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Archive for March, 2011

Songpa South Korea Awarded the Globe Sustainable City Award 2011

Posted in Building - Structures, C. Collective Intelligences, Level 7 Yellow, Navigating - IVSM, tagged , , , , , , , , on March 29, 2011 | 1 Comment »


STOCKHOLM, March 28, 2011 − The South Korean district Songpa wins the Globe Sustainable City Award 2011 for excellent sustainable urban development.

The Globe Sustainable City Award is now presented for the third year. The aim of the City Award is to recognize cities and municipalities, which excel in sustainable, urban development, and to set a positive example for others. The general mission of the Globe Sustainability Awards is to highlight and acknowledge particular cases and initiatives within the sustainability arena.

Songpa is an Asian City with a 2000 year-long history, as well as a recent history of Sport Olympics in 1988. It is now becoming a regeneration front-runner as it pioneers with the implementation of many innovations for Sustainability. Songpa employs a suite of significant sustainability metrics, which are branding it as a Sustainable Eco City. Among other indicators, environmental governance by the Green Songpa Committee demonstrates unique leadership.  Along with Eco Technology and Eco Leadership, the impressive Solar Power Plants qualify Songpa for the Globe Award.  Their application states:

“A modern City is not designed simply to facilitate convenience of human life, but to allow people of every group to mingle harmoniously with each other in order to work hard to preserve the environment for the next generations…”.   Aligning with this framing of Songpa’s philosophy of sustainability, the Globe Award jury affirms Songpa’s qualifications to receive the Award.

The competition was strong and the runners-up were such remarkable communities as: Araçuaí in Brazil, Murcia in Spain, São Paulo in Brazil, and Tampere in Finland. “Strong passion for a more sustainable city in combination with a high level of innovation of building effective processes between stakeholders is the backbone of the application from Songpa”, says jury group Chairman Jan Sturesson.

“Songpa has approached sustainability on a grand scale where its success with river restoration has expanded to solar energy production, resulting in completely re-patterning life for its citizens. The strong collaboration between different sectors of society – private, public and NGO – together with a holistic approach in building an environment-friendly solar power plant is a winning concept. Songpa had a really strong application in this contest – not the least of which was because the project involved NGO and private industry in support of a charitable purpose, i.e. cheap electricity for the poor. All of the contenders for the award this year, realized that human and social capital is critical to keep city dwellers in a harmonious relationship with each other”, emphasises Chairman Jan Sturesson.

The prize ceremony will be held virtually at the Globe Forum Sustainability Conference in Stockholm on May 11th. The winner and the jury will co-present the winning project. There will be an online chat after the prize ceremony so anyone who wishes can put forward questions directly to the laureates.

More information about the program is available at: www.globeforum.com/stockholm

The Globe Sustainability Awards have been given out since 2007 in four categories: Sustainable Research, Innovation, Reporting – and since 2009 – Sustainable City.

More information about Globe Award and other winners, is available at the Globe Award Website.

About Songpa:

Songpa has been effectively pursuing Green Policy with the aim of making their comprehensive environmental vision happen. Trying to become a Sustainable Low Carbon & Green Growth Leading City, Songpa has been taking many initiatives, such as: Green Energy, Ecological Urban Environment, recycling of resources, etc.  the level of implemented innovations is remarkable as well as short- and long-terms objectives which have been under way for years. By engaging the residents in implementing the innovative programs and raising public awareness about the environment and fulfilling green governance Songpa has been creating a multi-dimensional sustainable city.

The Jury:
The jury for the Globe Sustainable City Award consists of highly experienced and internationally recognized experts. The overall chairman of all four jury groups is Lars-Olle Larsson, Partner at PwC Sweden.

 

Jan Sturesson – Chairman of the jury, Partner at PwC and Global Leader of Government and Public Service, Sweden member of World Economic Forum Global Agenda Council of Urbanization.

