Author: Sam

I write books and talk about stuff.

My Week with the Great White Sharks

Posted on | by Sam | 1 Comment on My Week with the Great White Sharks

In the summer of 1975, I was four when my dad took me to see JAWS in a crowded theater.

It was a poor parenting decision — albeit one that resulted in my becoming obsessed (& terrified) of sharks for the rest of my childhood. I read every book I could find. I told anyone who asked that when I grew up, I was going to be a marine biologist. And I remained completely terrified of the ocean.

Now, fast forward four decades.

I am not a marine biologist, nor have I kept up my childhood obsession with sharks. (My fear of the ocean, however, has remained constant.)
So you can imagine my surprise when, a year ago, as my 50th birthday approached and person after person asked me how I was going to celebrate it, I responded with an idea that had never before even occurred to me:

Cage-diving with Great White Sharks.

Last week, after two different COVID-related delays, I finally got to do the thing.

It necessitated crossing two hundred miles of open ocean across heavy, undulating seas, until we arrived in the shadow of Guadalupe Island, an eight-million-year-old jagged mass of volcanic rock near the western coast of Mexico.

It featured three full days of diving, from sunup to sundown.

And it required donning a wetsuit, popping a regulator into your mouth, and descending the stairs of a metal cage into an underwater world replete with thick schools of mackerel, curious Sea Turtles, presumptive Amberjacks — and a cove full of the world’s largest Great Whites.

It’s hard to describe what it’s like to see this animal in its element (which is, coincidentally, the only way to see them; there are zero in captivity). Their appearance is the only thing you’re waiting for, and yet it always seems to come as a surprise, no doubt in part because of the way they move — with the languorous air of an apex predator. And this predator clearly understood the game that was being played (it involved dangling a giant piece of frozen tuna off the back of the boat), which it mostly approached with the insouciance of a cat casually flicking the end of its tail — teasing, probing, yet always measuring its possible avenues of attack.

Then there were the moments they decided playtime was over.

Their dorsal fins would come in tight to their body, they’d give a few flicks of their massive tail, and then their one-ton cartilaginous frame would propel itself through the water like a torpedo — an evolutionary design so perfect for its environment that it is essentially unchanged for seventy million years.

Game. Set. Snack.

They are beautiful creatures — deserving of our respect and our protection. It was a worthy celebration of my 50th. And while my shark-obsessed days are behind me, I feel equally grateful for getting to spend a week floating atop a foreign world that was holding us up and that could, just as easily, swallow us whole in an instant.

“If you want to build a ship,” St. Exupery said, “don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.”

To Reconnect With Nature, We Need More Organizations Like This One

Posted on | by Sam

Two years ago, I visited Indonesia to walk the inimitable bamboo hallways of the Green School, as part of a lifelong search for the best schools in the world.

Almost immediately after arriving, however, I met Tim Fijal — a transplanted Canadian and gentle spirit whose own journey of discovery had gradually taken him out of the classroom, and into the rice fields of Bali.

Since then, we produced a short film about Tim’s work with a mixture of Balinese adults and young people to use the natural world as an invitation back into the core of human identity (you can see it below) — and Tim has launched a new organization, The Astungkara Way, which provides a combination of courses and experiences to help people reconnect with nature.

And now, to make that dream a full-fledged reality, Tim needs your support.

I hope you’ll do so here. And please, help spread the word!

This is how we #changethestory

New Rules for New Schools

Posted on | by Sam

As more and more adults get vaccinated against the COVID-19 virus — and more and more students cautiously return to some form of in-person schooling — the desire to “get back to normal” feels like the irresistible lure of Spring after a long and lonely winter. 

Tempting as it may be, however, the barrage of warnings we have tried to wish away — spoken in the language of fires, floods, and invisible pathogens — make clear that the norms of the past are no longer tenable. 

There can be no return to normal, because normal was the problem in the first place.

This is the hindsight of 2020. 

To heed it, however, we must acknowledge the ways our common public world has shifted — and then we must shift the way we think about the structure and purpose of our common public schools.

Consider this: whereas in 1500, we produced goods and services worth about $250 billion in today’s dollars, today it’s $60 trillion — a 240-fold increase. 

