TheGlobal Design Charrette is a response to The Perfect Storm of energy descent, anthropogenically-forced climate chaos and overshoot we have created for ourselves through ignorant and thoughtless living on this planet. It is an attempt to encourage the adoption of green technology, particularly lo-tech solutions we and our neighbors can implement ourselves using recycled and re-purposed materials
. It is an attempt to encourage the development of a sustainable, self-reliant neighborhood within a sustainable, resilient, self-reliant urban area. It is an attempt to encourage generations of systems thinkers by bringing the ethics and principles of permaculture design/regenerative systems into the classroom as other nations have done. It is an attempt to empower the people to determine and create a future of their choosing, independent of, though possibly, hopefully, in partnership with those institutions that recognize sustainable community as the basis of all else. The Global Design Charrette seeks collaboration with people of all backgrounds, skills, beliefs, ideologies and styles to facilitate and encouraging the development of their homes, communities and bio-regions as post-carbon, post-industrial, regenerative entities. We hope to get on-line and real world collaboration ramped up across the globe.
* We move past talk: We have known the long-tail risk for a long time. Further bad news only reinforces the urgency to act.
* The solutions remain the same - simplicity, localizing, regenerative design - regardless of the scale of the problems or the details of how they are unfolding. As Mollison said forty years ago, the problems get more and more complex, but the solutions remain simple, embarrassingly simple.
* We have the knowledge to design regenerative nee sustainable systems anywhere. We simply need to act. We need no further knowledge, technology, or impulse to act. We act, now, or we risk the long-tail and Black Swan events: Collapse, extinction of millions of species, if not our own extinction.
