Tue 2 Jan 2007
Our global society faces the challenge of moving from an industrial-growth society to a life-sustaining society. This shift is often referred to as “The Great Turning.”
We spent some of our New Year’s holiday collaborating on this videoblog to create a positive vision for the New Year. We used Creative Commons-licensed material detailed below.
Here are some resources that we find useful in describing some optimistic social change approaches for the future:
COMMUNICATION
Non-Violent Communication is an approach to communicating that focuses on creating deep connection and satisfying relationships based on mutual respect, compassion and cooperation. Kent summarizes a weekend workshop of NVC here.
COMMUNITY
Joanna Macey wrote the book “Coming Back to Life,” which teaches community practices for facing despair and how to prevent from going psychically numb in the face of global challenges. Macey says, “When we deny or repress pain or treat it a private pathology we miss out. When we acknowledge and willing accepting the pain of larger world we open a path for a sense of interconnectedness.”
HEALTH
“The New Medicine” website by PBS is an excellent resource for understanding mind-body medicine and finding therapies that treat specific conditions with a integrative approach.
CONSCIOUSNESS
The Institute of Noetic Science’s ShiftInAction.com hosted an Essential Shifts Series consisting of interviews with some of the world’s best visionary thinkers talking about the current global situation and what we can do about it.
GREEN TECHNOLOGY SOLUTIONS
We bought the book “Worldchanging: A User’s Guide for the 21st Century,” which describes some of the latest and greatest solutions for a bright green future. It is packed with sustainable technologies that provide a lot of hope for what is already possible.
Update: this site climatecrises.net lists small changes you can add to your daily routine to help stop global warming.
VIDEO CREDITS
Creative Commons Music:
“Mind Field” by DJBLUE from ccmixter.org
Interview Audio:
Angeles Arrien from ShiftInAction.com
Creative Commons Video
Arin Crumley’s “Humanity Lobotomy”
freakypups’ “Free Hugs for Phoenix”
And the following Stock Footage from WGBH Labs Sandbox:
Clock, La Plaza Newspaper, New Yorkers 1939, Journey into DNA, This Information, Blood Flow, Splashes of Sparks, Of Human Bondage, Nubian Fisherman on the Nile, Crops in the Mist, Ocean Waves at the Shore, Baby Naming Ceremony, King Montgomery, Waikiki Counterclockwise, Nautilus Animation, Time Lapse Nature, Slow Motion Track
Creative Commons Flickr Photos
monkeyc, blumsy, neoncoil, kevint, benjamin_ellis, blogumentary, joyrex, ousby, tjt195, hawkey, sigman, hawkey, paulbence, hawkey, vithassan, hawkey, weston, lapidim, scatti_frullati, thomashawk, willpate, hawkey, scatti_frullati, cyberscorpion, scatti_frullati, hawkey, docman, k-girl, willemvelthoven, alfredoneto, hawkey, istanbulmike, sigman, tasteful_tn, jamesxv7
Falstad.com Physics Applets:
Ripple Tank (2-D Waves) Applet
2-D Circular Square Well Applet
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 License.
Want to Share this Video? More information under the share link here.
January 3rd, 2007 at 1:12 am
chills, I got chills watching this — wow
January 3rd, 2007 at 1:32 am
hey not quite sure what this site is but thanks for using my pic (I just made it CC it was all rights reserved by default)
January 3rd, 2007 at 2:47 am
love it! thanks for sharing. RETICULUM REX rules!
~C
January 3rd, 2007 at 2:57 am
Thanks ~C,
We hadn’t seen the Reticulum Rex piece describing Creative Commons before, but here’s a link to it for anyone else who’s interested.
January 3rd, 2007 at 9:20 am
Hey nice video! Cool to see some of those graphics I had montaged together in another video, yes this is how it should all be working. Also I def believe in the message. I’m very interested in the one laptop per child project right now because it seems a path for what this video speaks of to manifest.
Arin
January 3rd, 2007 at 2:21 pm
lovely!
January 3rd, 2007 at 5:37 pm
This is a great demonstration of the use of CC licensed material. Yay!
BTW, Ryanne sent me.
January 3rd, 2007 at 7:16 pm
Keep up the great work! It is wonderful to see our materials used to such advantage.
Happy new year from the Lab Sandworm at WGBH Lab Sandbox
January 4th, 2007 at 1:55 am
ryan and I just watched this. very cool that WGBH allows their video to be used now. see you in SF soon.
January 4th, 2007 at 4:24 pm
Really like the presentation and use of CC material. Fusion of sounds and visuals…A+!
Do not agree with the message though. “Life-sustaining” has been a recurring challenge throughout time. Peoples have won and lost the favor of the environment and the favor of their fellow man and woman many times over.
When our forefathers birthed the industrial-growth age, they (on the whole) thought it a positive vision. Much media was likewise fashioned in the vein of your video, trumpeting glorious futures.
These are facts. Now as for my tastes, I’d have this whole modern matrix burn in the fires at the center of our earth, and she can have the cell phones and the fiber optics and the satellites and the internet too.
