Deep Change

This blog is an attempt to circumscribe the context in which we currently find ourselves. The future this century is both bright and bleak depending on whether we seize opportunities for change or submit to the belief that human nature and history have little to offer besides an image of apocalypse.

If we wake up from enslavement to 6000 years of history and become conscious of it – extract the best solutions from it; if we take the best and most appropriate technological and epistemic knowledge, and the sum total of what is now known about the human condition; if we can resolve fundamental conflicts between human heart and mind, between political right and left, between human consciousness and nature; if we are brave; then we stand a chance.

I think in complex systems terms, cybernetics, processes. Ecological thinking if you like, as differentiated from classical compartmentalised thought. I have interests in human motivation and performance, and positive psychology. I have a masters in work/industrial psychology and find the industrial paradigm anathema to the future, I see a future instead in non-hierarchical methods of labour. I have interests in mind and consciousness, flow and human fulfillment, from Freud to Maslow, to Human Futures, artificial intelligence and informational consciousness – is the web Gaia’s emergent brain?. I have a PhD in the cognition underlying situation awareness (functional consciousness). I am a sustainability advocate and proponent of the idea of Human Scale development – society and civilisation designed to fit people’s inherent natures.

It is that latter sentence which informs my approach to this blog. Deep Change may well involve moving from the Graeco-Roman platonic-classical inspiration for civilisation, something that humans are as yet ill-adapted for, towards Deep Ecology’s aspiration for the hunter-gatherer instincts and the hunter-gatherer’s submission to natures’ forces to be recognised and integrated into our lives. Deep Change means going beyond the idea that climate change is the single biggest threat facing us. It is not. We are simply devouring our living planet, our biosphere, our home, through various means, fossil fuel burning being only one of them. We need to relearn how to live in congruence with The Earth, our sustenance, as our ancestors did. To live and to die within its embrace not trying to conquer Gaia. For to conquer Gaia will be to kill our own children. Technology by all means but technology appropriate to Gaia’s delicate and fragile nature.

The writer of this weblog, Alastair McGowan, can be found in Wales, Britain. Hence I spell civiliSation the British way. In this Celtic land resistance to the excesses of centralised rapacious civilisation was successfully managed by successive cultures. In its green valleys of Red Dragons dissenters and refugees of Civ still seek refuge from contemporary forces in tipis and permacultural settlements. While in the urban centres cutting edge technology and knowledge development offer new opportunities for us to transcend old orders in ways other than simply running away from the System. But there is also a new synthesis. At Macynlleth the Centre for Alterative Technology pioneers renewable energy and other appropriate technologies. And other aspects of appropriate ways ahead. A synthesis of old and new ways to take forward.

And it is this new synthesis, the finding out of what is most appropriate for us to take forward from 6000 years of Human and Gaian history into the 21st, the ecological, century, that inspires me to chronicle the best of what I find on the net that is contributing to a new way forward. I invite you – Be This Change for the sake of coming generations.

Alastair McGowan, Cymru/Wales