As a direct result of that conspicuous consumption, one-third of the Earth’s land is now severely degraded. 

There are half as many animals in the world today as there were in 1970. 

And we’ve used more energy and resources in the past thirty-five years than in the previous 200,000 — the total amount of time that homo sapiens have been alive and kicking.

Against these odds, and in the wake of all we’ve been through, it’s easy to feel hopeless. And yet as environmentalist Bill McKibben puts it, “the great advantage of the twenty-first century should be that we can learn from having lived through the failures of the twentieth. We’re able, as people were not a hundred years ago, to scratch some ideas off the list.”

When it comes to our nation’s schools, then, what ideas should we scratch off the list? And what, ultimately, is the shape of the change we seek — in our schools, our civic structures, and ourselves?

To orient us for the long journey ahead, we need four new rules of the road — and four new metaphors to use in redesigning how we learn and live:

  1. SCHOOL AS ECOSYSTEM 

For generations, schools and universities have looked and felt the same because of the ways our “sacred cows” of education have kept us trapped in boxes of our own making.  

School is a place, not a mindset. 

Work must be graded to become meaningful. 

Students are best sorted by age. 

And so on (& on & on).

In the span of a year, however, COVID’s complete disruption of our traditional patterns has forced us to question these assumptions on almost every front. 

What if school was a mindset?

What if the work itself was meaningful?

And what if we thought about learning design less mechanically, and more emergently?

Of course, this is already happening in many schools and universities all over the country (and your neighborhood Montessori school has been acting this way for the better part of a century). But in order for more students and communities to have the same experience, we need to stop unconsciously designing schools as assembly lines, and start consciously designing them as ecosystems.

The good news is that nature has shown us what living systems require in order to thrive — we’ve even written an entire (free) book about it . And although it may seem counter-intuitive, a central lesson is that anything that disturbs a living system is also what helps it self-organize into a new form of order.

Growth, in other words, comes from disequilibrium, not stasis.

So while it’s unrealistic for most of us to just burn the whole thing to the ground, what we can do is take a critical look at our own school’s sacred cows and then decide strategically which ones are both the greatest hindrance to our work — and the easiest to get rid of. (Here’s a helpful way to do this together). 

Then, over time, this gradual approach to structural change can start to chip away at the foundations of the systems that have held us prisoner for too long. 

Speaking of which . . .

  1. SCHOOL AS ACORN SEED

While it has been true for some time that the pace of change in our modern world requires long-range thinking and planning (see, e.g. Blockbuster v. Netflix), the catastrophic impacts of COVID-19 are demanding that we make a radical shift in our relationship to time — away from the seductive lure of short-term, election-cycle solutions, and towards a less certain, more generational worldview and way of being.

In short, as Roman Krznaric argues in his vital new book, The Good Ancestor, “we have to think long” — something we humans can do, just not very well.

It’s hard to think long when the world around us is driven by short-term dopamine-driven feedback loops. Yet our ability to activate what Krznaric calls our “acorn brain” is what will determine whether we can meet the existential risks that surround us, from climate to coronavirus. “The challenge we face is to amplify our acorn brains and release their dormant power,” he says.

In which case, we need less five-year plans — and more fifty-year intentions. 

This is not a new idea. It is, in fact, a feature of indigenous cultures the world over.  The Iroquois, for example, held that any decision made today should result in a sustainable world seven generations into the future. 

Imagine if the Seventh-Generation Principle were a part of our future decision-making in schools and universities?

It would probably result in less swimming pools, and more “living schools” (such as this one in Chicago, which is being designed and built for the same per-pupil expenditure as any other public school in the city). 

And it would definitely result in a radical shift in what we define as the end-goal — away from just being a good employee, and towards being a good ancestor.

  1. SCHOOL AS HORIZON LINE

As Kznaric reminds us, “we are the inheritors of gifts from the past.” 

Consider the gift of Jonas Salk, the scientist who, after a decade of experiments, created the first polio vaccine — and then refused to get his invention patented so more people could benefit from it. 

As Salk said, “The most important question we can ask ourselves is, ‘Are we being good ancestors?” 

