Civic Revolution , livre ebook

Troubador Publishing Ltd - Ric Casale

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65 pages

English

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Cities are the places that have the greatest influence over life on Earth.The single biggest cause of global warming, the urbanisation of humanity, is potentially the principal solution. The 'ecological genius' of the city enables us to live better - while consuming, wasting and polluting less. However it remains a vast, largely hidden civic power. What is missing is a citizen's guide to turn the place where we live into the seat of the solution.Energising, motivating and uplifting,Civic Revolutionis a topical and relevant book about the power of belonging that gets to the heart of how - and why - all of us must act.'A timely and readable call to arms to people who want to make life better in their local community but also understand the need for more fundamental system change.' - Matthew Taylor, Chief Executive of the Royal Society of Arts.

Sujets

Environment

Political economy

Climate change

Sustainability

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Publié par	Troubador Publishing Ltd
Date de parution	22 avril 2019
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781838598914
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0250€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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Copyright © 2019 Ric Casale

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

Cover artwork by Andrea Casale.

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

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ISBN 978 1838598 914

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Matador is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd

To those who live in towns and cities.
Contents
Foreword
Introduction

Telling Stories
Age Of Humans
Endless Growth
Technology Will Save The Day
A New Narrative

Rising Up
Cult Of Bigness
Treasure Islands
Rebirth Of City-States

Changing Direction
Past Revolutions
Civic Revolution

Using Power
Climate Change
Empowerment
Procrastination
Resourcefulness

Saving Life
Biodiversity
Ingenuity
Initiative

Discovering Richness
Public Affluence
Inclusiveness
Audacity

Inspiring Revolution
Leadership
Measuring Up
Tipping Point

Endnotes
Acknowledgements
Foreword
In the 4th century BC, Plato, the father of Western philosophy, had a profound insight which was that education should take place outdoors among woods and gardens to remind us constantly of the organisation and relationships of the natural world, and so be informed by observation and understanding of it. He chose as his first school site the garden of the Athenian hero, Academus, and it became known as the Academia and so heralded the dawning of what would become Academic thinking.
Two thousand years later, this intellectual insight would provide the background to the Age of Enlightenment, where intellectual life would become consumed by a curiosity with interrelationship and the ordering of all things, to better understand their nature and thereby see the world anew. First seen as something of wonder and revelation, the view of the world inexorably shifted into an approach that saw this new knowledge as being at the service of human utility: a world interpreted by the emergent economic philosophy of Capitalism as an opportunity to exploit nature in the name of growth.
Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species comfortingly provided a framework that was hijacked to imply that survival of the fittest, through competition, was the Natural Order of things. This made a revolutionary insight palatable to a religious culture that otherwise would have seen such thoughts as a challenge to its foundations. The tragic irony is that Darwin’s key observations revealed the extraordinary way in which life on earth succeeds by adapting to the myriad niches on offer. While it is true that extinctions follow the inability to find a niche to adapt to, he was describing a world of interrelationships with no waste, a system or systems that maintained a balance within the natural boundaries of what the planet could sustain.
Science, as a word, would not be coined until the 1830s. Up until then the study of natural phenomena and their interrelationships was called Natural Philosophy. Newton, Darwin, Lyell and Huxley would all have called themselves Natural Philosophers. The age of specialism cannibalised this overarching title and broke it down into the silos of “isms” and “ologies” we know today. Headlong reductionist pursuit of territory for study rendered the overarching understanding of natural systems old fashioned, and it is only over the last twenty or so years that we realise the wrong turn we have taken.
How ironic that Plato’s original thinking could have been so catastrophically undermined by the very institutions that took his name – Academia. At the same time, how heartening it is to see the ferment in the tech world as they rediscover again what we have come to call “ecology”. At the time of writing, the big tech companies are hiring ecologists for premiums above those of coders, realising that binary algorithms have their limits.
Recently, on climbing one of the biggest trees on earth, in Sequoia Crest in the Sierra Nevada Mountains of California, I had, in my terror, a moment of great clarity. As my sticky palms clung to the soft bark I turned to thinking of this Giant Sequoia’s great age. It was approximately 4,500 years old. To the best of my limited knowledge this particular tree had outlived the flowering and demise of 37 civilisations, each populated by an Establishment that would probably have had a relatively similar number of intelligent people to our own, yet, in each case the Establishment catastrophically got it wrong.
The reason we should be hopeful today, is that for the first time ever, we have a line of sight to our global interconnectedness, and our young people see their interests as not defined by narrow boundaries. At the same time, science is revealing aspects of life on earth that were formerly thought to be suited, and relevant only, to specialists in their blinkered silos. As we are coming to understand such expansive things as the micro-biomes inside ourselves, and the interconnected fungal chains in the soil beneath our feet, we are living through the greatest revolution in understanding the nature of life itself.
This book is important and well timed. It feels as if we are standing at a boundary which will define us not simply by a new Anthropocene era. Many are talking of meaning and purpose, and while the word spiritual is probably not quite right, there is a hunger for something that gives us direction with confidence. The lodestone for this emerging culture is deep ecology. The book’s urgent argument that the world needs a revolution in thinking is undoubtedly true. It is also true that no fact changes the world; only a story can do that. In this story, cities are the nexus and people are the agents of change, and the “ecological genius” of the city is understood to be both environmental and social – each dependent on the other and inextricably interwoven.
Civic Revolution is about the clash between our culture and wellbeing, and how this dissonance might be resolved. Ric answers a fundamental question for our time: how is it possible to mend the broken link between prosperity and a sustainable future? We should first ask whether in a well-balanced society the need to consume represents the only agency we feel we have, and is it possible that, with the return of a more holistic overview of life, a restating or revisioning of the values of community and deeper sense of belonging, those urges are tempered? A friend once memorably remarked when discussing education, “The question isn’t what sort of planet are we leaving our children. We should ask instead, what sort of children should we be leaving the planet?” Plato would have agreed.

Sir Tim Smit
January 2019
Introduction
What is happening in national politics makes me angry and I am not alone. We live precariously in an unsustainable twenty-first century global economy and an unstable environment. And yet our true calling to lift these shadows is deadened by the collective fear of breaking a broken system. The antidote to this lack of courage and vision is to do what we can to change the immediate world around us. Our livelihood depends on many things, not least a different perspective and broader aspirations. The good news is that the systemic change we need is fractal by nature: it requires leadership at every level of society.
Government can be pushed by citizens to make revolutionary changes, often with the help and organisation of impassioned social activists. They advocate fundamental change resolutely on behalf of their fellow citizens, agitating from outside the system. We need these committed individuals and their energy: they wake us up, and if we don’t wake up we become complicit.
Most of us are not activists, but all of us are citizens. This is a guide for us to take direct action locally, to spend our energy creating meaningful change where we live. Active citizenship is about finding new ways to make our city the seat of the solution and create non-linear change. It is about navigating the tension between our anger with this broken system and an appreciation of how it works. It is about implementing solutions to the problems that matter, no matter what happens.
Labelled as consumers and defined by our work, we forget our role as citizens. Our individual civic powers have atrophied to such an extent that we have become illiterate in civics. Civics boils down to the simple question of who decides. No one knows the city where you live better than you, so why let someone else take the decisions? I use the term “city” (here and throughout the book) loosely as shorthand for a place with a relatively high degree of urban-ness. Official city status does not matter: it’s the density and proximity of people that count, not physical boundaries or population size.
A friend of mine joked that it takes a mid-life crisis to write a good book. Our mid-life crisis could not be any bigger. Does humanity have a future measured in as many generations as its past? I don’t have the answer. How