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I’ve previously linked to pieces by author Charles Eisenstein whose essay ‘Building a Peace Narrative’ I really enjoyed and discussed back in DD101. I don’t agree with everything he writes, but he consistently challenges popular beliefs, especially regarding our relationship with nature.
In one of his recent articles, Eisenstein argues that we have made a scientific, strategic, rhetorical, and political error by reducing the ecological crisis to climate, and the climate crisis to carbon.
“Earth is best understood as a living being with a complex physiology, whose health depends on the health of her constituent organs. Her organs are the forests, the wetlands, the grasslands, the estuaries, the reefs, the apex predators, the keystone species, the soil, the insects, and indeed every intact ecosystem and every species on earth. If we continue to degrade them, drain them, cut them, poison them, pave them, and kill them, earth will die a death of a million cuts. She will die of organ failure – regardless of the levels of greenhouse gases.”
Eisenstein believes that in the hope of ‘solving’ the climate crisis we confuse ‘carbon math’ – which, erroneously, reduces ecological health to an arithmetic challenge – with a more profound understanding of the conditions required for life to thrive. That’s why the environmental movement, in his view, needs to return to its roots:
“Conservation does not mean to ‘use more slowly’ or to ‘save for later’. What the word really means is to serve with. To serve together. To serve what? To serve life. It is a rhetorical error to frame environmentalism in any other way than to make it about love of nature, love of life. No one becomes an environmentalist because of all the money they will save. No one calculates their way into love. And the changes that we will need to make to restore earth’s aliveness from its current depletion will require a degree of courage and sacrifice that comes only from love. We will not be coerced or bribed into them.”
Eisenstein offers some practical advice for environmentalists, too. But what I found more intriguing was his drawing of a connection between today’s mental health crisis and today’s lack of any spiritual connection to earth as a living being:
“The inner desolation mirrors the outer. The ecological crisis and the spiritual crisis that we call ‘mental health’ share a common source: denial of earth as a living being, worthy of love, worthy of service. The conservationist draws from a well of truth: that the purpose of a human being is to participate in the flourishing of life. To serve with. Sundered from that purpose, we inevitably become sick. That inner sickness, that soul sickness, reflects the outer sickness of ecosystems. Could there ultimately be any doubt that the global climate reflects the social climate, the political climate, the economic climate, and the psychic climate?”
Acknowledging problems with our current approach to ‘solving’ the climate crisis can easily send mixed signals and risks distracting from the urgency it demands. Yet, I’m equally convinced that ‘saving the world’ requires more than ‘green development’. To be left with a world that’s worth living in demands all of us to seek a renewed, deep-rooted reverence for life in all its forms. – Kai
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DD relies on word of mouth
If you’re enjoying DD, chances are your friends and colleagues will, too! Help me reach more readers by sharing the link to this issue with others:
densediscovery.com/issues/247
You receive this email because you subscribed to Dense Discovery, a weekly newsletter at the intersection of design, technology, sustainability and culture. Writing to you from Melbourne is Kai Brach. Do you have a product or service to promote in DD? Find out more about advertising in DD.
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An introduction to generative visual AI
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Artificial Intelligence is changing the way we work. Let us demystify the landscape of generative AI. Join us for a live workshop that provides a comprehensive analysis of available creative generative AI tools and the correlation of these tools to common design use cases.
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Apps & Sites
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This mobile app (iOS & Android) makes planning multi-stop road trips easier. The maps you generate include distances and driving times, while also showing you attractions, restaurants and accommodation along your driving route. You can also share your trip as a simple document with friends and family.
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1x is a photo community and gallery where paying members upload up to 20 photos per week to then get feedback by other members and a range of special curators with the goal of making you a better photographer and “creating an online photo exhibition with the works of all the best photographers in the world”.
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A playful drawing app that presents you with a new, colourful ‘blob’ every day that you then have to turn into a doodle by sketching or drawing on it, before sharing and comparing it with your friends online.
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Falling Fruit aspires to be the world’s most comprehensive map of freely available, accessible fruit and vegetables growing in and around urban spaces. “Falling Fruit is a celebration of the overlooked culinary bounty of our city streets. Foraging in the 21st century is an opportunity for urban exploration, to fight the scourge of stained sidewalks, and to reconnect with the botanical origins of food.”
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Worthy Five: Fernando Mendes
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Five recommendations by co-working trailblazer, design learning enabler & researcher Fernando Mendes
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A concept worth understanding:
Stigmergy, a principle evident in ant and termite colonies, triggers intriguing parallels with our human behaviours online. This concept urges us to reconsider if we’re evolving into digital ‘social insects’, shaping collective action via indirect coordination.
A book worth reading:
Trees on Mars by Hal Niedzviecki offers a riveting analysis of our tech-dominated era. It’s a must-read for those keen on scrutinising our future-fixated society.
An activity worth doing:
Better understand the opportunities that lie within heutagogy. Often referred to as ‘self-determined learning’, heutagogy emphasises the ability to take charge of your own learning journey in order to unlock benefits such as autonomy and critical thinking.
