Nov 20, 09
"Changer Pour Durer:" Change To Endure
"The French think differently,” said nearly every one of us who was not actually French. Of course, we said this to each other in French, so perhaps we were thinking differently too. Patrick Viveret presenting at Cerisy-la-Salle, Sep 2009 Last week (19-24 Sept 2009) I attended an inter-disciplinary colloquium at a castle in Normandy called Cerisy-la-Salle. The central massive stone structure (see photo at the end of this article), constructed in the 1600s to defend a Protestant...
Camping at Tällberg – Epilogue
My tent is back in the closet. The great circus tent used for the Tällberg Forum’s plenary sessions is undoubtedly on its way back home to Italy. The Tällberg Companion — the little book with schedules, participant bios, and general wisdom about how to survive the five-day, change-the-world marathon meeting that is the Tällberg Forum — is up on the shelf, next to the Companions of previous years. I notice that it is half the size of the others, a little resource...
Camping at Tällberg; Episode 4: Stop Talking, Start Planting
Morning again. Somehow folks crawled out of bed after dancing and drinking past midnight, and made their way to the big tent by 8:30 (it is full when I get there) to experience the climate change negotiations game run by Drew Jones and other colleagues. First, Drew Jones — his voice almost wavers with emotion — reports the passage of the first-ever climate change legislation in the US, to the applause of this crowd. Then (I have skipped several steps here, including Anders...
Camping at Tällberg – Episode 3: An Evening of Standing Ovations
Gro Harlem Brundtland is relating stories from her childhood — as a Norwegian refugee in Stockholm during World War II, leading her little brother safely across streets, and the unexpected apology she received from her father, when she was 12 or 13, because he had cut her off in a debate and declared her simply wrong. It’s lovely to hear these stories from this living legend in the sustainability movement. She is making an argument for “principled pragmatism” — which she claims not...
Camping at Tällberg -- Episode 2: A Bad Problem Problem is Actually Much Worse
It’s morning. I had a wonderful, quiet time by the Lake, sleeping, writing, playing guitar. (The photo was taken just after midnight, from my tentsite.) But now I walk (late) into the big tent of the Tällberg Forum. Global reality hits me like a desert wind. “The problem that we already thought was bad is actually much worse.” “The causes become the consequences, and the consequences become the causes.” “I want to be optimistic, but the situation really...
Camping at Tällberg – Episode 1
by Alan Atkisson Bo Ekman formally opens the 2009 Tällberg Forum in his traditional way — philosophically, and a bit theatrically. He asks us to just listen to the drip-drip-drip of a water drop, shown in video on the big screen. He reflects on the “the change of change” — we used to think of nature as the most stable and slow-changing of the core architectural elements of our planet. On the back of nature, we built what he calls “constitutions,” the...
Episode 2: A Bad Problem is Actually Much Worse
by Alan Atkisson It’s morning. I had a wonderful, quiet time by the Lake, sleeping, writing, playing guitar. (The photo was taken just after midnight, from my tentsite.) But now I walk (late) into the big tent of the Tällberg Forum. Global reality hits me like a desert wind. “The problem that we already thought was bad is actually much worse.” “The causes become the consequences, and the consequences become the causes.” “I want to be optimistic, but...
Letter from Sweden: The State of the End of the World
The Royal Academy of Sciences in Stockholm is always a good place to spend a seminar morning on a beautiful Spring day, even when the topic is far from cheery. This is the day, called Valborg, when Swedes, in their several millions, gather around great bonfires to celebrate the coming of Spring. Male choruses sing songs of fertility and virility, the water of life (akvavit, schnaps) makes its inevitable appearance, and great piles of wood are converted into carbon dioxide and water and...
Island Economies in a Globalized World
In Swedish, the word for "island" is a single letter, itself a small island: ö. When one comes upon it in reading, this little "o" with two dots over it appears suddenly and alone in a surrounding sea of words — tiny, yet redolent with linguistic meaning and personal associations. Ö seems too long for company, and to be happily self-contained at the same time. Ö needs no other letters to be a word and to mean what it means. And yet, unless it is surrounded by other words and given...
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