For too long, we have ignored this question at our peril. As cultural anthropologist Wade Davis explains, our current patterns of human behavior expose the fallacy that it was ever possible to achieve infinite growth on a finite planet. It is, he warns, “a form of slow collective suicide, and the logic of delusion.”

Yet we see evidence of our delusion in every direction.

In smoke-clogged Chinese cities, giant LED screens show daily videos of the sun rising. 

In American schools and classrooms, it has become commonplace to have “active shooter” drills. 

And people touch, swipe and caress their phones almost 3,000 times a day.

Is this the future we wish to resign ourselves to — even after the first global pandemic in a century? 

What if, instead, by using our acorn brains and letting nature’s design principles be our guide, we committed to a course-correction in the service of a different story, and a different way of learning and living?

In our schools and universities, the central contribution to such an audacious goal would be to start crafting fifty-year strategic intentions with the primary goal of creating good ancestors.

With that as our goal, we would need to design everything differently — our spaces, our cultures, our structures and our pedagogies. But in the spirit of a true long view, we wouldn’t have to do it all at once.

  1. SCHOOL AS TROJAN HORSE(S)

Long before there was a global pandemic, other industries were already making proactive pivots away from their timeworn traditions. As Eric Ries explains in The Lean Startup, “planning and forecasting are only accurate when based on a long, stable operating history and a relatively static environment. Startups have neither.”

Neither do schools and universities. 

What our institutions of learning do have, however, is the chance to learn from other industries. 

We can, as Bill McKibben said, scratch certain ideas off the list. 

And when it comes to a task this massive — resisting the lure of our sacred cows, adopting a long view, and/or changing the central goal of schooling itself — we must stop making comprehensive plans, and start making constant adjustments through what Ries calls the Build-Measure-Learn feedback loop. 

It works something like this:

  • Try lots of things (A day with no passing bells! A weeklong course! A month with no letter grades!)
  • Test them out in short-cycle, low-stakes environments
  • Let people opt into being part of the experiment (or watching from a distance)
  • Pay attention to what works (and what doesn’t)
  • Abandon the things that don’t work
  • Double down on the things that do
  • Follow the energy
  • Rinse. Repeat.

As Ries puts it, the idea is to start building “minimally viable products, or MVPs”

as quickly and imperfectly as possible. “It should feel a little dangerous,” he adds, “but in a good way.”

This should be our post-COVID goal together: to build a thousand Trojan Horses – future seeds of potential creative destruction that can, when the time is right, assume a different form, attack our most intractable rituals and assumptions about schooling, and usher in a different way of being that is more in line with both the modern world and the modern brain.

Simply put, the days of letter grades, two-dimensional transcripts and “senior year” are numbered. We don’t need to get rid of them all right now – indeed, the time it will take for the larger systems and structures of K-12 and higher education to adjust to a new ecosystem almost require schools to cling to these trappings a while longer.

But make no mistake – much of what we have come to find most familiar about public education will, in due time, go the way of the 1960s-era department store  (and, one hopes, the coronavirus itself). 

So let’s change the story of the way we live and learn: by using nature as our guide, activating our acorn brains, making decisions for our great-great-grandchildren, and sowing the seeds of our own creative destruction — one slightly dangerous Trojan Horse at a time.

 

To Redesign Our Schools, Post-Pandemic, We Need to Remove Some Sacred Cows

Posted on | by Sam

Watch this video. What do you see?

Literally, of course, it’s a sacred cow. And what strikes me is how everyone around it unconsciously adjusts what they do, to the point that the cow has become all but invisible to the chaos of a morning commute.

We have sacred cows here, too — but whereas in Nepal they literally block traffic, in America they block our ability to think in new ways. And I can think of no aspect of our shared public life with more sacred cows than America’s schools:

Grades. Bells. Schedules. Credit Hours. Classrooms. Tests. Transcripts. Homework. 180 days. Age-based cohorts.

And the list could go on.

For this reason, we produced a short film series that looks at a few of these structures, and how and why they need to change. Here’s one of them:

But more importantly, what can each school do to better understand which sacred cows are blocking traffic, and which, if removed, would best improve the quality of learning flow for kids?

