Emergence Festival December 12th 2006 December 8, 2006
Posted by Graham in : General , trackbackThe World Café Symposium in Dublin last weekend- part of the Emergence festival organised by the Cultivate Centre in Temple Bar- brought together speakers and participants from the areas of ecology, psychology and art to explore the issue: “How will we transform our values and thinking to respond to climate change and oil peak?”
World Café is an open space event based around the principle that the best conversations at conferences take place during the coffee breaks; so why not organise a conference in which the whole event is like a long coffee (or herbal tea!) break?
Introduced and chaired by Gavin Harte, the Director of An Taisce, the morning session featured six short presentations to open up the debate and introduce the different approaches to the issue: Graham Strouts, Permaculture Teacher, started things off with the question of to what extent are humans able to transcend the patterns found in nature whereby all life-forms seem to simply absorb the available energy and increase their population until resources are gone and a crash ensues: are we really any different from bacteria in a sugar solution, or is there a point of transcendence that comes with consciousness of what we are doing?
Seán McDonagh, Columban priest, environmental activist and author of Climate Change: The Challenge to All of Us was next, telling us of his work in the Philippines and the devastation being caused by the increasing storms, each one of which erodes the land and re-shapes the coastline. He spoke about ethics and how religion “gives us the energy to do difficult things”;
Paula Downey, writer and consultant on organisational values and culture change, was next with a look at how systems thinking could give us a radical new approach to the problem, which, fundamentally, is our mindset: “We see the world that we describe” claimed Paula, rather than the other way around. The assumptions of Newton’s mechanistic world that prediction and control are possible need to give way to a new kind of joined-up thinking, a Living System’s Approach, characterized by the humility that come with understanding that we cannot know complex systems, which are self-regulating; and that the relationships between things is more important than the things themselves.
John Giannini, Jungian Analyst, former Catholic priest, author of Compass of the Soul, who had given a lecture on the Sacred Feminine earlier in the festival, turned our attention to the inner world: “We are the evolution of the consciousness of ourselves; we are also evolution understanding our unconscious. John pointed to the importance of the awareness that “I have within me a universe as big inside as outside” in approaching environmental issues;
Amazing Mandal of sea-shells, pebbles and sand at the Cultivate Centre
Dolores Whelan, educator and author of Ever Ancient Ever New spoke about the lessons that Celtic Spirituality can give us: that the Celtic New year begins at Samhain with the onset of winter and the journey into darkness, because the darkness is the source of our creativity: we must embrace the darkness and let go of “knowing”;
Finally, John Lane, art editor of the journal Resurgence and author of several books including “Timeless Simplicity- Creative Living in a Consumer Society” asked: We face a catastrophe: what do we do? And gave the simple advice: start with ourselves. He referred to people like Virgil, who lived at a time of the catastrophic collapse of the Roman Empire. What did he do? -he gardened -he wrote poetry -he kept bees. In a word- he downsized! Virgil and others like him who lived through similar moments of great change in history didn’t try to organize a resistance movement, but provided a simple, beautiful vision of their place in society, and provide an example for us to face the coming pain with harmony and compassion.
The afternoon session was run as a “world café” with several tables, each with a table host who facilitated discussions with whoever visited their tables to discuss each of the following three questions: -what aspects of culture, society and human behavior have lead to the current problem? -how will the crises effect us as individuals and as a society? -how will we transform our thinking and values in response?
Space prevents a detailed look at the kind of answers that emerged, but the great thing about this kind of event is the cross-fertilization of ideas that comes with coffee-shop discussions between people approaching these challenging issues from so many different perspectives. I personally found it a refreshing and energizing event and made some great new contacts.
Comments»
Thanks for posting this report Graham. I found the event inspiring, the format of the day allowed the highest quality conversations and the speakers in context session in the morning were excellent. After I heard one woman saying that these were the best presentations she has ever heard at the Cultivate centre. It was refreshing to see so many woman present in the world café discussion, interesting to note after reading Rob’s blog which recently featured a long discussion on the gender issue.