Our guest today is Linda Booth Sweeney co-author, along with Dennis Meadows and Gillian Martin Mehers, of the The Climate Change Playbook.
Visit Our Partners:
Wild Abundance - Top 10 Vegetables to Grow that Will Really Feed You!
Marjory Wildcraft - How to Grow Food!
Donate Directly to the Podcast: PayPal -or- Venmo @permaculturepodcast
Join Our Patreon Community: Patreon.com/permaculturepodcast
Want to listen to more conversations about Permaculture?
During the conversation Linda shares with us how we can use games to better understand systems, specifically Climate Change. This is important because of the crisis that the weirding of our atmosphere is causing and our need to communicate this and other issue clearly, in a fun, proactive, and non-threatening way, while wrapping everything within one of the core roots of permaculture: systems thinking. This discussion takes those ideas of climate and systems and helps anyone who is practicing permaculture to speak with more clarity about both.
You can find more about Linda at LindaBoothSweeney.com, and The Climate Change Playbook at ChelseaGreen.com.
Games are a fun and upbeat way to play, and as we heard from Linda, also to learn, and her book has provided us a way to do so with only a handful of props and a little bit of time. As a longtime gamer myself, I’ve come to understand that play and the space created can allow you to safely try your hand at storytelling, diplomacy, and conflict resolution, deepen your emotional intelligence, your understanding of mathematics or game theory, and so much more. That we can apply that same play to bigger issues, whether around a table or filling an auditorium, is a new way to reach out to and talk to people about climate change, and The Climate Change Playbook provides a place for us to use games developed by others to begin this process, and in turn to create new games to include in our permaculture classes.
When it comes to permaculture, are there already games that you use to teach these concepts? Do you already have a copy of The Climate Change Playbook? What games do you like from it? As a parent do you have a copy of the Wildcraft board game?
Whatever way you are bringing play into your practice, I’d love to hear from you. Leave a comment below to get in touch.
Resources
Linda Booth Sweeney
The Climate Change Playbook Chelsea Green
Outward Bound
The Fifth Discipline by Peter Senge
John Sterman
Sloan School
Society for Organizational Learning
Systems Dynamics
In Over Our Heads by Bob Kegan
Gaia’s Garden by Toby Hemenway (Interview)