Sterling College's new David Fleming course, enrolling for Jan 31.
Fleming birthday celebrations, and new podcast!

View this email in your browser

On the occasion of David Fleming's birthday, a quick heads up!

Lots of you have been asking when we'd be launching the new, expanded
Surviving the Future: Conversations for Our Time offering, in partnership with Vermont's Sterling College.

And I can think of no better way to mark David Fleming's birthday than to announce that the answer is now!

I'll send out a fuller update later in the month, but for today particularly want to highlight The Deeper Dive. This is for those already familiar with Fleming's Surviving the Future book—which I know includes many of you!—and eager to apply, question, and reforge his principles in the context of today's realities.

The Deeper Dive will run for 8 weeks from January 31st, and enrolments are now open, so I wanted to give a heads up to ensure that none of you miss out.

We again expect participants from every continent on Earth (ages 20-93 thus far!), and this year will be accompanied by powerful guests including Jason Hickel, Kali Akuno, Isa Frémeaux, Rob Hopkins, Eve Annecke, Nate Hagens and David Abram.

And all offered on a trust-based 'pay as feels right' basis, so I look forward to unearthing wholehearted paths forward through these difficult times alongside many of you.

All details at:
https://www.ce.sterlingcollege.edu/surviving-the-future

Here's to reforging 2022, together.

Happy birthday David!!

For those keen to remember and celebrate David's life and legacy, take a look at the full dusk 'til dawn programme
'David Fleming: 10 Years on, Celebrating His Legacy'
(now on Youtube with timestamps to jump to the content of your choosing)

Featuring no fewer than three bands offering songs—and in one case even their name—inspired by his writing!

As many of you will already have discovered, we now have a
new Fleming Policy Centre website!

To explore it, click the image above.

Or for November's remarkably popular podcast, where David Bollier quizzed me on David Fleming's work and vision, click my pic below... ~Shaun

"Coexistence is not toleration; it is resonance; it is the nature of the human ecology.

Reliance on the market economy has led to the asset of a common culture falling into neglect; sometimes we pick through the ruins like tourists marvelling at a lost settlement and guessing at what was once there.

It would be helpful—though late in the day—to stop dismantling what remains of a culture in today's political economy, and to start to re-grow cultural and artistic links as an essential basis for cohesion in a future which, from where we sit, will be barely recognisable.

At present, culture is decorative rather than structural; although it may lift the spirits... The Lean Economy, in contrast, will depend for its existence on a deep foundation in culture.

It is possible to live without it, but only for a time, like holding your breath under water."

~ from the Cohesion entry of
Lean Logic, and p.40 of
Surviving the Future

"Fleming's work really struck me – the breadth of it and the integration of his thinking around economic deintensification through lean principles, as a way of thinking about energy and economic descent. I hadn't ever encountered anything like it.

It is magnificent in its scope, but so well integrated. And not about imposing a prescriptive set of ideas on the problem or saying that you must accept my definition of the situation we're in. So it really made an impression on me, and I've drawn on that work quite frequently in the years since.

There's a lot of analysis of the problems in the circles I work in, but often not a lot of concrete thinking about detailed approaches to actually dealing with this. Fleming is someone who really looked at that closely over a lifetime."

~ Joshua Floyd, energy, systems and society fellow at The Rescope Project, co-author of The Political Economy of Deep Decarbonisation

All info on the books

"David Fleming's lifework is nothing less than an encyclopedia of the timeless art of living, encompassing the art of building enlivening communities, the art of allowing the economy to serve life and creativity, and the art of unmasking invisible brainwashing.

Fleming has written a guide to becoming an authentic individual and to recognising toxic relationships on every level of material and personal exchange. This is a serious guide to health on every level of relationships and at the same time a deeply humourous read.

Whether the breakdown of technical civilisation will come (as Fleming is convinced) or humanity will just carry on muddling through as alwasy, this encyclopedia of manners, grace and style will make the reader's life more wonderful, and thus inevitably help to build a saner society."

~ Dr. Andreas Weber, biologist, philosopher, author of Matter and Desire, and The Biology of Wonder

Keen to tell a friend about David Fleming's work?

Here's the link to share, for our regularly updated page:
www.flemingpolicycentre.org.uk/books/

Our website

Facebook

Twitter

Newsletter Archive

Email us

Forward this newsletter by email