Our friend Shaun Chamberlin of Dark Optimism shares news of Surviving the Future: conversations for our time, an eight week online gathering which he will be co-facilitating on behalf of Sterling College, starting on Monday 6th April.

These are frightening and confusing days. As we rearrange our daily lives in response to the coronavirus pandemic, other interlocking crises continue to quietly worsen, from biodiversity collapse to food security to climate catastrophe.

In these tumultuous times, we will take a long moment to pull back and think together — to share conversation — curated by experts and in the company of some of the most compelling people who have been thinking about these issues for a long time.

The late David Fleming called this convergence of crises “the Climacteric,” and he held out a tantalising cultural vision of how we might respond. Now is our opportunity to reforge Fleming’s principles in the context of the diverse realities we are facing today in each of our own home communities.

“Most of human history was bred, fed, and watered by another sort of economy. But the market has replaced, as far as possible, the social capital of reciprocal obligation, loyalties, culture and traditions with exchange, price, and the impersonal principles of economics.”

David Fleming, author of Lean Logic: A Dictionary for the Future and How to Survive It

This timely online, interactive course is designed to create and foster an online community of citizens around the world who are committed to helping their localities seek out new insights that offer the promise of Surviving the Future. Some may choose to pursue the possibilities unveiled in Fleming’s works, while others might use these as a springboard for finding their own unique pathways to confronting the Climacteric.

The course will be co-facilitated by me, Shaun Chamberlin, and Philip Ackerman-Leist and will feature interactive webinars with internationally-renowned guests each week. As we open up conversations for and about people and communities facing profound change, we increase our capacity to share and discover solutions, making our own localities more resilient in their diverse circumstances while also supporting global understanding and shared priorities.

In order to make this timely course available to as many people as possible, we are offering scaled pricing so you can select the tuition level that best fits your financial capacity. Your contribution supports the development of future courses and our ability to make them available to as many people as possible, regardless of their financial means.

For full details, including how to register, please head here.

Featured image: Sterling College

About the author

Shaun Chamberlin writes at Dark Optimism. As an author of The Transition Timeline, proud editor of the astonishing Lean Dictionary, ex-chair of The Ecological Land Cooperative, he’s unashamedly positive about what kind of a world humanity could create, and unashamedly realistic about how far we are from creating it today.