Cumbria Environmental University Proposal · • Cumbria needs investment in education and infrastructure, especially in the NW. • An environmental group, the CEU Initiative, wants

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Cumbria Environmental University Proposal

A Centre of Excellence in Rural Construction for Cumbriaand a unique Sustainable Community for Broughton Moor


© 2004 ceu.org.uk 1

Main Points

Economic Stability • £200-300 million infrastructure investment, a public-private partnership • 3000 students + 500 staff – equivalent to 1.25 million tourist-days/year • 1000+ jobs created, plus many other knock-on boosts to local economy • Penn Report to fund and accelerate small & medium enterprise growth • New Eco-settlement industry created – started and based in Cumbria

Social Adaptability • Visitor Centre acts as focus for expanding community participation • Affordable low cost social housing created to help Great Broughton • Inward brain-magnet attracts top-class minds and leading think-tanks • Natural Health Care Centre promotes healthy living and lifestyles • Teaching Appreciative Inquiry, for community visioning and action

Environmental Purification • Former arms dump transformed into world-class leading environmental centre • New eco-build model – high-biomass, active-solar, luxury natural eco-housing • Wood / cellulose eco-building promotes reforestation, counters global warming • Zero Emissions R&D and training – more jobs, more wealth, and no pollution • State of the Planet – holistic solutions to causes of environmental breakdown

Educational Integration • Major investment to help bring together all Cumbrian HE in a single university • 3000 full & part-time degree & postgrad students from Cumbria and the world • Learning community for personal growth, leadership, innovation & environment • Unique open-admissions policy. Craft-oriented, apprenticeship-based courses • Students earn enough doing for-credit practical work to pay for their degrees

Cultural Growth • World-class centre for arts & crafts education, tourism & ecological renewal • Unique new eco-village sets new standard for sustainable rural settlements • Links to Environmental centres and innovative Universities around the world • WestEast – top development tools synergized with consciousness technologies • University boosts energy, participation, celebrations and events in community

"Chock full of goodies, and no negatives" – Procter & Gamble Brand Manager



Cumbria Environmental University Initiative Proposal for a new University Campus at Derwent Forest Cumbria Environmental University is an environmental university campus; eco-village; organic teaching farm; woodland, lake and adventure park; and interpretive visitor centre – all created as an integrated self-build development at Derwent Forest, formerly Broughton Moor Royal Naval Armament Depot, a 1050 acre site in Cumbria between Maryport and Cockermouth. The development is a social enterprise funded through a private funding initiative. Built over several years it will house around 3000 students and 500 or more staff. Sections 1-10 cover Cumbria’s need for a university, and how an environmental university makes

the site world class, uniquely marketable to cultural creatives, sustainable financially and helping others grow. Steps of business planning. partnerships to make it happen, and benefits.

Sections 11-20 cover core campus activities – eco village, forestry, farming, visitors, health care. The CEU development curriculum – core course to empower students as leaders, sustainable developers, creators of shared visions. The university’s vision, mission and role in the world.

Contents Main Points...................................................................................................................... 1 Contents .......................................................................................................................... 2 Executive Overview........................................................................................................ 3 Introduction..................................................................................................................... 4 1. A University for Cumbria ......................................................................................... 6 2. Delivering a World Class Opportunity.................................................................... 9 3. Marketing a Unique Place with a Unique Concept.............................................. 12 4. Market Research on Cultural Creatives ............................................................... 13 5. Financial Principles, Activities and Forecast Example ...................................... 15 6. Funding Small Business and Regional Growth .................................................. 18 7. Meeting Global and Local Needs .......................................................................... 20 8. Business Plan ......................................................................................................... 23 9. Partnerships............................................................................................................ 25 10. Summary of Benefits.............................................................................................. 27 11. Eco Village and Natural Housing .......................................................................... 28 12. Organic Farming and Reforestation ..................................................................... 32 13. Visitor Centre, Tourism & Leisure ........................................................................ 35 14. Natural Health Care ................................................................................................ 37 15. Core Course on Development............................................................................... 38 16. Personal Effectiveness and Community Leadership ......................................... 41 17. Zero Emissions and Appreciative Inquiry............................................................ 44 18. A Global Vision ....................................................................................................... 50 19. Peace, Sustainability and Evolution..................................................................... 52 20. State of the Planet – David Attenborough ........................................................... 58 Acknowledgments........................................................................................................ 59 Appendices ................................................................................................................... 60 Background Documents .............................................................................................. 61 Version History ............................................................................................................. 62

Our mascot is this wise young owl already living at Derwent Forest, the former Broughton Moor, still known to all the local people as The Dump. Whether we will ever change that name remains to be seen. Our owl is surely eager to enroll as a student – until we arrive, he (or is it she?) has to subsist on a meagre diet of bats and newts. Cumbria Environmental University will enhance biodiversity on campus and in the surrounding area, so our owl and its young can enjoy a richer diet. Mouse? Yummy.



Executive Overview

The Elements that contribute to this Opportunity: • Cumbria has long wanted its own university and already conducted a lot of groundwork. • Derwent Forest, a brownfield site, is available and even feels like a university campus. • Cumbria needs investment in education and infrastructure, especially in the NW. • An environmental group, the CEU Initiative, wants to build a university in Cumbria. • The Lake District has a unique, strong environmental association – world-wide. • Sir Brian Fender’s HE Report said Cumbria still needs a university, but offered no cash. • A report from Warwick University says future universities must be privately funded. • A finance package is available to fund an eco-campus as a co-housing development.

Broughton Moor former Royal Naval Armaments Depot The plan is to invest £200-300 million to create an eco-village settlement with social housing and university facilities. This will house 2,000-3,000 students and 500-1,000 faculty, staff, and families, as well as associated sustainable businesses and their staff. Significant local job creation will go with the build phase over several years, and continue on completion, as the university will be the focus of a new eco-building industry. Associated with the university will be an organic teaching farm and sustainable woodlands, with leisure facilities and an adventure park, all integrated into the university’s teaching activities. The university will also run an environmental visitors centre.

Background to an Environmental University The university was conceived at a course for Centres of Environmental Excellence in Lancashire, with the question “When are we going to stop telling people they must live more environmentally, and start showing them how?” Clearly a model settlement was needed, not yet another exhibition. The idea evolved through formative business consulting with Unilever in the Netherlands, ideas for an eco-village at High Carley near Ulverston, and especially the Zero Emissions Pavilion at World Expo 2000 in Hannover, Germany, and consulting in Australia and newly independent East Timor.

This Proposal Like a galaxy, spiral arms radiate from the core idea. One arm turns around the university concept, feasibility, funding etc. The other is around the ideas, educational models, faculties, and principles that will guide the life, learning and teaching of the university. First build CEU – then operate it. This proposal is an integrated development framework for the entire Derwent Forest. We want to work through the Derwent Forest Partnership with Forest Enterprise and others to ensure that many good and congruent ideas are incorporated as possible. Clearly, the CEU Initiative must be part of a focused development of the site, so that the whole campus has a character reflecting the status, dignity and energy of a major university, with proper structure, planning and governance.

Financial Feasibility Smart banks see this as an evolution of the co-housing model. A finance package is available.

Public Acceptance Everyone we talk to says a university is the best possible outcome for the dump, giving Cumbria needed resources and smart, appropriate, modern, dignified jobs, that will help turn around the Cumbrian brain drain. We avoided seeking publicity, even when the Utropia plan was announced, but a favourable article was published on CEU, and BBC Radio Cumbria asked to do a program. We said no, even when they said off record an Environmental University is the most exciting thing ever to happen for Cumbria (presumably since the last ice age?) – even if it weren’t to come off. We would rather wait for some indication that the plan may go ahead before publicising this idea.

Planning and Due Diligence We plan a full public consultation when the project has been short-listed for development of a full business plan. This will include a website, multimedia CD ROM presentation, public exhibition, and surveys of local opinion conducted through local newspaper websites, publicised via local media. Planning and due diligence processes will be carried out by a partnership of all interested parties.



Introduction

About the Proposal This proposal is develop Cumbria Environmental University at Derwent Forest. It is written in response to a call for Letters of Interest from the Derwent Forest Partnership, which has been formed to develop the former Royal Naval Armaments Depot at Broughton Moor. DFP comprises Allerdale Borough Council, Cumbria County Council, West Lakes Renaissance, The North West Development Agency and The Forestry Commission, and seeks inspirational ideas to deliver a world-class opportunity. We trust this proposal will be seen as sufficiently rich and appropriate that it will be short-listed for further development, and that a full business plan can be created, building on this foundation. To complete a full proposal and a funded business plan we intend to work with the Partnership, the wider Cumbrian Community, and the government bodies and agencies who serve the people of Cumbria – and to conduct an open dialogue with local residents and the people of Cumbria. This is the draft design for a social enterprise that intends to capture the vision, aspirations and needs of a local community, so it must be developed in a dialogue that includes all of the stakeholders.

What the Proposal is Not This is not a plan from a commercial developer to exploit Derwent Forest for maximum profit. This is a framework proposal for groups inside and outside Cumbria to discuss and jointly develop a new kind of social enterprise, with profits used to improve the lives of the people of Cumbria and the UK. Our proposal is not being sent to planners for acceptance or rejection, but submitted in draft, for completion in a dialogue with local interested parties until the benefits are all agreed. Nor is this an offer to pay for the university as a gift, or a new attempt to source public funding for higher education infrastructure in the way that has been attempted in the past. It is a template to show that a university, constructed as a public-private partnership, can be self-funded through a co-housing model, by the construction of its own social housing stock in the form of an eco-village for staff and students – and that commercial construction finance can be readily obtained for this. Nor is this an attempt to build a traditional university, forced to compete with the other universities in this country for students. More, it is a vision for a university that will be uniquely Cumbrian and which will stand alone in the market place for higher education, offering students something that only Cumbria can offer. In so doing it will not sit in line on the UCAS scale of places students rank for first and second choice, but to the side – a place some students select as their only choice. Nor is this a dogged do-gooder attempt to please all of the people all of the time. No one idea can satisfy everyone in Cumbria, but a fair dialogue can mean that people appreciate the benefits, and are prepared to put up with the hassle – students, visitors. And CEU cannot and will not appeal to every school leaver, but it ought to be sufficiently attractive to enough students in every year, to ensure strong competition for places, and an easy ongoing educational and commercial success. Last, this is not an economic panacea for Cumbria, or a handout for an area that relies on state support because of its particularly deprived or needy status in relation to the rest of the country. Rather, it is a well-designed collection of self-help tools that shows how to take what is unique, exceptional and best about Cumbria, and turn it to advantage. Cumbria will take pride of place in an economic renaissance, with a sustainable development programme to benefit the whole nation.

The Story So Far For the first time in history, indeed since the start of life on earth, a single ruthless predator, man, has established itself on every continent, and reached population levels that threaten the carrying capacity of the ecosystem. The predator has hunted all its natural enemies to extinction and in an ongoing evolutionary spiral has developed weapons of mass destruction capable of terminating the species itself. A hundred years of global war leaves him pulled back from a nuclear chasm and rocking on the brink. The interesting question is, what will he do next? Will he think of something?



The arsenal of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons available to superpowers and terrorists is still being perfected, but the toolkit is already being extended by electronic and nano-technologies. With these sort of weapons pointed at our own head, it’s quite a distraction from thinking about the other strand of man’s rather schizophrenic development, which is an amazing story of accelerating growth – spiritual and intellectual development, scientific, technical, artistic and cultural progress. We sense that somehow we have unlimited potential, yet at the same time it seems that western man, following a materialistic philosophy ruled by the selfish gene, is going to throttle himself with his own modified DNA. Does nature shout ‘cut’, strike the set on the movie, and try a better plot? Or are we just at the really scary bit? Does it turn out that our model of evolution was incomplete, and we have been ignoring clues that could save us? And does the 37th cavalry show up in time? Are we heading for apocalypse or a new renaissance? The jury is out but we have a choice. We need to heal rifts – the gap between science & religion, left & right brain, spirit & material, mind & body, city & country, East & West, hawks & doves. Where to start? … The corpus callosum both separates and joins left and right brain hemispheres. In peak experience and meditation, the most creative states, brainwaves are coherent and orderly and tunnel through the corpus callosum – so brain function is integrated. Opposites connect, differences resolve, creative leaps are made. There are sound scientific models for what is happening, in both new physics and new biology. We are simply shifting from classical modes of operation to quantum mechanical The old ways involve stimulus and response, effort and resistance. When we shift to the quantum level, the wave nature predominates over the particulate - this involves effortless flow, instantaneous perfect response. Disorder in the external system remains external, or is converted to higher order. The mind starts to operate like a superconductor, the physiology like liquid crystal. The game rises to a new level.

An Environmental University When we see the shift by an athlete from determined effort into invincibility – into ‘the flow’ - we see the shift from classical to quantum mechanical. From prose to poetry, hard work to inspiration, craft to art, ugliness to beauty, these are all shifts in the direction of higher order brain function. The university acts basically as a corpus callosum for society. We use all the western tools that tap into higher brain functioning, and teach people how to access their highest potential as a matter of habit. Then we boost them with eastern techniques that create brainwave coherence. There is now strong scientific evidence that coherence can be manufactured – can be wired into human brain function and radiated into the surroundings. If we can convert ordinary desert sand into silicon chips and fibre optics, it stands to reason that by now we ought to be able to do some fairly neat stuff with the human brain. The examples all around us, in our increasingly powerful technologies, are nothing but simple reflections of inner potentials we are starting to actualise.

"That serene and blessed mood, in which the affections gently lead us on, Until the breath of this corporeal frame and even the motion of our human blood almost suspended, we are laid asleep in body, and become a living soul: while with an eye made quiet by the power of harmony, and the deep power of joy, we see into the life of things."

- William Wordsworth, Lines Composed Above Tintern Abbey Wordsworth found the Transcendent but he couldn’t stabilise it. He didn’t have EEG coherence kit; the psychological tools of Maslow and Covey, Senge, Peck and Bennis, Pauli and Cooperrider; or the skill of great athletic trainers; or eastern tools to actualise consciousness. Lake Poets glimpsed full human potential – the Lakes University will unleash it. Mental and consciousness tools will help our students achieve the full potential and resolve previously intractable problems in the economy, in society, and the environment; And they’ll have fun, and grow healthy, wealthy and wise doing it.

