Organic Landscape Design

The foregoing brought you up to date on my experiments with these ideas. I can now give a blow by blow as new results come in. In late August we had a meeting of the Core Group for Transition Westminster / Arvada / Broomfield for the purpose of discovering our common values. We started by trying to answer the question 'Why Transition?' There is an on going discussion by the group in our group pages here on Transition Colorado but I woke up the next morning thinking about these things and want to share them here as well.

Why Transition?

It is within our power, as a community, to foster a thriving, inclusive community in harmony with nature, here in Westminster/Arvada/Broomfield, if we understand our limits and the real potential that results from incorporating nature's processes into human systems.

Let me comment on some of the words I used:

Inclusive refers to the idea that our goal is the maximum happiness for the maximum possible number of people. I don't think happiness quite captures the real meaning we are trying to convey. This is not about absence of pain, or absence of want. This is about the opportunity to explore one's purpose in life – an exploration of the gift each of us has to give the rest of us – and we are all the richer the more people are able to do that.

We are limited by the fact that we rely on other species and physical processes for our own existence – we cannot destroy their ability to function without harm to ourselves.

The real potential of incorporating nature's processes into human systems derives from the fact that we participate in a single system that operates as an indivisible whole – a single pattern of flows – a single set of interactions.

The key to our power to foster the kind of community we want to live in is this understanding of interconnectedness. It is superior knowledge to the old understanding that the world is a struggle for survival between individual entities. From the "struggle for survival" point of view we cannot see all the potential for new connections. As a result of our old understanding we have been reducing the number and quality of interactions taking place in the system. With this superior knowledge we can set about to enhance the set of interactions by consciously creating new places for more people, plants and creatures to fit.