An Emergent Dialogue with Eloisa Lewis

In this episode in was my pleasure to get to know permaculture consultant Eliosa Lewis from New Climate Culture. I thoroughly enjoyed hearing about Eloisa’s journey and work and look forward to having her back.

Here is a link to Kevin Bayuk of Project Drawdown that Eloisa speaks so highly of.

Here is the crypto token She talks about: https://icube.finance

I look forward to your comments (including questions for future conversations with Eloisa) and at the start I mention online events on Holistic Decision Making and Living Design Process you can find out more about here.

4 Comments

  1. Love the energy of this conversation and your ambitious spirit Eloisa.. “an experiment in being” for sure! Keep it going.

    Also, super impressed to listen to you Dan as you practice your craft, your focus, deeply sourced care and receptiveness.

    I quite liked the middle of the conversation about philosophy, holding a multiplicity of worldviews, the poetry of dialogue and logical debate and the machines of our lives.

    I’ve been wanting to bring up the work of Tim Ingold on this program for quite some time, and I think that Eloisa (and others) would really enjoy checking out his work which snorkels all through the coral reefs of philosophy, ecology, logic, worldviews, ontology and epistemology… and with the thread of “bringing dualities into oneness” throughout all his writing and public speaking with love, whit and whimsy.

    Ingold’s explorations of what it means to ‘correspond’ along lines.. that is to ‘image’ life and living “things” as an entanglement (meshworks and nodes) of lines.. as a confluence of time, movement, flow, materials, energy and becoming rather than a world of isolated blobs with naive and lifeless connections (as depicted in the fragmentary, imposed and facile constructs of ecology ‘schematics’ and imagined in the mechanistic mind while trying to grapple with a world that can’t be schematized).

    I came across a description of the refreshing effect of Tim Ingold’s ontological explorations of life in the opening of an article by Sue-Ann Harding.
    https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13556509.2021.1992890

    “I well remember reading the opening chapter of The Life of Lines (Ingold 2015), and how the revelation of lines and knots instead of blobs and connections made me stop, look up and see for the first time the invisible lines of people (past, present and future) coming and going through my house, of air moving in and out of the open windows, of the insects and arachnids that make their way in and find their way out. This was, like poetry, a transformative moment, in which I suddenly saw the familiar in an unfamiliar and powerfully intriguing way”.

    About an evolved project name for MPS, here were a few ones I tried:

    — Re-Sourcing Permaculture (to really maintain the focus and commitment of this project to permaculture’s regeneration specifically.. as you did cut the tree down after all! A cut and run would be unsavory)

    — Designing for Life ~regenerating design process together (to simply broaden the scope by merging with your umbrella project Dan.. with permaculture as an aspect, but no longer the core thread)

    — Permaculture is Alive! ~re-sprouting a living design process together

    — Nodes and Fields of Permaculture Design

    — Tales and Trials of “the New Emergent Permaculture”

    — Permaculture Emergence

    — The New Living Design podcast

    .. SO hard draw out a name that honors the project’s spirit while not constraining its growth and evolution! However, perhaps it needs only be something that serves the next phase (3 years?). My gut check is that this project needs to have “permaculture” in there somewhere otherwise it would be a betrayal of its deepest core intentions and community.

    1. Thanks Adrian. I have dipped into a little of Ingold’s writing over the years and always found refreshing and profound framings therein. I found a link to a free pdf of “The Life of Lines” here, it would be fun to have an episode exploring the lines and knots / blobs and connections distinction. Maybe with a group of us who read then come together to see where it takes us – get in touch if anyone wants in.

      Appreciate your reflections on names too. “Re-sourcing Permaculture” really grabs me as so accurate to what the intent has become, and I also totally get how it would be a bit of a crime to cut down the tree then run off and leave the exposed stump untended and the betrayal aspect of ditching the world “permaculture” also. Where these forces at play are taking me right now is to look at tightening up the title to Re-Sourcing Permaculture (or Re-Sourcing Permaculture Design) and then creating a new podcast with a wider scope where some of the episodes of that new podcast are co-released here for those more focused on how this work bears on permaculture specifically.

      Keep your reflections coming all. It really helps!

      1. Happy to partake in a discussion about blobs, lines, weaves, knots/nodes, nests and meshworks if there’s other interest in this.. and just how this may apply practically in our design work.

        I’m already enjoying to read from the link you sent (“the life of lines” sample pdf).. though may get my hands on a printed copy soon.

        .. And so glad that some of my draft project names have been generative. I tried a few more poetic variations that I didn’t submit, but they seemed to lack the aim and focus that a more functional name offers (something I think is needed in the case of this project).

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