Description:
In thinking about some of the current challenges that face humanity, such as climate change and the great acceleration, it’s easy, but also demoralizing, to shrug these issues off as human nature… you know, thinking that there isn’t much that we can do and that we’re only going to really face the music when it’s playing out in our own backyard.
And let’s be real, it’s not hard for people to still ignore problems when they are up close and personal… just look at the forest fires on the west coast of the United States and the storms on the east and the intense drive to rebuild in the same spots that were devastated.
With this in mind, we have two interviews to share with you today on the topic of collective action – that is, groups of people getting together to work towards a common objective. First, we are going to share a conversation that we had with Dr. Amy Poteete at the annual Sustainability Across Disciplines conference put on by the Loyola College for Diversity and Sustainability,
For the second half of the show, we share a conversation we had with author, architect, and community development consultant Kathryn McCamant who shares with us her experience working with and developing cohousing communities, and how she’s scaling up her impact with training and collaboration.
Music featured in this episode:Â
- Intro “R U Well” and “Lay it on me” by Best Fern
- Outro “Plans fall through” by Alexia Avina
- Back from the Brink, Life Underwater, The Last Fisherman, by K. La Luna for the Radical Oceans Futures Project
- Various sound effects and royalty free music include “Piano, Bach Fantasia” by , and “Plucky Walk,” “Bright Future,” and “On a Positive Note” found on SoundsCrate.
 Reading:
Some works by Dr. Amy Poteete
- Remember that book we spoke about? She co-wrote Working Together: Collective Action, the Commons, and Multiple Methods in Practice (2010) with Marco Janssen and “Lin” Ostrom.
- You can read more about elephants migrating to Botswana in a recent article in Quartz.
Some works by Kathryn McCamant
- She’s the president of CoHousing Solutions, where she runs the >500 Communities Program.
- She co-authored THE book on cohousing with Charles Durrett, entitled Creating Cohousing: Building Sustainable Communities (2011).
Other ways of building collaboratively: BauGruppen in Germany
- Here’s an article in The Conversation that walks us through the concept and applications in Germany.
Check out various cohousing networks:
- United States: the Cohousing Association of the United States.
- Canada: the Canadian Cohousing Network.
- United Kingdom: the UK Cohousing Network.
- Check out this nice Tedx talk by Grace Kim from Vancouver, British-Columbia, Canada.
We gushed about Elinor Ostrom in Episode 3, part 2, and posted a bunch of videos featuring her speaking on these issues back then. You can check it out here (scroll to the end of the post).