New Vision, New Structure, New Results Finally… It should not be a concern that the unusual system design for the university puts it at risk commercially or educationally – rather, this is the basis of its unique advantage. Successful new enterprise models are based on self-organising systems and on networking tools, and CEU is benchmarking and integrating the best. CEU has a stable financial base for growth, and a dialogue on best practice to stay on track. Like the fells, its uniqueness will help it stand out from the crowd.



1. A University for Cumbria

The inability to reset the course of higher education in Cumbria in 1992 meant that the development of higher education provision proceeded on an ad hoc, and not integrated basis. Nevertheless it remains my belief, now more than ever, that Cumbria needs an integrated institutional approach to higher education. I believe this can best be achieved by instituting a new Cumbria-wide, multi-sited, University of the Lakes, building on and enhancing provision in existing institutions of further and higher education in the County.

- Lord Dale Campbell-Savours, Report - A Case for a New University of The Lakes

Cumbria’s Need and Vision Any proposal for a university in Cumbria must take into account Cumbria’s long quest to have its own university, with a long succession of reports and visions in which Dale Campbell-Savours’ book ‘University of the Lakes’ is the shining star. Cumbria has many times asked the government for funding for its own university, and come away empty-handed. The disappointment must be all the deeper, because in preparing its case for a university, the benefits that would accrue have been well assessed. Cumbria’s own archives must by now be full of reports indicating that without a university it is disadvantaged and crippled compared with the rest of the country, and that all efforts to create economic growth will be hobbled. One can put a brave face on not having a university, but the unavoidable inescapable fact is that to be strong, Cumbria needs a University. Right now, students leave Cumbria for livelier climes, despite the great beauty of their homeland. And they don’t come back, because they can’t find smart employment. In a knowledge age it’s hard to recruit any kind of businesses to come to Cumbria, however beautiful and tempting, without bubbling centres of academic excellence. Westlakes Science Park may be a start but its association with the nuclear industry will not act a magnet to many. While BNFL dominates west Cumbria, the growth of industry, education and tourism in a post-nuclear world must be planned – even if decommissioning keeps the industry alive, diversification is vital for a sustainable future.

Cumbria ‘will have its own university’ in next five years - Cumbria Business Gazette, June 2003

The Fender Report – A Review of Higher Education in Cumbria Despite optimistic headlines, the report from Sir Brian Fender (attached as Appendix 1) is just one more in a long series of disappointments. It was smart to recruit him from the Higher Education Funding Council, but even post foot-and-mouth when government was at its most guilty and generosity could be hoped for, funding was not forthcoming. In best consultant tradition, Fender repeats what’s know and said before – that Cumbria is deprived, both economically and with regard to education. In real terms it is improving, but compared with other areas there is a gap and it is getting worse. Fender says that Cumbria needs a university, and that major investment in educational infrastructure is vital. But the bottom line was that he did not deliver the needed cash.



Cumbria has in recent years adopted the fall-back position of inviting other universities to create outposts in Cumbria, but while this creates seats for higher education in Cumbria, it is very much ‘second best’. These outposts are not the lead facilities of their parent institutions, so much as cash cows that generate extra revenue from getting ’bums on seats’. Both Campbell Savours and Fender suggest these units should band together under a Cumbria badge, and Fender provided £100,000 to aid this discussion. But Campbell Savours notes “It will require goodwill and trust between the heads of institutions in the County who in the past may have seen each other as competitors.” The more significant point is that even if agreement could be found, the collection of colonies from other universities is a rag-tag collection, not designed as an integrated whole that can and will work together. As a University it would be terribly disadvantaged, the runt in the litter – better than a motley collection of HE institutions, but hardly national-class, let alone world-class. The purpose of this current proposal is to show that Cumbria does not have to take the second or third best choice, and that there is an option to take a unique position by funding Dale Campbell-Savours’ vision through a publicly endowed (the land) private funded (the buildings) social initiative to develop an educational asset that serves the entire community. This environmental campus could be the central jewel in a truly Cumbrian university, around which these other units would be strong and stand tall, arranged in order, to provide a comprehensive and integrated curriculum.

The Case for a Virtual University Another approach Fender recommends is to build a ‘Virtual University’. This proposal dates from earlier initiatives that didn’t lift off, and needs to be considered. It sounds a reasonable alternative, but a virtual institution still needs a physical base – in the world of electronic commerce the key phrase is “brick and click”. The collapse of the ‘dotcom’ bubble was in part from the misconception that virtual can replace physical. Anyone who hopes that a virtual university can be built out of thin air (and constructed without cash?) and operate as well as a real university is both ignorant of the commercial reality of the Internet and of the human need for social interaction – especially in learning situations. And anyway, what’s the point? Why will anyone go to a Cumbrian virtual university if (a) you don’t get to go to Cumbria, and (b) Cumbria has no a physical university? The closest thing we have in the UK to a successful virtual university is the Open University, which builds on a very physical campus in Milton Keynes and the success of its physical summer school courses - a vital part of most course units. Plus it relies on the massive subsidy of free, dedicated access to BBC2. They have years of experience in distance learning and a huge catalogue of world-class courses. If you are looking for distance learning courses right now, then for sure in the UK, the Open University has to be the starting point. How could Cumbria possibly compete? So a Cumbrian virtual university is unfortunately in today’s environment a non starter . Funding requirements for a successful enterprise in Cumbria would be as great as to build a real university. And sadly – if it’s to be a true virtual university, then it can be done anywhere – it could be done as well, and far cheaper, in Bangalore, Madras, or Mumbai, where costs of faculty are by comparison negligible. Already, the University of Phoenix in Arizona works this way, and students wanting to go to Virtual U are better off with them. Cumbria will be well advised to avoids this route, and to do something uniquely Cumbria that builds on its unique physical assets – meaning the Lake District.

A Uniquely Cumbrian Vision Lord Campbell-Savours has the clearest vision for what is possible in Cumbria education – taking what is strong and unique, and already of world renown, and building on that. If Cumbria is ever to stop trying to play catch-up in the higher education stakes, and to make the creative leap-frog into creating a unique centre of excellence, the only way forward has to be Campbell-Savours’ model, which itself incorporates many of the world class ideas of the best thinkers on this subject.

Higher education is in a flux nationally, there is a need for a large increase in the number of graduates, particularly those in science and technology. With its unique concentration of scientific and technical skills, in an outstandingly beautiful environment, Cumbria is singularly well placed to meet those needs. A multi-sited university linked together with an advanced information technology network, making possible one of the finest electronic libraries in Europe, could attract international commercial as well as European Community support. Specific “Schools” or “Colleges” of the University would be



unapologetically designed to foster the development of particular sectors ort the local economy in energy, agriculture and tourism. A local University of this type would stimulate the participation of Cumbrians who have traditionally been excluded from higher education and would fundamentally change social and cultural patterns that have inhibited Cumbria’s development in the past.

- Lord Dale Campbell-Savours, Report - A Case for a New University of The Lakes This current proposal is a way to implement Lord Campbell-Savours vision - with some adjustment of course, but his central vision remains intact at the core. His most essential point is that a campus focused on the environment and sustainability would create something uniquely suitable to Cumbria and complementary to the National Park, and which would have world-wide reach. This can be part of a multi-campus facility with different specialisms, integrating other HE facilities already in Cumbria. There is no place in Cumbria that is not at least 2 hours drive from some other, so a single university campus cannot ever hope to meet the needs of local people for higher education. Part of the eventual plan for CEU is to have related campuses in all the quadrants of Cumbria, all serving slightly differing populations and specialities, and all linked in a high-tech network. This would necessitate development of ultra-high tech communications and IT, and the ability to deliver any course anywhere, So the outcome is a true ‘brick and click’ virtual university.

How to Create a new University of the Lakes The conceptual breakthrough is that by building the eco-housing for a university on a self-build, co-housing model, a capital gain is created that seed-funds – the entire campus – see finance section. It also provides a core trade-and-craft activity for students that will pay for much of their education. This cannot be criticised as too dumbed-down for a university – the building of truly sustainable eco-housing brings together in a practical synthesis much that is at the pinnacle of human achievement. And it is entirely appropriate for a rural community – a way to create Cumbria education that is different, relevant, practical, sustainable, and not just purely academic in content. These plans are deliberately not fully fleshed out here. For a start, not enough work has yet been done, and more importantly this should be a dialogue between the various groups of stakeholders:

1. The people of Allerdale / West Cumbria who have the land, and need jobs and investment 2. The people of Cumbria, who take care of the National Park and who need a new university 3. Existing HE and FE units & other universities already in Cumbria, and the Cumbrian LSC 4. The network of ecological building groups who can co-create and construct the eco-campus 5. The think-tanks on sustainable growth who will join to operate the environmental university

The Steps of Building the New Campus “2. To provide the framework to allow highly inspirational but perhaps less well defined commercial concepts to be registered. It is the partners intention to work with such interested parties to help formulate concepts and develop a business plan since additional public funds, over and above the £20 million already invested may be available for the delivery of a truly world class opportunity.”

- Purpose of Brief, Derwent Forest Development Guide Clearly the next stage is the development of a business plan, though we recommend this is done in two stages to avoid wasting time and public money This would be the stage to bring together all the interested partners above in a shared design process. This would potentially be followed by a phased build out of the campus which might have major delivery milestones as suggested below.

1. Brief assessment to determine potential viability and potential public acceptance (£50-100K) 2. Full feasibility study, financial & architectural planning, & due diligence process (£350-750K) 3. Small (60 unit) eco-village at Great Broughton: seeds the campus / provides social housing 4. First quadrant of university eco-village + start organic farm 75-100 units at £50-75 million 5. Campus/housing build-out + complete forest park & visitor centre: 200-300 units, £150-250m



2. Delivering a World Class Opportunity

“The purpose of this development guide is … (2) to provide the framework to allow highly inspirational but perhaps less well defined commercial concepts to be registered. It is the Partners intention to work with such interested parties to help formulate concepts and develop a business plan since additional public funds, over and above the £20 million already invested may be available for the delivery of a truly world class opportunity”

- Derwent Forest Development Guide

What is World Class? It is a great and appropriate aspiration to take a derelict former naval armaments depot in Cumbria and to recognise opportunity – the chance to create a world class site. But what does that mean? What would it look like? What will happen there? So we asked people, and the answer we get is “we will recognise it when we see it.” When we ask “like what, for instance?” there are two names that get mentioned quite frequently – The Eden Project in Cornwall and Tate Modern in London.

Getting it Right Both the Eden Project and Tate Modern show what’s possible when a few smart entrepreneurs get to remodel a derelict asset with £100 million. Eden is in a former clay quarry and Tate Modern used to be Hungerford power station. Nice when you can get the lottery money. Tim Smit’s Eden Project built on his track record restoring the Lost Gardens of Heligan and creating a successful visitor’s centre. Tate Modern relied on another magic ingredient – use of the Tate name, and through that, access to the entire Tate collection of modern art. In both cases something has been created that feels just right for the location and which engages the public’s imagination in such a way that visitors flock there. Media coverage has enhanced their images and, on balance, the outcomes are very positive and desirable. There’s another important ingredient – which is that both these ideas are unique – there’s nothing quite like them anywhere else. And the ideas are good enough and strong enough to attract people to the locations, believing they will have an experience that made the trip worthwhile. The places mostly deliver on this promise, so that Media Reports are supportive, and visitors return with their friends. If things always went this well we’d have a sure fire recipe for success.

Still Struggling… When we look for world class examples, the Millennium Dome, the Welsh National Botanical Gardens and the Earth Centre are rarely mentioned. Yet all are imaginative conceptions and all had loads of Lottery Funding. But all of these are to a greater or lesser extent seen as having missed the mark. The Millennium Dome went well over budget, had slipped on project management and fell short of visitor forecasts. But if it had managed to make the numbers, the attractions would have been very overloaded.

The Welsh National Botanical Gardens have recently closed having failed to achieve any kind of real commercial success, despite having the essential ingredient of any ambitious lottery funded plan – a gorgeous dome designed by Sir Norman Foster. But that doesn’t guarantee success, and tales of poor teamwork and waste help explain the closure. That’s the breaks, but sad when so much cash is just wasted. Time for Plan B, anyone? *

Tate Modern

The Millennium Dome

Welsh Botanical Gardens

The Eden Project

* Future Welsh eco-university?



The Earth Centre near Darlington is a great place, but like some other lottery winners it was punching above its weight, with ambitions it has failed to meet. It has only managed to achieve half its projected visitor figures, and when numbers don’t add up, jobs go away, there’s less for visitors to see and do things stop being so much fun – a vicious circle is created. Now, the Earth Centre needs to reinvent itself. *

Lessons at the end of the Lottery Rainbow Tate Modern and The Eden Project both make it look easy, but they were touch-and-go at various stages in their development. The Millenium Dome, the Welsh Gardens and Earth Centre all show that it’s just as easy to make mistakes and as we can see, there are far more lottery failures than successes. But in any case the lottery income has declined significantly, and it is now harder than ever to get at lottery funding, and virtually impossible to get free lotto loot for large-scale projects. The National Lottery has created distorted perceptions about success. The successes and failures are all day visitor centres, and to raise the game to a new level needs thinking that is ‘outside the box’. Not a bad idea, as the day of the big ‘day visitor’ centre may be ending – visitor numbers are falling as there are now too many of them all competing with each other, and cheap air transport means people can fly abroad for short breaks just as easily. In any case, day visitor centres are quite unsustainable – people waste petrol by the ton to drive hundreds of miles just for a day out.

Sustainable Natural Growth So to create a world-class project is going to require another route. In nature, nothing ever starts big and tries to carry on that way. Things start small and grow organically. But when you plant an oak seed and grow it properly, you know that nevertheless you are going to get an oak tree. Few of the models for what can be done at Cumbria Environmental University were full-formed on day one, but are still growing and maturing after steady growth from small but inspired beginnings. The Findhorn Foundation may seem an unlikely starting place. It is a community on the coast in Scotland, which started out as a New Age caravan site on the end of a landing strip at a former RAF base. The founders set out to grow healthy food on poor soil with help from friendly neighbourhood nature spirits. Idealistic hippies might arrive, but sharpen up in order to survive. Through ups and downs, Findhorn has become a living, working practical dialogue about spiritual, social, environmental and economic growth. And it has not just survived, but thrived and grown.

