Urban Permaculture Design Course - San Francisco Summer 2008

Problem: Sustainable development has been discussed world-wide for decades but the problems, mischievously keep getting worse. Could we have been missing something big, maybe huge? The recent documentary Blindspot (http://www.blindspotdoc.com/) shows how the most basic assumptions about our future are wrong. How wrong? It is as if modern civilisation has got stuck in reverse gear, with economics that systematically, relentlessly messes things up.  Millions of...

Action: 1.  Notice the blindspot.  Notice that we've been trying to solve global problems with the same thinking that caused them. Do problems really become more manageable when tackled separately, here and there, a bit at a time? Don't get so distracted fiddling with pieces of the puzzle that the big picture is ignored.  For example our struggles to recycle a bit more have masked the ease with which all resources could be rescued to help our economy and planet. When we grieve about the latest armed ...

Problem: This solution tackles the question of legal juristiction in a multi-layered, community based social structure. How can you establish human rights on a global level while allowing individual communities to determine their own laws for food standards or noise levels?

Action: Within the structure of multi-layer democracy (http://www.standardsoflife.com/representation) there needs to be a way of handling the differences between different consitituencies within a layer and between layers. Variable Law is a legal construct that is best included in a constitution (http://www.standardsoflife.com/constitutional+Template) and provides ...