VSHA Humanist Talk , 7:00 PM February 19, 2025
Cook Street Activity Center
380 Cook St. (Cook St. Village), Victoria
Free Parking and street parking
Co-designing the future we need:
A conversation with Gene Miller and Trevor Hancock
We live in the midst of a polycrisis, a confluence of multiple crises spanning the ecological, social,
economic, political and technological realms. In particular, we have crossed six of nine planetary
boundaries for the Earth system (and are approaching a seventh) and all the trends are in the
wrong direction.
In a recent paper Nafeez Ahmed, a member of The Club of Rome, and the Earth4All
Transformational Economics Commission, and Distinguished Fellow at the Schumacher Institute
for Sustainable Systems, argues that “the entire human-earth system is in a state of fundamental
transformation – that a new human-earth system is emerging. . . that human civilisation is
undergoing a comprehensive systemic transformation”.
He writes that “Every fundamental technological system that defines civilisation – energy, transport, food, materials and information – is experiencing a phase transition in which incumbent
industrial age technologies are being disrupted, outcompeted and replaced by a new set of
technologies across all these sectors.” And he argues that “For civilisation to successfully transform, it must also transform its cultural-organisational structures at all scales – otherwise the biophysical transformation too may fail.”
But, he adds, while “we are on the cusp of a ‘giant leap’ in our material capabilities as a species . . . we are in danger of aborting that leap, falling into a new dark age – if not into total collapse – if we
attempt to take the leap from within the outmoded framework of the old industrial
operating system.”
So shouldn’t we be talking about this? After all, while we may live on an island, we are intimately
bound up in these civilisational, technological and ecological changes, which will affect the
well-being not only of ourselves but of the next generations. So we have a task – to be responsible
ancestors, stewards of the future. But what might that mean right here in Victoria?
Well, right now, we are not even talking about it. But our two speakers have been thinking about
this for some time, and they have some ideas to share.
• Gene Miller is the founder of Open Space, founding publisher of Monday Magazine,
originator of the Gaining Ground urban sustainability conferences, founder/developer
of ASH houseplexes, and currently writing Nothing To Do: Life in a Post-Work World. In
his February 9th column in the Times Colonist he proposed a Centre for the Co-Design of
the Future.
“The work of the centre would be, in part, to craft novel strategies and methods by
which current social disconnection and a diminishing faith in social institutions
might be countered by purpose-driven, community-based, co-operative initiatives
and practices at physical, social and cultural settings — a comprehensive enterprise
of social repair.
• Trevor Hancock has written a weekly column in the Times Colonist for the past ten
years, covering many of these issues and ideas. A retired public health physician and
Professor of Public Health at UVic, and a co-founder of the global Healthy Cities and
Communities movement and the Canadian Asssociation of Physicians for the
Environment, he also founded a small local NGO, Conversations for a One Planet Region.
The mission of the Conversations is to establish and maintain community-wide
conversations on One Planet Living and a One Planet Region with the aim of
achieving the vision of a Greater Victoria Region that achieves social and ecological
sustainability, with a high quality of life and a long life in good health for all its
citizens, while reducing its ecological footprint to be equivalent to one planet’s
worth of biocapacity.
Our two speakers will elaborate on these and related ideas in conversation between themselves
and the audience.
See you there! Bring a friend. Question authority.
* Donations gratefully accepted