Findhorn now hosts an annual conference with an international reputation, and smaller conferences and courses. Findhorn is also the new home for the Global Eco-Village Network, with its own growing model eco-village which both experiments with, and demonstrates, all manner of neat sustainable technologies developed at Findhorn and around the world. And all this growth has been achieved organically, without outside funding. Visitors don’t just come for a day, but for weeks and months at a time – to live, learn, refresh, renew, and to leave restored and inspired.

The Centre for Alternative Technology at Machynlleth in Wales is what you get when a bunch of anti-capitalist survivalists escape from the city to an abandoned slate quarry. They figured out how to survive, developed technologies inspired by the author of Small is Beautiful, E F Schumacher. People came to see what they were up to, and their visitor centre is now a major attractor of tourists to the region – and they raised £1.5 million in a stock offer to expand it. All along, CAT has run courses, and when tourism has taken a hit, the courses kept them going. CAT runs MSc programmes and look

The Earth Centre

Findhorn Community

Centre

Findhorn eco-village

The Centre for Alternative Technology

* Thinks: What else could we do here?



after ongoing development for a generation of local government sustainability and Agenda 21 officers. Now they plan a £6 million expansion of their residential training centre – environmental education has overtaken the visitor centre, and is of course tourism of the most sustainable sort. Schumacher College at Dartington Hall in Devon was founded in 1991, again inspired by the teachings of Fritz Schumacher – that a new vision is needed for society, its values and its relationship to the earth. The college has become a centre of excellence with an established international reputation for the inspiration, quality and breadth of its teaching. It runs an MSc program in deep ecology, hosts short professional courses, and is building new, environmentally sound accommodation.

Inspiration for a New Centre of Excellence All the above examples show that there is a real growing market and opportunity for environmental education and sustainable eco-building, and that each complements and funds the other. We also see that there are well-developed environmental tools and technologies, directly relevant to our everyday lives, that people will pay good money to learn. What is still to be done is make the shift from pilot projects to a full-scale development, and from postgraduate courses to undergraduate. Cumbria Environmental University plans to build a new model eco-village from scratch using all the best practices, courses, and teacher from these and other projects, both in the UK and from around the world. With sustainable lifestyles and jobs derived from teaching and practicing the best environmental methodologies and economic growth strategies, the eco-village will be a highly self-sufficient model new settlement. And it will be economically successful to boot - Schumacher was not just an environmentalist, but by profession an economist - probably the greatest of his age. CEU will create jobs, wealth and sustainable growth.

Eco-Tourism and Education The university and eco village are natural tourist attractions – a £200-300 million eco village at the heart of a 1,000 acre organic college and sustainable forest leisure park will be spectacular. But it starts from the right point – not trying to make an artificial attraction to pull people in, but making something real that people will want to visit, see, stay and learn from. Why try to drag 500,000 day visitors to an artificial attraction at the end of a busy road in Cumbria, when 2,000-3,000 students can stay there all year round, and attract business-people for longer courses during the vacations? 3,000 x 365 = 1 million+ student-days – bigger numbers that don’t strain the roads, are balanced all through the year, and are people who will stay to explore the area and spend money all around. There should be no doubt that an investment of £200 million or so on an eco-village, organically grown but at an accelerated rate, will create a World Class site. A new model settlement on the edge of the Lake District national park will complement and enhance the Lakeland National Park, with economic growth that is sustainable and congruent, rather than damaging and polluting. It is a simple vision of something that has not been done yet anywhere in the world (try ‘environmental university’ in Google) – so it will be unique, and totally inspiring. Bottom Line - an environmental university will suddenly shift Cumbria from somewhere without a University to the place with the most unique and compelling new University in the world - a university Cumbria can be proud of.

Delivering a World Class Opportunity for Everyone We are not just delivering a World Class Opportunity for The Dump, or for the people of Cumbria. Nor is this just one more day attraction where you get ripped off at the naff caff and the gift shop. We are creating a sustainable new settlement that has as its core activities to research living well, in tune with nature, to put this in practice, and to show others how to do the same. Of course we’ll have an interpretive visitor centre, and invite visitors to Cumbria to take time out to come and see it, and enjoy. They’ll see that they too can live like this, back where they come from. Then they or their kids will return to learn how, and we’ll have delivered for them a truly world class opportunity.

Schumacher College

Example small town design with low-density natural eco-housing.



3. Marketing a Unique Place with a Unique Concept

“The Lake District is one of the four most beautiful places on Earth.” – Paramahansa Yogananda,

“Cumbria is internationally recognised as an area of outstanding natural beauty. The Lakes have the same sort of international recognition reserved for few places in Europe, such as Stratford-upon-Avon or Venice. A University is one of the few developments possible that could enhance and protect this beautiful natural environment that would be threatened by almost any other comparable industrial or commercial programme. The attraction of living in the beauty of the Lakes could well, also, draw high calibre academics and students to the area. It is one thing to ask students to attend university in built-up inner city areas, where accommodation is expensive and cramped, and quite another to provide them with an opportunity to come and live near to the Lakes. The escalation of crime, particularly in urban areas, may well, also, become an increasingly important consideration for parents, teachers and students in university selection.”

- Lord Dale Campbell-Savours, Report - A Case for a New University of The Lakes

‘School of Ecological Science and Sustainable Development’ Lord Campbell-Savours proposed a School of Ecological Science as the core of a new university. We integrate his idea in the crisp vision of an entire environmental campus. Governments have not provided funding for this, but we believe Lord Campbell Savour’s idea is a brilliant marketing concept – good enough to build a privately funded, commercially operated social enterprise round it – an Environmental University of Cumbria. This can be a world class site, and also the seed for unification and integration of other Cumbrian HE and FE facilities into a superb unified university. Universities are commercial operations, though most do not make a profit, and all rely on grant income from government. Alternative models are possible - in the USA universities are privately funded and run on a commercial basis. In an Appendix: A Different Future: The Consequences, Andrew Oswald, an economist at Warwick University, explains why new university development in the UK must be privately funded. Buckingham was first – Cumbria can be second of a new breed. A £100million self-build funding package has already been agreed in principle - see next section.

Location, Location, Location The North West splits into two: Cumbria, with 48% of the area, 7% of the region’s population and GDP, and which is the ideal location in the world for a rural environmental university. And then there’s the rest of the North West, with 52% of the area, 93% of population & GDP, and a bunch of fine urban universities, none of which can offer students a rural environmental university in the Lake District. Cumbria has a truly unique opportunity. While Lord Campbell-Savours favours a site that’s inside the National Park, it’s not a vital point, and could limit size, scope and timing. Besides, Cumbria needs investment in less well-endowed areas, and this will put cash where most needed.

Education, Education, Education This government may be getting stuck in some areas, but for sure education has been its priority. While no government has yet funded a university for Cumbria, a rural eco-university would help the government achieve its objectives – the government wants a focus on trade skills, and we will focus on the arts, crafts and skill of sustainable rural life, creating a new industry – self-built, low-cost, low-impact, high-tech, high-biomass, sustainable rural eco-housing. Government will love us.

Marketing to Students “It’s my dream, all my friends will want to go there” – Immy Burne, Schoolchild

This is the easy bit. Students and schoolchildren are mostly electrified by Cumbria Environmental University when they hear of it. For many it would not be their first choice, but their only choice. Lord Campbell Savours is inspired in his idea of what will appeal to students and academics. It remains to turn this great marketing concept into a commercial, viable reality. Our proposal shows how to do this with panache, in a way that overflows with jobs, growth and enterprise creation…



4. Market Research on Cultural Creatives If everything we seek to research and develop was already known, there would be no room for innovation. We trust we are ahead of the game and ready for a new market. Quite how large that market is may be a surprise, though. Just as the second draft of this report was being finalised, we heard of a new movie coming later this year, featuring the physicists and biologists creating the new science. The movie What The #$*! Do We Know?! is about their emerging new world view.

New Movie to catch New Wave The boxes below are from the movie website, http://whatthebleep.biz, which has details on the scientists. Much of the science here in this report is from lectures and papers given by Dr. John S Hagelin, one of the scientists featured in the movie. Hagelin is professor of physics at Maharishi University of Management, Fairfield, Iowa (formerly MIU). A brilliant physicist, he links the unified field to consciousness, and to a new physics of mind, and potential for transforming our society. Unfortunately, the language of Hollywood Marketing pervades the next pages. But you are used to that and can allow for it. The point we want to draw out is that there is a very significant market sector, a trend-setting group, one which is growing. They are exactly the people we appeal to, and Hollywood thinks this group is big enough to target a movie at – they believe it’s as much as 20% of the population. We only need to appeal to 2% of the population for CEU to be a success.

The Cultural Creatives – Our Emerging New Market Here, Hollywood is doing our market research for us. The movie says the new science is stranger than science fiction, and can unlock human potential in powerful new ways. The film-makers are spending big money to crystallise the group who think this way, the ‘Cultural Creatives’. The movie is made by cultural creatives – scientists, artists and moviemakers – for cultural creatives. And so is CEU. Cultural creatives want to start a new renaissance by bringing a wave of new thinking to our society. We unite deep science with deep ecology – exactly what our target group is wanting.

WHAT THE #$*! DO WE KNOW?! As Radical as Einstein • As Blasphemous as Bruno • As Heretical as Galileo

"WHAT THE #$*! DO WE KNOW?!" is a radical departure from convention. It demands a freedom of view and greatness of thought so far unknown, indeed, not even dreamed of since Copernicus. It's a documentary. It's a story. It's mind-blowing special effects.

A new art form • About a New Worldview • For a new audience This film plunges you into a world where quantum uncertainty is demonstrated - where neurological processes, and perceptual shifts are engaged and lived by its protagonist - where everything is alive, and reality is changed by every thought. Like the movies, The Matrix, Vanilla Sky, and Minority Report, this film shows you a greater reality behind the one we all accept as true, and you have the ability to create absolutely anything from your own thought. But the difference between this film and those movies is -

This isn't science fiction. It's stranger still… - It's real. And it's being proven by minds like the scientists in this film. For all of recorded history they said the earth was flat - until Copernicus, Galileo, and Bruno. For all of history, the workings of the world were thought to be like a vast machine and that matter was solid - until Einstein.



"What the #$*! Do We Know?" gives voice to the modern day radical souls of science, bringing their genius to millions. These maverick heroes at the cutting edge of their fields are at the forefront of a Paradigm Shift as great, if not greater than those of the geniuses who preceded them. And this shift involves the greatest uncharted territory yet -

Human Consciousness itself – "What the #$*! Do We Know?" says that science and spirituality are not different modes of thought, but are in fact describing the same thing. And it brings the power back to the individual man and woman as it demonstrates creation as the god-like capacity of every individual. Who's the audience? They begin with the 50 million people in the US and 80 million in the European Union who are called the Cultural Creatives. They are of all age groups and all socioeconomic classes with a 60/40 split women to men. Their incomes range from lower middle class to the rich.

That's a lot of people. Thirteen survey research studies on over 100,000 Americans by Paul H. Ray, Ph.D. and Sherry Ruth Anderson, Ph.D. determined an entirely new market of individuals with a different worldview, values, and lifestyle which grew out of the social movements of the 60s and thereafter from the consciousness movements in spirituality, psychology, and alternative health. These creative, optimistic millions are natural net workers, only now beginning to recognize each other. They are at the leading edge of several kinds of cultural change. They are the innovators and ground breakers who are shaping a new kind of culture for the twenty-first century. Why do they want to see this film? Because it provides them with exactly what they are most interested in and have a hard time finding:

Enlightened Entertainment. The Cultural Creatives are sick and tired of male movies that only engage adrenaline. They are sick and tired of female fare that offers false hopes of romantic paradise. They are looking for something that delivers the most thought-provoking concepts of emerging ideas in the most entertaining way. This educated, media-savvy subculture can't be fooled. They read a lot. They are informed about new trends of knowledge. They watch eagerly new developments in science and want to know how new scientific discoveries can change their lives. Some of them have religious affiliations, but their religious beliefs don't correspond that strongly with the religions they find themselves in. And they are open to new ideas. Others have grown from Religious dogma to an innate sense of Spirituality and are searching for a voice somewhere in this fragmented culture. They all await a catalyst.

Exactly like this film. And they are waiting for it.

And they will be talking about it. And nothing will ever be the same.

OK, that’s the hype. Even allowing for that and adding a pinch of salt, people who see this movie will emerge with a clearer sense of the nature of reality, human potential, and the direction that evolution, science and society are headed. Cumbria Environmental University will be the natural destination for some of these, and scientists from the movie will be included in our visiting faculty. You don’t have to understand the science, or believe the new paradigm. You might still enjoy the movie! Just appreciate there is great interest in new ideas in this sector of society, and that people who like this movie will also be attracted to CEU. By creating a very distinctive place, we may even put some people off, but we send very clear signals to our target group, simplifying our marketing.



5. Financial Principles, Activities and Forecast Example Successful businesses have product propositions and financials that fit nicely on the back of an envelope or on a restaurant napkin. These show the principles – if they are more complicated, it means the plan is faulty. The spreadsheets in business plans rarely show the underlying model, but here we start by showing the simplicity and scalability of the core ideas. The environmental university is funded by self-building its own staff & student housing – this creates positive feedback loops and makes the university inherently viable. The eco-village is also the demonstration site for a profitable new industry – building new eco-settlements. The model is scalable – the investment can be £100m or £500m – so detailed spreadsheets await further dialogue between the partners.

1. Unique Marketing Concept “The best way to predict the future is to create it” – Alan Kay, Apple Research Fellow

The financial concept for this environmental university benefits from a strong marketing idea, so recruitment is easy and we have 100% student occupation. Without this, life can be tough – as some of Mrs Thatcher’s polytechnics are finding, struggling to make the grade as universities. Universities are locked in a competitive downward spiral, of copycat marketing, having been asked by government to create the education that employers want. An environmental university is a 180 degree turn, creating higher education that students want – the place our own faculty would have wanted to go to. In a market economy, where students can choose, this gives a terrific advantage. And the core eco-housing model can be replicated and marketed, creating graduate employment.