Try doing this exercise with your entire school community:

  1. Name as many “sacred cows of schooling” that exist in your school and/or district as you can
  2. Number these along a continuum of least imposing (1) to most imposing (10), in terms of which prevent you from doing your best work for kids.
  3. Now, rate the same list according to which would be easiest to remove, (10) and which would be hardest (1).
  4. Add the two numbers together.
  5. Take note of the sacred cows with the highest total. These are the habits and structures that are the biggest obstacles, and the easiest to remove.
  6. Start with those, by thinking about the ways in which you could either replace, revise, or remove them from your school’s overall learning culture.
  7. Rinse. Repeat.

How the Arts (& #artseducation) Can Save the World

Posted on | by Sam

In Australia, the country of his birth, Thanh Bui learned early on that kids who looked like him faced two possible paths.

On one, traversed by the only other Asian student in his school, the cold sting of isolation and ridicule awaited. On the other, however, came the assimilatory embrace of knowing you were “one of the lads.”

For Bui, youthful, outgoing, and kinetic, it was an easy choice — one that would take him to heights his immigrant parents could never have imagined: first, playground popularity and acceptance, and then, eventually, global celebrity and superstardom.

The only requirement was that he suppress his Vietnamese identity.

It would take decades before Bui understood the true cost of his unconscious choice.

And it’s why he’ll spend the next decade planting seeds that he hopes can one day frame new paths, and new choices, for a new generation of Vietnamese children.

Recently, amid the symphony of barking dogs and the aromatic smell of diesel fuel, Bui sat on a fishing boat atop the muddy waters of the Mekong River, contemplating how his family’s journey had begun in this exact spot, a lifetime ago.

This was where his parents, along with eighty-five tightly-packed strangers, had summoned the courage to leave the country of their birth in search of a better life.

“They were the age then, 28, that I was when I first came back,” Bui said. “They had no education, no money, and nothing but the clothes on their backs. That’s why I wanted to come back here. I wanted to know exactly the place they had left.

“When you know where you’re from,” he said slowly, “there’s this sense of humanity that sweeps through you. I don’t think you’re ever O.K. until you know exactly where you’re from — and I’ve been on that journey my whole life.”

For anyone who is the child of immigrants, Thanh Bui’s journey will feel familiar. Although he grew up in Adelaide, a cosmopolitan city on Australia’s southern coast, Bui’s early experiences were limited to the dusty farm where his father picked potatoes. When the crop was wiped out one year, Bui’s parents packed what little they had to travel 700 kilometers further south, to the capital city, Melbourne.

Through a network of fellow immigrants, Bui’s parents found a job making jeans. To encourage her two sons, Thanh and Tan, to pitch in, their mother promised one penny for each pocket they sewed. As they worked, Bui recalls, “my brother and I heard every day that the only way to elevate oneself is through education. And although we were allowed to spend our earnings on jellybeans, every dollar my parents saved went into our education.”

At home, the Bui brothers led a life that was disciplined, directed, and thoroughly Vietnamese. Yet Thanh recalls “starting to feel this sense of not belonging anywhere, which left me wondering, ‘Who am I?’ But my father always said, ‘Son, I almost died three times getting out. The last thing you’re going to do is disrespect me and your ancestors by not knowing your language.’”

Eventually, Thanh earned a full scholarship to a prestigious boys school in Melbourne. His parents were thrilled, but Thanh remembers “feeling so out of place, like all eyes were on me. That started my whole understanding of how I fit in. I had to learn how to be an Australian.”

At the same time, Thanh was realizing that the dreams he held for himself did not align with the dreams his parents held for him. “Ever since I was little,” he explained, “I had the sense that music was part of me, that it could take me to this other world that I’d never visited before.”

His parents encouraged him to pursue his artistic side — as an extracurricular activity. But by the time he was 17, Bui’s talent had yielded some enviable choices, from pursuing a college degree on full scholarship, to becoming the lead singer of a band on the cusp of its inaugural Asian tour.

For Thanh’s parents, the choice was simpler: doctor or lawyer.

“You could see the pride in their faces,” Bui recalled. “They’d worked their whole lives for this, they’d sacrificed everything for this, this moment. This was the achievement.”