Carlos Arruda – PhD, Chairman of the Unicon, Director of the International Relations and coordinator of the Innovation Center Fundação Dom Cabral (FDC), Brazil

Lawrence Bloom – Deputy Chairman of Noble Cities Plc., Former Chair and Current Member of the World Economic Forum Global Agenda Council on Urban Management, Chairman of the UN Environmental Programme, Green Economy Initiative, sector on Green Cities, Buildings and Transport. and the UK Chair of the Intergovernmental Renewable Energy Organisation

Marilyn Hamilton – PhD, CGA is the founder of Integral City Meshworks Inc. and TDG Global Learning Connections, Canada 

C. S. Kiang – professor, Chairman of Peking University Environment Fund, China

Leif Edvinsson – Adjunct Professor of Intellectual Capital at Lund University, Sweden

Hazem Galal – Globe Award Ambassador, Partner at PwC, Brazil

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Globe Award was founded in 2007 in Sweden by the international business network and marketplace Globe Forum. Globe Award 2011  acknowledges prominent researchers, innovators, cities and companies – from all parts of the world – within four categories Sustainability Research Award, Sustainability Innovation Award, Sustainable City Award and the Sustainability Reporting Award.

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Spiritual Practices for Dealing with the News

Posted in C. Collective Intelligences, Emergence, Global/Worldcentric, Integral Maps, Level 8 Turquoise, tagged , , , , , on March 23, 2011 |


As a follow up to my blog on the Systems and Resilience Cycles for the Restoration of Sendai, Integral City Spiritual Advisor, Terry Patten blogs a much needed set of practices for dealing with the News – good, bad and otherwise.  Terry says:

“The news so far during 2011 has been particularly electrifying: Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, and the whole Middle East.  Budget crises worldwide, and in the USA, bitter battles including dramatic moves to rewrite the social contract. Japan’s earthquake, tsunami and nuclear crisis. The brutal civil war and international intervention in Libya. And there will be more electrifying and heartbreaking news soon, undoubtedly.

It stirs our hearts and our fears, distracts us, fascinates us, and confuses us. There are several ways to practice with this kind of news, and I want to share three perspectives about how we can work with it as a practice.” 

Terry outlines three practices that work at every level – from the macro-world scale to the deeply personal experience.  Click here to read his full blog.

These practices can help us find how to respond to news in ways that tap into our capacity to find out how we can offer our greatest service to the world’s greatest needs - whether that be holding a compassionate heart-space and/or taking appropriate action.  Following, Terry’s wisdom releases us from addictive reactions into designing proactive responses. This is a whole system win because it creates relationships with self, other, Gaia and the Kosmos that make possible an evolutionary emergence. For those who follow these practices in the Integral City it opens up the channels of healing, resonance and collective intelligence.

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Systems and Resilience Cycles for Sendai Restoration

Posted in Integral Maps, Lifecycle, Panarchy, A. Contexting Intelligences, tagged , , , , , , , on March 21, 2011 | 1 Comment »


How do you integrate five of the resilience models that I have used in Integral City?  How can they help us understand how to respond, repair and restore the city as a living system in disasters like we have seen this year in Brisbane, Christchurch and Sendai?

Integral City(p. 43)  illustrates the four stages of the resilience cycle as they progress through different degrees of connectedness and potential. It seems to me that each author I have cited in the book and below (Adizes, Bloom, Eoyang, Graves and Holling)  has used a 4 stage cycle and because these are applied at different scales of the human system, they help us understand the dynamics of the city — both in good times and in disasters.  Essentially these five resilience cycles are embedded in one another.

(Note this model illustrates the 4 stages in a 4 quadrant model that is different than the Integral 4 quadrants. It is especially important to notice it is a CYCLE model that appears to apply to all living systems. In terms of the Integral Model you can imagine the Integral Model progressing through each of these stages as it develops or evolves.  I have mapped the authors and their cycle description in the two images below – one a Legend and the other a “stacked” map of the cycles.)

Systems Cycles Legend    Resilience Cycles Co-Exist in the City

In order to illustrate this I am going to use the city of Sendai Japan because the cycles are all in very high activation and differentiation at the moment.  I don’t know much about Sendai except through the news, and I offer this with the greatest respect of the difficulties they face at this time.(I hope this is helpful to see the dynamics of systems in the city, in play before our eyes. On many occasions they are hidden because the change states are not changing much – but this is a very vivid example.)