2. Cost-effective Construction and Operation The next steps are that if we can build the university at lower cost than is usual, and operate more efficiently, we shall then be more profitable than other universities. In our simple, scalable financial model we show how we intend to achieve both these aims. The starting point is the public-private partnership that provides the land at low cost to create an asset for the community. Saving cash by self-building our own campus on a cooperative, co-housing model builds on this foundation. Operation of the campus with world-leading visiting faculty, a block-teaching system, and students participating in practical activities that build the campus while creating academic credits, is the basis for cost-effective operation. Add to this a focus on effectively meeting basic human needs, using best-of-breed technologies in our own campus, and teaching others how to do the same.

3. Research and Development By marketing ecological consulting and research services to governments and industries, we will move ahead of the game. We will aim at total transparency – consumers and academics alike seem justly suspicious of commercial R&D funding – e.g. Nottingham University accepted British American Tobacco funding for a Department of Ethical Business, and even their own cancer research faculty resigned in protest. CEU will attract the leading ethical think tanks in sustainable development and engage in an open dialogue on most effective solutions – implementing them itself as a demonstration site, and marketing them both directly and with business partners.

4. Grant and Other Funding By creating a brand that is unique and distinctive, with a demonstrable track record right on our own campus, we expect that all kinds of grants, funds and opportunities will open up. Billions of dollars are to be spent helping the new Eastern European EC joiners to become less polluted, more economically self-sufficient and sustainable. There and elsewhere, many more billions will be spent helping the world reverse the catastrophic migration of CO2 into the atmosphere. An environmental university is well positioned to help with these evolutionary processes. Using the methodologies of Zero Emissions and Appreciative Inquiry will generate these desired results.



5. Starting A New Industry Silicon Valley grew as an offshoot from famous alumini of Stanford University, like Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard. MIT and Harvard have created the Boston Research Triangle. But no university in this country is known in this way for having founded a new industry. So CEU can be first to do it. BedZED (Bedlington Zero Energy Development) has pioneered a new model of eco-housing being adopted by Government in the South East. BedZED is not a university, but its high-density high-concrete passive-solar developer-built city housing is very influential. CEU will pioneer a low-density high-biomass active-solar self-build rural settlement model that will allow us to lead the development of rural communities, and the remodelling of unsustainable cities. The potential value of this new housing market is big. How big? A doubling of house values since 1994 raised the asset value of the UK by £1.5 trillion to £4.98 trillion. New luxury eco-sound, high-tech, value-added communities could re-double this, making CEU the lead player in a £1 trillion+ market. Even with only modest success in this sector, a stake in the market in eco-housing would far exceed all other income generated by the university, and provide employment for the majority of our graduates (and many others) – as well as create paid-for housing for them. Our students will usually leave with their degree already paid for, often to join a new community where they will build their own home. Another example of positive, reinforcing feedback in the design of CEU.

6. Financial Modelling

“There are lies, damn lies, and statistics.” – Winston Churchill

To which we can now add: sexed-up Government dossiers, PowerPoint presentations and Excel spreadsheets. Whatever the Hutton Report said, NASA has blamed the recent Space Shuttle disaster on PowerPoint presentations that are too-glib and accepted too-uncritically. And as everyone can see only too well, spreadsheet can justify pretty much anything, including the dotcom bubble and Anderson’s spectacular auditing at Enron and WorldCom. So be warned. The lesson is that if experts can spin accounts, it will be easy to create glib and plausible financial plans, sample balance sheets and profit and loss accounts for a new university – which few will understand and no-one will ever look at again. The due diligence work and financial feasibility study for the new university of Cornwall cost £140,000+. We’ll repeat this for CEU, and hire their experts to help, and used their experience. But if the financial concepts underlying the plan are not easily expressed, transparent, and comprehensible to anyone, chances are that they are a fiddle. The limitation of spreadsheets matches the major flaw in most western business models, as most businesses are structured around a linear focus on core business. Much of our language - ‘supply chain’, ‘trickle-down’, etc., illustrates this one dimensional flow. Try and build a feedback loop in a business and you can’t model it properly in a spreadsheet, because you get a ‘circular reference’. Surprisingly, this is not seen as a fault in spreadsheets, but it is a fatal flaw in life and business, because we miss out on the most natural and effective approach to both the creating wealth and eliminating waste – natural living systems are based on circular self-reference since time started.

7. Positive Feedback Loops Suppose we start with just £1 million for building housing. And let’s suppose it is being used to build student accommodation rather than faculty housing. It builds rental accommodation for 30 to 40 students. With land at low cost, and taking no profit, 50% is spent on labour and 50% on materials (say). That means £500K going into the local economy creating work around natural material, and £500K being paid to students for construction work. Note that the students use this money to buy their education and housing, so (say) 1/3 of the labour (£1/2 million) goes to pay for this housing, and another third pays tuition – faculty teaching & running the self-build program. From the other £1/2 million used for materials, a minimum of 25 job-years are created in the local economy – and far more if this feedback loop concept is developed as fully as we are intending. £1 million spent on self-build on low cost land creates social housing with £2m valuation, to be sold to staff at around 75% of market value. The£500K capital gain for the staff is their reward for joining the venture and making it a success. The university uses its £500K gain to build core



campus facilities on this co-housing model. Thus an initial £100 million used to build student and faculty housing goes to build £50 million of research, teaching, recreation and other facilities.

8. Example. How £100 million goes a long way - through integrated feedback loops The example covers just the funding which has already been agreed in principle - £100 million to capitalise construction of the university housing. It shows how this inward investment, already sourced from outside Cumbria will also seed the construction of the central faculty housing and other university community buildings, as well as underwrite the first ten years of cash flow – the daily operation of the university. This may sound like an exaggerated claim, but check the figures – it’s expected that the financial feasibility study that we undertake will more than bear them out. The model is scalable to any level. Currently we’re thinking of around 3000 students & 500 staff. And note in this example that ALL of this is before the university even begins to add in the income and effect from the activities it plans to undertake, and before it attracts any of the kind of funding that universities normally attract, or any of the kind of funding that a unique environmental institution and think-tank like CEU can be expected to attract. -- Before we get what’s due to us from government, and what will come from our consulting and grant-seeking activities. Note also that we expect to attract sustainable businesses to share the site, and to add to this rich mixture. A. Construction. From £100 million already sourced for housing, these 2 feedback cycles create:

1. Student housing (cost £50m) for up to 2,000 students. (market value of £100m?) (annual rental income £4-8m, more if housing used for conferences during vacations).

2. Faculty housing / homes (£50 m) for ~300 faculty & families. (market value £100m).

3. Central teaching, research and accommodation at ~£50 million (value £100m? (Matched funding will also be sourced to more than double the value of assets created.)

B. Labour. Combining elements (50%) from A1-3 above, means £100 million (check this) for student labour. Recycled to pay for student education through construction wages means:

1. 10-20,000 student years, fully funded. This is doubled or tripled when government adds in what it contributes in university and grant funding, and further leveraged when students work on other projects. Of this time, 20% to 40% is spent building the £200m of buildings.

If (say) Students spent 1/3:1/3:1/3 (say) on housing, tuition, and other things, then:

2. £33 million to pay for accommodation1 (10,000-20,000 student years).

3. £33 million to pay faculty salaries2 – 1-2,000 staff years – which will be leveraged by consulting work and outside contracts, as well as by having much of our faculty be only part-time visiting faculty, coming to teach intensive block courses. Note: many faculty will be from the on-site businesses, NGOs and think-tanks, their salaries already funded.

4. £33 million to pay for student living3, much of this in the local economy (more loops). C. Materials. Combining elements from A1-3 above yields £100 million for locally grown materials. This can be viewed different ways - even a simple conventional analysis would show this creates:

1. 3,000-10,000 man years of local employment, or more as wages are further recycled.

2. Or – 1,000-3,000 permanent new jobs, -- even if invested inefficiently in building linear supply chain relationships. As we will create supply cycles, this will likely be higher.

Bottom line. £100 million invested in buildings is sliced, diced and recycled, creating £200-400 million+ in assets – faculty and student housing, teaching and community facilities; funding 10 years of the university’s cash flow; and creating thousands of local jobs, and that’s just the start. Activities of staff and students in the local community will generate similar transformations in the local & regional economy, community and environment. Which is the whole point of the university. 1 Pays 50% of student housing loans. 2 1/3 goes to staff/faculty mortgages. 3 Food, fun, etc.



Input comesFrom a simplequestionnaire

SophisticatedComputer

Financial Model

GovernmentIncentives

Series ofTailor MadeStructureReports

6. Funding Small Business and Regional Growth

The Four Pillars of Growth and Regeneration Those responsible for the growth and well-being of Cumbria have said for a long time a university is needed. They explain it is a form of commercial development that creates high quality jobs and attracts other employers, reduces brain drain and is non-damaging. This view is supported by Middlesex University research on what makes regeneration truly effective, which shows there are four key pillars/legs to a vibrant economy: • infrastructure • community participation • small business • and a university – confirming higher education is vital for growth. A new university builds infrastructure, creates jobs, and stimulates community participation. So virtuous circles are created, with one pillar reinforcing the others – which is how and why a university is a vital ingredient in growth and regeneration. Hopefully this positive feedback works both ways, with the local pillars of infrastructure regeneration and community action helping create the university… • Investment in infrastructure – building a stable base on which all other growth can occur • Development of small and medium enterprise – a basis for economic growth & diversity • Community participation – without a lively and involved community, things just stagnate • A university is vital – not intuitively obvious perhaps, but without one, growth is hobbled

Stimulus for Small and Medium Enterprises This reinforces the case for a university in Cumbria, but the focus of this piece is business. A new university can at best only be expected to have a delayed effect on building small and medium enterprise – however this university has a mechanism to directly stimulate SME growth, and it will start before construction of the campus even begins. By the time the university has a campus, relations with local small businesses should be cordial, and ready to move up to the next level. Most business are not well structured for growth, profitability, cash flow, taxation, and so on. This is been proved by structural accountant Michael Penn FCA, who has made a career of helping small businesses develop optimum financial structures. Michael has developed a financial expert system to model small businesses, simulating structures that incorporate government incentives, improve stability, flexibility, cash flow, retained earnings, profitability and of course reduce taxation.

The Penn Report The Penn Report expert system takes in financial details for a business through a questionnaire, rather like the government’s tax self-assessment system, but instead of calculating tax liability, the Penn Report calculates an optimised structure. Most small businesses operating at a profit can make very significant improvements, far more than might be expected from such a simple step.

As the graph shows, tax savings for small businesses with profits £15-100Kpa can be up to 50%. This may change at the next budget, but the Penn Report will always creates flexible optimised structures. The Penn Report is provided via accountants and independent financial advisers, trained to service and implement it for their clients. The fee is 10% of first years savings, and it comes with a money-back guarantee, so it is a ‘no brainer’ decision for a business to decide to use it.



Backing Winners for Regeneration This initial financial boost for business will improve economic performance in Cumbria in the most direct and effective way. In the Biblical parable of the servants, the master rewarded the servants who invested his money well - Jesus shows that the correct principle for economic growth is to back your winners. While it might be politically unacceptable to subsidise the most successful businesses, it would for sure be the most effective growth strategy, and the Penn Report provides a tool to accomplish exactly this, by providing a direct financial boost to the best businesses. Applied to the spectrum of businesses in Cumbria, the economy boost could be £25-75m p.a. The Penn Report is a streamlined financial consulting service, using an expert system to deliver highly optimised results at a very low cost. Good financial advice used to be something only big business and the rich could afford, and it came in a bespoke package – now individually tailored expert advice is available to all through the internet. The marketing structure will help accountants and independent financial advisers add value to their clients, and grow their businesses - it will also reward satisfied clients who recommend the report to their friends, speeding growth. So this is good for clients, for financial professionals, for regional economic growth, and for the university.

R&D with the Penn Expansion Report For established businesses which are expanding, The Penn Reports have another offering that structures an R&D partnership with the university. The initial effect is a clear improvement in financial performance, some of which is made available as credit for further R&D around sustainable innovation with the university, and for staff training based around the university’s core courses in development. So an initial expansion will fund further growth. The government is encouraging businesses to engage in Research and Development, and to develop partnerships with universities. Right from the start, Cumbria has a mechanism to make these relationships immediately profitable for the business, even before any R&D is conducted. Section 8, on the university’s core development curriculum expands on these core courses, which teach tools and a common language for: • personal growth and interpersonal effectiveness, • for leadership and team building, • for sustainable innovation, and • for achieving shared visions of desired outcomes, using a synthesis of the best modern management tools and eastern wisdom. These tools have all been used to achieve faster growth in businesses and corporate turnarounds, but used in combination they are a powerful way for individuals and enterprises to create positive and sustainable visions, and to implement them in such a way that personal, corporate, economic, social & environmental goals are aligned and mutually supportive – like the elements of this plan. The University’s own R&D will be structured as an ongoing world-wide dialogue around what is best in natural solutions. This will be across all faculties, and interdisciplinary research will be encouraged that produces breakthroughs in meeting basic human needs – for food, shelter, work, housing, clothing, health, energy, water, sanitation, transport, education, justice, peace, etc…

E-Street – Partnerships for Entrepreneurs Already a collaboration is planned with the Stockholm School of Economics. Stockholm is the biggest hot spot point for entrepreneurship in Europe and the leader in environmental innovation. SSE’s innovative programme, E-street, partners students and young entrepreneurs with successful innovators and businesspeople in a research and learning network that builds peer-to-peer support and upward and downward mentoring. By facilitating a partner network in Cumbria and the North West, CEU’s collaboration with SSE will enhance innovation and entrepreneurship – accelerating the rate of economic growth and sustainable development. Program goal:- reverse the north-south divide and put Cumbria ahead of the crowd (the South ;-)



7. Meeting Global and Local Needs

How to fulfil the Agenda from the Rio Earth Summit? A picture emerged from the first Earth Summit at Rio – that the needs of society, the economy and the environment are different but overlapping, It was the basis for Agenda 21 – a model for development in the 21st century. The point was to recognise that development could not just be aimed to save the planet or the environment, and that possibly conflicting needs have to be balanced. The question left after Rio is how to do this – the plan was that global needs - whether it’s for society, the environment or the economy – can only be fulfilled through local action. So what emerged from Rio was the idea for everywhere to have a Local Agenda 21.

