Sustainable Civilisation

Listening to people talking about sustainability is like walking across a desert looking for an oasis. These are beautiful places when one finds them, but one must first know where to look and what to look for, or run the risk of dying of thirst:

 

“You tell her about the desert. You tell that here, here in this world, among all this aridness, there are places called oases, where there is water and lush vegetation, and great beauty. Yet words can never truly communicate what such places are like. Only by visiting an oasis can one really understand it and that which it represents in the desert. Yet to reach such an understanding one has to make the journey, which often involves many hardships, and it is by making such a journey that one gains insights concerning the beauty of the destination, which is not a point of termination, but just one more staging post on the journey.”

(Extract from a A Tale of Two Deserts)

 

This web site is not about accepting what exists, but giving people the hope, the inspiration and the information to help them to peacefully make the world as it could and should be. Achieving this goal is a long and never ending journey for sure, but one that is worth making. And perhaps, as never before, a journey that ordinary people can and must undertake, to build, so to speak, a different type of civilisation; one where the madness that is emerging from religious, scientific and free-market economic dogma and extremism cannot thrive, and where such thinking finds no place. "But how?" you ask. This is what we as ordinary people must discover, for it is now self-evident that we cannot look to political leaders for such answers, which are of course, not so obvious, and why should they be! But there are clues, hints, which one might say, have been left for us to find. And one of these is surely to examine in detail what it is about religion, science and free-market economics that drives men to madness. Perhaps also we need to start resolving conflicts of minds, especially the one between religion and science, which just adds to the insanity in the world.

This is your world, so make it a place that your children will thank you for. This your story, so make it one that your children will be proud of. Do not let anyone tell you that you cannot change the world. This is a lie. In the free world, adults have a vote, a wallet and a right to change their lifestyle, so start using these precious gifts to make a difference.

 

Why Use Literature and Art?

Transitioning to a sustainable civilisation involves changing the collective values and beliefs upon which the present industrialised world is based, and opening peoples’ eyes to the damaging consequences of the ideologies that underlie science, technology, engineering, free market enterprise, etc. If humanity is to ever achieve sustainability, it will need to reinvent these most important aspects of our civilisation.

Paul T Kidd uses art, in particular literary art, but increasingly also visual art, not just to help people understand sustainability, but also to help develop new perspectives, while at the same time exploring the interconnections among these art forms (a kind of scripto-visual art, a rather simple example of which is shown in the above picture titled Genesis in Reverse - Desert Words).

Through acts of creation, Paul explores relevant matters, comments upon the nature of contemporary society, the forces at work that keep people locked in a way of living that has long since ceased to be relevant, and highlights the possibility to follow a different path.

Then through the use of exegesis, he identifies the new knowledge and understandings that emerge from the use of art in this way, and then he then builds upon this knowledge in his non-fiction writing, in a more objective way, by showing how new paths can be developed in practice by providing critical analysis of prevailing thinking and assumptions, offering new visions, and identifying the policies and research that need to be pursued to make these visions a reality. Paul also aims to provide people with the means by which all the peoples of the earth can begin to lay the foundations of a different world. And the development of these new approaches to science, engineering, technology, free enterprise, etc., as well as the development of a new spiritual awareness that transcend the old order, is what he spends most of his time working on.

Click here for news about the development of, and additions to the site

"Optimism is a mania for insisting that all is well when all is by no means well"
Voltaire (Candide)

"Men's courses will foreshadow certain ends, to which, if persevered in they must lead ..., but if the courses be departed from the ends will change"
Charles Dickens (A Christmas Carol)

"Two roads diverged in a wood and I - I took the one less travelled by, and that has made all the difference"
Robert Frost (The Road Not Taken)

"You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete."

(Buckminster Fuller)

"Be the change that you wish to see in the world."
Mahatma Gandhi

Paul T Kidd's new book 366 - A Scriptovisual Composition Unknown: An Artistic Investigation of the Spaces between Spaces in the Quest to Create a post-European Era, post-Enlightenment Science was published in November 2017. A further book with the title STARTS Weaving the Art-science Tangled Web was published on 29 March 2019. A book addressing STEAM and entitled Integrating the Arts and Humanities into STEM was published in October 2020.