Where I live, on a small island off the west coast of Canada, the traditional Celtic season markers make more sense for our community rhythms and the cycles of our landscape than the solar seasonal calendar, and I’m not as versed in the Skwxwu7mesh seasons well enough to relate to those. Today is Lughnasa, the traditional commencement of the harvest season. The province of British Columbia is burning in many places, and today the winds have brought us smoke from the interior to colour the sun pink in a grey and orange sky. The produce in our local markets is …
We are embarking on a innovative approach to a social problem and we need a framework to guide the evaluation process. As it is a complex challenge, we’re beginning with a developmental evaluation framework. To begin creating that,I was at work for most of the morning putting together a meta-framework, consisting of questions our core team needs to answer. In Art of Hosting terms, we might call this a harvesting plan. For me, when working in the space of developmental evaluation, Michael Quinn Patton is the guy whose work guides mine. This morning I used his eight principles to fashion …
More from the Kauffman book: “The wondrous diversity of life out your window evolved in ways that largely could not be foretold. So, too, has the human economy in the past fifty thousand years, as well as human culture and law. They are not only emergent but radically unpredictable. We cannot even prestate the possibilities that may arise, let alone predict the probabilities of their occurrence. This incapacity to foresee has profound implications. In the physicist Murray Gell-Mann’s definition, a “natural law” is a compact description beforehand of the regularities of a process. But if we cannot even prestate …
I’ve begun Stuart Kauffman’s latest book, which will be a little heavy summer reading, and he states his purpose very clearly in the preface: “If no natural law suffices to describe the evolution of the biosphere, of technological evolution, of human history, what replaces it? In its place is a wondrous radical creativity without a supernatural Creator. Look out your window at the life teeming about you. All that has been going on is that the sun has been shining on the earth for some 5 billion years. Life is about 3.8 billion years old. The vast tangled bank of …
Detail from Richard Shorty’s work “Genesis 1:20-25” Wednesday is National Aboriginal Day and ten days later, Canada commemorates its 150th birthday. Since the centenary in 1967 and even since Canada 125 in 1992, the whole enterprise of Canada has become deeply informed by the need for reconciliation between indigenous people and communities, and settler people and communities. We are all treaty people. Everyone in Canada who has citizenship is also a beneficiary to the treaties that were signed and made as a way of acknowledging and making binding, the relationship between settler communities and indigenous nations. The ability to own …