Thomas Harblin

Communications

Interesting Marcin that there is a bit more public discussion of wealth distribution of late thanks to current potus and congressionally endorsed egregious accumulation schemes.

      People are beginning to hear, if not understand, that allocation beneficiaries, i.e., who gets what, when, how, why, are a choice, not a given deity-promulgated manifest. Political economy is not a common framework for defining and analyzing community problems in depth except in the most simple dichotomies, rich/poor, powerful/powerless. 
      Those choices are made in the voting booths, which is why Republicans are going all out to restrict who gets to vote and whether those votes get to matter. 
      Among a highly urbanized population a challenge would be how to integrate parallel regen settlements into existing delimited urban areas, rather than as separate, more or less autonomous communities. Ownership, land use constraints, zoning, ubiquitous codes requirements, all add complexity and costs and make innovation less likely and corruption more so. 
         I apologize for not having a fuller picture of what you are doing. I heard only part of your interview, and my comments likely are random and out of context to be even provocatively useful. 
          Your ideas and strategies are important, and you are taking concrete steps to demonstrate their viability and distributive benefits. They not only raise consciousness and awareness, but invite and engage adherents to act. Congratulations and thanks. Tom

Going Further

Dear Marcin, congratulations on your important work. It is needed and transformational. I thought you might enjoy the attached article link wherein I introduced the concept of ecovolution, which symbolizes the interdependence of ecology and evolution. Best wishes, Tom Thomas D. Harblin, Ph.D. Heard your recent BBC radio interview and then looked you up.

    Will try to forward the article, but it is lengthy and with some tables. Can you open it as pdf, if I can format it as such? 
      Thx for responding. Cheers, Tom

Syracuse, NY

Ecovolution

Rolling

Interesting Marcin that there is a bit more public discussion of wealth distribution of late thanks to current potus and congressionally endorsed egregious accumulation schemes.

      People are beginning to hear, if not understand, that allocation beneficiaries, i.e., who gets what, when, how, why, are a choice, not a given deity-promulgated manifest. Political economy is not a common framework for defining and analyzing community problems in depth except in the most simple dichotomies, rich/poor, powerful/powerless. 
      Those choices are made in the voting booths, which is why Republicans are going all out to restrict who gets to vote and whether those votes get to matter. 
      Among a highly urbanized population a challenge would be how to integrate parallel regen settlements into existing delimited urban areas, rather than as separate, more or less autonomous communities. Ownership, land use constraints, zoning, ubiquitous codes requirements, all add complexity and costs and make innovation less likely and corruption more so. 
         I apologize for not having a fuller picture of what you are doing. I heard only part of your interview, and my comments likely are random and out of context to be even provocatively useful. 
          Your ideas and strategies are important, and you are taking concrete steps to demonstrate their viability and distributive benefits. They not only raise consciousness and awareness, but invite and engage adherents to act. Congratulations and thanks. Tom

Startup

I think we can definitely get into urban regen zones - it is definitely on my radar - but that would have to be later in the game when we have sufficient negotiating power to neutralize the expected corruption. Interestingly - even now - we got an offer from St. Joe for redevelopment land - which interestingly was rejected for NIMBY reasons. So redev is definitely likely, and possibly will even be welcomed as we nurture up an irresistible offer via our usual manner of inclusivity. Let the show begin...

Previous

Excellent Marcin. I live in suburban Syracuse NY and grew up here altho have lived and travelled widely both domestically and internationally. I regularly transit a severely deteriorated and neglected south central part of the city.

       On a recent visit I was struck by the number of dumpster divers and depressed persons wandering the area as well as the seriously dilapidated housing stock. The area is ripe for regen development. It is multiracial, needing an infusion of commercial services, and beginning to be acknowledged as in need of attention. 
          I emailed the range of political stakeholders including our MC, State reps, County Exec, and Mayor, urging our MC (who I know well) to play a leadership role (given the need for fed $ to jump start transformation). 
          Again, my apologies for not knowing in depth your strategy, model, and terms for integrated regen revitalization project development, but I guess it may be especially adaptable and appropriate to this area. 
            Ideally, I can envision a roundtable meeting of the politicos and your team, at least to plant a vision of what a regen project can do and how it could be initiated here. I do not know where your home base is. I should do some homework Marcin. Do you have some succinct materials I can get in the hands of local pols, hopefully to engender an appetite to think about the opportunity? 
        Thx and cheers, Tom
            

Sent from my iPhone

Last

I'm in the Kansas City area of MO. Don't have a prospectus for your guys, but we should develop it. How about we take your paper and operationalize it to a node of OSE in Syracuse? Our current model is building 40 acre scale campuses that integrate immersion education (full renaissance person style rapid learning, such as Alpha Academy) for people 18+ who are considering regen dev as a life path. My nominal goal is 10,000 such facilities within 8 years, if we can get the first one off the ground here and show how it's done. A parallel effort, based on a rigorous localized adaptation, could be useful. For one, with Syracuse inspired, have Syracuse fund a cohort that brings the knowhow back to Syracuse. That means a full functional prototype community. However, ChatGPT tells me that integrated transformation has low marketability, so we may need to frame around solving immediate needs. Housing would fulfill such a need. I think backed with your academic rigor and spiritual enlightenment, this could go far. You would have to understand that the constraint now is recruiting. Nobody signed up (very few did) for the Future Builders Academy.  https://learn.opensourceecology.org/ The current path is to perfect the Builder Crash Course (2 weeks), and after a few of these - we would have a convinced population willing to take a deeper immersion, which we are thinking would be 3 months. The full program, where I promise to gain all skills I learned in the last 20 years, is 4 years - which is realistic if it is a 5x learning compression factor over my trial and error - if backed by serious rapid learning infrastructure.