It's interesting that throughout the social revolution here in Oaxaca in 2006-2007 I never contemplated returning to the United States, yet with the H1N1 flu outbreak I nearly did so. Why? I think the invisibility of this threat, the fact that you could acquire it from anyone and the intense media frenzy made it different. During the movement there were isolated areas of danger you stayed away from, with H1N1 it could be anywhere.
Sunday, May 03, 2009
h1n1 pandemic
It's interesting that throughout the social revolution here in Oaxaca in 2006-2007 I never contemplated returning to the United States, yet with the H1N1 flu outbreak I nearly did so. Why? I think the invisibility of this threat, the fact that you could acquire it from anyone and the intense media frenzy made it different. During the movement there were isolated areas of danger you stayed away from, with H1N1 it could be anywhere.
Monday, April 20, 2009
don’t waste a crisis...
ORIGIN late 15th cent. (in the sense [management of material resources] ): from French économie, or via Latin from Greekoikonomia ‘household management,’ based on oikos ‘house’ +nemein ‘manage.’ Current senses date from the 17th cent.
The opportunity here, while the big boys are down, is to rebuild the genuine, local commercial infrastructure. To make shoes, clothes, food, education, healthcare and everything else we can in a bottom-up fashion. While speculators enjoy the economy of scale, we inhabit an ecology scaled to the human being that was lost in the corporatist equation."
The economic structures now in place were developed for an older industrial model based on scarcity, the extraction of value from planet and people, a disconnect between management and the stakeholders served, and an underlying value system centered on self-interest. At the heart of this was the corporate structure.
In my work with Halloran Philanthropies and Hardin Tibbs on well-being we have asked ourselves "How have human needs been met in the past." The industrial-era answer to this question is “by expropriation” – we take what we need from nature and from other human beings. This answer sees the human being as having mastery over nature and as being able through technology to be independent of environment and society. A wiser answer is that we depend on our environment and on other humans. Thus the need to think about ecology - the relation of organisms (people) to one and other and to their environment. Social entrepreneurs are demonstrating how to do this every day.
A shift from focusing on income to well being does not mean accepting less. On the contrary, it means doing more with less through better design and technology. A new paradigm that acknowledges this as our shared American Dream is what will really change the world.
mark
Wednesday, March 04, 2009
why do you do what you do?
now there is one outstandingly important fact about spaceship earth, and that is that no instruction book came with it. i think its very significant that there is not an instruction book for successfully operating our ship. in view of the infinite attention to all other details displayed by our ship, it must be taken as deliberate and purposeful that an instruction book was omitted. ... so we were forced, because of a lack of an instruction book, to use our intellect, which is our supreme faculty...thus... we are learning how we safely can anticipate the consequences of an increasing number of alternative ways of extending our satisfactory survival and growth - both physical and metaphysical.
r.buckminster fuller
submitted for the wdydwyd project today march 5, 2009
Thursday, January 29, 2009
obama office of social innovation
Wayne and I stressed the need for a sustainable, long term vision for jobs with impact and the role new equity capital can have as a catalyst for the field - particularly the opportunity the Government has to provide incentives for private capital to form and that serves as a forcing function for the field. This proposal may or may not make it into the current stimulus package but we hope it will catalyze a dialogue among investors and entrepreneurs that leads to legislation. Another potential avenue includes working with the SBA (Small Business Association).
In his most recent visit to China just befor the meeting Wayne also received interest in the proposal from senior Chinese leaders in partnering with the United States in developing the fund.
Mark
Friday, September 26, 2008
money & meaning

Amidst the market turmoil enthusiastic investors and entrepreneurs are increasingly turning toward a new form of capitalism and philanthropy that recognizes both the power and efficiency of market systems and the opportunity to direct them toward the sustainable exchange of human, social and natural resources and a balanced set of social and financial “returns.” Early efforts by social entrepreneurs and enlightened investors over the past 30 years has given rise to what can be called the “Social Capital Markets” that include affordable housing, renewable energy, microfinance, fair trade, base of the pyramid and others. Particularly in the last few years these markets and the philosophies embedded in them are being accepted by a growing and diverse set of market participants and just may transform our existing system in a way that addresses the massive demographic, social, environmental, technological and cultural changes unfolding around the globe.
