Ed Dowding

I think it’s safe to tell you what’s going on, now. Enough of the elements are firmly in place.

We’re setting up a small-holding in West Lexham, Norfolk, on 2 acres of land. We will be suppling food to, and helping out with the development of, the new sustainability centre which is being developed there, renovating an old farm (photos, and more about the plans).

Ali has taken up the offer of a full-time job with the UN Principles for Responsible Investment. They are a WONDERFUL organisation who have found a very successful way of enculturing civilisation amongst the financial sector by asking them to adhere to a set of principles. I’m very proud. It’s changing the world in a huge and subtle way.

In addition to some interesting and fun interface design work with an old employer, I’m rekindling Online Personal Assistant. I’m also going to be doing a permaculture course in October for a few weeks.

Our field is just across the road from our house (annotated map) and so very easy to get to. It slopes away to the south, so catches lots of sun, and is bordered on all sides by trees, with many large oaks. It’s a lovely place to be working.

We hope to be getting our first pigs in a month or so, once we’ve re-fenced, and obtained our DEFRA licences. About the same time you will be able to invest in Lexham Farm* Pork Futures, wherein you invest in your pig now, and when it’s ready we supply you with discounted, organic, packed-and-delivered rare-breed pork, butchered and prepared to your wishes. Alas we’re unlikely to have any ready before Christmas, but if we can, you’ll be the first to know.

If you’re thinking – as I know some of you will be, “Sustainability centre? That sounds a bit wafty / dull / predictable / ambitious ..” Then you will probably be reassured by the same fact which first drew me to it: it’s all taking place on the family estate of one of the chaps who established the Secret Garden Party, Ed Colville. This immediately speaks volumes about its vibrancy, and potential to ignite the imagination, whilst being economically sustainable.

If you’re thinking “Sustainability centre? What does that even mean?” then there is an Open Weekend happening on 25-26th September where we’ll talk about what the place is going to be. (In essence, we’re currently looking at a sort of social / rural enterprise Hub type setup, coupled with courses, events, and erm.. things. A blend of renaissance enterprise, the Centre for Alternative Technology without too much geekery, and Findhorn without too much herbally-infused expressive dance)  If you’re disposed, it would be lovely to see you. There will be festivities, tours around the buildings and gardens, camping, and probably swimming if it’s warm. I’ll post more details about this later, but save the date.

I was up at the farm yesterday, emptying the car from our journey back from France, and it’s really very lovely. It’s going to great up there. Everything is right on the doorstep: barns, toolsheds, fields, good people, and just 90 minutes into central London and 30 minutes to the beach. Ideal, really.

* Or whatever it ends up being called. Any ideas? We’ll decide after the Open Weekend.

The UK currently exports 131,000 tonnes of chewing gum to Spain, only to import 125,000 tonnes back again. We send 3,300 tonnes of cuddly toys to New Zealand, only to bring another 2,400 tonnes back again.

One person in the US will, by 4am in the morning of 2nd January, have been responsible for the equivalent in carbon emissions that someone in living in Tanzania would generate in an entire year.

In 2009, the UK went into ecological debt on 12 April. The world as a whole went into ecological debt on 25 September.

Source: NEF

The four steps, when used in “self-expression” mode, work like this:

1. To observe without evaluation, judgment, or analysis,
2. To express feelings which these observations evoke,
3. To express needs connected with these feelings,
4. (optional) To make a specific request of another person to help meet an unmet need, and to enrich life of everyone involved. Essential in this is that the other person is to be left free to honour or decline the request.

The two modes of use of this model are

• empathy, including both self-empathy, and empathy for another, and
• honest self-expression, including “please” (request) and “thank you” (gratitude)

Non-Violent Communication (NVC) advocates that in order to understand each other, the parties express themselves in objective and neutral terms (talking about their factual observations, feelings and needs) rather than in judgmental terms (such as good versus bad, right versus wrong, or fair versus unfair).

It follows four steps: making neutral observations (distinguished from interpretations/evaluations e.g. “I see that you are wearing a hat while standing in this building.”), expressing feelings (emotions separate from reasons and interpretation e.g. “I am feeling puzzled”), expressing needs (deep motives e.g. “I have a need to learn about other people’s motives for doing what they do”) and making requests (clear, concrete, feasible and without an explicit or implicit demand e.g. “Please share with me, if you are willing, your reasons for wearing the hat in this building.”).

Practicing NVC means that one listens carefully and patiently to others, even when speaker and listener are in conflict. The listener may show empathy for the speaker by responding with reworded versions of the speaker’s own statements (“I hear you saying that….”) and attempting to recognize the needs motivating the speaker’s words (“It sounds like you need….”).

via Nonviolent Communication – Wikipedia

1. Thou Shalt Not Simply Trot Out thy Usual Shtick
2. Thou Shalt Dream a Great Dream, or Show Forth a Wondrous New Thing, Or Share Something Thou Hast Never Shared Before
3. Thou Shalt Reveal thy Curiosity and Thy Passion
4. Thou Shalt Tell a Story
5. Thou Shalt Freely Comment on the Utterances of Other Speakers for the Skae of Blessed Connection and Exquisite Controversy
6. Thou Shalt Not Flaunt thine Ego. Be Thou Vulnerable. Speak of thy Failure as well as thy Success.
7. Thou Shalt Not Sell from the Stage: Neither thy Company, thy Goods, thy Writings, nor thy Desparate need for Funding; Lest Thou be Cast Aside into Outer Darkness.
8. Thou Shalt Remember all the while: Laughter is Good.
9. Thou Shalt Not Read thy Speech.
10. Thou Shalt Not Steal the Time of Them that Follow Thee

via The TED Commandments – rules every speaker needs to know.

