Books

While I would love to see the economy bounce back to what it was, I believe any further thinking along these lines is tantamount to the proverbial ostrich with its head in the sand.

I don’t mean to suggest we should just give up; what I do mean is that if we expect things to return to the “old normal,” we’ll miss key opportunities to proactively prepare for the “new normal.”

With our life, culture and society transforming in fundamental ways, it behooves us to embrace this paradigm shift and challenge our old assumptions.

I work with people more than natural resources in our land use planning work here at the Foundation, so I sometimes miss the “purer” discussions around preservation or enhancement of a balanced, sustainable natural environment. That’s why I always eagerly await the next issue of Orion Magazine.

While the field of conservation has moved significantly towards the inclusion of humans in the discussion of and decisions about natural resources, the ethereal yet powerful spiritual elements of nature still find a constant thread in the articles, poetry and photography found throughout Orion.

Orion’s July/August was a different delight for me, however, as it looked at issues closer to home. It examines the interplay of climate change and peak oil and the responsibility of communities to plan accordingly and in a principled way.

The editors exhort the reader by asking, “When we take to the streets of our communities...shouldn’t we feel a sense of home that encompasses the past, the present and especially the future—a sense that our places are being made and remade to reflect the best of who we are and who we aim to become?” I’ve recently read two competing visions of how to answer these questions.

In his book The Experience of Place, the gifted writer Tony Hiss, offered us a new way to look at and appreciate place. In his latest offering, In Motion: The Experience of Travel, he does the same for travel.

Hiss, a Trustee Emeritus of the Foundation, is a truly lyrical writer with an incredible ability to draw information and inspiration from a highly diverse and extensive array of sources, and combine facts and philosophies to advance new insights.

In his new book, Hiss tells us how to reawaken our ability to experience travel and take it from something that, over time, has become familiar and even onerous and return it to an experience of higher awareness and true enjoyment. Developing the concept of Deep Travel, Hiss introduces us to this special type of consciousness. Deep Travel is a “bringer of novelty and the unexpected, a dissolver of boredom, even during an otherwise routine activity, like a trip to the supermarket.”

Jared Duval’s book Next Generation Democracy has just been released by Bloomsbury. Jared is on my Board, so I’ll admit my bias. But there’s no doubt his book is an important contribution to the evolving discussions on where democracy needs to go in our communities and our country.

Part educational and part advocacy, Jared’s engaging book offers a refreshing perspective on how the philosophy and field of open source software has shaped the “millenial generation” and its expectations of governments (and institutions). Being of the millennial generation himself, Jared is able to draw from his own experience and that of his contemporaries, as well as “baby boomers’” work and perspectives on the pressing topic of how to improve a system of government that clearly isn’t working.

Image: soundplusdesign.com

When I woke at 4:57am today in rural Vermont, I realized I had been woken by birdsong. The air was so packed with it you couldn't distinguish one call from the next. There was no starting and stopping; it was full on, full-throated and loud, startlingly so. My two-year-old woke up asking for milk and a spot in my bed. Neither of us fell back asleep.

Lying there in the half-light, I remembered waking up in New York City when I lived there a decade ago and what that sounded like: traffic, traffic, store front shields scraping up for the day, sirens, more traffic—a tinny, grinding, cacophonous din, which sometimes, for reasons I never figured out, became a hum that could sound like surf if you forgot where you were (which was never easy). Heavy snowfall was the only thing capable of muffling the City into, not silence, but a constrained quietude. And for a few hours—if we were lucky…the spell could be broken in minutes—all of Manhattan became a blanketed leviathan, a feverish heart in the chest of a submerging whale, an entombed anthill writ large. That’s when we’d get out our skis and slice right down the center of 2nd Avenue or up Broadway to the sparkling stretches of Central Park bordered on all sides by the city, uprising enormously in all its geometric force and certainty. But it was soft in the middle, and we sluiced along.

Image: Joyce Geleynse

I am encouraged right now. I’m wrapping up my reading of Stick Your Neck Out: A Street-Smart Guide to Creating Change in Your Community and Beyond by John Graham, President of The Giraffe Heroes Project. This book has lots of inspiring stories about individuals taking risks to make a difference in their communities, and it provides some concrete tips on beginning and sustaining these efforts. It’s an easy read that helps to fuel the possibilities.

I’m also a regular reader of Rich Harwood’s blog and appreciate his regular acknowledgements of individuals making a difference. He often takes popular culture or nationally reported incidences and finds the golden nugget or the silver lining, gently but cogently urging us to work from the better place within. And I watch with admiration as Steve Clift of eDemocracy and Matt Leighninger of Deliberative Democracy work away to foment change at a collective level.

This morning I sat down with my two-year-old son to read a book called Harry and the Lady Next Door. Though I’ve been familiar with the story since my own childhood, a hidden story within the story revealed itself to me today. But let’s start with the basic premise:

Harry (our protagonist) is a small, friendly, spotted dog of the terrier variety, who loves “all his neighbors…all except one.” The neighbor in question is the infamous Lady Next Door (antagonist), who sings incessantly, very high and very loud, which of course hurts Harry’s sensitive ears. She sings higher than the peanut man’s whistle, louder than the siren on the fire engine, higher and louder than all of the neighborhood cats put together. So Harry sets out to make her stop.

Photo: © Pedro Meyer, 1997

Just the other night I was casting around for some blog post inspiration. We all work so hard in the trenches and in our heads that sometimes it’s hard to get out of the present and think a little more broadly.

So there I am reading my local weekly paper and out jumps an essay about Plato. That is one of the attributes of living in a college town: professors will share their musings, often “dumbed down” for us mere mortals. In this particular article, Professor Victor Nuovo discusses “Laws,” a less well known work of Plato’s, and reminds us of the role of individuals:

“[I]f the rule of law is to accomplish [peace], it cannot be imposed upon a people from the outside or from above. It must operate within each individual member of society....” (Addison County Independent, March 11, 2010 p 17A).