The bulk of the workshop is divided into two sections: Context & Design.
0. Introductions
I. Context (50-60%)
Objective: re-frame our current situation in terms of “deeper” functional and historical relationships; realize some points of leverage and intervention that might otherwise remain hidden.
This section alternates between:
A. Small-group active learning: create a new “snapshot” of present-day social and ecological relationships using the Daylighting mapping exercises.
B. Lecturette: illustrate and explain long-term trajectories in human cultural evolution along key variables; show relationship between social caste and ecological extraction.
II. Design (40-50%)
Objective: foster opportunities for new interventions; bridge knowledge gained in first section with thinking about current and desired projects.
This section follows a similar pattern of alternation between interaction and presentation, with less small-group discussion, and more large-group.
A. Offer design criteria, tools, and techniques, to frame the transition from theory to application, and stimulate fresh and provocative project ideas.
B. Discuss, dissect, experimentally adopt, playfully provoke: wrestle with questions of application in our lives and projects.
D. Review currently existing projects that can function as models and inspirations for our work.
E. Invite and challenge participants to articulate daring desires, concrete goals, and doable next steps, in order to bring the work home and into their lives and projects.
III. Feedback and Closing
I’ve been back from Belen for a week and a half now, and it feels like I’m just beginning to touch down. The whirlwind of the trip to Peru segued immediately into the whirlwind of Xmas, travel, the New Year, sickness, moving, and a host of logistical dramas.Hopefully the regular readers of this blog have been nearly as busy, and so haven’t been waiting impatiently for an update…Belen was just amazing, in about five ways at once. Each of those ways in turn…
To cut straight to the full photoset, go here.
Continue reading ‘Back from Belen’
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This is Belen, sandwiched between the city of Iquitos and the Itaya River. Or, in the case of Pueblo Libre, the neighborhood where I’ll be working, extending out into the Itaya River. That satellite image probably doesn’t really qualify as “current conditions,” but it is where I’ll be by tomorrow evening.
Right now I’m in San Francisco, having torn myself free of the Hudson Valley on the heels of a blizzard, after more than a day of wrestling fruitlessly with icy roads and plowed-in driveways. I booked my flight here so that I would have a 24-hour visit in the Bay before meeting the GI crew at the airport. I go to meet them in just a few hours now.
I’m vacillating constantly between the feeling that I’m underprepared, that I need to be somehow “cramming” to get ready for the experience ahead of me; and the more rational perspective that there is no way for this first, short, trip to be anything but preliminary, introductory, and exploratory. And more, that there is no amount of preparation that could substitute for responding with flexibility and sensitivity to the conversations and landscapes I find myself in as I meet Belen.
Continue reading ‘Current Conditions’
…clown for credibility.
That’s what Dr. John Glick said to me when we spoke late last week.
“You’ll be much less of a target for pickpockets, you’ll be safer, and you’ll be more credible, if people know you’re with us.”
John Glick is my main contact with the Belen project. The “us” he is referring to is, of course, the Gesundheit Institute Global Outreach Project. If you aren’t familiar with them already, a major part of their mission is doing international clown-care work - in hospitals, orphanages, refugee camps, and even war zones - all over the world. Clowning is incorporated into pretty much everything they do - including the community development initiative in Belen that I’m involved with.
“Bring a red nose, even if you just wear it around your neck.”
So when I go to Belen for the first time this coming week, I’ll be bringing the usual selection of durable, light-weight travel clothing, plus a selection of mismatched, brightly colored plaid, hawaiian, and striped shirts and shorts, a plaid blazer with the arms cut off, a baby-sized red velour hat that ties under my chin, a small, purple, frilly umbrella, and yes - a big red nose that squeaks when tweaked.
Safety first, after all.
