The Second Body
The idea of a body which can reach over to the other side of the world is not one we tend to speak of in everyday language right now. In normal life, a human body is rarely understood to exist outside its own skin - it is supposed to be inviolable. The language of the human animal is that of a whole and single individual. You are encouraged to be yourself and to express yourself - to be whole, to be one. Move away from this personality, self-expression, and you risk going out of your mind, being yourself, failing to be true to yourself, hearing other voices or splitting your personality: it doesn't sound good. This careful language is anxious, I think - threatening in a desperate way. You need to take care of yourself, it says. You need boundaries, you have to be either here or there. Don't be all over the place.
Climate change creates a new language, in which you have to be all over the place; you are always all over the place. It makes every animal body implicated in the whole world. Pg. 13*.
Every living thing has two bodies these days – you are flying into the atmosphere and back down to the ground right now, but you can’t feel it. You breathe something in, and what you breath out is something else. Your first body is the one belonging to “you”, the place you live in made out of your own personal skin. Your second body is the body belonging to Gina, a body which is not so solid as the other one, but much larger. This second body is your own literal and physical biological existence – it is a version of you. It is not a concept; it is your own body. The language we have at the moment is weak: we might speak vaguely of global connections; of emission and circulation of gases; of impacts. And yet, at some microscopic or intangible scale, bodies are breaking into one another. The concept of a global impact is not working for us, and in the meantime, your body has already eaten the distance…. It understandably difficult to remember that you have anything to do with this second body – your first body is the body you inhabit in your daily life. However, you are alive in both. You have two bodies.
I need to find some place where real life and this global truth – the two bodies – come into one another. I want to make the second body come into the first body. I’m not going to tell you what to do with your second body or how to use it. The purpose of this book is just to find its real life. I want to incorporate the second body with the first. Because the body exists at different scales, I need to close in on it, starting from its most expansive expression. I want to start by talking about the whole world. Pg. 25 – 26*.
(*The Second Body by Daisy Hildyard)
Donella Meadows

“To be systematically untrained to find and communicate vision. I think what we need to do is to brush away something of our training and rediscover our ability to vision, to see goals to make the idea of a sustainable world a living picture in our minds and in other people’s minds. So that we know what we’re talking about, and we know where we're going.

Playing with the idea of vision and incorporating it into my own life. I think that I probably don’t need to tell you that when we, particularly we on the environmental side of things, start talking about a sustainable world, we somehow engender, I do know if it’s us or the audience we're speaking too, a vision of sacrifice. A vision of having much less, a vision of tight central control of deep regulations, a loss of freedom. Whether we communicate that, because it’s in our heads or whether it’s in the culture we're communicating too. I think you probably know that most environmentalist are not considered people who put forth exciting visions. They generally are assumed to be people who are calling for great sacrifice. and this must say something about what the vision in our culture of what a sustainable world is like. And it’s not likely a vision that is likely to mobilise the implementation, the lives, the policy, the resources or the money that’s need to make the world sustainable.” 4:00 – 6:00mins

“I asked people to describe not the world they thought they could achieve, or the world they were willing to settle for, but the world they truly wanted.”
“We have a habit of go straight to the implementation instead of spending time envisioning, dream, hopes and wishes for the future and the world we would like to live in and want to create.
First reactions can be such as stop being so naïve and let’s let down to businesses. A child can naturally envision something, so it’s clear that as we grow up this envisioning have been removed from us.
This vision can mobilise human value statements from the deepest level of the heart and soul, and this is probably the missing element that keeps people from participating.”

“How to tap into this part of you, it’s not the intellect it’s not the mind or the set of rational skills that we have as human beings, it comes from another place which you might call heart or soul or some combination of the two. Since then, I don’t take on any project without formally doing a vision of what that would look like…. I formally and strictly take time to vision it to see what it would be like if it were perfect, if it came out exactly the way I wanted. I can even write down that vision and keep referring to it when I lose my way in the process of trying to make the vision come into being.” 13:00 – 14:50mins





What Donella Meadows learned from this process.

“It’s very difficult at first but gets easier as you keep doing it, you are trying to articulate what you really want, not what you think you can get. You have to throw way models of possibility and think about what you want, which is the essence of vision. What is a sustainable world that you would like to live in, that would satisfy your deepest dreams and longings?

Second if you can get there to that picture, you are under no obligation whatsoever to tell us how to get there from here. This is the easiest way to shoot down a visionary, is to have someone express a vision and you say oh ya, great but how do we get there from here and if the visionary can’t tell you then you sweep away the vision? This is our rational left brain working again.

My experience of having brought parts of vision into being, is that in the begin you never know how to get their but as you articulate the vision, put it out share it with more people and it gets more polished and real the path reveals itself. And it would never reveal itself if I’m not putting out the vision that I really want and finding that other people really want it too. Holding on to the vision reveals the path and there’s no need to judge the vision by whether the path is apparent.

Visions do have to be honed by rationality. There does need to be responsibility in vision. Visions become responsible through different processes, one main one is by sharing it with other people. Whom bring in their knowledge their point of view and their vision. The more a vision is shared the more responsible it gets also the more ethical it gets.

Good modelling, sharing and understanding, as much as possible, how the world works brings a vision to responsibility.
Once, I’m clear and have worked on a vision it becomes more and more real to me and I can literally see it. And it gets better and better. The more I learn the more I ask other people. It lives in me as a sustainable world that isn’t a sacrifice or a bunch of difficult regulations, a sustainable world that I would love to live in. and having such a vision alive in me prevents me from selling out to something less that someone else maybe offering me. Such as a vision for perpetual economic growth that economics gives us. Growth isn’t what I want, it has nothing to do with what I want. And I think the only reason growth is a terribly abstract and when you think about it, stupid vision of the future. I think the only reason that can be sold easily in every policy and arena is that there’s nothing, there’s no alternative vision. There’s nothing real and better being offered. So, vision, first of all gives you a power to be resistant to seductive short term not very well though through self-centred visions that are being offered by many other kinds of people in the world. And furthermore, when I’m clear about a vision that I’m trying to bring forth it informs my choices in an amazing way, it makes me see options I wouldn’t have seen if I didn’t have the vision. It opens my eyes to good news as well as the cynical bad news…. It makes be see the little seeds of that vision, the little experiments of that vision already on the ground happening all over the world and it makes me see that those are the places to be watered and nourished and brought forth because that’s the vision already coming into being.

And when you see that a sustainable world, when you're clear on your vision of what that is, I guarantee it, you will see it in pieces and in patches everywhere coming into being and it shows you where to put your energy and who your partners are. And so, in a very practical way…. I’m amazed at the practicality of envisioning, in terms of helping you to find your way.” 22:00mins
https://donellameadows.org/donella-meadows-legacy/envisioning-a-sustainable-world