But Bui decided he had to follow his true path. “So I took a deep breath, I swallowed, and then I said the words that I knew would break my parents’ hearts:

“‘Mom and Dad, I want to be an artist.’”

Eight years would pass before he returned home again.

He traveled all over the world.

He started songwriting.

He nearly won Australian Idol.

And then, in 2010, at the height of his fame, he was invited to visit Vietnam on an open ticket — to meet with producers, record some tracks, and see what happens.

Three years later, he was still there — performing regularly as a solo artist, hosting the country’s most popular TV show, and beginning to feel accepted for the first time: a Vi?t Ki?u returning to his roots.

Yet his time in the country of his ancestors had made two things clear: the first was the complete absence of infrastructure to support Vietnamese artists. “Music at that time was an elite product few people had access to,” Thanh explained. “In a country of 95 million people, there are only a handful of people pursuing careers in music. And there’s talent here — but if talent doesn’t meet opportunity, then it’s nothing.”

The second epiphany was more personal. “I’d been shuttling between two homes for three years, trying to figure out what it meant to be Vietnamese and Australian in a world that was so globalized, and how to reconcile these different sides of myself. That’s when I realized that if I ever wanted to do so, I needed to move here for good. I needed to go all in.”

And so, on January 1, 2013 — Thanh Bui moved permanently to Vietnam to open the SOUL Music & Performing Arts Academy, a school that could stitch together both the modern and traditional sides of Vietnamese identity in order to “bring the soul back into our music.”

It was a rocky beginning.

Image for post

At SOUL’s first open house, even though a thousand people came through the door, just fifteen registered for classes. “It was a stab in the heart,” Bui says. “Everyone was telling us it wouldn’t work. And in that moment the numbers reflected that. But it helped me understand the local context of the families we were trying to reach. We were still too Western-leaning. Parents wanted their kids to be singing in Vietnamese.”

So Bui and his partners tweaked the course offerings, and gradually their student roster grew. “Our formula was to bring the world’s best ideas about artistry and craft to Vietnam, and then localize it,” he explained. “What was missing in Vietnam was a different sort of advocacy for the arts — to make them a vital part of a child’s holistic development: to be global citizens with local values.

“Vulnerability, for example, is a Western concept; ‘saving face’ is a Vietnamese value. The modern identity requires elements of both. So we use the arts to give kids the courage to find their own sense of themselves. Ultimately that’s why we exist — to inspire the next generation to be unafraid, and to find and use their voice.”

One weekday afternoon, amidst the patchwork of old French colonial and modern buildings that make up the SOUL campus, fifteen-year-old Bao Tan provided a walking embodiment of her school’s founding purpose. With long black hair, steady eyes, and a smouldering intensity, Bao recalled passing the school everyday as an eight-year-old, and “wondering about it.” Then she started writing songs, “and saying all these things I hadn’t been able to say in the past,” and she registered for every class she could take, from traditional singing to hip-hop dance. “All these things had been inside of me for so long,” Bao explained. “I’ve discovered that music is a part of me. I can’t say that I’m an extrovert but I feel like I have lots of things to say but I don’t know how to express it. And sometimes I really feel lonely, but not really because music is besides me.”

Image for post

As a swirl of students around her — from infants to teenagers — arrived for their afternoon classes, Bao reflected on her generation, and what music can provide. “A lot of teenagers nowaday, not all the time do we know what we really want. We don’t really know what we want to do and pursue — so it’s really hard for me personally. I feel like sometimes I’m just scared that if I speak, will people judge me? You’re supposed to listen to your parents. But what are the other ways I can learn to explore myself? By speaking for yourself now, you really know what your identity is. When you look at me, what do you think I am — and is it the way that I think I am?

“A lot of parents in Vietnam, they raise their kids to just be a businessman or a lawyer. But there are lots of kids out there just like me. They want us to live in the safety zone. But for me, each of us has something — we’re still growing mentally and physically. They want to keep us in a frame in order to keep us safe. Music doesn’t fit into that frame.

“But music reminds me to slow down. Just be yourself. Just be Bao Tan. Just be who you want to be.”