Continue reading ‘Clown for Safety…’
I’ll be doing a full-day Liberation Ecology workshop as part of a Permaculture Design Certificate course in Manhattan. It’s an interesting format - stretching a 2-week (72 hour) course out over a year, in order to be as accessible as possible to working families. I’ll be teaching on the opening weekend. Details about location will get posted as the date approaches. Some other information about the class follows:Local Energy Solutions, a 501(c)3 Not For Profit Organization and a project of the Five Borough Institute, is organizing a second Permaculture Design Certificate course. LES will bring permaculture to more New Yorkers as an antidote to the converging crises in climate, energy and food production. This provides one way of empowering city dwellers to live more sustainably.This class will be held over a 1 year period, from March 2008 to February 2009. Classes will be held on the first Saturday of each month with the exception of July and August which will have no classes. Two Sunday classes will be held in March 2008 and February 2009. Class will be held on the following dates: Mar 1,2; Apr 5; May 3; June 7; Sept 6; Oct 4; Nov 1; Dec 6; Jan 3; Feb 7,8.Classes will be held in mid-town Manhattan, close to public transport. We will be encouraging all participants to bring their own food to share at lunchtime.
The trip to Peru is approaching faster than I can believe.
I’ve been networking like mad. First, to try and connect with the people working on the Gesundheit/PAHO collaboration, scattered from Peru to Norway to Virginia. Secondly, to try and connect our whole network effort with the other clinic/water/sanitation project underway in Belen. Unbelievably, there have been two projects developing there over the last few years, without being aware of each other. So I’ve been doing what I can to intiate some coordination and collaboration between the two groups. Everyone seems pretty eager to do so - more heads to put together, and more avenues by which resources can flow to the community of Belen. What could be better than a Gesundheit/PAHO/Amazon Promise/Engineers Without Borders collaborative?
When not doing that, I’ve been digging deep into the global conversation on low-budget eco-sanitation initiatives. Engineers and permaculturists have not always made the easiest of bedfellows, and there are a lot of engineers involved in this project. And, as far as I can tell, I’m the only participant coming from a background in permaculture. (And I know I’m the only one coming from a background in liberation ecology!)
So, even though this is a preliminary reconaissance for me, I need to be prepared to persuasively, if not forcefully, frame the discussion in terms of community leadership, low-energy/biological systems, and resource-cycling. I may be overestimating the difference in perspectives, but it doesn’t hurt to be prepared.
It’s a complex situation, environmentally, culturally, technically… in every way. I’m excited to begin the conversation in earnest, with folks on the ground there in Belen.
If anyone is interested in helping to organize a northeastern climate justice convergence for next summer - or if you are just curious - feel free to come to this general interest organizing meeting.
The meeting will be held at the Albany Free School, in Albany NY. I know that folks from Rising Tide, from the Rhizome Collective, and many others, will be participating. Housing is available.
It’s been a very full week since returning from Berkeley, and I’m overdue to give a report on how things went out there. It was an amazing trip. The Symposium itself was a heady mixture of great and less-than-great, as such things often are.NB: I won’t often be writing about art in this space - unless the mission of this project changes substantially. So savor it, or disregard it, as exceptional, whichever way you lean.First, the Symposium. The organizers of Out of Time-Space had, in my opinion, a great idea: take the abstract, experimental, high-concept art scene of UC-Berkeley and San Francisco Art Institute, and emphasize and extend the more politically-grounded and socially-engaged side of that millieu. Continue reading ‘Report: Regenerative Media Ecologies
@ UC-Berkeley’
Liberation Ecology Project is taking on a very exciting project. I’m coordinating a research/design project on urban eco-sanitation for a community-led development initiative in Belen, Peru. Belen is a 73,000 person “informal settlement” outside of Iquitos, in the Amazon river basin. I’m working with the Global Outreach Project of the Gesundheit! Institute (a radical, loving, silly, health-care reform project), who in turn are partnering with the Pan-American Health Organization, and a few other Peruvian NGOs. I’ll be joining the GI Global Outreach Project for a week in Belen on their next trip down, this December.
Continue reading ‘Belen, Iquitos, Peru’
