Blue sky, green earth, brownfield thinking
Blue sky thinking is seeing something no one has ever seen before; it
is creative, imaginative, iconoclastic, foolhardy, daring, ruthless,
extravert, neophiliac, entrepreneurial, radical.
Green earth thinking is understanding what all people everywhere have
always understood; it is receptive, realistic, conservational,
sensible, cautious, compassionate, introvert, ecological, cooperative,
social.
Brownfield thinking involves the synthesis of blue sky intuition and
green earth realism to address where we are now - full of history,
compromised, polluted, needing to move on - not to pastures new but to
renewal and repasturing, whatever that might imply.
If our cultural myth is of endless blue skies and inexhaustible green
earth, the reality is that there is no part of the planet that is not
touched by industrial humanity and its effluents. Earth is all
brownfield and blacktop now - get used to it!
We are already living in the poisoned ruins of our own civilisation.
Our only
option is to build a new world. The mistakes and consequences of
industrialisation, deliberate and inadvertent, are inescapable. If we
are an intelligent species, we will succeed
because we succeed what went before.
Blue sky, green earth, brownfield thinking acknowledges the necessity
of deconstruction of history, of ideas, of behaviour, of brain, of
humanity. The foundation of the future is on the ruins of the past.
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