This project is concerned with understanding the promoting and restraining forces related to local food networks in Australia, particularly in urban and suburban contexts.
The paper is presented in three main sections:
- Action research in a local food context
- Research activities, presenting major activity features and analysis for each activity.
- Pathways for action
It is clear to me that local food networks provide an important alternative to the corporate-controlled mainstream food supply system (industrial agriculture).
748kb (PDF)
An exploration of philosophical and moral notions of leadership appropriate to rapidly complexifying social environments.
The starting point is a linkage between leadership phenomenon and complexity theory, showing how the concept of "apotropaisis"-the ability to avoid disaster-can be considered the ultimate arbiter of morality.
With a proposed recipe for morality and leadership, I turn to social applications of leadership and suggest that the most critical issues of our day arise from the novelty of super-dense human organisations, specifically large cities and corporations.
I offer examples from personal experience, suggesting three modalities are appropriate to these environments: organisational leadership, personal leadership, and anonymous emergent leadership.
208kb (PDF)
Continuing the discussion for a new basis of ethics, this is a highly personal (and theoretical) look at the application of complexity theory metaphors to the social/ethical domain.
Explores: self-organisation, dualisms, emergence, and applications to some common ethical dilemmas (eg, overpopulation)
The sensitivity to act in the name of what we know to be more right, more holy, more loving, can be seen as an evolutionary learning that yields improved social performance, thus species viability, thus systemic duration, thus we stay in the thermodynamic vortical zone, or "alive".
1.1mb (PDF)
