The Thinker. The Box.

Samhain                          Waxing Wolf Moon                          Holiseason

It’s easy to get stuck in the way we approach problems and problem solving.  That famous box we all want to think outside of only illustrates the consensus that most of would not know the box we were in if we saw it.  The web offers several different ways to jar our thinking out of its rut and onto new superhighways.

In this post I want to point you toward five websites that I’ve come across in the last year that have jarred me out of old patterns and presented new, surprising paradigms.

Grain

The new concept for me:  agro-imperialism.

GRAIN is a small international non-profit organisation that works to support small farmers and social movements in their struggles for community-controlled and biodiversity-based food systems.

VerticalFarm

New concept:  just as it seems, vertical farms for urban areas and other sites.

Bio-Physical Economics

New concept for me:    ” the vision of the Earth as a thermodynamically closed and nonmaterially growing system, with the human economy as a subsystem of the global ecosystem. This implies that there are limits to biophysical throughput of resources from the ecosystem, through the economic subsystem, and back to the ecosystem as wastes. ”

Mega-Regions

Not as new idea for me, but expressed in an up-to-date form, mega-regions notes that various areas of the US are joined by geography and economics into areas larger than states.  This has implications for many of the important policy matters facing us today.

TED

Riveting talks by remarkable people, free to the world.   Their tag-line says it.  These are video clips, none more than 15 minutes long by break through thinkers in multiple fields.  They come together at TED conferences and give these speeches, limited to 15 minutes to 6,000 or so fellow innovators.