this approach to SustainAbility appears to bring to the table the voices of stakeholders from the four quadrants of both the city and organizations. This is promising news for the future of Integral City Sustainability Planning. Perhaps the States of Cities will become the leading indicators of the wellbeing of City States?

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City Purpose: Glimpsing Prosperity Scorecards

Integral City proposes that all cities have a purpose that serves Earth’s sustainability and wellbeing. Glimmers that the value of purpose are breaking through into the world of organizational and business scorecards are showing up in the news and financial presss.

The Toronto Board of Trade just released a report showing how 7 major U.S. cities compare to 5 Canadian cities in 9 industrial sectors. We must recognize this opportunity to measure prosperity as the first step along the way to actually measuring wellbeing in cities.

The 9 clusters which effectively measure the success of business hubs in each city included:

• Auto & Parts
• Finance
• Food & Beverage
• Energy
• Transportation
• ICT
• Bio-Medical
• Aerospace
• Entertainment

It is not surprising to notice that each cluster is still very hard asset oriented, with little nod to the Creativity or Innovation that underlies the capacity for each and all of these clusters to be successful. While it may be interesting to note that Calgary’s success could be attributed to the nexus of the Finance and Energy sectors in the city, it is only a first step to acknowledging that the expertise, relationships, consciousness and culture in the city enable those sectors to perform at world class levels.

However, the practise of Prosperity Scorecarding is a shift in the right direction for seeing cities as purposeful contributors to the prosperity and wellbeing of the planet. Can we anticipate that such a beginning will open up to a whole Integral Vital Signs monitor in the not too distant future?

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Integral City 2.0 Develops Innovation Ecosystems

Integral City 2.0 innovation systems are emerging because conscious capitalists, governments, students and citizens are aligning strategies for leaders, organizations and governance systems to transform entire cities from resistant holdouts to resilient human hives. Humans as Gaia’s most “reflective organ” have located 50% of our species’ brain trust in the world’s cities.

We are starting to see the shape of Integral City 2.0 in places that have developed a variety of innovative frameworks and practical approaches to optimizing human co-existence. If we could combine and align these emergent designs into innovation ecosystems, we would create a resilience strategy that would move our human hives from City 1.0 to City 2.0 in service to a healthy planet. Five cities on five continents lead the way.

1. Curitiba, Brazil demonstrates an ability to develop individual capacity and organizational capital through people-friendly transportation systems and re-valuing eco-citizens who collect cooking oil, tires and even fallen leaves.

2. Sydney, Australia has developed Sustainability and Resilience strategies through the Sustainable Sydney 2030 Vision  for a Green, Global, and Connected City. It identified 10 targets and  five big moves embracing the city centre, transportation network, green corridors, community hubs and energy and water infrastructure.

3. Metro Vancouver, Canada  leverages community engagement and dynamic decision making that coalesces authority, power and influence, at breakfast meetings with citizens across 21 municipalities. They are anchoring three imperatives: regard for both local and global consequences and long-term impacts of decisions; recognizing and reflecting the interconnectedness and interdependence of systems; and being collaborative.

4. Songpa, South Korea demonstrates the value of Context mapping that integrates Place, Priorities, People and Planet. It completely removed a major freeway that bisected the city and fully restored the river that now has become the ecological and cultural centre of its urban life.

5. Murcia, Spain applies navigational dashboards that monitor vital signs of wellbeing across all city systems. It integrates KSF’s across city initiatives and objectives with multiple stakeholders. These measures include everything from reduction of energy consumption to school use of photo-voltaics to citizen awareness, especially immigrants, women, seniors and students.

What these Integral Cities 2.0 are proving, is that we can create the life conditions for innovation that will become a legacy to future generations. When we co-create City 2.0 habitats for innovation eco-systems we discover that:

• secure supply chains emerge in around the Integral City 2.0
• risk is mitigated through shared values and proximate peers
• we can retain and attract high-performers
• we create opportunities for sustainable energy efficiencies as we learn how to competitively recycle energy and effort in our eco-region;
• we can redefine value-added profitability not just for our organizations, but for the city, its eco-region and Gaia herself;
• our actions inevitably enhance our brand reputations.

Multiple stakeholders acting together in Integral City 2.0 create innovation ecosystems that become self-fulfilling – where we naturally align leaders, strategies and governance systems to develop caring capacities for taking care of people, taking care of priorities and taking care of this planet.

Download Links, Resources, Connections for Integral City 2.0 Developers at: http://www.integralcity.com/developers/

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Wellbeing indicator of a living system – “Could I die happy?”

