Education
There are a number of organisations and communities around the world with this name. This is the link to: Emmaus International, which is committed to its work in six priority areas:
right to water,
health
education,
ethical finance,
fighting human trafficking,
international migration
Erowid is the Pyschonaut Central site. Almost everything you might want to know about humans and psychoactive substances. American site.
Located on coast of California at the Big Sur. Esalen is a commune; a centre for human consciousness-raising educational workshops; hot springs; land conservation and stewardship; yoga and tantric sex; a retreat. And at various times, home to talents and ideas of luminaries such as Aldous Huxley, Timothy Leary, Joan Baez and Albert Hoffman.
A fascinating seedbed of influence even on Russians such as Boris Yeltsin.
The site says it:
“is a platform for experimental urban development. We think that the liveable and sustainable cities of the future will emerge from urban experiments rather than being the result of traditional planning. This website is meant to inspire new ways of working with urban development, based on 1:1 experiments in urban space and is intended as a resource for citizens, developers, planners, politicians and others who is interested in working with experimental urban development.”
A movement or a non-movement? Performance as art? Free spaces as art?
Founded from ideas in the Manifesto developed by George Maciunas who was Lithuanian American artist. He was a founding member and the central coordinator of Fluxus, an international community of artists, architects, composers, and designers. Other leading members brought together by this movement included Ay-O, Joseph Beuys, George Brecht, Dick Higgins, Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, and Wolf Vostell.
Complex ideas…
Fortean: Based loosely on the ideas of American researcher and writer, Charles Fort (1874-1932), fortean studies include everything that is regarded as ‘anomalous phenomena’. In other words, ‘stuff that is hard to explain’. Fort’s own life-work was to take notes on anything that he found interesting. He appears to have been witty, energetic and endearingly odd. One of his unpublished books, titled simply ‘X’, explored the notion that the inhabitants of Earth are being controlled by the inhabitants of Mars. Charles Fort said, “I believe nothing of my own that I have ever written.”
It all seems to be a mad mix of science fiction and fantasy, conspiracy theories, myths, magic, the paranormal with wedges of anarchic humour and general scientific and quasi-scientific research with added mayhem. Perhaps.
Here are links to The Centre for Fortean Zoology (on the track of unknown animals) and the Fortean Times Forum.
Free to Learn is an influential documentary that offers an insight into the daily life at The Free School in Albany, New York.
The Free School expects children to decide on how they spend their time in schooling.
The Free School is unique in that it transcends obstacles that prevent similar schools from reaching an economically and racially diverse range of students and operates in the heart of a city.
A portal site that encourages a ‘warrior response’ to global catastrophes. Developed from the work of Max Igan, who started formulating the idea of The Full Circle Project in 2012. The site tells us that, “he was particularly concerned to draw attention to the plight of the Amazon forest and all the natural treasures it contains. He wanted to call people everywhere to come together and recognise the power we had as One People to change the tide of destruction and the rape of our planet.”
This is described on the site link as: “Through Gaia University, they are pioneering educational designs that allow learners to discover and demonstrate grounded solutions to complex ecological and social problems through the integration of ecosocial theory and hands-on practice.”
The founders are: Liora Adler and Andrew Langford, who have been deeply involved as leaders in ecovillage, permaculture, bioregional and consensus facilitation worknets for over thirty years.
The United Nations named the village a model of sustainable development. Gabriel Garcia Marquez has called founder Paolo Lugari the “inventor of the world.” An example of the ‘Blue Economy’; self-sufficiency on a local scale.
Links to video films and descriptions of what goes on there.