Holling describes the stages of an ecosystem. (He uses the Panarchy reslience model that he co-created).
Sendai is a coastal city, whose ecosystem was at a steady state Conservation stage. The earthquake/tsunami plunged it catastrophically into a Release stage where all the elements of the ecosystem are still connected but no longer ordered. As it responds to the emergency it will attempt to move from the Release stage into the Reorganization stage where the elements will actually be reorganized to deliver higher potential with new systems.
Bloom describes the stages of species systems (for bees and I have borrowed it for Humans).
The Human Species who lived in Sendai were probably also at a steady state of Conformity Enforcement where daily life was governed and moderated by supportive bureaucracies and agencies. After the disaster it was forced out of Conformity into the first stages of Diversity Generation (DG) just to stay alive. We are already starting to see DG move from an entry stage into a more mature stage as so much emergency response kicks into gear.
Eoyang describes the stages of self-organizing sectors or organizations.
Within Sendai let us imagine that there was a retail sector selling electronic devices (handhelds etc.). It was not doing so well before the tsunami – so it was already in a Disconnected stage. After the tsunami there was nothing left of the business neighbourhood, office buildings, the employees or most of the customers. So this retail sector has shifted into a stage of chaos.
Adizes describes the stages that single organizations go through as they mature.
Within Sendai let us imagine there was a Startup Company that was selling new nutraceuticals including Iodine tablets (used for radiation remediation). The demand for its emergency supply nutraceuticals and radiation skyrockets and it was located on high ground and survives the tsunami. It must move from a startup phase into heavy production to meet the demand.

Graves and Beck describe the stages of change that individuals go through (these have sounds that I often illustrate when I am speaking or lecturing – alpha is the happy humhmmhmm; beta – is the uhohuhoh something is changing; gamma is the “oh shit – there is no way back”; and delta is “wow, a clear day has dawned; new alpha is the return to happy humhmmhmm but at a new level of capacity because of the learning that has happened through progressing through each stage.
In Sendai let us say there was a woman who had just picked up her child from school (alpha). The tsunami roars in on her way home (plunging her thru beta right to gamma). Somehow she and her child miraculously get swept to high ground – she has a Delta relief to have survived. But when when she looks around her and none of her house, family, neighbours survived she realizes that life has changed forever (back to gamma).
(Note that in the resilience model I have made the Graves stages of change double barrelled eg. alpha-beta etc. to better represent the ranges that would occur in each of the Resilience quadrants.)

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What the above attempts to illustrate is that the Relience framework has been discovered and modelled at each level of scale of a living system by different researchers. All the cycles are ongoing – but at different different speeds. It appears that the Panarchy model illustrates the upshifts and downshifts in the cycles much the same way as Spiral Dynamics describes the vertical dimension of the Integral Model.

If any readers are familiar with Weisboard’s “Discovering Common Ground” or “Productive Workplaces Revisited”  he actually identifies the appropriate response to support systems at each stage of the cycle. These are instructive to consider when conditions are stable in a city.  But in order for Sendai (and its sibling cities who have been affected by disaster) to restabililze what it needs most now is attention to the spiral of complexities through which cities evolve and out of which resilience emerges.

Sendai needs the basics of life (people are winuclear thout food and shelter); family relocation and support systems (they have been torn apart – the sense of belonging has been traumatized); a focus for energy and healthy tolerance of risk (to align warrior spirits and release the powerful blockages of grief); restoration of order and authority for dependable city infrastructures (obliterated and/or multiply threatened); strategies for successful economic results (to re-establish economies and social systems) ; caring and sharing across cultures and/or castes (to bridge cultural silos, stovepipes and solitudes which have emerged from the disaster. And all of this requires systems thinking (to align and re-align attention to all of the needs concurrently demanding attention) and a worldcentric consciousness (that embraces the intensity of immediate needs and the evolutionary spirit of our ever-evolving resilience cycles).

The culture of the Japanese seems to have developed a remarkable resilience (noted by many) because of its life conditions which has created a history of surviving natural disasters. They are providing a model for other cities around the world to learn how to work together and re-build the resilience systems that support people at all levels of scale, even under the most challenging conditions.  Keeping both the resilience cycles and the spiral of needs in view, the world can be effective in offering assistance to help restore Japaneses cities to their full sense of wellbeing over the months and years ahead.

References:
Adizes, I. (1999). Managing Corporate Lifecycles. Paramus, NJ: Prentice Hall Press.

Beck, D., & Cowan, C. (1996). Spiral Dynamics: Mastering Values, Leadership and Change. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers.

Bloom, H. (2000). The Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century. New York: John Wiley & Son Inc.

Eoyang, G., & Olson, E. (2001). Facilitating Organization Change: Lessons from Complexity Science. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Pfeiffer.

Graves, C. (2005). The Never Ending Quest: A Treatise on an Emergent Cyclical Conception of Adult Behavioral Systems and Their Development. Santa Barbara, CA: ECLET Publishing.

