Subject: [permaculture] City Repair
Project, and leadership
Aloha,
This past friday PM I saw Mark Lakeman's
presentation on the City Repair Project that started in Portland (OR, USA)
a number of years ago (Toby wrote about it for the Activist a while
back).
If you haven't seen their presentation(s) and have any
opportunity to do so at any time, **Just Do It!** (take that, Nike... ;-).
They're starting a tour of some Northeast USA and Canada locations today or
thereabouts (schedule on their site, cityrepair.org).
Excellent,
excellent, excellent! If you're organizing/scheduling courses, they'd
be a *fantastic* guest gig - for the urban stuff, sure, but they go well
beyond that systemically speaking.
AND - it offers a living breathing
example (quite a few of them now, actually) of how a self-organizing group
of culturally conditioned human beings can get outside some of their
conditioning and design and manifest what they want in their "village" -
despite the heirarchical "leaders" who won't allow it, etc. etc.
The
neighborhood residents become the collective "leaders." And their
example is being recognized and sought out by all manner of people who
maybe thought it couldn't be done (at least not by them) and now see that
it can.
I think we're *social* animals. I doubt we're primarily
*herd* animals. Of course we can choose to be sheep, but we can also
choose lots of other roles - they're all stories we tell ourselves about
who we are (and what we can/can't do). Change the lived story, change
the consequences.
I'm not interested in training future leaders in the
current sense of the phrase. It looks suspiciously like passive
yearning that someone else will fix the mess I think I'm in. Like any
addiction - the pattern of "I'll feel better/everything will be fine if I
just have one more drink/fix/sex act/relationship/sports car/giant TV/new
leader."
I am interested in inviting people to recognize their own
abilities of self-leadership - to be their own leaders and collaborate with
others doing likewise. Who's going to want to follow some "tin-horn
despot" (foreign or domestic ;-) then? Too few people to
matter.
The problem is the solution, says Permaculture. If the
problem right now is that *too few people to matter* are taking action to
replace pathological "leadership" with healthier systems, then the solution
is for more people to take action to create healthier systems - systems
where *too few people to matter* are taking action to create pathological
"leadership."