LIVING BEAUTIFULLY
Living Beautifully by beautiful.business is a regular newsletter to share and inspire a different way of looking at the world. What would our world look like were we all to make it a little more beautiful?
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01. Beautiful Conversations
This interview with James Thornton, the founder of Client Earth, and Brain Eno is so good, I have to share.
This is a rich and engaging conversation that not only explores the extraordinary work that Client Earth does, but also how culture and storytelling changes how we see, frame and then act in this world – listen in.
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As Robin Wall Kimmerer harvests serviceberries alongside the birds, she considers the ethic of reciprocity that lies at the heart of the gift economy. How, she asks, can we learn from Indigenous wisdom and ecological systems to reimagine currencies of exchange?
Listen to Robins wonderful words – The Serviceberry: An Economy of Abundance.
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02. Beautifully Made
In 2009 I remember a friend talking to me about Biomimicry. My thought at the time, wow, I love that idea, but it's going to be a hard sell. I am selling biomimicry really hard these days, in fact I say it's the only design game in town.
If you are back in 2009 - jump to the future, listen to Biomimicry Design, explained via 99% Invisible. I just love Roland Mars voice.
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I believe the industrial world is poorly designed. Which is why copying nature helps. So here's an idea, why not run a business like a redwood forest?
Nature as Inspiration, purpose, form, process, and ecosystem. Looking for a play book, nature has run the longest R&D project ever – the Factory as a Forest.
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Who made my clothes? I never asked this question 20 years ago, nor probably read the labels.
The millions of people around the world who make our clothes are too often living in poverty, exploitation, or danger. If we want to restore the equilibrium between ecology, economy and society. We need to change that.
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03. Beautifully Restorative
My friend, the artist/activist/photographer Richard Ross, has used his lens to document the US juvenile (in) justice system for the better part of a decade, producing the books Juvie Talk and Girls in Justice.
I once asked "when prisons are run for profit like a factory - raw materials in, products out, where does the raw material come from?" Here Ross shares his brief but spectacular take on giving them a voice. Juvenile-in-justice.com
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Yarrabilba plans to become Australia’s first circular economy community. Yarrabilba, meaning ‘a place of song’ in the language of the traditional owners, the Yugambeh people, is a master planned community 40km south east of Brisbane.
On completion in 2042, its population is projected to be approximately 45,000, making it a similar size and scale to the regional cities of Bundaberg and Gladstone.
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Founded in December 2020, Poets Against Poverty began with one family cooking hearty, home-cooked meals for the homeless. When they took the warm food to people living on the streets, they sat with them and listened to their stories of how they became homeless. They realised that they needed to do so much more to help them as they need houses urgently.
To help, you can buy an anthology of poems, donate, or buy art. We can all do something. My thanks to Deborah Varley.
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04. Beautifully Built
Microlibrary made out of 2,000 recycled ice cream buckets in Indonesia. Books are the window to the world.
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Bulldoze the high street and build a giant park: is Stockton the future of Britain? What do you do when M&S, Debenhams and New Look are all gone? Knock down the shopping centre and replace it with a riverside oasis.
Could the ‘visionary’ plan of Stockton-on-Tees spark a revolution?
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05. Beautiful Reads
Mission Economy: A moonshot guide to changing capitalism – Marianna Mazzucato
Watch Mariana Mazzucato & Rana Foroohar in conversation discussing this radical new way of looking at the grand challenges facing us, arguing that we must rethink the capacities and role of government within the economy and society, and above all recover a sense of public purpose.
My interest is in how we achieve the equilibrium between ecology, economy and society, it is the only way we will thrive.
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06. Beautiful Food
Jay Rayner recently wrote about the impact of COVID-19 on the UK restaurant industry.
Sauce-it.net aims to hook consumers up with chefs, restauranteurs and suppliers and offers a series of virtual food halls contain stalls from seafood companies, Spanish produce suppliers, cheesemongers and so on. You can shop across them all into one basket. The user interface is rather complex, but the range is huge.
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“Lean in” with Russell Brand – Indian farmers are protesting over new laws that could leave them at the mercy of giant corporations, while Big Tech companies are capturing their data. With Facebook and Bill Gates involved, what does it mean for you?