The Reality of the Change Process Ten years later we have no integrated social, economic and environmental planning or action, nor any initiatives at world level that might lead to this. At the subsequent Kyoto Earth summit, plans to reduce global CO2 emission levels and tackle climate change were blocked. Was it first world nations against third world, or insurance companies (who pay for climate change) against oil and energy companies (who don’t)? Whatever - the needs of the economy and the environment weren’t even seen as overlapping, and we seem locked in dysfunctional systems with no way out. The recent Environment at Johannesburg was just as inconclusive – no political initiative with sufficient critical mass for change. Plenty of words and rhetoric, but no deep agreement or action.

Development at the local level Local planning must now take cognisance of the Rio Agenda, so language that juxtaposes the words social, economic and environmental appears in planning documents and structure plans, but sadly most building development is still ad-hoc, with developers submitting proposals that maximise profit, and local planning officers and elected officials trying to juggle things so that social and environmental needs are not entirely ignored. House are still sold at highest price to the first buyer, and no account is taken of distance that will be travelled to work, service needs etc. This is not the fault of planner. Few people are as knowledgeable about Agenda 21 and as eager to pursue integrated development as local planners - it’s just that it is extraordinarily hard to create a planning structure that will deliver truly desirable results in every case, or even most cases. But the diagram above shows the desired future, with more and more overlap of the social, economic and environmental circles, so development of one helps development of another, without conflict.

Converging on mutually beneficial solutions There are waves of change, gusts of fresh air blowing in several fields that converges hopefully on something useful. In business it is called positive change, transparency, corporate responsibility and social enterprises. In personal and social change its called solution-focused therapy and appreciative inquiry. And in the environment it goes by names like zero emissions and natural



capitalism. All of these are methodologies that are bringing the Rio circles closer to overlapping. For the purpose of this document it’s not so important to explain how the methodologies work as to hint oat the results. And this is the point – we focus on the desired outcome, not current problems.

Asking ‘The Miracle Question’ In a field called ‘brief, solution focused therapy’ that yields extraordinary results compared with conventional counselling and therapy, there is a standard question called the ‘miracle question’. The client is asked ‘suppose you woke up one morning and overnight a miracle had happened and the problem was solved, how would you feel? What would have changed?’ And the interesting thing is that though they don’t know how they’d get there, they always have an answer. From this is drawn an assessment of where we are, and a change strategy that yields rapid positive change. We can borrow from this. We may not know how to do proper Agenda 21 development planning, especially within the current planning system. But we could ask the question, ‘suppose you awoke overnight and found that integrated planning was being done. What would it feel like? What would be different?’ Without pre-judging different people’s answers, they would likely include that there wouldn’t be so much conflict, there would be fewer trade-offs, that solving one problem wouldn’t create another, that fulfilling one need would fulfil a range of others. The planning process would be simpler because there would be more initial agreement. And money spent would yield results. The point – we know how it feels when it’s done right because we all have everything we want, and nothing we don’t want. This extract is from Allerdale Local planning guideline policy REN2:

In assessing any proposals for the re-use and/or redevelopment of the former Royal Naval Armaments Depot at Broughton Moor, the Council will approve the following uses either individually or in combination if it can be demonstrated that they are necessary to achieve restoration of the site, subject to the criteria below:

• institution(s) standing in their own grounds, to include education but exclude prison uses

• large scale leisure development of a predominantly "open" nature

• teleworking community with ancillary facilities

• hotel/restaurant and conference centre

• tourist related development of a predominantly "open" nature

• sports development of a predominantly "open" nature, eg golf course, ski slope, cycle track, nature trails, equestrian activities

• (N.B Forestry and farming are also mentioned as desirable pre-existing uses.)

Evaluation of Proposals The environmental university is designed to fulfil a vision for world-class Cumbrian higher education, to create sustainable economic growth without negative effects other commercial growth might have. It will be interesting, then, to assess how closely this proposal (and others) fits the local desirability criteria listed above, and the restriction criteria to be found below. The miracle, will be found to have happened if any proposal satisfies all these criteria. But because the design for an Environmental University has been developed using an integrated approach based on zero emissions methodology and appreciative inquiry, it should come pretty close. Individual proposals may well each 8 or 9 (on a scale of ten) on some of the above, but the integaretd university proposal approaches 20 on all counts, we are bold enough to suggest…

Economic Impact There is a consequence of integrated planning that is not immediately obvious given our current experience of commercial development. Here, as social enterprise is commercially funded and



does not require local or government subsidies. It will be self-supporting and profitable, creating a substantial base of rateable property which generates maximum income to the local authority.

All proposals will be expected to conform to the following criteria: (i) Development proposals on the whole or part of the depot site will be expected to

conform to sustainable principles concerning natural resources, pollution, wildlife and the need to travel. All proposals will be expected to comply with the published development brief.

(ii) Development proposals for the depot site as a whole will be expected to

contribute to the regeneration of the local economy and bring substantial benefits to local people in economic social and environmental terms.

(iii) Proposals for the piecemeal development of the depot site will be resisted.

Proposals for individual parts of the site must conform to the published development brief and form part of an agreed phasing of individual parts. Developers will be expected to enter into a Section 106 Agreement with the Local Planning Authority covering the phasing of the development of the whole site.

(iv) No development or land use approved by the Local Planning Authority shall be

implemented until the Authority is satisfied that the relevant site area is entirely free from contamination and/or dereliction of any kind.

(v) The aggregate amount of building, including new building, in terms of floorspace,

should not substantially exceed the total floorspace of the existing buildings (including the former magazines), except where the overall scheme, or part thereof, would result in a more beneficial impact upon the landscape than the existing situation or includes some other overriding environmental, economic or social benefit. There shall be minimal building in that part of the depot site designated as Locally Important Landscape Area, except where any proposed building would not have a significant adverse impact on the landscape character of the area.

(vi) Any package of proposals for the whole site should include elements of public

access, wildlife habitat enhancement, an increase in overall tree cover particularly of indigenous species and the continuation of the Northside to Broughton Moor Cycleway.

(vii) Any package of proposals for the whole site or individual proposals for parts of

the site must satisfy the Local Planning Authority that on and off-site infrastructure is adequate to accommodate the proposal concerned. In particular the Local Planning Authority will require the submission of a full Environmental Impact Assessment where appropriate, and, in all cases will require the submission of a traffic impact study.

Proposals for other uses not listed above will be resisted, as will any proposal which does not conform to the above criteria, or to any other relevant policies in the Local Plan.

Extract from Allerdale Local planning guidelines

An Integrating Methodology Note that (iii) above says proposals for piecemeal development will be resisted. The Cumbria university proposal is to create an integrated educational community to serve the local community, and will be integrated with other sites beyond Derwent Forest. It is also an integrating structure, and there is every reason to expect that other proposals from community groups and sustainable businesses can be enhanced by developing in the overall context of the environmental university.



8. Business Plan

“It is the partners intention … to help formulate concepts and develop a business plan … for the delivery of a truly world class opportunity”

Derwent Forest Development Guide

To Be Written… So there isn’t a full business plan – yet. We don’t want to compromise the collaboration proposed above. This plan needs to be built in partnership with the people in Cumbria who will provide the land, and want a university, and in consultation with the locals who will be its neighbours for life.

“Enough Goodies for Everyone What we have focused on is showing just some of the potential already identified for this university and integral eco-village, to be funded as a public-private partnership, and formulated as a social enterprise. We want to show that this is both very imaginative and at the same time very down-to-earth, practical and viable, and that it can stand on its own feet – financially and academically. We have discussed the plan with the lead financial consultant involved in the recent new university creation – for Cornwall. (The other new one is the Highlands and Islands – everyone else has one, surely it’s time Cumbria had one?). His comment was that this plan is more exciting and far more holistic than Cornwall’s – and that Cornwall’s plan was watered down in implementation, whereas this needn’t be compromised – “it has goodies for everyone”. Unusual words from a consultant on higher education perhaps, but indicative of how holistic, beneficial and integrated this project is.

The Firstest With The Mostest

“The art of war is to get there the firstest with the mostest” - J E B Stuart, US Civil War Confederate General

The idea has been to create an integrated plan that outclasses anything anyone else has, with a scalable financial model that can be adjusted to fit, to deliver as much as possible. When we run the numbers, based on the agreed bearing capacity of the land, we will get a bottom line that works. It’s going to help if we hire this guy, because he has already worked with a new university, and he already has a basis for predicting the difference between forecast and actual performance. We started out in our estimates with a figure of around £100 million for the eco-village housing, both for staff and students, with co-housing funds used to part-fund the academic facilities. Now, we realise that some of the faculties can be recruited as a unit, and that think tanks will bring their own funding for their own buildings. The same applies for some of the sustainable businesses we can expect to attract, that will have synergies with the university and campus and our eco-building and zero emissions projects. Also we think it highly likely that we will also attract a fair share of matching funding - not that we would if we had asked at the outset, but as we are self-funding, others will want to throw cash at us, just as banks only lend money to people who don’t need it. What this leads to is a current feeling for an overall scale of project in the range £200 to £300 million, with a final student capacity around 3,000. This would be accompanied by 500 to 1000 faculty, staff, and families of the university and its associated businesses. We anticipate there will be a major commercial development nearby some years later, as sustainable businesses move to Cumbria to be near the university, and as the university spins-off commercial enterprises, but we do not want to build a business park on campus – we’d like to maintain an eco-village atmosphere.

Small is Beautiful We do not see the University as a £200 million building project so much as a family of 400-500 projects, each in the range £100K-£1M. All buildings will fit within a master plan, but we are less



concerned with efficiency and speed of building than with giving the maximum possible opportunity for project management experience to our faculty and to their students. Any concern of loss of ‘economies of scale’ will be made up by the educational benefit, and the extra attention to detail, plus of course, we will create savings that more than compensate, through the self-build process.

Phased Development and Project Management The intention is to create the site mainly as a self-build project, though there is no reason we would not employ commercial contractors for capacity or other reasons, particularly at start-up. A German partner, dfh Siedlungsbau (‘settlement builders’), has built 5,000+ homes in commercial housing developments on an innovative self-build eco-housing model. Their unique experience in self-build project management means we will work closely with them, especially at the outset.

Integration with other Projects and Proposals This is a whole-site proposal and we would not want to be part of a piecemeal development. We would like to be involved in the overall site planning, much of which we approve of, but some of the existing proposals might not fit easily within the framework of an environmental university. That said, we would benefit from some of the proposed uses and will want to encourage and enhance. We like the idea of a lake and a visitor centre, and these have already appeared in our draft plans. We are not so sure about an eco-theme park, though some aspects might fit. Bear in mind that with 3,000 students and staff we would already be contributing over a million visitor-days per year to the Cumbria economy, with hardly any stress on the transport infrastructure, as 95% of these days will involve an overnight stay on the campus – as everyone lives there. Also, no commuting. An (eco-)hotel will be helpful, and we want to maximise the attraction of cycle ways, leisure walks, and other facilities, and indeed involve our leisure management, forestry and farming students in creating these facilities - otherwise, valuable learning opportunities will be lost. So we do not want to delay getting on the campus until it is ready – as far as we are concerned it is perfect right now.

The Zero Emissions Bamboo Pavilion Our proposal for a visitor centre atop the slag heap will immediately establish the international reach and environmental focus of the university – as well as attract huge attention. It’s the award winning design for the leading environmental exhibit at World Expo 2000 held in Hannover Germany. Built from bamboo and fast growing softwood, it is the perfect example of huge, immensely strong and exciting structures from sustainable, grown material. We will localise the design and build it as our first construction course.

Timescales and Phased Implementation We would aim to build the visitor pavilion within six months from getting the go ahead after completion and acceptance of the business plan, or even just the visitor centre part of it. We would like to build a 60-120 home eco-village social housing project before tackling the main campus, giving more time for detailed planning and for building up a learning curve. We suggest doing this with Great Broughton Council and redeveloping their North Terrace at the same time. We would use, say, half this housing at first, to jump-start the university’s on-campus housing.

Involvement with Site Remediation We appreciate the model that Cumbria has used in the past on brownfield projects, which is to absorb the cost and risk of site remediation before inviting tenants, putting them on safe and prepared land. This would miss an important opportunity for Cumbria and for its Environmental University, which is that one of our consulting specialities will be – has to be – in the field of site remediation and land regeneration. If would be missing an important learning opportunity if we were not part and parcel of cleaning up our own land. We want a phased approach, using some of the existing buildings as factory workshops to pre-fabricate parts of our eco-buildings, before we remove them. This way we save a lot of money and our students also get remediation experience.

Zero Emissions Bamboo Pavilion for World Expo 2000 in Hanover, prototype - Manizales, Colombia



9. Partnerships

Organisation We understand that if we are short-listed for development of a full business plan, this will still be developed somewhat at arms length until an appraisal process is completed. Nevertheless, we will want closer access to the Derwent Forest Partners, so the local views they represent can be more clearly understood, and initial feedback incorporated in the proposal. It is especially true that we seek closer co-operation with those tasked to integrate higher education offerings in Cumbria. Once our proposal has been validated, debated, evaluated and accepted, we plan to proceed as part of a public-private partnership, ideally based on the existing Derwent Forest Partnership. Hence we have not chosen at this stage to establish a separate organisation for the university.

Quiet Unobtrusive Development We have not been deliberately touting this proposal around, except when and where appropriate to advance the ideas. Meaningful development will only happen once the plan has been accepted. Nevertheless, we have found great interest in the university concept, even when people are only exposed to a fraction of the overall plan. This is just as true when we talk to people in Cumbria who might benefit, as when we talk to people outside Cumbria who can help deliver the project. Development from Cumbria’s side has appeared slow, with a two year wait while the Broughton Moor partnership regrouped and reissued their development guide. There has been no evaluation or feedback from our original submission, beyond a brief mobile phone call from a consultant late one Friday evening, just before he was due to make a presentation to Allerdale Borough Council. We have not striven so far to structure a consortium to deliver the university, simply because we would want to involve the best people in the world to do this, and we do not wish to insult them by involving them before having a reciprocal expression of interest from Allerdale and/or Cumbria. But when this comes, we are ready to act. The Lords Bragg, Campbell-Savours and Hankey all say it’s a good idea, and we get strong interest from everyone we sound out – including banks. What follows is a list of individuals and groups in the UK who we have talked with and who have the capability to create and deliver a viable project. Some names we cannot mention at present, but the idea is so strong that when Cumbria says ‘we do’, we can involve whoever we might like.

