And Now What

10/09/2024

Tipping Points Confluence - Flanders

Day 1 (2)

The hosting team from Equinox Collective and AndNowWhat welcomed our attendees with a wonderful check-in circle under the trees at . Valérie Carrette told us about the cloister, the regional history, and the self-sustaining habits of the Benedictine nuns. Each of us shared our own intentions in attending a Confluence about such a heavy topic.

After a wonderful vegetarian lunch Ralph Thurm and Bill Baue introduced the first two sessions of the r3.0 Conference. Bill framed the history of the term ‘tipping points’ in the literature—important grounding before the first Provocateurs: our friends Jem Bendell, Dr. Avit K. Bhowmik, Karen O’Brien and Joe Brewer (at short notice for Chidi Oti Obihara).

This first session was “Tipping Points - the Positives and the Negatives: As the world teeters on the brink of multiple catastrophic tipping points that can trigger collapses in ecological and social systems, humanity holds a key to its salvation: the potential to trigger positive tipping points for rapid transformation to social norms that reinforce earth system stability and social system resilience. This session will gather leading experts on tipping points – both adverse ones and beneficial ones – to explore how best to navigate our predicaments.”

The authenticity, vulnerability and fractal agency of each of the speakers really shone through! These people are living examples of how to step-up to share deep understandings of the enormity of our global predicament and what we need to do about it. Their honesty, perseverance, radical candor and love for life, are an example to us all, impressed our attendees, and prompted rich discussions and reflections.

The second session was an all-female suite of Provocateurs: Samantha Power, Belén Páez, Alison Shaw, and Ting Pan. “Municipalities & Bioregions: Place-Based Collapse Resilience” was more about how “a conscious shift for r3.0 (and us) into a primary focus on place-based engagement, specifically at the nested scales of municipalities and bioregions, as these represent the most promising contexts for navigating collapse with resilience. This session focussed on the systemic innovations that communities are seeding to ruggedize in the context of increasing complexity and potential crashes”, and the wonderful work the panel are doing.

Our diverse group could see the importance of each initiative, and (for us, future) relevance in our bioregions. We watched the sessions live, together, (though not all were visible on our stationary camera) and discussed content, implications and personal impacts over lunch, dinner and breaks. Our participants contributed to our ‘harvest wall’, while Kaa Faensen was simultaneously capturing her wonderful digital visuals in real time.

11/08/2024

TOXIC LEGACIES...
“If we want [wells] not to leak, we need to design them to last for the future of humanity,” said Dwayne Purvis, a petroleum engineer and oil and gas consultant at Purvis Energy Advisors. “But I don’t think anybody conceived to do that at any point in the history of the industry.”

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/06082024/texas-oil-industry-pollution-lawsuit/?utm_source=InsideClimate+News&utm_campaign=6d5d54cdda-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2024_08_10_01_03&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_29c928ffb5-6d5d54cdda-330041598
A Legal Fight Over Legacy Oil Industry Pollution Heats Up in West Texas
A “first of its kind” lawsuit contends that oil companies including Chevron failed to properly plug and decommission wells on private property, challenging common assumptions about plugged wells.
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“Can people still live out here? Or have we just tacitly decided as a society that this land is going to be r***d, pillaged and left for dead?” she asked. “And if we as a society have decided that, has anyone told the landowners?”
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A “first of its kind” lawsuit contends that oil companies including Chevron failed to properly plug and decommission wells on private property, challenging common assumptions about plugged wells.

14/06/2024

We are co-hosting a Bioregional Confluence in Europe!

TIPPING POINTS ON TIPPING POINTS CONFLUENCE - FLANDERS, SEPTEMBER
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(This is a long post, though for those of you as concerned as us about social-ecological systems collapse, I think you will appreciate it.)
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As many of you will know

"The challenges of our times require more than individual responses."

"...if we are to enable broader systemic changes we will need to build collective collapse awareness in whole bioregional ecosystems of players, with sufficient critical mass and governance coherence to redirect significant program funding (not just project funding) within collectively agreed anticipatory whole system designs. For this we will need whole ecosystems of collapse-aware change-makers, enabled with sufficient resources to conduct and implement whole systems anticipatory design on behalf of all.