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07. Beautiful Experiences
Californian artist Charles Gaines takes vast monochrome photographs of what is inherently beautiful – the human face, the spreading boughs of a tree – and then mounts them behind Plexiglas screens. Each screen is partially overpainted with tiny coloured squares, and each pixel bears a number. It is the strangest configuration to behold.
Charles Gaines: Multiples of Nature, Trees and Faces exhibition, viewable online, at Hauser and Wirth, London, 29 Jan – 1 May 2021.
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Dante's Divine Comedy reveals its 21st-century meanings to Katya Adler as she travels through the regions of the afterlife with three expert guides. With Michael Sheen as Dante. BBC Radio 4
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In this podcast The History of English Kevin Stroud has created one of the great projects of modern times, a complete guide to how the English language emerged and evolved. After 150 episodes he’s only up to Chaucer. By focusing on details, Stroud is actually telling much bigger stories: the histories of people and culture, religion and war, commerce and trade.
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This Year’s Underground Sensation: Modern Monetary Theory via New Republic
At the close of 2020, it’s hard to think of another year in living memory that has forced such a radical rethinking of our politics and social life. About time.
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Mark Carney’s BBC Reith 2020 Lecture series chart how we have come to esteem financial value over human value and how we have gone from market economies to market societies. He argues that this has contributed to a trio of crises: of credit, Covid and climate. The former Bank of England Governor outlines how we can turn this around.
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A Brief History of Mathematics - Numbers inhabit and describe our world in so many ways. There is a mysterious relationship to the coding of our cosmos.
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Regina Dugan, CEO of new biomedical non-profit Wellcome Leap, and former director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in the US, talks about her approaches delivering breakthrough technologies and why she has now set her sights on global health.
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The next act for messenger RNA could be bigger than covid vaccines. New messenger RNA vaccines to fight the coronavirus are based on a technology that could transform medicine. Next up: sickle cell and HIV – via MIT Technology Review.
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At the very beginning of the vaccine production process, someone uploaded this code to a DNA printer (yes), which then converted the bytes to actual DNA molecules. That, it seems, was the simple part...
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Theories of Change Climate change represents an unprecedented global challenge. This new podcast, hosted by Sarah Ladislaw of the CSIS Energy Security and Climate Change Program, features conversations with global experts to discuss their Theories of Change, and what they think are the most necessary near-term steps and longer-term strategies to ensure a manageable climate for future generations.
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Battery technology - no cobalt required – via ChemistryWorld.
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Steel companies make nearly 2 billion tons of high-strength material every year using vast amounts of coal. Can the industry kick its coal habit? via Grist.
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There are hundreds of gigafactories focused on car battery production. China builds one gigafactory a week; the rest of the world builds one every few months. Via Prof Ray Wills.
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Dan Wang’s annual letter. Wang is one of the best-informed and most thoughtful China analysts.
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Taiwan is a civilisation, and is one of the most progressive societies, if not the most progressive, in Asia.
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The Organic Basics Impact Report 2020. They say there is no such thing as sustainable fashion, but we can make clothes in a better way. I wonder if you agree?
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09. Beautiful Leadership
The theme this month is music –
Radical Poptimism: When K-pop band BTS donated one million dollars to Black Lives Matter, their fandom matched the money in a day, while they and fans of other K-Pop bands neutralized rightwing hashtags and police apps by flooding them with pop videos and memes.
Colleen Nika, writing for Good Trouble Magazine, details the subversive history of BTS, some say they are the most disruptive, wonderfully radical band in pop...
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Herbie Hancock on the wisdom of Miles Davis and so much more. Open your heart, and be lifted up.
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10. Beautiful News
Join me for the book launch of Do Build. How to make and lead a business the world needs.
On the 4th March I will be in conversation with Sir Tim Smit of the #edenproject. Come along if you are interested in all things regenerative and making business beautiful.
Sign up to get involved & join the free online event.
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Publication of 'Do Build'' takes place on 4 March 2021 in the UK, and 16 March 2021 in North America.
Available to preorder
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The introduction is free to read. You may also be interested in this fascinating review – my thanks to Richard Brophy.
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