Image for post

A decade in, Thanh Bui now sees a future in which the lessons of SOUL can be applied to millions of Bao Tans, nationwide. In 2020, he opened a preschool that was designed in direct partnership with the pioneering educators of Reggio Emilia, Italy — one he hopes can provide a template that, in time, will transform early childhood education across the country. He has partnered with a Finnish University, Turku, and Harvard’s Project Zero, to think through issues of accreditation and assessment. Instead of trying to invent everything from scratch, he has contracted with existing curriculum providers, such as the German program Kindermusik, which introduces infants and toddlers to music. And he has begun constructing a one-million-square-foot “learning city” that brings together a K-12 academy, a college, a performing arts academy, and a sports and entertainment complex.

“The world is changing,” he said amidst the din of passing motorbikes, taxis and dust. “So must the purpose of school. We have to reconnect the artistic and scientific sides of ourselves: artist and businessman. Dancer and Engineer. Children of Vietnam and citizens of the world. If we’re serious about changing the way the world sees us and the arts, we have to build a new ecosystem that puts creative education at the heart of learning.

“We are a country that is not afraid to look forward. But social mobility is still very difficult here. My parents felt that sense of helplessness. ‘Where is home? What’s going to be the future?’ But if we can give access to the arts to every kid in this country, we can help them understand their roots and develop a more holistic viewpoint on life.

“Not knowing who you are, not knowing your purpose, that’s the biggest problem in the world. This whole understanding of who am I? Straddling between different cultures and different sets of identities. That’s something we can all relate to in this modern interconnected world.”

As Thanh spoke, a young boy’s voice could be heard from one of the school’s practice rooms. He was singing a traditional Vietnamese ballad, beautiful and slow, and the sound of it brought tears to Thanh’s eyes.

“We’ve been at war with ourselves for a long time,” he continued, running his hands through a pompadour of thick black hair. “But the last 45 years have provided an unprecedented period of peace. The modern byproduct of that are people like myself, who can bridge the two worlds. We share the same story. And we’ve all been searching for that pathway home to understand who we are and what we stand for.

“When people think about Vietnam, we don’t want them to think about the war anymore; we’re tired of that. It’s time for the new stories — the stories of hope.”

SEED + SPARK: The Expedition

Posted on | by Sam

Now that it’s December 1, the start of our yearlong expedition — the one on which we’ll use nature as a model to reimagine the way(s) we learn and live — is less than two months away.

And yet in many ways the expedition has already begun, as we start to establish a plan, an intention, and a structure for the first nine months of 2021, and how we can spend them well.

You can join us in that work whenever you wish, via our Expedition Whiteboard. (And when/if you do, please introduce yourself in the Be HERE section.)

You can contribute songs to the emerging SEED + SPARK mixtape on Spotify.

And you can peer into the future by reading Seed + Spark itself.

Looking forward to learning more about, with, and from each of you in the months ahead. 🙂

Travelers Wanted for Yearlong Expedition to Change the Story of How We Learn & Live

Posted on | by Sam

There is so much wrong with our world, and it’s so easy to feel hopeless in its wake.

I was grateful, then, when earlier this week a friend suggested I read a piece Arundhati Roy had written several months back, in the pandemic’s earliest days. “Historically,” she wrote, “pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.”

I think that’s right. Which means we have (light) packing, and (heavy) planning, to do.

In response, in eight weeks — the day after Inauguration Day, to be precise: 1.21.21 — I’m joining a quixotic yearlong quest of people from all over the world who share a commitment to change the story of how we learn and live — by using nature as our guide.

In between now and then, our shared challenge is to design an expedition worthy of the moment, our time, and the needs of the world.

If you’re interested, you can see how the design is unfolding anytime, and offer your own ideas and advice, on our community whiteboard.

Better yet, you can join us. A new world is struggling to be born . . .

After the Election: HUMANS WANTED

Posted on | by Sam

Now the real work begins. 

As this historic year (and election season) draws to a close, the barrage of warnings we have tried to wish away — spoken in the language of fires, floods, and invisible pathogens — make clear to anyone paying attention that the norms of the past are no longer tenable. 

There can be no return to normal — because normal was the problem in the first place.

This is the hindsight of 2020. 

To heed it, however, we must acknowledge how we got here — and then we must change our ways.

