active hope – Seeding Our Future

Book Review: Active Hope by Macy and Johnstone

An excellent guide to personal resilience I have taken part in workshops led by both Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone, and regard them as two of the best teachers on personal resilience in a full sense of the phrase. Working in depth with this book could be a good start to exploring super-resilience. This book … Read more

Grow your own Happiness

60-90-minute online workshop Cultivate your wellbeing with gardening skills! Available for group bookingsWith Alan Heeks In these stormy times, we need new skills to stay happy. A cultivated ecosystem, like a garden, is a role model for human nature: this workshop shows how gardening methods can help you grow your own happiness and deepen the roots of your resilience. For example: Mulching and pruning to nourish your rootsComposting stress as a source of energyUse gardening skills like observation and creativityFind new ways to adapt to the climate crisisDraw inspiration from Nature to guide you in uncertainty Alan Heeks has over 25 years of experience exploring Natural Happiness with groups. It grows from creating a 130-acre organic farm and education centre at Magdalen Farm in West Dorset, and from gardening with his wife at home. In this online workshop, Alan will describe the Seven Seeds of Natural Happiness, and participants will have a chance to try some of them out. Alan is happy to take bookings for this event from environmental, community and other groups, at a time of their choosing for a moderate fee by negotiation. CONTACT LINK
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NATURAL HAPPINESS: cultivate your resilience with the Gardener’s Way

July 9-11 2021: at Hazel Hill Wood, near Salisbury With Alan Heeks, Jane Sanders and Marcos Frangos How can you stay happy when there’s too much change and uncertainty? This workshop shows you how: to cultivate yourself like a garden, and grow your own wellbeing by learning from natural ecosystems, using Alan’s unique Natural Happiness model. In this workshop we’ll explore these questions, with the natural ecosystem of this magical wood as our guide. Our methods will include: nourishing our roots; composting problems; using co-creative skills to work with nature; growing inspiration; and ecosystem insights about community. Along with workshop sessions, there will be solo times in the wood, plus good food, campfires and songs to nourish us. This will be a residential group at Hazel Hill Wood: if Covid restrictions prevent this, it will be run with a series of online sessions with personal time in between. We will explore how to grow resilience for individuals and communities, especially in response to the climate crisis and the related pandemic. If you are interested in using this model in your professional work with individuals or groups, Alan will be happy to offer you advice and support: the content of this workshop relates to his fourth book, which is planned for publication in late 2021. Alan Heeks has been exploring resilience with people and nature for many years, and has led many groups on this theme, drawing on experience of resilient natural systems from creating an organic farm and setting up Hazel Hill. Jane Sanders has over 25 years’ experience in working with a mindfulness based approach to wellbeing with groups and individuals, and has also incorporated deep ecology, ecopsychology and the wisdom of natural systems into her work in many different settings, including numerous groups at Hazel Hill Wood. Marcos Frangos is widely experienced in group facilitation, coaching, counselling and constellations work. He was General Manager of Hazel Hill Wood for 5 years, and has co- led many groups there with Jane and Alan. Cost including food and accommodation: £220, concessions £180. We will share cooking and other community tasks. To secure a place, we will need a deposit of £40, £30 for concessions: if, nearer the time we have to run this as an event online event, your deposit will cover the cost of this, or you can receive a full refund. Hazel Hill is a magical 70-acre conservation woodland and retreat centre, 7 miles from Salisbury. It has simple, yet beautifully crafted off-grid wooden buildings with lovely indoor and outdoor group spaces, basic accommodation in bedrooms and sleeping lofts (or camping), good hot showers and compost loos. See more at www.hazelhill.org.uk For bookings and enquiries: Please contact Carol Nourse via email on: naturalhappinesscontact@gmail.com
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Book Blog: The Ecology of Commerce by Paul Hawken

This is how business can be the driver of positive climate change In my frequent episodes of anxiety about climate change, this is a favourite book I turn to for encouragement. Amazingly, it was published in 1993 even then, the climate crisis and the pivotal role of business was clear if you chose to look at it. Whilst details have been superseded, the essence of the message remains hugely valuable: in 2015, it was voted the best college text on these issues by professors in 67 US business schools. The core of his message can be summed up in two sentences. “Without doubt, the single most damaging aspect of the present economic system is that the expense of destroying the earth is largely absent from the marketplace.” “Ironically, business contains our blessing. It must, because no other institution in the modern world is powerful enough to foster the necessary changes…” The book provides a practical exploration of how to transform the role of business along these lines, and one of the many reasons I like it is that he uses principles from ecology as a model. Connecting with these basic analogies can really help us see the wood for the trees, for example: “waste equals food. In nature, detritus is constantly recycled to nourish other systems…” “Nature runs off current solar income.” At this simple level, the problems with our current financial system are glaringly clear. The practical steps which Hawken suggests to transform the impact of business still look wise and practicable to me, twenty-seven years on. One of the central changes is a shift to taxation primarily on CO2 use and environmental impacts, but he suggests that the changes are announced and then implemented progressively over twenty years, ie a five percent change each year from current tax systems to green taxes. This would mean that business does not have a sudden somersault to perform, but knows that the rules of the game are changing steadily year by year. He also has an interesting proposal for an ‘intelligent product system,’ in which all products would be within one of three categories: Consumables: products which are used and then disposed of, all biodegradable.Products of service, ie durables such as cars, fridges etc. These would be licensed by the manufacturer to the customer: they cannot be thrown away, but must be returned to the manufacturer, who would therefore be accountable for their recycling.Unsaleables: this would include toxic chemicals and other items where we currently don’t know how to dispose of them or recycle safely. These could not be sold, but only ‘rented:’ the original manufacturer would pay for storage of such products once used, until a safe disposal method is found. Like many other observers, Hawken is an advocate of re-localisation. He quotes an eloquent comment from Wendell Berry: “We have allowed our suppliers to enlarge our economic boundaries so far that we cannot be responsible for our effects on the world. The only remedy for this that I can see is to draw in our economic boundaries, shorten our supply lines, so as to permit us literally to know where we are economically.” However, Hawken recognises the huge efficiency in mass production and international trade, and being realistic, advocates limiting this rather than replacing it. He writes about ‘guardian governance,’ as found in tribal societies, where trading relationships are person-to-person, and balance with Nature is inherent. He contrasts this with open trading cultures, which tends to be innovative but also impersonal. Each of these approaches has value, and it would surely improve our quality of life and environmental impact if more of our transactions reflected the guardian approach. Hawken is well qualified to write this book, as he is a successful business entrepreneur, and has worked with a number of progressive large businesses, such as Interface, who changed to a sustainable business model after their CEO read this book. It is worth checking out Hawken’s other books, especially Natural Capitalism, and Blessed Unrest, which is a really encouraging book describing the thousands of mostly small and unsung community groups and other projects who are making a great contribution to environmental and social progress. His main project for several years has been promoting practical solutions to climate change: see https://www.drawdown.org/ The ecology of commerce offers plenty of encouraging examples of businesses who are making progressive change, along with soberingly clear insights about the huge problems of the current financial system. Some of these, like the huge power that large corporations wield, will be hard to change: we all need to hope, believe, and act towards having enough levers of change to reorient the rules of business and a role that is a primary leader in responding to the climate crisis.
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