Indicators of wellbeing have been a fascination of mine for many decades. Today I am contemplating the indicator of happiness – as in “Could I die happy today?”

The EU calls and I have my powerpoint bags packed with all the trends that show the Big Picture of Global Sustainability to share with Experience Integral  along with the Grok Talk Walk Rock Story I have to share with Gen X and GenY. Could I die happy that I have this opportunity to connect my (meshworking) Purpose with my environment? A big Yes!!

Connecting with the environment is one of three conditions of a living system. The other two are reproducing and surviving.

I have had direct encounters with those two in the last three months that have really put me on my edge.

First the surviving condition … I’ve been the bone marrow donor for a brother with lymphoma. Ouch what a potentially dehumanizing experience that can be!  All the medical system wants is my stem cells and they trade an “out of body experience” for my blood in exchange for the (better than) faint hope that my brother will be able to re-cover his immune system with the amazing quality of stem cells to become any organ/function the body needs. If you are really committed to sustainability how can you say no to such a request?  You can’t, because all at once you get to reproduce in a way only science and technology can “magically” now enable. If you are a person like me who has a perspective that we arise out of consciousness (and not matter) you imbue those stem cells with all the capacity you can charge into them before, during and after they are transplanted.

Let me tell you a bone marrow transplant (BMT) is a fairly clinical procedure for the donor but an incredibly risky and messy procedure for the recipient. They endure the complete destruction of their immune system in preparation for the BMT and then live on a series of chemical cocktails while the stem cells (hopefully – no guarantees) grow a new immune system in the recipient’s body.

But LIFE never guarantees anything, so even though my bro has days where he questions the choice that he made, I see (like a sister/mother) that his system is gradually gaining strength. I can’t hold him like a new baby but I do watch him work his way back up the mountain of life’s taken-for-granted capacities – eating solid food, walking a few steps, pushing furniture around (even vacuum cleaning is a major milestone :-), writing notes, responding to email, playing music, managing his anger, driving himself on purpose.  Like a mother I hug him every chance I get and I root like a cheer leader for every small gain in his white blood cell count and rejoice with him when the doc says he can drive again. My bro’s old body has been given a new lease on life – and together our stem cells our coming into our 100 day anniversary. Hopefully mine will have done their job and his will be taking over any day soon.  Perhaps then I will feel like the parent whose child has left home. Could I die happy with the pleasure of such a relational empty (but ever so full) nest??  Absolutely! (Though I await the results with small trepidation and intuitive optimism!!)

What’s more today I am ESPECIALLY buoyed by the other of LIFE’s manifesting conditions – the usual manner of human reproduction – the sweet sweet joy of the new life of Cole Stephen Perkin, born to my granddaughter Amanda Jenny Dobson Perkin. WOW!! I am a great grandmother!! I never expected such an honour!! I can’t believe how elated I feel!!. I had no direct genetic link to this birth but I feel as happy as if I did. Just a Kosmic connection to the young woman I taught to read 25 years ago as her (step) Granma. I really feel like celebrating!! And I feel an upswelling of affinity for all the conditions of LIFE in this special moment – that I/We/The Family have survived, reproduced and connected with our environment long enough to savour the magificence of existence through this new life!! It brings into focus all the other reasons for so deeply living life!! My gratitude is overwhelming!!

Could I die happy as a GGM? You betcha!!

As a living system I can die happy, simply BECAUSE I connect with my environment, reproduce and survive. Now that’s a pretty awesome measure of LIFE’s value, isn’t it?

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Climate Change Scoreboard

As we are striving to create new frameworks, approaches and paradigms, it is often easy to overlook how far we have come and what progress we are making. For someone, like Hazel Henderson, who has demonstrated decades of commitment to changing our perspectives on economic performance the following is good news indeed.

MH/Integral City

For Immediate Release:

NEW GLOBAL CLIMATE PROSPERITY SCOREBOARD FINDS OVER $1 TRILLION INVESTED IN GREEN SINCE 2007

 

Washington, DC – December  4, 2009 – Ethical Markets Media (USA and Brazil) and The Climate Prosperity Alliance today launched their Global Climate Prosperity Scoreboard® which tracks private investment in companies growing the green economy globally.  This new, never before reported number, showing $1,248,740,645,993.00 (over $1.248 trillion) in total investment since 2007, indicates how investors and entrepreneurs are leading governments in promoting sustainable growth.  The scoreboard totals investments in solar, wind, geothermal, ocean/hydro, energy efficiency and storage, and agriculture.  We purposefully omitted nuclear, “clean coal,” carbon capture and sequestration, and biofuels.  We indicate which investments have been publically announced and committed by major companies for 2010 and beyond.