Gunderson, L. C., & Holling, C. S. (Eds.). (2002). Panarchy: Understanding Transformations in Human and Natural Systems Washington, DC: Island Press.

Hamilton, M. (2008). Integral City: Evolutionary Intelligences for the Human Hive. Gabriola Island BC: New Society Publishers.

Weisbord, M. R. (2004). Productive Workplaces Revisited: Dignity, Meaning and Community in the 21st Century. San Francisco,: Jossey-Bass.

Weisbord, M. R., et al. (1992). Discovering Common Ground: How Future Search Conferences Bring People Together …. San Francisco,: Berrett-Koehler.

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Open Letter to 3 Women Imagineers of the Integral Age on 100th Anniversary of International Women’s Day

Posted in E. Evolutionary Intelligences, Emergence, tagged , , , , , , , on March 8, 2011 | 1 Comment »


This is An Open Letter to Three Women Imagineers of the Integral Age
On The Occasion of the 100th Anniversary of International Women’s Day

Dear Drs. Hazel Henderson, Barbara Marx Hubbard and Jean Houston

I claimed I was never a feminist in the 60’s or 70’s. That’s because I didn’t see myself as an activist then. But in truth, my father programmed me for some kind of emerging feministic perception and behaviours. When I was still in my mid-teens, he brought me Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan, and a dash of Germaine Greer and Gloria Steinem along with many opportunities to discuss and debate their arguments on the lives of women. What’s more, he convinced me there was nothing I couldn’t do.  I just believed him and carried on as if it were true. So I didn’t encounter cultural resistance in my family of origin and I simply took for granted the fertile adaptive ground that all the suffragettes, feminists, liberationists and activists had prepared for me.
As an older and more appreciative woman, I am deeply grateful to the women (and men) who came before me that enabled the sexual freedom, conscious awareness, political rights and social structures that have become my life-right (if not my birthright).
On this occasion of the 100th Anniversary of International Women’s Day (March 8, 1911) I marvel that I have become an activist. I seem to have skipped over the stages of activism that relate to the modern and post-modern woman and plunged directly into the age of the integral woman – even the integral human being.
Based on my understanding and experience of systems, lifecycles, life conditions, change, resilience, self-organization, global perspectives, marriage, human relationships, cities and cultural shifts, I have even formulated  a theory of evolution (and involution) for human systems. I am writing this letter of appreciation today because whatever I know has been so greatly influenced by you trio of women who called yourselves the Power of Yin. Thirty-three years ago, in 1978-79 – two thirds of the way through the century following the first International Women’s Day -  Hazel Henderson, Barbara Marx Hubbard and Jean Houston – gathered to share your insights about female sensibility and  principles.
When my book was published in 2008 “Integral City: Evolutionary Intelligences for the Human Hive” I had not read the book that emerged from your trialogue  — now a book called The Power of Yin.  I did not discover it until 2010 and serendipitously I am re-reading it this week of the 100th Anniversary of the International Women’s Day. I could not have chosen a more appropriate way to celebrate 100 years of women’s progress than with you three activists, authors and animators. All of you should be in the bibliography of Integral City – but somehow your messages had become so integrated into the meshwork of my thought patterns, your names were most embarrassedly omitted from the book’s Reference record.
I hope this letter somewhat rectifies that sin of omission because it was unintended and is a most grievous oversight. I can only surmise that the reason for the omission was because the principles described in the Power of Yin had become the field from which the ideas for my book were birthed. I didn’t recognize the birth waters I was emerging from.
In the first chapter of Power of Yin, Jean speaks of the beehive as her technological image for how she is in the world. No wonder she so graciously responded to my book which has the subtitle of “Evolutionary Intelligences for the Human Hive” when she was actually present at its launch in 2008. I feel like she anointed and attuned me to her trans-cultural, fractal time, universe-wide sensibilities – which she more recently (in 2010) amplified in me during her “Saging” social artistry course.
Even before those occasions, Barbara impressed me at both World Future Society and the Vancouver Summit events where she had spoken of her long-held vision of the cosmic human whom we are becoming as we reach out to the universe to access, gather and reconfigure the resources we are depleting here on Earth. Barbara’s vision of the evolutionary future was so potent for me that when I met a NASA physician who reminded me of that image, during the final edit of my book, I re-wrote the last chapter to propose that one of the reasons we need to optimize our life in the Human Hive is to learn how to successfully build space colonies. I hugged her when we were together in Perpignan in 2009 – and that was not nearly a sufficient expression of gratitude.
But the longest shadow of your Yin trio has stretched across the doorway of my inquiries from Hazel Henderson.  For almost two decades I have been under the influence of Hazel’s healthy community and quality of life indicators as she has redefined how a wholistic economy emerges from the leaky edges of the old paradigms. Since the early 90’s, I have followed your activism from Florida-based Healthy City Indicators to whole systems thinking, to your ethical investing initiatives. Hazels’ courage to question, provoke and challenge the dominant power structures in the face of globalization, international finance and several rounds of whole system banking failure have sustained my own small efforts of imagining city futures, mapping city values and developing integral vital signs monitors.
I honestly believe that I could not be who I am today without the ideas, priorities, imaginations, actions and visions of Hazel, Barbara and Jean. In retrospect, I realize, even the title and substance of my book has been seeded by all that you identified as integral Yin Principles – the integration of all the possible intelligence of being human, our evolutionary past and future and our human hive technology. So Thank You deeply, you whom I have discovered are not just my Yin mentors, but my Yin attuners.
Beyond the book and the work that calls me from the practise now called “meshworking” and “sustainability”, I have been called to gather women leaders to provide peer support to ourselves as we lead other women. Our first gathering in 2008 was called the “Quantum Woman” gathering.

