Right-wing – Seeding Our Future

Right-wing chaos: control through fear

Naomi Klein’s 2018 book, No is not enough: defeating the new shock politics, is the most lucid, convincing, and alarming account I’ve seen yet of what Donald Trump is really about, and much of it is relevant to the numerous other right-wing leaders gaining power in these chaotic times. She’s clearly right that Trump excels … 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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Technology Power: for whose benefit?
Pragmatic ways to mitigate the downsides Guest blog by Jeremy Green and Fred Barker As part of Alan’s Scanning our Future project, Jeremy Green and Fred Barker were commissioned to research the potential UK future impacts of new technologies over the next 15 years. This blog is a summary of some of their conclusions. Some might say we stand at a point where developments in technology can provide the material basis for all humans to have a life of material and cultural abundance. Drudge work – both mental and physical – can be eliminated through automation, leaving more time for creativity, community and caring for each other. But this cornucopia has arrived, not on to a blank slate, but in a specific time and place, and a specific social and economic framework. Here, productive activity is organised around an economic and financial system that requires most work and transactions to take place in the context of financial profit. Many clever people spend their waking hours thinking about how the capabilities of transformative technologies can be fitted in to this economic model – how they can be ‘monetized’. They need to be clever, because their task is a difficult one. These transformative technologies have the potential to create abundance, but the economic model is based on scarcity. The technologies could do lots of wonderful things, but for some of the most powerful technologies, it’s not obvious how they could make money for anyone. The way in which the technology industries, and their finance backers, have responded to this conundrum goes a long way towards explaining why technology developments are the source of so much anxiety, and why technology is often perceived to have negative rather than positive implications for personal and community resilience. A number of themes in industry’s response are discernible, including: extension of the monetization of peoples’ attention; redefinition of the boundaries of privacy; and shifting the definition of ownership and personal property. They have also encouraged the belief that both governments and society are powerless in the face of the inevitable forward march of technology, a view that extends from the inability of governments to censor or control information, through the growth of digital currencies and markets for illegal services, to the inability of governments to collect taxes from the technology giants. Further observations on these four themes are:. Attention: Google and Facebook (and Twitter, and all the others…) didn’t invent advertising, but the tools available to them have allowed them to bring it to a new level. What they are selling is not the ‘services’ they provide to users, but those users’ attention. They are already good at it, and they keep getting better. That’s why the services are so distracting and so compulsive; that is how they are meant to be. In terms of personal resilience, the challenge is to manage this distraction and compulsion.Privacy: The assault on attention is armed with information about our preferences, desires and behaviour. Apple and Google know where we walk, how long we stay there, where we drive and where we park, what we are thinking of buying, what news sources we regularly look at and how long we spend looking at them. If we buy a wearable device they know how often we exercise, whether our performance is improving. If we buy ‘smart’ objects for our homes they know how warm we like it, and when we’re not in. Robot vacuum cleaners map out the layouts of our homes and send the information to the manufacturer so that they can sell it on.Ownership: It is not just our data that we do not own. There is an increasing trend towards ‘servitization’, whereby companies seek to sell us services where they would once have sold us things. This makes for continuing revenue streams on the balance sheet, reduces our ability to repair what we have ‘bought’, constrains the extent to which we can find innovative uses for our things, and limits our ability to share. This is even more the case with digital goods, where sharing is re-conceptualized as ‘piracy’.Regulation and control: over recent decades the state has become less able to regulate markets and transactions in the name of society. Communications technology, digital currencies and online markets do not respect borders. Responding to the challenges posed by technology Our society is still at an early stage of understanding the manipulatative and pervasive impacts of technology, and how to take back some power. This issue is likely to be one of the priorities of the next Scanning our Future project. Here are some initial pointers: Adaptation and Assimilation: learning to come to terms with a technology, including developing techniques to mitigate and minimize their negative impact (e.g. social media diets, weekend Luddite).Hacking and Subversion: learning how to change a technology so that it does more of what we want and less of what we don’t want (e.g. privacy settings, using ad blockers).Embrace: careful and selective adoption of technologies which can contribute significantly to individual or group resilience (e.g. drones for community mapping projects).Shape: engaging with the development of technology, especially at the level of development funding to maximise the positive and minimize the negative impacts (e.g. participating in P2P networks, user support groups). There is much exciting work going on at the moment around the development of ‘platform cooperatives.Influence: seeking to influence public bodies at local, regional and national level, including local authorities and government. For more about the Scanning our Future project see www.futurescanning.org https://www.howtogeek.com/341905/how-to-spot-and-avoid-fake-android-apps-in-the-play-store/
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