Consider this: whereas in 1500, we produced goods and services worth about $250 billion in today’s dollars, today it’s $60 trillion — a 240-fold increase. As a direct result of that conspicuous consumption, one-third of the Earth’s land is now severely degraded. There are half as many animals in the world today as there were in 1970. And we’ve used more energy and resources in the past thirty-five years than in the previous 200,000 — the total amount of time that homo sapiens have been alive and kicking.

Cultural anthropologist Wade Davis says these patterns of human behavior expose the fallacy that it was ever possible to achieve infinite growth on a finite planet. It is, he warns, “a form of slow collective suicide. To deny or exclude from the calculus of governance and economy the costs of violating the biological support systems of life is the logic of delusion.”

Yet we see evidence of our delusions in every direction.

In smoke-clogged Chinese cities, giant LED screens show daily videos of the sun rising. 

In American schools and classrooms, it has become commonplace to have “active shooter” drills. 

And people touch, swipe and caress their phones almost 3,000 times a day.

Against these odds, it’s easy to feel hopeless. And yet just as past behavior patterns have laid bare the extent of the damage we have done to the natural world (and ourselves), so, too, can our propensity as pattern recognizers lead us, in this first year of a Biden presidency and beyond, to course-correct in the service of a different story, and a different way of learning and living. As environmentalist Bill McKibben puts it, “the great advantage of the twenty-first century should be that we can learn from having lived through the failures of the twentieth. We’re able, as people were not a hundred years ago, to scratch some ideas off the list.”

What, then, are the ideas we should scratch off the list? 

What should we start, stop and keep doing during the remainder of this pandemic-fueled pause from our regular routines? 

And what, ultimately, is the shape of the change we seek — in our schools, our civic structures, and ourselves?

In a line worthy of a poet, Sir Ernest Shackleton remembered a similar moment of extreme shared trial: “Deep seemed the valleys,” he wrote, “when we lay between the reeling seas.” 

For Shackleton, the British explorer who, a century ago, placed an ad in which he sought 28 intrepid volunteers for a hazardous expedition to the Antarctic by promising “small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, and constant danger,” moving toward an uncertain future meant facing it with courage, belief, and imagination.

As 2020 (and this election season) draws to a close, we need a different expedition, and a different ad — not the exploration of a barren wilderness, but the effort to reclaim lost wisdom and ways of being, in the service of elevating a new story for the world. 

HUMANS WANTED 

For hazardous journey in search of what comes next. No wages, long months of purposeful wandering. Success doubtful. Food for thought and fellow travelers provided. In event of success, a new story for humanity.

The journey begins on 1.21.21. Will you be part of it? 

Inquire within.

New book outlines how to apply nature’s principles in (re)designing the human world

Posted on | by Sam

Today is a special day.

Two years ago, a small group of us set out on a collaborative design project, in search of the irreducible principles of a healthy learning environment  — the equivalent of DNA’s A, G, C & T.

That search took us deep into an exploration of the natural world, where we learned about the seven design principles that enable all living systems to thrive.

In response, we tried to create a bread-crumb trail for others, by providing illustrative case studies and actionable ideas to help you apply those principles to the creation of truly living schools, workplaces, and social structures — ones that can give voice, clarity, meaning and form to a new story for how we learn and live, so that together we can build a better world, by design. 

And today, we’re giving that book away — in order to ensure that its seeds spread as far and wide as possible.

Learn more at seedandspark.live, and help us #changethestory.

White People: This Is On Us

Posted on | by Sam | 2 Comments on White People: This Is On Us

Four years ago, on the eve of the 2016 U.S. presidential election, I made the dispiriting prediction that, regardless of who won (and, at the time, the notion that Donald Trump would win seemed inconceivable to most of us), America was witnessing the birth of a new civic (dis)order.

Four years later, in the shadow of another election, our world is both radically different — and dispiritingly similar. So it’s notable that the storyline of HBO’s dystopian, overwrought, and prescient 22nd-century series, Westworld, once again provides an edifying parallel to the real-life drama of 21st-century American public life.

If you haven’t watched it, Westworld is a show about a question at the heart of American identity: What does it mean to be free? — albeit in the context of watching what happens to our great-great grandchildren when their robot playthings become hip to the game and decide to exact some revenge.