The Cumbria Environmental University Initiative We are a loose-knit group of friends and professionals who met through involvement in personal, business, educational or environmental development, united by a shared vision. Our mailing list has 400 people on it and we have not yet met in large groups, but we are ready to move on this. On getting a go-ahead from Cumbria we will create a local project staff, with regular development meetings between members of our core team, local interested parties and our delivery partners.

Some of the Core Team David Saunders – system designer, marketer, eco-builder, consultant, writer, project manager Sibylle Rhovier – eco-building liaison, community development, naturopath, writer, and advisor John Harrison – journalist, eco-business guru, coach, chairman Triodos Bank wind energy fund Tim Lane – project leader, inner city technical colleges, and IT network guru for public schools Michael S Penn – Chartered Accountant, developer, Penn Report for small business expansion Dagmar Albrecht – director, housing & food, ZERI guide resources – ZERI World Expo 2000 Andrea Lautenbach – yoga & ayurveda, pilates & dance teacher, life coach and web designer Marcus Brierley – Plain Communication, photographer, writer, business packaging & PR expert Anders Karlsson – director, ZERI Pavilion, World Expo 2000. PhD Zero Emission consultant Barbara Light – Middlesex University, specialist in accreditation of work-based learning courses Dave Hampton – chair, UK Construction Industry Council Sustainable Development Committee Paul Cragg – green farmer, creator Working Wonders – student exchange leadership program Mr. X – we are being helped by some good friends in Cumbria who want to see a university there Plus a goodly collection of other individuals, in Cumbria and elsewhere, interested to participate.



Selected Building Partners Era Limited – Creative think tank and Development Project designers. Helped put together our

first Letter of Interest. Currently lead major city centre projects in Slough & Birmingham.

Gilmore, Hankey, Kirk – architects, surveyors, engineers, planners, economists. GHK Chairman The Lord Hankey, is one of England’s first registered green builders. Designing a sustainable energy centre for Newcastle University, and building a new university for Riga, Latvia.

The Co-Op Bank – Interested in principle to provide a construction funding package – they see this development as an extension of a co-housing model. They want to see local interest.

Price Waterhouse Coopers - Higher Education Consulting Division. Experts in due diligence work & business planning for new universities. They say CEU has goodies for everyone.

Dfh Siedlungsbau – founded by Karl Kubel, German philanthropist & social innovator – dfh ‘settlement builders’ have built over 5000 homes as project managers of a self-build social housing model. Young families build affordable homes in new eco-community developments.

Triodos Bank, Barclays Bank, The Ecological Building Society. All these are interested too.

The Global Eco-village Network. – international network of eco-villages with experience running the gamut of issues that can arise in projects like this. Plenty of project managers available.

ABS Consulting – civil engineering facilities management group with OLS system (Overall Liking Score) allowing comparison scoring of buildings and facilities planning for sustainability

Plus – many eco-builders, architects, financial consultants, planners, thinkers – anyone we talk to.

Selected Educational Partners The Centre for Alternative Technology. Leading UK environmental visitor centre and home of

MSc courses in sustainability. Experts in all aspects of eco-tourism and sustainability.

New Economics Foundation. The UK’s leading radical economics Think-Tank. NEF are very active in many forms of regeneration and participative democracy. Like CAT, NEF have strong links to the legacy of E.F. (Fritz) Schumacher, first British green ecologist. We are exploring the possibility NEF will build and operate a faculty of new economics at CEU.

Middlesex University Innovations. We have links with Middlesex University that would help with aspects of project planning and work-based learning as well as course accreditation.

Newton Rigg Agricultural College. Will help run our farm, and our organic farming courses.

The Findhorn Foundation. Leading UK spiritual and ecological retreat centre, pioneering community and eco-village. Home of the Global Eco-Village Network headquarters.

Construction Industry Training Board. The idea here is that CITB would partner in creation of a faculty on new construction, since we plan to replace most of the UK’s housing stock.

Schumacher College. Leading English postgraduate course centre and think-tank on deep ecology. Programme Director Satish Kumar offered to host a curriculum conference for CEU.

Stockholm School of Economics / World Academy of Sciences – via Anders Karlsson – leading centres of Economic and Environmental Innovation. E-Street & the Zero Ladder

EAFIT University / Zero Emissions Network / UN University – Links to leading universities involved in the world network of Zero Emissions research, education, and innovation.

Gujarat Ayurveda University. We have links in India with colleges and universities teaching traditional Ayurveda natural medicine. Can help set up clinic, run courses, accredit degrees.

The Rocky Mountain Institute and The Wuppertal Institute. Leading US and German eco-think tanks. Amory Lovins & Ernst von Weiszacker, authors - Natural Capitalism & Factor Four.

AI Consulting / AI-List / Case-Western Reserve University – links to the global network both academic and commercial involved with Appreciative Inquiry teaching / consulting.

And So On. Many want to be involved, including contacts at Newton Rigg, St. Martins College.



10. Summary of Benefits It is something of a scandal that Cumbria has been unable to create its own university before now, but it would be just as tragic if what it had was not of the highest standard, reflecting Cumbria’s unique place in the world. At the same time it is unfortunate that such a large site has been cut off from the public so long and left abandoned. But these two come together for a unique opportunity. A radical new university design built on the principles of systemic thinking, sustainability and self-organisation – some call it ‘joining-up thinking’ – creates a new kind of academic enterprise. CEU is inherently flexible, designed for self-sufficiency, and certain of economic success – as well as to be socially restorative and environmentally friendly. Wherever it is weak in any of these, we will encourage dialogue on best natural solutions, so that the structure is self-improving from the start. The enterprises we benchmark – CAT, Findhorn, MIU, and others – are all thriving communities.

For Students We have set out to design the university we would like to have gone to ourselves, founded on principles of community and co-operation. A university where you learn the tools you need for effectiveness in life, as well as the principles for actualising your own vision without harming others or damaging the environment – indeed, through helping others achieve their visions, by reducing waste and enhancing biodiversity. The debate over top-up fees hints that students will be attracted by a place where they will not graduate with a humiliating debt – or the prospect they will never be able to afford their own home. CEU students will earn their way, doing work for credit, and leave debt-free to a job in which they’ll build their own home. Competition for places should be intense.

For Faculty CEU is designed by potential faculty, with input from leading thinkers and think-tanks around the world. Such a place does not yet exist, bringing together all the elements – best practice from so many fields, and a synthesis of eastern and western thought tools and techniques. If CEU were only to be a self-build eco-village embodying best principles in natural design and construction, it will be a fantastic place to live and work, and a great way to add rateable value to Derwent Forest. But basing a university at the eco-village takes the eco-village to another level. As Dale Campbell-Savours says “the attraction of living in the beauty of the Lakes could well, also, draw high calibre academics and students to the area.” Especially if the place is designed to fulfil their dream. We already know there will be terrific demand not just from individuals, but from entire think-tanks, to locate at CEU. We will attract leading thinkers as staff, and bring in world leaders as guest faculty.

For Allerdale and Cumbria As a minimum, Allerdale wants to put Broughton Moor / Derwent Forest on the map. A Forest Park is perhaps rather low key, and can only be considered a baseline plan. As a fiscal responsibility, the Borough Council must honour planning guidelines and bring in best value. As an imperative, infrastructure investment is needed to gain ground in an area that’s behind in economic growth. Cumbria County has similar priorities, but also has a need – and responsibility - to raise the level of its higher education, and only a forlorn hope that it may one day have a university of sorts. The CEU plan fulfils all of these in a single stroke, with a big private inward investment in educational infrastructure creating a unique university, rateable value, jobs, visitors, world class status, etc…

For England, Europe and the World A first-time visitor to the Lake District once said “So this is where God goes on his holidays.” When they think of England’s green and pleasant land, the image that comes to mind for many people is Cumbria. Cumbria is a world treasure site, one of the jewels that make us recognise our place as a species, and our role in the natural order of things, and to feel that all this is good and right. Poets and painters have discovered inspiration in Cumbria. We want to build something, not that draws on the strength of the national park, but that stands strong beside it, in an area a little less privileged, and holds a mirror to the park – and to ourselves. So we learn what is best, and how to grow and enrich it, and we leave Cumbria bearing gifts, going back to enlighten our own homes.



11. Eco Village and Natural Housing

Q1. Suburban Life – An Oxymoron? Discuss… Plenty of people build nice housing, with all sorts of eco-additions. In Leicester, Environ (www.environ.org.uk) have an ‘eco-house’, having spent a lot of money to convert an ordinary house into something more sustainable. And a visitor centre, where you can go see, and figure out why you would spend time and money turning you place into what is still a suburban house, with improvements that will take years to make a return, if ever. 100,000 visitors so far though, so they’re doing something right. Food for thought. If you live in a city, whatever you might do to your existing place, or whatever an architect may come up with for energy efficient urban housing, chances are you will still be commuting to work, and a goodly chunk of your life will be utterly unsustainable and stress-producing. It simply doesn’t work to solve the environmental crisis one suburban house at a time. Or does it? What else to do?

Q2. Urban Eco-Villages – The Solution?

“BedZED is the first large-scale ‘carbon neutral’ community - i.e. the first not to add to the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. BedZED shows how housing can be built without degrading the environment. BedZED aims to be a beacon, to show how we can meet the demand for housing without destroying the countryside. It shows that an eco-friendly lifestyle can be easy, affordable and attractive – something that people will want to do.” – BedZED website.

One eco-house at a time doesn’t cut the mustard. It’s not a sustainable solution – it only tinkers with the symptoms. Sustainable solutions must be grown a settlement at a time. BedZED (www.bedzed.org.uk), Beddington Zero Energy Development is a pioneering 100 unit urban eco-village in south London, from an innovative partnership between the local authority, a housing trust, an eco-architect and an environmental group – quite like they way we’ll create CEU. Carbon neutral applies to ongoing operation and not the brick, concrete and steel construction of BedZED. And housing at BedZed comes in around £1200 / square metre - you pay quite a lot for your urban plot, and your garden is on the roof, with 6” of soil. Come back Babylon, all is forgiven.

Q3. Is High Density Housing Sustainable? The exhibition at BedZED explains one of the presently accepted postulates of the sustainable urban living movement. Which is that high density housing is inevitable as more and more of us crowd on the planet, and desirable as it uses less material, and wastes less energy. A ten second analysis points out the fatal flaw: If you double the population of London in the same area, you still double the area required to grow its food, so each food item must travel 40% further (square root of 2 is 1.4). So the city doubles in size anyway, and food travel energy goes up 280%. Oh dear.

Q4. So What Would Be Sustainable? It’s a big question and it should be considered from the top down. How much land do we need, and what would be fair? As a species? As families? As individuals? Well, suppose we were to live (sustainably) on 10% of the land mass, leaving the rest for deserts, mountains, forests, bears, elephants and the like. That’s 90% - it sounds reasonable, and it’s not far off the mark from where we are now. Suppose again that population rises to 10 billion, which is a bit higher than the most likely levelling-off point of current growth projections. And suppose we live reasonably intelligently in three-generation homes or groups of 6 Friends – that’s not the case right now, but those living individually can divide by 6. How much space would that give us as households? Lebensraum?…

Environ’s Eco-House in Leicester

BedZED – Beddington Zero Energy Development, Sutton, London



It works out around 2.2 acres per family, which seems to be a fair, reasonable and sustainable amount. Given that there aren’t that many of us yet, and more than half the world’s population is living in cities with densities of 30-80 people per acre, and sometimes far higher, there seems to be room for growth, room to breathe. It’s a far cry from the housing densities we currently have. What we have done is concentrate our people in towns and our food production in intensive farms. Is that not negotiable? It’s certainly impossible to contemplate living at lower densities in the UK right now, because land prices are so impossibly high for building land, but that could be changed.

Q5. Why Do We Live In Cities? We used to cluster together for safety and security. And we are social animals. A village could have a school and a blacksmith. A town could have a grammar school and lots more specialists and variety. A city can have a university and the whole world of arts & crafts, commerce & luxury. A city might protect us from wolves, marauders and even armies. But since ICBMs and terrorism, a city is not as safe as the country. And since the Internet, a city no longer has the advantage of putting us close to business or higher learning. Why be close to a city’s expert in a field when we can be connected to all the world’s experts? The gravitational attraction of cities has lessened. People often go to the city now with the ambition to earn enough to be able to buy a place in the country – a retirement place or a hobby farm. Because cities are where the money is – or were.

Q6. Who Knows Best How to Look After The Land? The mass exodus to the cities with the industrial revolution denuded, depopulated and de-skilled our countryside. Farming became industrialised and rural population densities shrank. And because we all became specialised in our jobs, we lost the skills of looking after the land. Farmers became the chosen guardians, because only they knew how to make affordable food in quantity. The best the rest of us could do was tend our vestigial gardens, allotments, window boxes or pot plants, and dream of retiring to the countryside. Meanwhile, farmers had to farm industrially, while the rest of us were herded into cities and the green belts were preserved. Town land prices rose to £250K per acre and above, while farm land prices sank to £2K per acre and below. What a divide. The countryside is beautiful, and it would be crazy to sprawl all over it in an uncontrolled way. But since we are now very rich, and post-industrial, knowledge-orientated and more environmentally aware, another way of living with land may well be possible. The important thing to know is that industrial farming is only productive in terms of yield per person. When more people live on the land, biodiversity can go up, and yields per acre actually increased – for the very simple reason that more people are tending for the land and caring for it. We have forgotten how, but it is easy to learn, especially when you create a community that has this as its intention. Industrial farming really only works well with big one-crop fields, and chemical fertilisers – now an obsolete model.

