I find myself part of a “field” of people hosting some incredible work in the United Kingdom. It’s an initiative called
Tasting the Future which is being called by some brave souls within the WWF-UK in partnership with
the Hara Practice Collaborative of which I am a member. Along with all sorts of people who are joining us from across the UK and Europe, we are creating an ever-widening field of "collaborative innovation" for a One Planet food system.
Tasting the Future is less a "project" and more like a movement because it is about collectively finding a new way of living with the planet and with each other, through the portal of our food. I use the word brave because, in fact, what we are calling in is a new way of working on systemic and intractable issues. We are on the edge of what we know. So it means we need to be brave enough to not-know, and yet to step in and say Yes, I am here, join me. The nature of our work as a “field” is to create a container for our deep knowing and our not-knowing to meet, and to work with what emerges.
Currently, the UK alone consumes as if it had
3 planets from which to feed itself. Factor in North America, Europe, and the massive consumer cultures emerging in Asia and it is almost too much to bear. Tasting the Future is asking,
what would a food system actually look like if we produced and consumed in a way that sustained, rather than depleted, people and the planet? The answer is actually that nobody knows what our new systems can and will look like because we are currently in a world in transition. We have a sense of new ways forward, and we are only beginning to witness the massiveness of our current systems' dysfunction. Our damage to the planet and to our humanity has led to unprecedented depletion of both our biosphere and
ethnosphere. Citizens in Europe, North Africa and the Middle East are collectively
walking out of old structures of dominance, corruption and oppression and standing up for a new way of living life.There is huge potential for change. But what now?
There are many possible pathways forward. We can consume
better and create higher standards and regulations for our current industries. We can consume
differently by creating entirely new industries, like electric cars and upcycled product lines. Or we can consume
less and in so doing, shift industries and behaviours radically: car-free cities and everything open-source. In this “spectrum of change”, the latter is a fundamental shift in our values, behaviours, artifacts, and assumptions about what ecology and economy and humanity are and can be. This is systemic transformation within a "
dynamical" context~ it is characterized by high levels of complexity, inter-connectivity, non-linearity, emergence.
So in this context, what is Tasting the Future doing? Using the principles of self-organization, it is
illuminating the work that is happening already in the UK by
convening projects and people across organizations and sectors so they can meet and begin to see more together. We are
connecting in meaningful ways through all sorts of modalities of interaction and collaboration - from large-scale Assemblies to Depth meetings, hosting meaningful conversations and Pro-action cafes. Our purpose is to create and sustain a
learning ecology for innovation, learning and new relationships to grow. This is a way of tapping
collective intelligence to source new knowledge and
practice. We are building our capacities to integrate what we are learning together into our own lives and networks and then
scaling this out to a much wider field.
The edge in this work is around calling out a
new culture, one that learns and grows together through actually being in profound relationship with each other and with the earth. We are finding that following these four principles, the greater we are willing to take our own personal transformation to the edge, the more transformation in the system we are able to hold:
- The core of the work of systemic transformation is relationship
- Systemic transformation includes all systems, and it starts with ourselves
- It takes practicing, experimenting, and discovering together
- Learning how to learn is a core innovation.
Why is a new culture of learning how to learn, based on relationships that include all systems in order to practice and experiment needed?
Because the norm is to work with cause and effect and to see the system as outside of ourselves: to see problems and find solutions, to bring together experts or power brokers and get them to create strategies that will be implemented by us, or to create lists of recommendations that others should follow. What we don't have as a sophisticated human capacity is to be learners together regardless of our status, to be the us that leads and the them that follows. It is us as learners who access a collective intelligence from the whole - from our diversity, differences and inter-connectivity, from what the Earth is asking of us and trying to teaching us. It is to engage in what matters to us from our wholeness as human beings, as opposed to from our "titles", positions, these fragmented aspects of our selves.
As Margaret Wheatley writes, "
whatever the problem, community is the answer" and "the leaders we need are already here." Those that are showing up are "
paradigm pioneers" who hold a sense of purpose so strongly that others gather around, bring their beauty, and live their way courageously into the unknown, yet tangible, future. We can already taste it...
*the Hara Practice Collaborative is field of independent practitioners who came together to support Tasting the Future comprised of
For more on Tasting the Future click here.
photos: Sarah Whiteley, Vanessa Reid, Julie Arts, Helen Titchen Beech