What we really need, while we are still privileged enough to have the opportunity, are systematic processes for facilitating the emergence of system-wide collaborations of willing, informed, ecologically-conscious, collapse-aware contributors! Ideally, these collapse-aware individuals would be ready, willing and able to participate and influence multiple fractal scales, from grass-roots, bottom-up individual organisations and local businesses, to top-down industry or government agencies, and from local projects right up to integrated, bioregional-scale anticipatory whole system design programs… so how do we get there from here?"

(from our AndNowWhat website: https://andnowwhat.be/systems-facilitation-and-synthesis/ )
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We think one first step on the way forward is through meeting with like-minded others to deepen individual and collective experience while courageously learning about, contemplating and facing the reality of difficult topics.

We've designed an event to do just this, wrapped around the excellent conference content of R3.0 (with the blessings of Ralph Thurm & Bill Baue) and with our friends and colleagues at Equinox Collective.

We also hope to start weaving in the concepts of Bioregional Learning Centres coming from the excellent work of Joe Brewer & Penny Heiple's Design School for Regenerating Earth (in which Anne and I are participating and contributing Courageous Conversations).

Perhaps we can even start co-creating Islands of Sanity...and see how we can find synergies that build the groundswell of a greater collapse-preparedness movement, in bioregions like ours.

You can check out more details and register here https://www.equinox-collective.org/tipping-points-confluence/

We'd love to see you there.

Neil Davidson, on behalf of the Team (Anne Billen, Valérie Carrette, Kim Oostvogels & Bob Vanderstukken)

Equinox Collective r3.0 Conference 2024 - Confluence 'Tipping points on tipping points' - Building Necessary Collapse Resilience - In collaboration with: A confluence around the 2024 r3.0 online conference

12/05/2024

“When politicians and the mass media keep trotting out the phrase "Don't panic" or "There's no cause for alarm," they're evoking the imaginary panic you see in movies.

They don't want you to panic for real, even if your panic results in the appropriate actions that save lives.

Real panic makes them look bad. It costs money (and elections). It eats into profits.

Why should we be panicking now?

As Allen and so many other writers have explained, the world is ending. We're in the middle of a sixth mass extinction, one we caused. Our weather patterns are going haywire. We're facing a cascade of pandemics. We've nearly depleted our natural resources. We're heading into a major population collapse. Almost every scientist in every discipline knows this, even if they're too afraid to say that out loud.

Of course whe should panic”

Jessica Wildfire echoes Greta Thunberg: I want you to panic!

Anything better than the smug complacency or active hostility of people in denial.

And then, move on: through the panic of , to .

Let’s get serious about And Now What

And ask ourselves: who do I choose to be? What NEEDS to be done? What can we do together, that we cannot do alone?

Overturning a stigma.

22/04/2024

Conversation Article: Don’t blame Dubai’s freak rain on cloud seeding – the storm was far too big to be human-made

"The interesting thing is that humans have a hard time coming to terms with the fact that 2,400 gigatonnes of carbon (our total emissions since pre-industrial times) might make a difference to climate, but very readily get behind the idea of a few hygroscopic flares making 18 months worth of rain fall in a day."

Some parts of the Gulf experienced 18 months of rain in a single day.

18/03/2024

March 2024 Update — Video Footage of Coral Bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef😢

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-03-14/great-barrier-reef-facing-another-mass-coral-bleaching-event/103590186?

My poem—Great No More—was written in 2016... we knew this was coming... https://neildavidson.medium.com/great-no-more-bf62bb5e083f sadly, my words, based on their science (I've met Ove Hoegh-Guldberg and Terry Hughes) gains more relevance every season...

https://andnowwhat.be/about/

Sarah Ferguson presents Australia's premier daily current affairs program, delivering agenda-setting public affairs journalism and interviews that hold the powerful to account. Plus political analysis from Laura Tingle.