New Models and Practices

One cannot merely follow the timetable we have set for our influence on the world, we must also honour and respect the infinitely more complex timetable the world has set for itself. That timetable is the sum of the thousands of independent timetables of an infinite number of natural, historical, and human actions. ~ Vaclav Havel The new normal is transformation, but what does that really mean?…

Mirror Flourishing: The New Business North Star

David Cooperrider describes how the Appreciative Inquiry Summit—multi-stakeholder planning with a thousand people in the room—brings out the best in human systems: "What we appreciate appreciates—we become what we study—so let's study the concept of full spectrum flourishing." “We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly. We…

The Enlivenment Manifesto: Politics and Poetics in the Anthropocene

Rambunctious garden: Red plastic bags and a lone poppy turn the untended lot between two Berlin traffic lanes into a contemporary wasteland. Key Concepts The current ideology of dead matter, mechanical causality, and the exclusion of experience from descriptions of reality in ecology and economy are responsible for our failure to protect aliveness in our world. The challenge of the…

Tom Christensen

Tom Christensen is Editor of Innovative Development: Emerging Worldviews & Systems Change and Developmental Innovation: Emerging Worldviews & Individual Learning. A student of human nature and Spiral Dynamics, his other works can be found at www.graves3g.com/

Activists for the Evolution of Life

As I look out my window I see a vision of natural beauty that takes my breath away. There’s a special tree I have watched grow from a little twig to a mass of green foliage quivering in the wind with squirrels running up and down the trunk. A little chipmunk scurries into the woodpile outside my door every now and then and sometimes a little bunny, too. My beloved temple dogs, Sophia and Willy,…

Regenerative Economies for a Regenerative Civilization

“There is nothing more difficult to plan, nor more dangerous to manage, than the creation of a new system. For the creator has the enmity of all who would profit by the preservation of the old system and merely lukewarm defenders in those who would gain by the new one.” — Niccolò Machiavelli Einstein once said, “It is the theory which decides what we can observe.”1 I believe this…

Mystical Anarchism: A Journey to the Borderlands of Freedom

On Beginnings They say it takes a certain type of personality to be a radical. Questioning of the status quo, anti-authoritarian, angry perhaps, undoubtedly rebellious, critical rather than accepting of what is. Complex analyses and algorithms are deployed to compare shared psychological traits, relationships to authority figures, level of socio-economic privilege, and even birth order. If any…

Engaged Ecology: Seven Practices to Restore Our Harmony with Nature

It has rained steadily through the night, a gentle hushing sound in the thick tree canopy. In the morning light, crickets thrill and every leaf trembles and gleams. Soft mist gently rises as the creek gushes along its deep habitual groove in Rose Valley, a place as beautiful as it sounds: my home. Amid such grace, one might forget the planet is in chaos. Wars rage… and the trees grow slowly.…

Regenerative Development: Going Beyond Sustainability

Sustainable Development is a half-vast approach to vast problems. Its purpose, to make life on this planet sustainable, is a noble disguise for the maintenance of the status quo. When the status quo includes hundreds of millions of acres of degraded to destroyed farmland and leveled rainforest, depleted to exhausted fisheries and aquifers, toxic-choked streams, decreasing biodiversity, and a…

Shahzor Ali Memon

Shahzor Ali Memon is an avid changemaker who has started a lifelong journey in reaching out to underprivileged communities. At 18 years old and just a high school graduate, Shahzor has mentored many marginalized students in remote villages of Pakistan. Recently, Shahzor recruited other ambassadors for a venture called Youth for Enlightenment and Welfare (YEW), which he fundraises for schools that…