Mottainai  is a Japanese term meaning “a sense of regret concerning waste when the intrinsic value of an object or resource is not properly utilized.”

The expression “Mottainai!” can be uttered alone as an exclamation when something useful, such as food or time, is wasted.

In addition to its primary sense of “wasteful,” the word is also used to mean “impious; irreverent” or “more than one deserves.”

Source: Wikipedia

There have been lots of coincidences, serendipity, and small-world moments during these last few weeks.

Exactly a week, almost to the hour, after the end of our experience chez Jimmy’s Farm, I was helping a farmer friend with a little challenge:

1. There is a field with some cows in it.
2. We have some hurdles.
3. We need to make a pen.
4. We need to herd the cows into the pen.
5. We need to select the small bull from the herd, and put it into a trailer.

The small bull (let’s call him Randy) we needed was following around a big old cow called Rita, who was the most fertile of the herd. She also had a calf. So if we focus on getting the calf into the pen (which was easy enough to build), then Rita would follow, and Randy would follow Rita.

It worked a treat. We moved nice and slowly and let them take their time, stood in the right places to funnel them suitably, and then swooped quickly to pull the hurdles together, to close the opening we’d made to let them into the pen.

So there we all are. Rita, her calf, and Randy all in the pen together. Tidy job, plenty of time left to spare.

“Are these going to be OK without a pin [to hold the hurdles together]?” I asked the very experienced and successful farmer.

“No, that’ll be fine. Come and hold the gate here whilst I drive him out.” And since the hurdles are pretty heavy, and appeared to the eye to be closed, it seemed like a reasonable assertion.

I went to do the gate. Nameless Farmer started moving the cows towards the gate. Randy turns … and bolts out of the pen the way he’d come in, straight through the unpinned hurdles.

Alas I’m contractually prevented from telling you quite how similar this was to the events of a week before, but I just wanted to salve my indefatigably tiresome ego by telling this story of how the seasoned professionals make mistakes, too.

It’s also worth mentioning, again for the sake of my ego if nothing else, that things only become problems if you don’t have the nous – or have not allowed yourself sufficient time – to rectify them.  We simply had a longer-than-expected chat, repeated what we’d done before, rounded them up, got them in the pen, pinned it, put the bull in the trailer, and were home in time for dinner.

The world is melting. Guess what you need:

The only words I can think of which would fully express my disappointment would be a hex to melt all consumers of bottled water within 2 miles of a tap. Alas, I don’t know any. Maybe the benzene will get them.

1. The Art of Starting
   • Make meaning
   • Ask women
   • Get going
2. The Art of Positioning
   • Seize the high ground
   • Make it personal
   • Niche thyself
3. The Art of Pitching
   • Explain in the first minute
   • Answer the little man
   • 10 slides
     • Title
     • Problem
     • Solution
     • Business model
     • Underlying magic
     • Marketing and sales
     • Competition
     • Team
     • Projections
     • Status and timeline
   • 20 minutes
   • 30 point font
4. The Art of Writing a Business Plan
   • Pitch then plan
   • Focus on the executive summary
   • Write deliberate, act emergent
5. The Art of Raising Capital
   • Build a real business
   • Get an intro
   • Clean up your act
6. The Art of Bootstrapping
   • Manage for cash flow, not profitability
   • Build a bottom-up forecast
   • Focus on function, not form
7. The Art of Recruiting
   • Hire infected people
   • Double check your gut
   • Apply the shopping center test
8. The Art of Partnering
   • Partner for “spreadsheet” reasons
   • Ensure that middles and bottoms like the deal
   • Cut win-win deals
9. The Art of Branding
   • Create a contagion
   • Lower the barriers to adoption
   • Foster a community
10. The Art of Rainmaking
    • Let a hundred flowers blossom
    • Suck down
    • Go after agnostics
11. The Art of Being a Mensch
    • Help a lot of people
    • Do what’s right
    • Pay back society

Summary of Art of the Start, by Guy Kawasaki

EDF is not green, it’s not British.  And it spends £20m on marketing Green Britain day which is more than its annual spend on investing in new green energy (source).

• It operates 8 nuclear power stations in the UK
• It is the world’s largest corporate producer of toxic nuclear waste behind the US and Canada
• Its claims around “low-carbon energy” actually refer to nuclear power that has generated 1420 tonnes of high level nuclear waste that will remain a toxic threat to the environment for hundreds of years.
• Only 1% of EDF’s generation capacity in the UK comes from Renewables (Nuclear = 66%, Coal = 28%, Gas = 5%).
• EDF’s electricity generated from their coal fired power stations is responsible for over 20m tonnes of CO2 emissions.
• Over the last 6 years EDF spent a yearly average of £4.98 per customer building new green energy – this puts them in 5th place amongst the ‘Big 6′