Reimagining Orcas Island: Building Resilience Amid Turbulence

Monday, October 14, from 6 to 9 pm at Odd Fellows Hall

from the Orcas Island Library

The Orcas Island Library presents “Reimagining Orcas Island: Building Resilience Amid Turbulence”

We face an array of unprecedented challenges:

• A global financial house of cards
• Depletion of energy and other critical resources
• Environmental and climate chaos
• Food safety and security

During a time of contradiction, as perpetual growth meets natural limits, how can we can strengthen our resilience and achieve genuine sustainability? How can we adapt and respond? Join Nicole Foss and Laurence Boomert, experts in disciplines ranging widely from global finance, energy, and nuclear safety to permaculture and community-building on a grassroots level.

Monday, October 14, from 6 to 9 pm at Odd Fellows Hall, 112 Haven Road, Eastsound, WA

FREE Sponsored by Friends of Orcas Island Library

Nicole will paint a comprehensive picture of where we stand today globally, how our human operating system functions, how and why it is acutely vulnerable, and what we must do about the predicament in which we find ourselves. The focus will be primarily financial and social, reflecting the priority of impacts likely to be felt in the relatively short term.

She will conduct a world tour, using different countries as illustrations of different points in a cycle of economic and societal expansion and contraction, setting New Zealand in up-to-date global context. She will highlight the critical factors for change and outline the possibilities that exist within the scope of the emerging reality.

Laurence will explain how our current crisis reflects an unprecedented opportunity to create a better future. We are presented with the most expansive cultural possibilities in human history, and the power to deliver positive change rests with an increasingly empowered global grass roots. Laurence will present a wide range of working examples of how neighborhoods and wider communities have woken up to their power to create a smarter, kinder world, using a myriad of both sophisticated and simple social innovations, along with super networked, yet decentralized, systems for meeting human need.

Nicole Foss is Senior Editor of The Automatic Earth, a big-picture website. Since January 2008, she and her writing partner have been chronicling and interpreting the on-going global credit crunch as the most pressing aspect of our current multi-faceted predicament. The site integrates finance, energy, environment, psychology, population and realpolitik in order to explain why we find ourselves in a state of crisis and what we can do about it. Nicole is also an international speaker on energy and global finance. She has lectured in hundreds of locations across North America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand, and has made many media appearances in a variety of countries. In addition, Nicole has been involved in teaching on permaculture design certificate courses in Central America and Europe.

Prior to the establishment of The Automatic Earth, Nicole was Editor of The Oil Drum Canada, where she wrote on peak oil and finance. She also ran the Agri-Energy Producers’ Association of Ontario, where she focused on farm-based biogas projects, grid connections for renewable energy and Feed-In Tariff policy development. While living in the UK she was a Research Fellow at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, where she specialized in nuclear safety in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union, and conducted research into electricity policy at the EU level. She also has significant previous experience practicing as an environmental consultant. Her academic qualifications include a BSc in Biology from Carleton University in Canada (where she focused primarily on neuroscience and psychology), a post-graduate diploma in air and water pollution control, the common professional examination in law and an LLM in international law in development from the University of Warwick in the UK. She was granted the University Medal for the top science graduate in 1988 and the law school prize for the top law school graduate in 1997.

Laurence Boomert has a long history in contingency planning, green business development and community up solutions. In the early 1990s he founded the 500-member Environmental Business Network. He currently runs the Bank of Real Solutions, an online database of community can-do success stories. He co-published, and was a writer for, the NZ Edition of Fleeing Vesuvius: Responding to the Effects of Economic and Environmental Collapse, published in 2011. His approach to sustainability is grounded in whole systems thinking and spans a wide range of practical applications, including business, economics, politics, sustainable land management, local food security, media, grassroots initiatives, and neighborhood and community resilience projects. Laurence has been an organic farmer, a television presenter, and founder of a new political party – the New Economics Party. He has been actively involved in the development of Transition Towns initiatives in New Zealand and is one of the country’s foremost proponents of complementary currencies and new trading systems. He is featured in the 2013 book True Wealth: Money and the Making of a New Collaborative Culture. As a speaker, Laurence focuses on the increasing empowerment of the global grass roots and the expansive cultural possibilities it represents. He presents a wide range of working examples of positive and proactive social innovation, emphasizing the potential for networked, yet decentralized, communities to create smarter and kinder systems for meeting human need.

For more information, contact Phil at Orcas Island Library, 376-4985, pheikkinen@orcaslibrary.org.
Or visit www.orcaslibrary.org.