New Rural Lifestyles With sensitively designed eco-villages, our countryside can be more beautiful, more biodiverse, much more productive and far more economically successful. Gentrification is a force for urban renewal, and similarly, bringing knowledge workers to the countryside can be an economic and intellectual force for rural renewal. With a sharp mind, clever friends, a TV and the Internet, one can learn to be a good smallholder. With intelligence applied to rural production, the result will be more value added, healthier food, more biodiversity and less pollution than industrial farming. By smartening our distribution systems, people living in the countryside can earn more for their produce and at the same time lower the cost of healthy food. This apparent paradox is resolved by reducing the role of supermarkets in the local loop. Farmers markets, upmarket food-stores, local brands - all these and other innovations will free us from the crippling spiral of imploding farm prices that results from commodity pricing and globalisation. Think about it - why pay £1/kilo for carrots in a supermarket if I have an acre of land and pay a friend or neighbour £10 per hour to grow them fresh for me in my own garden – while I focus on my own little knowledge business? At the end of the day I will be in profit. This is just one perspective on how smart rural living can work.

The High-Tech Rural Eco-Housing Model The model eco-village at Derwent Forest will show what can be accomplished by building eco-housing – not to a price point for maximum profit – but by self-build aiming at greatest value for money, with a maximum of natural materials, craft input, energy efficiency, and minimum waste.



It would be silly to predict exactly what this will be like, because we want to bring together the best thinkers in this field and give them free rein to dialogue with the prospective university faculty. CEU will be a showcase of the very best practice possible, because that’s the way we plan to do it. There are architects who know how to design both houses and settlements in tune with nature. There are builders who know how to build with the most natural materials and the greatest care and creativity. We have a developer who leads housing developments as self-build projects. Plus we have easy access to the best experts in water, energy, communication, transport, and the accumulated experience of CAT, Findhorn, Schumacher College, Fairfield and the Global Eco-Village Network. So all the ingredients are available for a high-energy dialogue and great results. We assemble a community to not just do this once, but to learn, live, teach and propagate this.

Grow Your Own House – Solve Global Warming While BedZED was built for low lifetime carbon emissions, it was still built with brick, concrete and steel, which use up a lot of carbon in their construction. Fossil fuels are burned to make all of these materials, and can never be replaced. The burned carbon as carbon dioxide is pumped in the atmosphere and, in excess, creates global warming. The ideal would be if we could take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and store it in our houses as we build them, That would be rather smart, and with the aid of trees and grass we can do it. The highest quality, most beautiful, best insulated eco-homes can be built from timber in its many forms, and from fibre composites used to create insulation panels, ceilings, roofs. High-tech forms of timber-frame, wattle-and-daub thatched, new-Elizabethan homes - bang-up-to-date, and built with care and craft – to die for. No fixed formula, but an ongoing dialogue about what works best, and lots of variety – build your own. And at the end of its natural lifecycle, a few centuries on, it can be ploughed back in the ground.

Housing Regeneration Principles

Beddington Zero Energy Development Cumbria Environmental University

• High concrete, steel, brick • High wood, fibre, biomass • Passive solar • Active solar • High density housing • Low density housing • Rooftop micro-garden (6” soil) • 1 acre garden • Developer led • Community led • Commercial housing • Social housing • Contractor built • Self build • 80% commute • 80% stay and play • Near a tube or bus • Near a fell or lake • Urban model • Rural model • £1,200 / sq. m. • Quite a lot less

And What Of The Cities? The question is whether, having seen the rural eco-village at Derwent Forest, people will be satisfied to go back even to the best kind of model urban eco-village? We have already raised questions about whether cities can ever be sustainable. Cities are giant, super-efficient, human-powered engines for soil depletion. Food is harvested, preserved and packaged with non-renewables, transported with great use of fossil fuels, and after a rest in store and refrigerator, eaten, excreted, treated and pumped out to sea. The biomass is not returned to the land to nourish the soil, so there is an additional non-sustainable



cycle where fertiliser is mined and added to the land. This picture is unsustainable beyond belief. Our soils will never recover properly from this, certainly if we carry on as we are. Note also that the chemical fertilisers we use only replace nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium (NPK) and not the other 90 or so trace minerals – all of which are vital to life. Our soils grows weak, and foods they grow are less healthy. Foods grown this way are (a) not nutritional, and (b) cancer promoting. So cities may not be such a great idea after all. What is sustainable is to recycle food waste – either uneaten, or after eating, composting it and returning it to nourish the soil. From the soil’s perspective, and that of our health and sustainability, our current cities are bad news indeed.

The City Of The Future This is one of the most expansive visions of how to create the feasible, sustainable, city of the future. Restructuring all our living space to be more beautiful, more sustainable, more integrated, more efficient, and self-sufficient. The answer is simple. Take the unsustainable city, and its equally unsustainable industrially farmed hinterland. Draw a beautiful symmetrical grid. And treat the sustainable eco-village we have created as one tile, and its adjacent farm or open space park as another. Then tile the grid, working from the outside in. The city looks like a cancer on the map, which of course is what it is, as far as the planet is concerned. Gradually, unhealthy urban concrete jungle is transformed into healthy, sustainable, balanced ecosystem. Just as unsustainable rural farms are raised to new levels of biodiversity and productivity nicely mixed with beautiful eco-villages. The total land needed to support the population reduces as diseconomies of scale are eliminated – packaging, transport, etc... This proposal comes from Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, and is based on the ancient Indian Vedic principles of Stapathya-Veda, which means ‘establishing in space-time’ – also called Vastu Shastra. Vastu is an architectural system to create housings and settlements in tune with nature, through principles starting with right orientation, right proportion & right placement. It is incredibly audacious to think to transform our cities like this. But why not? Having seen our eco-village, why will anyone want to settle for less? We rebuilt our housing stock in a generation after World War II, at the same time as expanding and rebuilding the economy and we’re rich enough to do it again at a new level. CEU would be the centre for a renaissance in quality of life throughout the country. The scale is colossal – each tile on this grid is £100-200 million – very good for Cumbria. The north-south divide is reversed as our new rural eco-housing model becomes the ideal of urban life.*

Phase I Controlling the expansion of the city by establishing a master plan with parallel road in East-West, North-South directions. Phase II Construction of ideal villages and satellite towns around the city, free from pollution, noise, and stress, set in landscaped gardens. Phase III Starting to demolish congested areas in the city centre, replacing them with beautiful gardens, parks. lakes and fountains. Phase IV Final stage of expanded garden city – providing ideal living conditions, including modern communication and transport systems.

* But when all’s said and done, we’re still living in Cumbria.



12. Organic Farming and Reforestation The Derwent Forest site includes both former farm and woodland, and the planning guidelines call for forest and farming applications. An environmental university can go well beyond simple uses, using the farm as a research and teaching centre, to provide food for the university as well as to supply and be part of the visitors centre. Cumbria hardly needs another forest park – it has plenty already and a simple forest park could hardly aim to be world class. But as part of a research and teaching effort around reforestation, the Derwent Forest Park is elevated to a higher value as part of the environmental campus. The forest is part of environmental building with biomass, as well as a positive focus on enhancing biodiversity while encouraging economic and leisure applications.

Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology The government and MAFF don’t seem to have cottoned on to the idea that the public don’t trust their advice on agriculture and foods. While well over 80% of the public are opposed to GM foods, and 100% of supermarkets are committed to not using GM ingredients for precisely these issues of consumer acceptance, the government seems committed to continuing GM trials and the introduction of GM foods. This may be connected with the GM industry having sponsored this government, and a lingering hope that it may still spark a high-tech and economic revolution. Most GM research is paid for and sponsored by biotech companies, which the public somehow do not fully trust. There is also genuinely independent research (e.g. http://www.isis.org) which has accumulated evidence to indicate that all GM strains are highly unstable and mutate wildly even within 2-3 generations. The biotech companies know this – gene splicing involves attacking the cell’s immune system with the virus that inserts the DNA sequence, which makes the cell unstable. The precautionary principle suggests this is very dangerous and that we take care. GMOs are OK maybe for medicines, but for food? Surely not yet? The research on which both sides are agreed shows the main effect of GM crops has been a massive increase in pesticide use – GM crops are mostly tweaked to be pesticide resistant. The chemicals we eat in our food, industrial products and environmental residues are a main cause of cancer, so this is hardly a finding to be pleased about. GM foods are not necessarily the answer to world hunger, and there is no evidence to suggest that farm incomes have risen as a result. The only beneficiaries so far, funnily enough, have been the biotechnology firms and agribusiness, and even they are struggling. There is, on the other hand, a quality revolution in agriculture, which the public like, which creates premium pricing and results in proven higher revenues for producers – the organic food and green farming movement…

Organic Farming and the Future “Fresh food, locally grown, eaten in season” – this is the advice given in Ayurveda, the Indian natural health care system, on a recipe for health and longevity. The simplest way to ensure an improved economy for farmers – with the interesting side-effect of a healthier population - is to make sure they get a fairer proportion of the price paid for food by consumers. At present food prices rise by a multiple between farm gate and the supermarket checkout. If this unnecessarily long supply chain is dramatically shortened with local farmers markets, the public and farmers benefit in several ways, especially with the public being sure they have fresh food, locally grown. Cumbria Environmental University will not just promote research and development on this healthy, increasingly popular, and premium priced approach to food and agriculture, but it will purchase 80% or more of its food for staff and students locally and directly from the producers. It can also promote this healthy model of living with a farmers market integrated into its visitors centre, run by students, local people and the farmers themselves. We will help local farmers convert to organic farming, and expand to more and more healthy biodiversity from current subsistence farming.

Newton Rigg Agricultural College It’s our intention to co-operate closely with Newton Rigg Agricultural College in development of an organic teaching farm, situated not just on our own campus, but involving other local farms as well, giving outplacements for our students to help local farmers and to learn from them. This is a good start to working towards integration of the diverse higher education facilities currently in Cumbria. STOP PRESS: Since the first draft, the author of ‘So Shall We Reap’, a new book on the future of sustainable agriculture, has proposed we create a College of Enlightened Agriculture at CEU.



Cumbria is very beautiful, but it is very much a monoculture – in fact it has been described as a sheep desert – the sheep preventing other forms of sustainable farming from gaining a foothold. It could have been hoped that lessons would have been learned after the foot-and-mouth outbreak, but the fells have as many sheep as pre-FMD, overstocked because of the subsidies farmers get. We can improve on this. Already the Zero Emissions approach and Integrated Biosystems have been effectively introduced in other areas with disease-prone monocultures. Often these had prices squeezed by globalisation and industrialisation of the ‘supply chain’ – i.e. the interposing of industrial giants between producers and consumers. Integrated Biosystem approaches enhance biodiversity, by building in more integrated crop systems with multiple crops and feedback loops. These create more work, but also more profit and more biodiversity while reducing and eliminating pollution. A primary effect is the relaxation of strain on soils caused by single cropping and NPK fertilisers. This is in line with latest agricultural policy that will pay farmers to look after the land – CEU will help farmers do this most productively, and with greatest return to the farmer and public.

Reforestation as an Urgent National Priority Cumbria Environmental University will run the woodland at Derwent Forest, in conjunction with Forest Enterprises, hopefully. But not just as a forest park - we will teach woodland management, and let loose generation after generation of students into making the forest park more and more interesting, more biodiverse, rich, productive and exciting. More than that, we will encourage local sustainable reforestation in massive amounts, so that the forest on campus will have lots of nearby friends.

God creates light

Trees turn light into life Man turns life into consciousness

There is an important relationship between trees and man, keeping life in balance on the planet. Trees breathe in carbon dioxide and breathe out oxygen. We do the reverse. Trees actually cool the planet while doing this – a growing tree is the opposite of a forest fire – heat and light are used for photosynthesis, gluing water and carbon dioxide together to make useful cellulose fibres, and exhaling the leftover oxygen for the other creatures that have a use for it. Virtuous circles abound. We have cut down our primordial forests to build our medieval warships, to warm our houses, to fire potteries and brick kilns, to prop our pits, and support our railways and our telegraph wires, to make our paper. And of course to build our homes. All fine and well if only we had replaced them, but we did not. While the average amount of tree cover in Europe is 25%, England only averages 11%, and it’s only 8% in Cumbria. It’s a real joy to fly over a country like Germany, where the tree cover is 33% - to see trees everywhere, alternating with villages and farmland. Lets do it here.

Global Warming To reverse global warming we have to take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. There are some really bizarre suggestions for how to do this with factories, but they are totally crazy and unnatural proposals. Far and away the best way to rip CO2 out of the atmosphere is to get a tree or growing grass to do it for you. A tree even provides active shade, and cools the air at the same time. The onlytrouble is, when trees rot down and burn, the CO2 goes back in the atmosphere. So we need to store timber very carefully, so it doesn’t rot. What better way than in our houses? If we make wood the popular building medium, then people will be motivated to grow trees for profit again. If we make wood the popular material for construction, we wouldn’t be able to grow enough of it, actually. The trick is to use timber for frames, which makes a house beautiful and strong. And then fill, or clad the outside of the frame, with thick, super-insulated blocks of cellulose fibre, preferably laminated – though in its most primitive form, straw bales will do the job. In a few years of trials we can find ways to incorporate straw and other fibres in ways that are strong and super-insulating and provide luxury housing made primarily of biomass, instead of houses built mainly of concrete, bricks, steel, and plastic, all of which use up precious fossil fuels and give off CO2 in the making. It’s quite different from the way we build most homes now, but not entirely so, and a lot closer to the way houses were built in the Elizabethan Era. The cost of wood will rise of course, but so what – that will provide more motivation for reforestation, and this must be the main parallel action of the environmental university to complement its eco-building. It’s not enough to plant one tree for



every one cut down – the ratio must be far, far, higher than that. And of course, we should be creating pleasant wood parkland, not industrial monoculture tree farms. Trees yes, but with room for variety, and animals, and woodland parks, and adventure. Working in woodland is wonderful.

Funding Overseas Development Down in the sunbelt, around the equator, there are initiatives that are pushing back the Sahara Desert, through a restoration of old farming practices updated with new ideas. And people are renewing rainforest as they learn to create more integrated biosystems rather than slashing and burning for monocultures that rapidly deplete the rather poor soils the rainforests actually sit on. Because we have been naughty in the north, we have thought up a self-imposed punishment, which is to pay for the rights to use an excess of CO2 – carbon dioxide emission credits. Before this guilt money deteriorates into just one more cynical game played with big money that exploits the developing world even more, lets think what could be done with this. There’s something even faster growing than timber that does the same job – Giant Bamboo. Giant bamboo takes carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere effectively 40 times faster than the fastest growing pine tree, according to Gunter Pauli, founder of ZERI – Zero Emissions Research and Development.