In 2016, the show’s first season took place exclusively in an amusement park in which people paid obscene sums to act out obscene fantasies with humanoid robots whose memories would be wiped clean after each new day in an endless loop of unconscious servitude. But in 2020’s season three, Westworld (like our own) is in freefall. It turns out the owners of the park were secretly mining the data of their visitors in order to advance their own Orwellian notion of a more predictable social order. Meanwhile, a few robots have slipped the yoke, only to discover an outside world eerily similar to the one they’d just fled. As one character puts it, “They built the world to be a game — and then rigged it to make sure they always won.”

Which brings us to our own real-world dystopia — one in which Trumpian notions of “liberation” are merely a symptom of a much deeper malaise, and the Orwellian overlay is as relevant as ever, albeit in an even more chilling way than the worlds depicted in 1984 or on HBO.

That’s because, unlike the robots in Westworld or the proles in Oceania, we are not color-blind, but color-bound. And while this has always been true — the Peculiar Institution, after all, is America’s Original Sin — the Coronavirus pandemic has laid its enduring legacy even more nakedly at our feet. 

As The Atlantic‘s George Packer puts it, the virus has exposed America’s underlying conditions in ways that reveal us to be, in effect, a failed state: “in prosperous cities, a class of globally connected desk workers dependent on a class of precarious and invisible service workers; in the countryside, decaying communities in revolt against the modern world; on social media, mutual hatred and endless vituperation among different camps; in the economy, even with full employment, a large and growing gap between triumphant capital and beleaguered labor; in Washington, an empty government led by a con man and his intellectually bankrupt party; and around the country, a mood of cynical exhaustion, with no vision of a shared identity or future.”

Here, too, the parallels between Real World and Westworld are instructive. 

”How did you get here?” multiple characters are asked throughout the series. “Start at the beginning.”

If we take that question and apply it to ourselves, there’s only one American intersection where all roads converge — from the unmasking of our runaway wealth inequality to the bands of masked protesters demanding the country re-open so they can get a tattoo or eat a cheeseburger:

In this land — our land — freedom is whiteness (just ask Amy Cooper).  And until that changes, we will remain trapped in our own endless loop of social, moral and spiritual decay.

As New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie explains, citing the 1993 work of legal scholar Cheryl Harris, “Whiteness” has always been the defining characteristic of free human beings in America. To be white, therefore, is to have control over oneself and one’s labor, and to be subject to no one’s will but one’s own. And that tie between whiteness and freedom has only strengthened over the years — from Westward Expansion to Chinese Exclusion, or from Emmitt Till to Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd.

“The great irony,” Bouie writes, “is that this conception of freedom, situated within racial hierarchy and meant to justify deprivation and inequality, has always been impoverished when compared with an expansive, inclusive vision of what it means to be free. And in the particular context of a deadly pandemic, the demand to be free of mutual obligation is, in essence, a demand to be free to die and threaten those around you with illness and death. Most Americans, including most white Americans, have rejected this freedom of the grave. But among the ones who haven’t are the people leading our government, which means that this ‘freedom’ remains a powerful — and dangerous — force to be reckoned with.”

Where to, then, from here?

In Westworld, the path forward leads to the most predictable, stereotypical end-goal of “revolution” — burn the motherfucker to the ground. 

But Westworld’s characters also deliver lines that could be seen as beacons for our own desperately-required awakening. There are rare moments in life, one of them explains, “when randomness interacts with your life to create a truly free space where you can make a choice — a bubble of agency.”

This pandemic, and all it has laid bare, is our bubble. Yet as I wrote four years ago, the actions required of us include, and are not limited to, the next presidential election. And for those of us who are “white,” the reality is that the bulk of this work is ours to do — not because of some modern-day Kipling-esque fantasy about white exceptionalism, but because to unwind such deeply entrenched notions of privilege, the people who receive the benefits must be the main ones to demand that the system(s) be unwound. 

To do so, however, as my friend Susan Glisson has wisely written, we must give ourselves the breathing room to question whiteness and its power over this nation. As Orwell himself once wrote, “the moral to be drawn from this dangerous nightmare situation is a simple one: Don’t let it happen. It depends on you.”