Expand the common good

Listening to Nicola Bullard and Vandana Shiva in conversation at the final thematic session of the Global Network Congress was fascinating. Both insisted that transformation isn't about the big idea, the era of the meta project is over. Bullard said that one of the most important things she had learned was that being involved in the process was important. Getting involved in those processes often means that many small changes begin to take place. Part of the work of critical involvement is then about patience and trusting the process. It is much more important to get workable local projects going, to use horizontal networks as a way of encouraging people to reconnect with reality again, this is also where our creative action and creative thinking can be worked through.
Shiva spoke movingly about the importance of local identity and the need to revalue the local after all of the delocalisation that has been taking place. Both insisted that the addicts of the current economic model have no new ideas and that this is a good time to to start promoting news ideas.
They ended with the idea of trying to expand the common good. The only way to counter the fragmentation of life is to reclaim the commons, those things such as air, water, land, seeds, healthcare, which belong to all of us together. This is a bit like the creative commons form of copyright but more about a creative way of resisting patenting and commercialising the whole of the basis for life by using our common creativity and energy, by identifying and affirming what it is we hold in common.

What kind of chicken are you?

I had my first experience of the world café methodology this morning and enjoyed it - although when you're interpreting it's not always easy to get a sense for things. It seemed to go well and there are a lots of interesting things to read on the cards that have been put up with ideas and comments. The Kirchentag will be using this methodology for the first time this year at the forum on Israel and Palestine. It will be interesting to hear how it works.
Martin Robra ended a session this afternoon by asking the panellists what story they would give to a young person from Germany wishing to transform the way things currently are.
Vandana Shiva said she would tell a young person in Germany today a story that a young man from Germany told her at the Kirchentag about 15 years ago. He was unemployed at that time, on the scrap heap literally and figuratively, so he had started collecting rubbish and taking it away to make compost out of it and recycle it in other ways. Shiva was herself already very involved in campaigning to protect biodiversity and stop life itself becoming a commodity. At one point in their conversion the young German man suddenly said to her "Now I get it. You are an organic chicken and you can already eat organic food, but you are trying to stop them put you into the battery chicken farm. Me I've been thrown out of the battery chicken farm and told I'll never be able to feed myself. What I think is that the two of us should meet at the gates to the battery farm and work at changing things."