Schumacher College – Enterprising Ecosystems

I’ve always thought of them as those little (or big) situations in time when useful lessons about ‘being in the world’ suddenly reveal themselves ‘in the world’. Life imitating art imitating life imitating on and on – our mental models, if sufficiently malleable, working themselves out in constant flow – always wrong, of course, but sometimes useful – as we attempt to interpret the phenomena before our eyes (all imaginative senses, really), including what makes its way into our conscious experience. Teachable moments.

From Troy Vine’s workshop on Goethean colour theory.

Believe it or not, that kind of talk is more or less how we normally begin our graduate course in Regenerative Economics and is emblematic of an aspect of our inquiry here at Schumacher College. We describe our course as pluralistic and transdisciplinary. We begin with a deep dive into holistic science, deep observation and phenomenology, then move on to systems, complexity, ecology and deep ecology. We practice interrogating our presuppositions, reflections and observations. A foundational element of our epistemology concerns making sense of our reality as human beings as it plays out in time and space, and in our case, paying special attention to the social, political, economic, cultural, ecological systems near and far, and from multiple perspectives. ‘There are many ways of knowing’, one would hear us say; ‘many paths to many mountaintops’, a favourite metaphor.

Continue reading “Teachable Moments: Crisis and what might be next at Schumacher College “ →

Perhaps your head, dear reader, is already full of ideas. This is expected given our historical moment. There’s growing consensus that the myriad wicked crises bearing down on us, at all scales with existential threat and increasing dystopian probability, are a consequence of the current dominant political-economic paradigm and its realisation in the world. Neo-classical economics does not offer enough in the way of help to both fully understand these challenges nor the solutions.

If we’re to avoid catastrophe, then this political-economic reality must change from being its cause to becoming its solution, both in the extremely short run and in the very long. This is the central challenge for all the generations of this century.

Continue reading “The kind of economics we need right now” →