Engaged Economy
Project: Polytopia

Sparked by a good month of #Occupy movement, people are engaged against, networking against.

Much of what people are against happens behind closed doors. Fine for private matters, but there are no private politics. There should not be. The people occupy - against. They do gain attention.

The occupy movement has been criticized for:

• not having an agenda - it has many


• not having a leader - it has many

but - that gives it diversity and resilience.

Such energy may fizzle, and to keep momentum, people appear to aim their networking for:

• replacing winner-takes-it-all financial casinos with a more sustainable social contract


• bringing crony capitalists to justice, to stop their shredding of the social fabric woven from agreements and laws

and the objectives may grow more diverse, as people gain freedom to pursue their own dreams, refine agreements in conversation and debate, and form their own groups forwarding their own causes and ideals, at best in mutual respect.

Patterns will emerge, become signs of progress, and new social contracts may be drawn up.

Direct democracy. Engaged Economy.
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Want to dive deeper? Synapsing evolutionary events and prior art:

• Awareness movement: Occupy to engage


• Community vs. corporatist: TEDx video, Thomas Power


• Corporate redesign: Corporation 20/20


• Democratic workplaces: WorldBlu


• Transition economy: New Economy Network

This list may grow. What would you add? 

Image credit: Simon Verrall on flickr

Sun, Oct 23, 2011  Permanent link
Categories: collective intelligence, polytopia, inspired, justice, sustainability, thrivability
Sent to project: Polytopia

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re-new-able, by choice

Have you had this happen to you? You mull over the meaning of a word, look at it from various viewpoints, explore its context and connotation, and poof - its meaning changes or shifts unexpectedly. Just had it with the word "renewable", loosely attributed to energies preferred for their sustainable and non-polluting properties. Fits on some energies, like wood, or mental energy, but not others. I think the word has been used to loosely, because in a way, nuclear energy is renewable (by re-processing), Negawatts are renewabe (by switching off or efficiency up). How is the sun re-new-able? It implies choice. Solar and other inexhausitble energies are "tappable" but not really (you may disagree here) ...

Renewable (Energies)

Does a dictionary entry help?

renewable
Relating to a natural resource, such as solar energy, water, or wood, that is never used up or that can be replaced by new growth. Resources that are dependent on regrowth can sometimes be depleted beyond the point of renewability, as when the deforestation of land leads to desertification or when a commercially valuable species is harvested to extinction. Pollution can also make a renewable resource such as water unusable in a particular location. Compare nonrenewable.

The American Heritage® Science Dictionary Copyright © 2005 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

Got here and appreciate the image from Rethinking Japan's Energy Future, 2011-04-11 by J. Matthew Roney. Gist:

A review of Japan's geothermal, wind, and solar energy potential shows that domestic renewable resources could easily power the world's third-largest economy.

Hat tip: Sepp Hasslberger

Geothermal is a potentially fierce competitor to petroleum type fuels. We can expect all kinds of tricks to make less of it, including outright false statements as to its potential, from petrochem interests.

And then there is tidal and wave energy, which have made progress, too. Falling cost bring break-even much closer. BBC article and video on a recent second generation design.

So is wave energy re-new-able, in that we can regrow it if we want to?

Sun, Aug 28, 2011  Permanent link
Categories: technology, Systems Science, energy, sustainability

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