 Dr. Marc A. Weiss, Chairman and CEO of Global Urban Development and Chair of the Climate Prosperity Alliance, said, “This $1.248 trillion of investments are not only from North America and Europe, but also from China, India, Brazil and other developing countries.  They indicate that the private sector currently is ahead of governments in understanding that during the 21st century, people, places, and organizations can only get richer by becoming greener and only earn more money by using fewer resources and reusing more. Private capital investment is now leading globally in promoting technological innovation and resource efficiency that will accelerate environmentally and socially sustainable industrial growth and economic development throughout the world.”

Dr. Hazel Henderson, futurist, author of Ethical Markets: Growing the Green Economy (Chelsea Green, 2006) and president of Ethical Markets Media, serves as vice-chair of the Climate Prosperity Alliance together with vice-chairs C.S. Kiang (China), Rodrigo Loures (Brazil), Lawrence Bloom (UK) and James Nixon (USA).  Dr. Henderson said, “Ethical Markets Media’s mission is reforming markets and growing the green economy globally.  Our Global Climate Prosperity Scoreboard® will be updated regularly to show progress toward the ecologically sustainable economies that are vital to our common future.  Societies are transitioning from the 300-year old, polluting, fossil-fueled Industrial Era to the advanced technologies of the information-rich Solar Age.”

The Climate Prosperity Alliance, a volunteer, global network of financiers, businesses, economic development authorities, scientists and NGOs is based on earth systems science, showing the widespread evidence of destruction caused by the now-obsolete technologies of the combustion-based Industrial Revolution and its extraction and exploitation of the Earth’s capital: oil, coal, gas, minerals, forests, water, land and biodiversity.  Human societies are now gradually re-industrializing our economies using the Earth’s income – the renewable energies of sun, wind, ocean/hydro, geothermal and non-agricultural biomass – based on human capital: new knowledge of planetary processes and ecosystems, designing our economies with Nature.

The Climate Prosperity Alliance uses the Climate Solutions 2 computer model of Australia’s Climate Risk Pty., showing how $1 trillion invested every year for the next 10 years can assure the global transition to sustainable prosperity and job growth.  This $10 trillion is less than the bailouts of failed banks in the USA and Europe and less than 10% of the world’s pension and institutional funds of $120 trillion.  Institutional fund managers can shift 10% of their assets away from hedge funds, risky derivatives and commodity speculation to real investments in a greener global economy, thereby assuring their beneficiaries a healthier future.

“While we encourage progress toward directly investing in growing the green economy, we urge government officials meeting in Copenhagen December 7-14, 2009, to follow the lead of these private investors that have already committed $1.248 trillion.  We applaud our pension fund colleagues of the UN Principles of Responsible Investing who have joined in pledges to allocate more of their members’ $19 trillion of assets into similar green companies.  Now, governments must go beyond arguing over targets, caps and carbon-trading – and follow the lead of China and the USA in their comprehensive plan for cooperation on clean energy and climate change.  Such a general agreement in Copenhagen can promote and underwrite more direct investments and growth of the green economy,” said Dr. Henderson.

The new Global Climate Prosperity Scoreboard® is researched and compiled by the Ethical Markets Media expert team: Timothy Nash, M.Sc., principal, Strategic Sustainable Investments, Toronto; Rachel Tubman, M.Sc., senior researcher/futurist; assisted by The Cleantech Group and members of the Ethical Markets Sustainability Research Group.  As these investments increase, the scoreboard will track totals, providing investors and governments with tangible evidence of the growing green economy.

Contacts:

• Dr. Hazel Henderson, president, Ethical Markets Media, www.ethicalmarkets.com, hazel.henderson@ethicalmarkets.com, 1-904-829-3140

• Dr. Marc A. Weiss, Chairman and CEO, Global Urban Development; and Chair, Climate Prosperity Alliance, www.climateprosperity.com, marcweiss@globalurban.org, 1-202-554-5891.

• Rosalinda Sanquiche, Executive Director, Ethical Markets Media, rosalinda.sanquiche@ethicalmarkets.com, 1-904-826-1381
• Timothy Jack Nash, Co-founder, Strategic Sustainable Investments, nash@ssinvest.com, 1-416-821-9179

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