A newsletter worth subscribing to:
The Superhuman newsletter dives into the dynamic world of AI development and offers insights of AI’s influence on technology, behavioural science and productivity.
A quote worth repeating:
Laurie Anderson, the widow of musician Lou Reed, mentioned in her speech at his induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2015 that Reed had three rules he lived by: “Do not be afraid of anyone. Get a really good bullshit detector. Be really, really tender.”
(Did you know? Friends of DD can respond to and engage with guest contributors like Fernando Mendes in one click.)
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Books & Accessories
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A peek inside a therapist’s world
If you’re interested in mental health, you will probably like this memoir about a therapist pursuing therapy to help her deal with her own issues. “Maybe You Should Talk to Someone is revolutionary in its candor, offering a deeply personal yet universal tour of our hearts and minds and providing the rarest of gifts: a boldly revealing portrait of what it means to be human, and a disarmingly funny and illuminating account of our own mysterious lives and our power to transform them.”
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Rejecting myths, embracing change
As a great follow-up to last week’s intro on design teaching, The New Designer is a vital treatise to help creative folks shift the discourse on design from aesthetics to ethics by challenging common myths and preconceptions about what comprises good design. “Rather than sticking to outmoded ideas about perfectionism and individual genius, designers must work together to tackle some of the most challenging questions of the twenty-first century. How do you make room for humanity, with all its wondrous variations, in a society increasingly driven by metrics, algorithms, and profit? How can ecologically responsible designers consider a product’s entire life cycle and look well into the future? And how can designers better respond to a community’s local needs while taking advantage of global networks?”
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Overheard on Twitter
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Americans: I use miles and pounds
Europeans: I use kilometres and kilograms
Canadians: [snorting a line of assorted measuring systems] I’m 5’3, I weigh 150lbs, horses weigh 1000kgs, my house is an hour away and I drive 80 km/h to get there, I need a cup of flour and 1L of milk.
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Food for Thought
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As I write in the intro above, in this essay author and teacher Charles Eisenstein makes a case against simple ‘carbon math’ and for a new spiritual connection to earth as a living being. “I do not worry that our system is not sustainable. I worry that it is. I am afraid that we can continue to lay waste to the living earth, indefinitely, ending up on a concrete world, so chronically ill physically and mentally that we must incorporate technological assistance into our very brains and bodies.”
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This is an adapted essay from the book mentioned above, The New Designer, exploring the long-term impact of the products we create, often without any accountability to future generations of human and non-human life on Earth. “We do not design for humans. Customers are only transient users of our products. We ultimately design for the environment. Your product will likely outlive your end user and inhabit the environment for much longer. We need to expand the life cycle of a design and plan for postuse. Any product journey is incomplete if it doesn’t reflect this critical shift in understanding.”
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A great summary of why ‘free’ parking in cities is a bad idea and ends up costing all of us dearly. “Free parking induces demand and incentivises car-centric planning. The more cars there are, the more planners will plan around cars, until you end up with a city like Houston: a place where you absolutely need a car to get around. Needless to say, putting the entire city behind an auto industry paywall is a bad idea, affecting low-income households the most.” (I love the metaphor of car-centric design as a car industry version of a paywall.)
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Aesthetically Pleasing
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Italian artist Roberta Boffo specialises in “highly detailed, subtly mind-boggling, monochromatic artworks”. You really have to watch some of the making-of videos to appreciate the amount of work that goes into each piece.
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A lovely reader pointed me to this project: Cohaus, a twenty-unit housing development near Auckland, New Zealand. Their vision? To build affordable housing, using smart design and innovative technology in order to create a community where it’s easy to live comfortably while minimising resource use. I love this so much and immediately found many similarities to my own building. The project has its own website, too.
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Named after the traditional Italian spirit, Grappa features unique triangle serifs that give it a distinct edge. It comes in nine weights and a variable font that offers greater customisation options.
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Notable Numbers
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An analysis of online publication Rest of World shows that almost half of all openly accessible websites use English as their primary language, despite the fact that English speakers only make up just under 5% of the global population.
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A non-academic study of trust in media, government and business with more than 32,000 respondents across 28 countries shows that business is seen as competent and ethical, while government is viewed as unethical and incompetent. Business is a staggering 53 points ahead of government on perception of competence and 29 points ahead on ethics.
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In early July, world temperature records were broken for a second day in a row. The average global air temperature was 17.18C (62.9F) on Tuesday, July 4th, surpassing the record 17.01C reached on Monday, July 3rd.
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Classifieds
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New World Same Humans is a newsletter on trends, technology, and our shared future. It goes to over 25,000 visionaries and innovators each week, as both text and podcast. Join us!
Email template development can be tedious. There are so many limitations because of outdated email clients. We know all the tricks to make your newsletter look great. Get in touch!
Finalist is a different kind of To Do app for iOS, based on a classic paper bullet journal method. Simple and fast – early users get it free for life.
It’s time to imagine harder! The Manual of Design Fiction from the Near Future Laboratory has the principles and examples to help you grapple with the future and its implications.
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The Week in a GIF
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Reply or tweet at DD with your favourite GIF and it might get featured here in a future issue.
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