About

healthy human culture..

What is healthy human culture? An impossible dream? Something that humans have lived for millennia? Something we can move towards, but perhaps never quite realise?

This territory is as controversial and divided as the question of what human beings are really like. Are we inherently violent, greedy, selfish? Are we by nature loving and generous? In our world we see extreme examples of both and everything in between.

These questions feel important, as we face crises which are the direct consequences of our collective actions. A destabilising climate, rapidly diminishing resources, vast and growing inequality of wealth and power. And at a time when more and more people are looking to build something different, learning the lessons of our current system.

  • Where can we find examples or characteristics of healthy human culture? Where are they and why do they work?
  • Are there principles and characteristics that apply across all fields of human endeavour and activity – economics, technology, psychology, sociology, ecology, and any other -ologies you can think of?
  • If we can identify and understand what makes for healthy culture, how do we get there from where we are today? 
  • And how can we bring our understandings of why we humans often create culture that is unequal, unsustainable and unhappy to help us find good pathways forward, to check that what we’re creating today won’t turn out in the long term to be making old mistakes.

This site explores answers to these questions. It includes learnings and wisdom from the Transition movement, which scooped me up and took over my life as it came into being in Totnes, England in 2006.  It draws on many older traditions and ideas. It’s part of the emerging understanding that to get the answers we need requires a view across many different disciplines, integrating and relating ideas which have often been separated.

You’ll find here some of the models I have worked with – some my own, some borrowed or adapted. And some of the themes that I see repeating again and again, issues that humans encounter in personal, relationship, group and organisational life.

My specialism to the extent I have one, is psychological. My original training is in engineering. My interest is in seeing how systems work, understanding what characteristics govern their behaviour, and if they aren’t working well, what could make them work better? I have been described as a generalist, and that’s what this site offers… Overview and interconnection rather than specialised detail. Integration and relationship that bring new ways of seeing, new insights, new direction for action in this beautiful and precious world

I hope.

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