Thursday, June 19, 2008
Buckminster Fuller Challenge & Whitney Exhibition
The Buckminster Fuller Challenge from Buckminster Fuller Institute on Vimeo.
Let me know if you are in NY next week.
Paz
Mark
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Thursday, February 14, 2008
oaxaca & oliver sacks - patterns
Oliver Sacks who has lived in and written about Oaxaca recently wrote an article appearing in the NY Times entitled "Patterns." He writes:"I have had migraines for most of my life; the first attack I remember occurred when I was 3 or 4 years old. I was playing in the garden when a brilliant, shimmering light appeared to my left — dazzlingly bright, almost as bright as the sun. It expanded, becoming an enormous shimmering semicircle stretching from the ground to the sky, with sharp zigzagging borders and brilliant blue and orange colors. Then, behind the brightness, came a blindness, an emptiness in my field of vision, and soon I could see almost nothing on my left side. I was terrified — what was happening? My sight returned to normal in a few minutes, but these were the longest minutes I had ever experienced.
I told my mother what had happened, and she explained to me that what I had had was a migraine — she was a doctor, and she, too, was a migraineur. It was a “visual migraine,” she said, or a migraine “aura.” The zigzag shape, she would later tell me, resembled that of medieval forts, and was sometimes called a “fortification pattern.”
This was a truly beautiful and insightful description of a phenomenon I have experienced for as long as I can remember. I have lived in Oaxaca, Mexico now for over five years, drawn here by some attractive force and random coincidence. Since being here this attraction has become more localized to a particular piece of ground beneath a tree overlooking the pyramids of Monte Alban. I feel as though I lived here at some time. At least something is intimately familiar. Today I recognize that the pattern I see when I experience my aural migraines is a jagged shape similar to the style of patterns found throughout Zapotec culture.
Sacks makes this co
nnection too:"Migraine-like patterns, so to speak, are seen not only in Islamic art, but in classical and medieval motifs, in Zapotec architecture, in the bark paintings of Aboriginal artists in Australia, in Acoma pottery, in Swazi basketry — in virtually every culture. There seems to have been, throughout human history, a need to externalize, to make art from, these internal experiences, from the decorative motifs of prehistoric cave paintings to the psychedelic art of the 1960s."
He also references hallucinations produced by mezcal, an agave based liquor produced here:
Many years later, as a young doctor, I read a little book (really two little books) by the great neurologist Heinrich Klüver, “Mescal” and “Mechanisms of Hallucination.” Klüver not only culled many accounts from the literature, but experimented with mescal himself, and described geometric visual hallucinations typical of the early stages of the mescal experience: “Transparent oriental rugs, but infinitely small … plastic filigreed spherical objets d’art [like] radiolaria … wallpaper designs … cobweb-like figures or concentric circles and squares … architectural forms, buttresses, rosettes, leafwork, fretwork.”
On my 44th birthday, July 10, 2002, five months before I discovered Oaxaca, I wrote this poem:
44
Thinkin of mom
Waitin for the bomb
Thoughts of fleetin
Things heatin
Scratchin
Crawlin
Reachin
Breathin
Where will I be
Whom will I see
Lay me by a tree
Let me see thee
Before during after now
Don’t know how
But makin a vow
Before during after now
Keep listenin
Keep breathin
Open wide
Slide inside
Move from here
Live without fear
Open your eyes
Strengthen your ties.
I have spent long hours beneath the tree at Monte Alban and at times, when opening my eyes it seems, I have Zapotec-like visions. I wonder what self-organizing activity in the vast populations of my own visual neurons led me to this place and why? I know my attraction has to do with the light here but perhaps there is more to discover through the ancient patterns that decorate the culture here.
Dr. Sacks has given me a lot to think about in this regard:
"What we can say, in general terms, is that these hallucinations reflect the minute anatomical organization, the cytoarchitecture, of the primary visual cortex, including its columnar structure — and the ways in which the activity of millions of nerve cells organizes itself to produce complex and ever-changing patterns. We can actually see, through such hallucinations, something of the dynamics of a large population of living nerve cells and, in particular, the role of what mathematicians term deterministic chaos in allowing complex patterns of activity to emerge throughout the visual cortex. This activity operates at a basic cellular level, far beneath the level of personal experience. They are archetypes, in a way, universals of human experience."
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