I suppose it makes sense that the week after a holiday, this newsletter feels a little bit like my fridge — stuffed with interesting stuff that doesn’t really go together but makes for intersting reading.
Building the Great Green Wall the Old/New way
This article is actually 5 years old, and I only just found out about it. Which tells us a lot in itself about the gaps in our information…especially when it comes to the incredible innovations happening in a part of the world that a lot of us were wrongly taught didn’t innovate anything.
This article is fascinating on several fronts. First, it shows us a situation where a programmed and proclaimed solution turned out to be infeasible (shocker), but the concept was morphed by the people on the ground who understood the situation best into a strategy that actually made a big impact.
Second, it shows us a decentralized, really network-based system of development and spread of that solution. Because the farmers had their own networks and systems of sharing information, independent from any government organization or NGO, it spread broadly and resiliently, adapting as it went to very local conditions.
And third, all of this occurred completely out of sight of the people and organizations that the Industrial Era assumed would lead it.
As I compared this to our efforts to improve local communities and make them more resilient, it struck me that what we might be lacking is the dense and very practically-oriented networks that were necessary to spread these ideas across much of the width of the continent. As a colleague of mine says, there’s lots of good ideas out there, but they don’t scale — they don’t reach wide enough or far enough to change anything more than the very local context in which they started. Even with all of our organizations and conferences and listservs, somehow the stuff with really transformative potential stays unknown outside of a very narrow band of local recipients - or enthusiasts with a very narrow focus.
Do you think that’s the right assessment? Am I missing something? How would you build this kind of robust, big-impact-through-local-action network?
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