We have discovered in a variety of conversations that women’s path and the power of the human species seems blocked by inappropriate framings for death, sex, relationships and money. Removing these blockages seems reason enough to re-engage the Quantum Woman gathering later this year. However when I re-read the Power of Yin I can see that already thirty-three years ago that you had identified these intractable barriers as relating to the dinosaurs and pterodactyls of the dominant male culture. In your Yin reframings, instead of death as an end point, you offered dying as a natural and necessary stage in the cycle of life. Instead of mere, sex, you acknowledged the power of the maternal energy that wants to birth a new human. Instead of more and indiscriminate relationships you offered the provocation of  “Supra-Sex” and the swarming of a living system. Instead of mere money you offered new paradigms for interconnecting resources in an ecologically responsible way.
Thirty-three years ago you offered a completely different way of being – one that called forth not just “Being the Change” we want but “Doing the Change” we want to see in the Universe. Your principles were ecological, fearless, full of Laughter and Life!! Veritably Cosmic!!
That is what I want to celebrate today on this 100th Anniversary and recognize you each and all as exemplars of the indomitable spirit of the evolutionary woman who came of age through you, one-third of a century ago, so we could be reborn in the Integral Age today on this one hundredth anniversary of Women’s International Day.
May the Power of Yin that has mysteriously unlocked an Integral Age for a growing number of women like me, mark not only the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day but also the thirty-third anniversary of Universal Humanity’s birth celebration.
Meshful Admirations,
Marilyn Hamilton

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A Crisis of Decision Making: What Underlies Our Inability to Respond to Climate Change

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on March 7, 2011 | 5 Comments »


Jan Inglis has just released a video that helps us to understand the impasse we face related to decision making and climate change.

Jan’s Summary of the Video: Underlying the climate change crisis is a crisis in our collective ability to make decisions that support sustainable systemic responses. This 37 minute video highlights the connection between the complex challenges of responding to climate change, and the capacities needed to engage in effective democratic decision making. It indicates that research in human development helps us to understand these 21 century capacities. Public deliberation through deliberative democracy, when designed to support  adult development, holds the possibility of improving our capacities to respond systemically to these complex public issues.

This video includes environmentalists Thomas Homer Dixon and Lester Brown, evolutionary biologist Elisabet Sahtouris, developmental specialists Robert Kegan and Bill Torbert, and deliberative democracy and complexity specialists Shawn Rosenberg, Jan Inglis and Sara Ross. Presentations and a study guide are available to accompany the video. This video link is made available free of charge for initial viewing.  As production was self financed donations to cover video production costs are appreciated. For institutional use the High Definition DVD can be purchased. Click here to download and obtain web link for details.

