Front Matter

Participatory Sustainability

Notes for an emerging field
of civilizational engagement

by

Tom Atlee

ISBN-13:
978-1542856393

ISBN-10:
1542856396

Published by
CreateSpace
100 Enterprise Way
Scotts Valley, California 95066
for
Co-Intelligence Institute
PO Box 493
Eugene, OR 97440

Participatory Sustainability: Notes for an emerging field of civilizational engagement copyright © 2017 by Tom Atlee.  This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-SA 4.0).  To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ .

…….

Dedicated to

Iris Atlee

my granddaughter
who has the challenge and opportunity
to participate
in making a world
so much better
than the world she was born into
…….

We make the road by walking.

Paulo Friere and Myles Horton

This ain’t no party,
this ain’t no disco,
this ain’t no foolin’ around.

Talking Heads

The Grand Challenge is global unsustainability. 
National security and the bridge to resilience have just as much to do with food, water, the built environment, transportation, education, health care, and the physical solvency of our nation as some bad guy sitting in some dark corner plotting whatever deed he’s going to do.

Marine Colonel Mark Puck Mykleby
former Special Strategic Assistant
to the Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff

The development of a worldview which will respond to the challenge of our times requires an imaginative recognition of humanity's fundamental participation in the natural world, a recognition of the way the human person, mind and body, is engaged in a co-creative dance with the primeval givenness of the cosmos. 
In this vision humanity is nature rendered self-conscious, one part of the cosmos capable of reflecting on itself, which has evolved so it stands on the threshold of conscious participation in the unfolding of the whole.

Peter Reason

The way we’ll hold it together is to hold it – together.

Sarah Crowell

---

Acknowledgements

Thanks to my friend and colleague Janette Hartz-Karp for the impetus to write this book, for the phrase “participatory sustainability” and for support during and after the actual writing.  Thanks to Gail Miller for proofreading and editorial help.  Thanks to my friends at the Co-Intelligence Institute and Walnut Street Cooperative and to Dulcy Lee for ongoing companionship.  

And thanks to those unborn and unnamed people who will feel called to ensure the curation, preservation, use and evolution of all knowledge that could help build something better from the raw material that we will leave them.

About the author

Tom Atlee is founder of the Co-Intelligence Institute and author of four books including The Tao of Democracy and Empowering Public Wisdom as well as the first version of The Wise Democracy Pattern Language.  He has collaborated on numerous other books and written dozens of articles for alternative journals and hundreds more for his blogs and websites, all accessible through co-intelligence.org.  He can be contacted at cii@igc.org.