I have recently returned from my second expedition to North East Scotland with the Center for the Force Majeure. I found this country illuminating in so many ways. The people, the landscape, the colors of green, the light quality. I felt a warmth and understanding radiate from this spot in the world that I had never before experienced. We were working in a small Scottish village named Banchory, with the inspired Barn Arts Center, led by Mark and Fiona Hope, two incredibly generous and brightly spirited people. Another vital connection we have to this region is Anne Douglas, a prominent thinker and champion of practice led PhD research in the arts. Anne and I are now thinking a great deal about how to bring the arts to bear on policy making.
Last year as well as this year, we stayed with Marc and Fiona at there home named Sunninghill. A beautiful old home overlooking the small village of Banchory. Fiona has a rambling garden that spills over the side of the hill. She forages, cooks and feeds us such healthy loving food.
Last year, Marc took us traveling up the Dee and Don rivers that had been experiencing catastrophic flooding during the previous year. He wanted us to help him think through how to address this ever increasing issue. Little did he or Anne know where that request would eventually go. My memory of this first visit shows up as a warmth in my heart. They not only invited us in and cooked for us, we also had the most stimulating conversations about the possibilities to heal the landscape, create new models of trade, and reconnect to life itself. Marc and Fiona’s Sufi nature often came forward here, that kind of depth plus a keen and discerning intelligence, combined with a knack for bringing people together.
The first set of proposal-images we made featured a guiding poem written by Newton that beautifully reimagined Scotlands great commons: the topsoil, the water, the forests, the air, the commons of mind and bespoke of them as the true wealth, deep wealth, of this nation, Scotland. What I have realized is that this was such an important first move, as it created a large scale vision helping guide the second stage of thinking, keeping us from patchwork and getting caught going down endless rabbit holes. It also helped crystallize the core actors of the living system in a way that everyone could imagine and see in their mind’s eye. It also pointed to a national unity and power, in that it said “Scotland could become the first country in the history of countries to give back more to the life web then it takes.” There was something about these two psychological and linguistic elements woven together that broke new ground and provoked new seeing. The images along with a animated video poem can be seen here.
The second phase of the work took this guiding poem and made proposals for restoring the commons (albeit still at very large scale). In brief they are: For the topsoil - learn a new form of Syntropic farming from Farmer Gotsch. For the forests - learn from the elders, the 2000+ year old trees, and design a new type of forestry. These elders have lived through drought, heat, fire and are the essence of resilience. Here is a group we found that is already moving in this direction, called the Archangel Tree Archive. For the waters- a provocative idea was put forth for the future when the waters rise - could they make a virtue of this phenomena by creating highly productive estuarial lagoons at some of the mouths of their great rivers? All that is needed is a narrowing of where the fresh water meets the sea using sand bars, then a grand sea nursery appears that can meet 1/5 the needs of the people for protein thereby reducing the need for cattle, and timber… and then a virtuous cycle is born.
Lastly, a beautiful moment of seeing revealed that Scotland has a rich foraging community, with 1 million of the 5.3 million people engaging in this pastime. A very high overall percentage. It was a “million person conversation” with the landscape. So after gathering many of their stories and looking for patterns in them, we proposed to awaken this special foraging community, a group of people whom are in direct touch with the landscape and naturally averse to big business. The call was to bring them together, and ultimately try to form a voting block that could transform the country from the inside out.
What a challenge and gift Newton and the center had given the country of Scotland, what refreshing ways of seeing the landscape anew. During this second visit we asked the question : how do you do something like this on a country-wide scale? Is it possible? Is it just big thinking that will be stopped by little thinking? We had many interesting meetings around this challenge, and I listened as well as reflected on the patterns I heard being spoken around me. All were very interested in these ideas becoming a reality, but how? This is the next stage of thinking that needs to be done. A big takeaway from these fascinating conversations with land owners, politicians, academics and local enthusiasts was that a “grand synthesis'“ was needed in order to bring efforts together and become emergent, more than the sum of the parts. We wanted to envision and the enact the work at scale, in a way that countered the 6th mass extinction itself. We spoke of holding “deep listening” sessions, to see who was thinking and doing what where. This was deemed step 1. Yet I am left wondering what is step 2? These listening sessions needed to be guided towards action, or it had the danger ending up as just more talking.
This got me thinking about this ennobling problem, and I felt that one of the things Newton and Helen have done so beautifully is turn ideas into icons, visible images that everyone could see and discuss. Creating a locust for synergies to emerge. Therefore I realized, there is a real need to visualize the great network of people working, and to turn it into an icon to compose and re-compose as a ground. Where are the overlapping geographies of focus, what strengths can be combined to create a new order of doing? That way we could be begin to design how we could work together for the good of the whole, a country wide whole. This is now in the incubator - how to manifest a multidimensional mapping that allows us to co-create has been calling to me after this experience. I will pursue this impulse, Stay tuned.