Two radically opposed models of development are being born in Ethiopia at the same time. One is small, local, socially fair, and ecologically respectful. The other takes the globalisation of fashion to a new and more destructive level.
No sooner had I posted a long piece on Politics And The Fashion System than two stories reached me from Ethiopia that embody the profound rift between old and new models of development. Read More
In fashion, despite more than 400 eco labels, an incremental ‘do less harm’ approach has addressed the symptoms, but not the principal cause, of our difficulties: an economy based on perpetual growth in a finite world. A new and global ‘leave things better’ politics affirms our co-dependency with living systems and the biosphere. The Commons, and the sharing or Peer-to-Peer economy, give shared meaning to this new politics. It is beginning to take practical form in the creation of foodsheds and fibersheds at the scale of the bioregion.
[The text below was commissioned by Kate Fletcher and Mathilda Tham for their forthcoming anthology, Routledge Handbook on Fashion and Sustainability, which will be published in September. It’s 4,800 words long].
You probably need to be naked to read this paragraph with a clear conscience. Its author, for one, felt like stripping off as his exploration of the fashion system progressed. It took 700 gallons of fresh water to make my cotton t-shirt, I learned. It’s partly down to me that 85 per cent of the Aral Sea In Uzbekistan has disappeared because its water is used to grow cotton in the desert. A quarter of all the insecticides in the world are used on cotton crops. Nearly all the Read More
Yesterday’s G8 Dementia Summit made much of the fact that millions will now be spent in a race to identify a cure or a ‘disease-modifying therapy’ for dementia. The likely outcome will be the creation of a Dementia Industrial Complex – and the mass production of un-met expectations.A better way for nation states to spend money on dementia is in the ratio: 95 per cent for Care, five percent for Big Research.
(Above: the demential care ecology of Newcastle, in North East England. Illustration by Barbara Douglas)
When War was declared on Terror, a Security Industrial Complex (SIC) boomed. For the purveyors of full-body scanners, high-end police trucks, and Total Information Domination software, Terror has been good business. But is the world is a safer place? The SIC and this writer are aligned on the question: No, it is not. Read More
“The global economy treats nature and material resources as if they were infinite, and knowledge as if it was scarce. We have to swap those two around”. (Michel Bauwens). Audio interview below the fold.
Having enshrined the rights of nature in its constitution (*) Ecuador is now exploring how this principle, and the principle of open knowledge, might reshape its economic development. The contribution of Michel Bauwens, founder of the P2P Foundation, is to lead a strategic policy project for Ecuador’s government called Free/Libre Open Knowledge (FLOK), also known as the social knowledge economy project. Read More
It is surely alarming that the world’s economy is being shaped by people who are mesmerised by all things digital – but who are blind to a much larger reality: the analogue knowledge accumulated in nature during 3.5 billion years of evolution.
The invitation to do this talk arrived around the time I was stopped in my tracks by this perplexing sight (above) in one of those endless corridors at Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris. Who commissioned such a thing, and why? What, if anything, was in their mind? Where did they procure that cheesy stick-on foliage? Is that a robot digging away behind the window – or does it have a driver? What does he make of the living wall that’s not, in fact, alive? Read More
My hosts last week at the Asia Pacific Design Library in Brisbane (which, on reflection, is probably the finest new library I have been in) asked me a few questions before our xskool:
Q: What does a typical day look like for you?
A: When I’m on the road, which is nearly half the time, I get up between 5 and 6, make the custom porridge which I bring from home In vacuum-sealed sachets, and then prepare the talk or workshop that I promised myself I would Read More
[Photograph: Hans Sylvester]
Interni and the Be Open Foundation are publishing a book, called Gallery Of The Senses, that explores the ways we experience the contemporary world through sight, hearing,smell, taste, and touch. It then asks: Are we missing a sixth sense? Here is my contribution.
Humanity’s troubles did not begin with with the industrial age, nor even with agriculture. Our problems began when we embraced symbolic culture and placed language, art, and number above other ways of knowing the world. Read More
In 1996, Ivan Illich (above) agreed to speak at Doors of Perception in Amsterdam on the theme of ‘speed’. The philosopher-educator surprised us by bringing along two fellow speakers: Sebastian Trapp, a field biologist, and Matthias Rieger, a musicologist. Their contributions are as fresh today as when we heard them in Amsterdam – so we are running them again in three parts. This is part three, the concluding remarks of Ivan Illich.
Ivan Illich: Prisoners of Speed
First let me thank the organisers of this conference for challenging us to prepare an intervention. My circle of friends in Bremen owe it to your programme that we have examined a neglected subject, the historicity of speed. Let me take you right to the core of the issue by expressing my thanks in old-fashioned English: Michiel, ‘God speed thee and thy close!’ Milton’s words would fit the occasion well. ‘To speed’ then meant ‘to prosper’ and not ‘to go fast’. Read More
Conflict and Design
An exhibition in Belgium poses a timely challenge: When confronted by such complex issues as an ageing population, resource depletion, migration, or growing impoverishment, how are we to balance the desire to do something positive, with the need to understand the back story before we intervene?
The installation (shown above) consists of open books, in different languages, nailed to a wall. For the architect-artist Ola-Dele Kuku, the words displayed are a reminder that gaps and contradictions in our knowledge as designers can lead not just to imperfect work – they can make things worse. Read More »