I have been away from home now travelling and talking about incredible edible to people in China, Hong Kong, and Australia. There is universal interest and connection with the ideas and the practicalities of engaging in activity in a small way to modify and temper the individual lifestyle and nurture community. I am struck as I sit and meet with a whole range of people how many of them are a) clearly disturbed by the way that they are living and b) how they are so keen to begin to do something about it. This has been a powerful impression of my trip. The cultural and political boundaries are quite clearly transcended by the common desire to connect to the natural world, to realign how they live and to look for ways of establishing a level of activity which is both understandable and as the chinese som simply state - more natural.
This has been a theme then, of my thinking during what has at times been quite a disturbing and certainly very challenging set of experiences. I think I want to develop some ideas around a theme I will call 'radical hope' - where we might usefully ask ourselves 'for what might we hope?' - I think the trip has clearly demonstrated to me that there are clear limits to human existence - some of the places in China were the most challenging environments I have ever encountered in terms of day to day living. But this is not to aim a criticism at any one place, one nation, instead it is to suggest that perhaps we need to ask the genral question of our civilisation which in many ways appears to be at the tipping point of complete collapse, for what may we hope?
We need to transcend our present ways and begin to ask what makes future goodness? What will help us to understand a different future? What do we do when we have so few appropriate concepts through which to understand a viable alternative future? This I think is what in part Incredible Edible offers people, but it needs much further reimagination for us to begin to see ourselves as a serious development - we have some of the characteristics of a new direction, we emerge from a challenging situation, we struggle, sometimes against the odds, we are in danger however of people interpreting our efforts through other lenses and I think we are also in danger of providing partial answers. Amidst the ruins of the old ways of living are some of the possibilities of a new vision, carrying with it new ways of living which can provide useful stepping stones for us towards a different future. But as my trip has so strongly reminded me, as people, we are almost universally unanchored in the modern world, as a result we have lost both identity and we are assimilated deeply into the new order of consumerism which is engineered into the core of modern living. To unpack and realign this is a huge challenge, it is something that questions how we exist, how we relate, how we engage with and connect with other people and the world around us, it somehow challenges us to maintain and create a connection from a pre-modern to a post-modern world, a serious consideration if we are to create a new orthodoxy, a new way of being which is more benign. Our hope is therefore radical, it questions and critically rejects the existing order of things, but in doing this it must provide some of the hope through practice and example - some of that hope comes from seeing possible futures and Inc Ed offers a little of that, some comes through sadness and concern which I have touched during this trip, a feeling amongst people of many nations that something is not right - and hope that we, as sentient, loving beings, are capable of doing something about that situation and overcome the destructive force of determinism. Our hope is in the education of our lives, connecting to an as yet undisclosed future.
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