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2011 Nominees for Globe Sustainable City Award

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on March 5, 2011 |


Globe Forum has announced the 2011 Nominees for the Sustainable City Award

Criteria

This award focuses on a holistic approach to Sustainability in cities and integrates different types of resources or capital for a better future in cities around the world. The Conceptual approach is to use the different types of capital below:

  • Environmental Capital – Natural Resources Preservation
  • Social Capital – Well being and Social Relations
  • Human and Intellectual Capital – Innovation and Social Intelligence
  • Technical and Infrastructure Capital – Transportation and ICT
  • Culture and Leisure Capital – Experience
  • Political Capital – Confidence and Public Trust
  • Financial Capital – Assets and Financial Management

Your city needs to demonstrate one or more special initiatives that it has undertaken in the last two years in one or more of the various types of capital above in order to reach a more sustainable future.

How to apply

The nominated cities are:
• Aracuai Brazil
• Murcia, Spain
• São Paulo, Brazil
• Songpa, South Korea
• Tampere, Finland 

Links to their qualities are listed here.

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Merchants & Philanthropists Creating & Using Diasporas

Posted in C. Collective Intelligences, Emergence, Ethno, Global/Worldcentric, Meshworking, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on March 4, 2011 |


The weak signals that diasporas emit into and outside of systems reported earlier this week is the subject of a new book. Parag Khanna, a Distinguished Visitor at the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto has just released “How to Run the World”.

Excerpts in today’s National Post read:

“In the Middle Ages, diverse merchant communities were a driving force of diplomacy, managing to translate languages, exchange currencies, and trade a cornucopia of goods across Eurasia. … Corporations now have the grand strategies just like countries. … Technology and finance have torn apart the relationship between borders and identity. … What will the politics of Arab monarchies look like if the Indian government starts demanding a political voice for its millions of guest workers who outnumber the local populations by five to one?”

One wonders what kinds of inter-group tournaments are on the verge of emerging between human hives and national clusters of human hives?

Read the whole excerpt here: Our Ne0-Medieval World

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Are Diasporas Potential Meshworkable Cultural Accelerators?

Posted in C. Collective Intelligences, E. Evolutionary Intelligences, Emergence, Meshworking, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on March 2, 2011 | 1 Comment »


The watch continues as events unfold in North African and the Middle Eastern cities and countries. We wonder whether and how autocracies in these places may be superseded by autocracy, theocracy or even democracy? Each country is different so most informed observers don’t expect that a single solution will emerge across all countries.

From the outside of this area, all we can see right now are the surface behaviours. The real sources of change are entrenched four, five, even six deep below the surface, in the social systems, cultures, family beliefs, individual psyches and even the genes of the people who are in the midst of this massive collective shift.

Maybe there are also other factors at play as well?  I would point to two possibilities, both having to do with the intermixing of cultures. One is the sizable ex-patriot populations that we see fleeing Egypt, Tunisia, Libya (and to a lesser extent the Mid East). These people will bring direct experience of the countries in turmoil and share their stories with the parts of the world to which they return or flee.  These ex-pats will influence attitudes, behaviours, policy decisions, cultural outreach (or distancing) and personal intentions.

The other possible influence comes from the other direction - it is the large Diasporas that have emigrated from Egypt, Libya and Tunisia to Europe and North America. They have experienced democracy and many have returned home to stoke the flames of rebellion and revolution. But many still remain behind in their new home countries.

The scale of these current day emmigrations (particularly when the EU, UK and Canada have had such inviting immigration policies) has been experienced before in history when invading armies have impelled peoples to flee in advance, thus spreading cultures like a wave into adjoining lands. But today’s Diasporas are spread half a world away and are adapting and growing up in democracies, mainlining its dignities and disasters.

What can this mean for the Diasporas’ countries of origin? Might it be possible that the diaspora can and will act as accelerators to the development and evolution of their cultures and countries of origin? Might we hope that the development of tribal cultures through the stages of lawful governance and freer trade could be accelerated because of the influence of a returning diaspora who will import changed beliefs, wider worldviews, greater technological systems, and more informed behaviours?

Might we even consider arming the (inevitable) return of the ex-patriots to North Africa and the Middle East with resources that enable the natural development out of tribal cultures into more complex cultures? Resources like education for girls and women. Resources that enable food security and sustainable existence. Resources that promote micro-finance and freer trade to enable prosperous economic exchanges?

It’s just a thought. Maybe the two-way transitions of ex-patriot workers and diaspora emigres have the potential to accelerate the natural development of worldviews, cultures, structural systems,  and much expanded options for healthy behaviours ?? It is interesting to consider how such influences could improve our capacities to take care of our selves, take care of each other and take care of our places (and Place).

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