And yes I feel indigenous spirits are misrepresented by the quote in your video I’ve just alluded to.
I think the indigenous peoples the world over had the solution a long time ago. Let’s revert, wholesale. Sure, we’ll rise and fall with the droughts and tides, but this is a law worth abiding. Am I guilty of romanticizing? Absolutely. But I’m still right.
:)
January 4th, 2007 at 5:25 pm
Hey Mike,
There are definitely human behaviors that we need to change in order to live sustainably and in harmony with the earth, but I certainly don’t think that we need to abandon all technological advances for the sake of human survival.
The Worldchanging book is packed with sustainable technologies and suggestions for how we can make better choices towards a bright green future. It doesn’t suggest that we throw the baby out with the bath water — and in fact, the communications technologies will play a huge part in spreading information that is vital for our resilience in the 21st century.
As far as misrepresenting indigenous spirits, here’s a bit more context on the quote that we featured from an interview with Angeles Arrien. Arrien is a cultural anthropologist who has worked with the World Indigenous Council sponsored by the United Nations. She was involved with a project that looked at the prophecies from different indigenous cultures ranging from 2000 to 2050 to see if there were any dovetails in the prophecies.
The quote we feature is one that she said kept coming up over and over. She said that part of becoming global citizens is that we’re able to learn from our diversity and great points of unity.
January 4th, 2007 at 10:39 pm
Thanks for the beautiful piece! I find it very inspiring on many levels.
January 5th, 2007 at 9:35 pm
Inspiring vlog, points necessity of solidarity out, convaying from many ways of variety to one common bond, or to way of common sense to the end of the clip through single-track inciting to go on, to see… to act . . .
January 6th, 2007 at 5:51 pm
Video did not come through - I’m checking the archives…will let you know.
February 19th, 2007 at 4:28 pm
Commenting is starting to suck for me because I can no longer say what I mean in a box. But I love this video and watching it today made me feel better about a number of things I will relay more effectively on the phone. Love to you both.
March 11th, 2007 at 12:41 am
[…] I love the message of this video, kudos to Kent and Jenn of Ebb & Flow, a video blog that “focuses on social change and issues of inner peace”. They also used one of my photos briefly in a montage, Charlottetown Hippie Girl, thanks to the Creative Commons license I put on all my photographs. […]
April 17th, 2007 at 9:28 am
Thanks for this. Beautiful imagery, beautiful message. My vote is for Rainbow Peoples as well — however, for today I’m voting Green Party!
(Or is that the same thing? HA HA)
Point of clarity — I’m not sure I agree that ‘Wisdom of the Sky’ is cellphones, internet, and satellite, altho I see the point there. However, the way I see Wisdom of the Sky is ‘that which is not of the Earth’, while Wisdom of the Earth I see as ‘that which is of the Earth’.
So when humans can grasp our role as farmers, cultivators of life, charged with spreading life forms throughout the galaxy, then maybe we’ll have united Wisdom of Sky with Wisdom of Earth. (We humans will also, at some point, have to give up our ways of exploiting creatures and living on their misery & death.)
I’ve decided for myself awhile back that videos are probably not going to motivate people to get up and change the world.
But maybe helping people envision change is enough.
Just like Fox is helping people envision stagnation, white supremacy, fear, and death, so too can other viewpoints inspire better goals and aspirations.
At some point, however, power must be released from those holding on so desparately, and power must be regained by the exploited groups …
Best of luck to you with your TV. PROPS!
REkz
rekzkarz.com
May 12th, 2007 at 12:57 am
Great video. Nice work.
June 26th, 2007 at 4:52 pm
I really enjoyed the video and would like to share it with others. I attended the Navigating the Great Turning conference in Columbus earlier this year.
I couldn’t find the video in YouTube. Have you considered making it available there? Also, a suggestion for michaedl lipp: open the video it a new tab or window. I use Firefox and it didn’t come through when I first clicked on it. But when I gave it its own tab it displayed fine.
July 4th, 2007 at 2:43 pm
Hi Dhiro,
Thanks for the heads up we fixed it so it would play in Firefox.
Yes, I haven’t had the time to produce the video further but many people have been contacting me and responding positively too it.
I’d like to get it to UTube and anywhere else. I just haven’t had the time.
We would be happy to show it anywhere to get the word out.
So feel free to show it. I’d love to hear about it.
-jen
August 23rd, 2007 at 2:43 am
Hey nice video! Cool to see some of those graphics I had montaged together in another video, yes this is how it should all be working. Also I def believe in the message. I’m very interested in the one laptop per child project right now because it seems a path for what this video speaks of to manifest.
Tajinder Singh(AUS.)
September 15th, 2007 at 8:06 am
Deep Video, great message. From the music, to voice over, to the images, everything was 100% on point.
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December 2nd, 2008 at 8:38 pm
Nicely done video. I agree with the idea that the internet is one of the most powerful tools available to establish a global network of like-minded, positively focused people. Playing small does not help anybody. We have the option to strive for the highest and greatest good of the entire world. We have the ability to make lasting, global improvements. Empower yourself and take an action step. Do it now. Tomorrow, do it again.
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