Two years ago this blog suggested that Cuba offered a great case study for Cities Under Peak Oil conditions. Subsequent to that blog Jim Garrison interviewed me for Integral Life about my book Integral City. We talked about The New Cuban Revolution: how the fairly surprising case study of Havana, Cuba offered insights to the sustainability discussion. After the fall of [...]
Come with me on a journey through the eye of beauty across an ocean of grief ... and beyond. Filmmaker Jan Vozenilek of Copper Sky Productions shared one of the most moving stories of human-caused assault on the natural world at the Building Sustainable Communities Conference (BSC) in Kelowna. I have just returned from there and am [...]
This blog is the third prologue for a keynote at the FreshOutlook Feb. 27, 2012 Building SustainABLE Communities Conference. Integral City is a new paradigm for looking at cities that reveals its bio-psycho-cultural-structural evolutionary intelligences. These twelve intelligences cluster into five capacities and are organized into an Integral City Compass that provides direction and alignment [...]
P 1. Ecosphere Intelligence 1. Honor the climate and geography of your city. 2. Steward the environment. 3. Add value to the Earth space. P 2. Emerging Intelligence 1. Survive so holons serve each other’s existence. 2. Adapt to the environment. 3. Create a self-regenerating feedback loop, by interconnecting human regeneration cycles so that they [...]
Last week Almere Netherlands was the location of my learning and the focus of my attention. Attending the fifth Centre for Human Emergence, NL, fifth Spiral Dynamics Integral Confab, Almere was featured in case studies to explore the city with Integral City related lenses. Almere was created as a New Town, 30 years ago, using [...]
I had another brush with fear yesterday when I read the Climate Primer released by the Melbourne Climate Action Centre called 4 Degrees Hotter. Ironically I had just finished teaching at Royal Roads University, the inaugural Sustainable Community Development Graduate Certificate, with a Challenge focused on a Climate Action Plan for a BC City. I had completed the literature [...]
I spent last week at Royal Roads University delivering the first Residency of the Sustainability Graduate Certificate. Ten students from across Canada provided a rigorous proving ground for the Integral City approach to sustainability. Using the Integral City Compass to prove the design with three leverage points, here is what we did. Integral City Compass [...]
A few days ago a trusted colleague, John Steiner, sent me an email thread that told the story of an interesting Japanese invention - a machine that converts plastic into oil. You can see a video for yourself if you click here. This machine answers a question I have harboured for years, and that is: if plastic [...]
One of the things I like about the Holland America cruises is the ship's log they give at the end of the voyage. It is an interesting accountability document for key resources, especially water and fuel. My recent cruise on the MS Rotterdam used 120 tons/day of fuel to travel a toal of 3529 nautical [...]
When you are looking for weak signals about the toughness of economic times look to see how business keeps the revenues flowing. I just returned from a floating city holiday aka a cruise. The travel industry has been hit in so many ways from terrorist threats, biological invasions and economic down cycles it is interesting [...]