Grow Your Own Home Incredibly strong homes, earthquake-proof, hurricane-resistant, can be made with giant bamboo, using designs and construction approaches perfected by associates of ZERI. And bamboo itself can be protected from rotting by smoking in a vapour that comes from bamboo itself, rather than using expensive and damaging industrial chemicals, as has been done hitherto. So here’s the easy solution to global warming – an area the size of a tenth of the world’s former rain forest could extract carbon dioxide four times as fast as all the rain forest put together, if done using giant bamboo. With care of course – as it grows like a weed. And the local people can be paid to do this with carbon dioxide emission credits while actually building their own luxury homes. Which is nice.

Bio Steel ZERI was invited to show projects from around the world at the World Expo 2000 in Hannover Germany, as the principal, invited, environmental exhibitor. The inspiration Gunter Pauli had was to house these exhibits in a bamboo pavilion, illustrating the incredible potential of bamboo – a biological steel. A huge 40 by 16 metre bamboo pavilion was designed by Simón Vélez, foremost Columbian bamboo architect. Unfortunately, there was no building code for bamboo in Germany. Undeterred, Pauli and Vélez built a prototype in Columbia, where there are no building codes, and the locals assume things Vélez builds won’t fall down. German engineers were flown out to test it, and it was far stronger than they expected. A local variation was created in the building codes in Hannover – a single change is sometimes allowed in a building – in this case it was that the material was bamboo instead of steel. The pavilion was built, the engineering tests were repeated and permission granted to allow the public inside, the day before the World Expo 2000 opened, Because of this, there is now a European building code for bamboo. There’s an interesting and unexpected consequence from this. After World War II, the Japanese wanted to modernise and follow their western conquerors. They jettisoned traditional approaches and adopted European building codes. So now, all of a sudden, the Japanese can start building again with their own traditional materials. As a footnote, when the Pavilion had to be demolished at the end of the Expo, it was far harder than expected – it survived many different attempts to bring it down.

Woodland and Farming Roundup A managed woodland at an environmental university can be a perfectly good attraction in itself. But it will also be a focus of teaching and recreation, and simply a place for the staff and students to walk in and renew. It’s a wonderful resource and inspiration, and as part of a university it will have far more resources devoted to its development than it ever could, looked after by a few people from the Forestry Commission. The same is true of course for farmland on the site, not to mention acres of unkempt scrubland that will be improved, enriched, and made more biodiverse. The farm and woodland at Cumbria Environmental University will be a vital part of the curriculum, study, teaching and life of the new settlement, and will be enriched to serve the wider community.



13. Visitor Centre, Tourism & Leisure

We think it will be fun to build the third ZERI pavilion at Derwent Forest as our first visitor centre, It is hardly local materials, but that make it more interesting and newsworthy, and we do have a story. Building it will make a good teaching and learning experience, and establish the international character of our university.

An Interpretive Visitor Centre There’s no way out of this one, and we wouldn’t entirely want to escape even if we could. If we build a new kind of eco village, and an environmental university, people are going to want to come and see it. We might as well make a virtue of necessity – make them welcome and comfortable, and give them a good experience. What we don’t want to do is have a flood of visitors just for the sake of it, or to have our own residents and students in the eco-village living under a microscope.

A Million Visitor Days, and Counting The nice thing is that, as far as visitor impact is concerned – and Cumbria does think that way – having a university at Derwent Forest will have the economic impact of over a million visitor days. 3000 students and 500 faculty times 365 = well over a million, before even a single visitor turns up, but with far less impact on the road system. This compares quite favourably for economic effect with anything that might be achieved by any other kind of visitor centre or attraction on the site. And our people will all be staying overnight. Cumbria gets 10 million day trips a year and 14 million overnight stays, so this is a significant addition, especially as it’s in an area that gets less attention.

What Will Visitors See? We’ll have an army of students studying all aspects of sustainable living so there will be no shortage of subjects visitors can lean about. A selection of interpretive displays might include:

Accelerated Learning How to do your own self build Actualising your own dream Integrated Biosystems Adventure Leadership Lakeland Foods Appreciative Inquiry Leadership & Natural Law Building your own home Meditation and Peace Coast to Coast Cycle Trail Natural Healthcare Community building Natural Materials Composting and Recycling Organic farming Computer Networking Organic farming and natural biotechnology Community Action Our Friend the Slug Cumbrian Fell Ponies Participative Democracy Eco Housing Personal Growth & effectiveness Eco-Villages & Sustainable Settlements Reforestation Electric Cars and Fuel Cells Self-organising systems Energy Systems Solar power, wind and water energy Financial Management Stapathya-Ved – Vedic architecture Finding your own Vision Sustainable Lifestyles Foot And Mouth Disease Sustainable Transport Global warming – solutions to a crisis Woodland crafts History of Broughton Moor – ’The Dump” Woodland management Holistic education Zero Emissions How to start & grow your own business Displays on other Cumbrian Places, and more.



Jump-starting the Visitor Centre As they learned at the Eden Project, as soon as you start to build, you have already got a visitor attraction, and you might just as well make them comfortable, show them something interesting, give them tea and a cake, and take a bob or two off them. Fortunately there are existing buildings on site than can be used for this, and we have an offer from the Centre of Alternative Technology of an environmental exhibition they constructed that has been on show in several UK cities. We could have use of this and localise it to talk about the proposed university and use it as the basis of a local consultation dialogue, extending it as plans and models are developed. CAT’s exhibition has been a stimulus to Local Agenda 21 wherever it has been invited to appear. Why wait?…

Visitors versus Student, or… As the experience at CAT has shown, the one complements the other. Visitors become students. And because there is more going on than just a tourist attraction, the place is that much more of an attraction – it’s not just an entertainment created to artificially boost tourists and fleece them. Part of our student’s coursework will be about effectively communicating new ideas, so they can successfully start new initiatives when they go home. So having a visitor centre is a great excuse for creating displays, events, exhibitions, and the like, practising communication in all its forms on a continuous stream of visitors. So the place will be ever changing and ever fresh – attracting more visitors and giving students more live bodies to practice on. It should be a very lively centre.

Capability Building for Eco-Tourism Some of our students will actually be focusing on tourism and hospitality management. After all, this will be a very appropriate topic for local people, wanting to professionalize their kids, and their hotel and guest house staff. So the university will not just be a destination for tourists, but a training centre for those whose living depends on tourism. The university will actively seek not just to boost tourism in Cumbria, but to provide help and resources for those involved in tourism in Cumbria. In other words it will not compete with other tourist venues, but cooperate and help out. That can of course include making students available for practical placements, so the university can be a resource for trained help – but kept to a level that will not compete with local workers or drive down wages. How will we train our students? We will run our own cafes and restaurants on campus as commercial establishments and seek to make them as competitive and enticing as possible. One advantage we will have is organic food, and another is that they will not be doing seasonal business, but all year round with staff and students as customers. So tourism won’t be a seasonal boom-or-bust to depend on, but a nice summer bulge that simply helps boost the coffers.

Hostels and Hotels In a similar way, our students will not just live in their own student accommodation, but run it as well. Student hostels will be built as fairly small units, probably housing around 50 students in a pleasing mix of rooms and shared apartments. During term-time our leisure management students will get to run them as hostels, which is the entry-level of tourist accommodation. During holiday time we will run short courses for businesses, and our distance learning students, and we’ll need a higher quality and quantity of service for this. So our students will get to run their own term-time housing as hotels during the vacations, with their buddies earning their pin money as extra staff.

Local Bookings and The NerdMap Obviously a university has to manage its own room-space, and has occasional needs for overflow space. We will create – indeed are already involved with – a flexible online booking system that allows both easy booking of rooms, and easy management of them, and payment and so on. This will be given free to local guest houses, hotels and so on, for them to use to administer their own bookings, as well as making online booking and payment instantly available. It will also give the university access to their spare capacity when occasional extra space is needed. We have also already built a prototype computerised smart tourist map of Cumbria, the NerdMap, which allows people to keep track of which of Wainwright’s fells they have walked. So we will encourage visitors to return to Cumbria again and again to visit all the corners and ‘do all the fells’. This interactive map tells them where the nearest Youth Hostel or B&B is, and food and other visitor attractions, and will link to the booking and payments system, making Cumbrian holiday planning effortless.



14. Natural Health Care

Mens Sana in Corpore Sano A sound mind in a healthy body – that’s the old public school motto. Regrettably, with the rise of fast foods and the elimination of games, gym and free milk, our schools are not doing so much for our children’s bodies as is desirable – apart from teach contraception – we live in strange times. Our universities do even less. Despite the clearly understood connection between physical and mental health, when we want our minds to be at their best, nothing is done to condition the bodies for total health. Even though early teaching on personal health care can lead to lifelong health habits that will guarantee (well, statistically speaking) a far longer and healthier, more vital life.

Trends in Health Care A study in Australia showed that 40% of hospital visits were due to iatrogenic diseases – that is, sickness caused by the results of previous medicine. No surprise then, that other studies are showing that 40% of health practitioner visits are being made to alternative practitioners. People do not trust the old models – this is the kind of turbulence associated with a paradigm shift, the phase transition to a newer model with higher ‘implicate order’, as David Bohm calls it. Unfortunately, transition times are not necessarily the best for consumer of the emerging science and technology. Too much experimentation is going on – terrifically exciting for the practitioners, of course, but the customers and patients they are practicing on often get to be the unwitting subjects of ad-hoc trials of recently learned odds-and-ends of semi-holistic knowledge. The whole field is pretty unregulated and riddled with new cures, some of which are excellent and indeed do work miracles, but not in every case. As with drugs, the effects can be very powerful, but it does help if you can be absolutely certain which one to take, under what circumstances, when and how much. The answer is not to oppose this experimentation and exploration – you couldn’t anyway. But to shape it, encourage dialogue and carefully controlled experimentation using proper scientific method, speed up the interchange of ideas, and look for systemic models that explain a great range of the phenomena. In other words to find an encompassing and holistic new theory of health that integrates old and new. There’s no reason we should stick exclusively to the ‘tried and tested’ western allopathic system of medicine, especially when it relies almost entirely on natural products for its starting point in developing drugs. And no reason to suppress new natural models either.

Looking for Complete Systems The simplest thing to say is that we feel the topic of health and vitality is of great importance. If a diet like the Atkins system can get to the top of the national best seller list, it shows there is (a) real interest, (b) a real need, and (c) money to be made. Incidentally, the success of Atkins, which has confounded and shocked the scientific community, is almost trivially explained by the models of Ayurveda, which explain that when the desire of the body for a particular taste has been satisfied, it stops being hungry. Simple enough if you think about it – animals don’t have schooling on whether carbohydrates are good for you, so they seek out foods that satisfy a desire for a taste – it’s nature’s way of going the balancing. Tell people to eat something other than what they desire, because it’s ‘good for them’, or doesn’t have something bad, and they’ll keep on eating, because a taste isn’t satisfied. Similarly, lace food with artificial tastes, and you confuse the body. Sigh... The trick here is to take experts trained in the best western systems, and engage in a dialogue with those who understand the traditional models of other cultures, looking for common ground and understanding, and integrating the best of each system, with skill, finesse and caution.

Student and Public Health Care We will not seek to supplant the health care provided by the National Health Service, but we will take the opportunity to enter, contribute to, and benefit from an emerging new market in holistic health care. At the very least we will open a natural health care clinic, staffed by qualified western health care practitioners supervising whatever else may be on offer. Dialogue will be encouraged. Our students will be introduced to models of natural medicine and traditional health care from many cultures. Healthy herbs, foods and procedures will be available both to our own community and to visitors. Courses up to and including degree level will be available. Research will flourish.



15. Core Course on Development

Greatness starts with superb people. Great Groups and great leaders create each other. Every Great Group has strong leaders. Leaders of Great Groups love talent and know where to find it. Great Groups are full of talented people who can work together. Great Groups think they are on a Mission from God. Every Great Group has an island -- with a bridge to the mainland. Great Groups see themselves as winning underdogs. Great Groups always have a Vision and a Goal Great Groups are optimistic, not realistic. In Great Groups the right person has the right job Leaders give Great Group what they need, free them from the rest. Great Groups deliver. Great Work is its own reward.

Take Home Lessons from Organising Genius,

by Warren Bennis and Patricia Biederman

Developing a ‘Great Group’ at CEU In order to be a powerful and effective centre for innovation, Cumbria Environmental University must function as a ‘Great Group’ – a team or a set of teams that performs at exceptional levels, of the kind described by Warren Bennis in Organising Genius. It’s not enough to have an idealistic vision of what is to be accomplished – one of the deepest principles for collaborative development is that there has to be a shared language – a ‘mind set’ that allows a group to work together. Creating a shared language and ‘tool kit’ for growth and change can be all that’s needed for a corporate turnaround, as many case studies have shown – as it empowers change agents who already know what needs to be done, and creates the basis for dialogue. This can even work for whole nations, as with the relatively non-violent turnaround of South Africa from apartheid. Few of our businesses have this language and toolkit in place, and it’s not taught yet in our schools. An analogy: As the computer revolution kicked in, more and more small businesses were able to afford tools that were previously the preserve of government and corporations – who alone were able to afford the early mainframe computers. As personal computers became available, even individuals could afford them, but at first there was a major barrier. The earliest programmes were expensive and only worked in isolation. Word processors came first (Wang, then WordStar), then spreadsheets (Visicalc then 1-2-3) and databases (e.g. dbase II). But none of these could talk with each other (share data), and they had different user interfaces. Also they were very expensive. Microsoft and Apple both copied the first graphical user interface developed ay Xerox Palo Alto Research Centre, and created personal computing environments in which all programmes have a common graphical interface, and all can communicate with each other. With Apple Macintosh, and Microsoft Windows & Office – a whole toolkit for the price of one program, with a common graphic interface and shared data – the personal computer revolution kicked in and hasn’t stopped since.

In Search of Excellence With the high-tech revolution came the news that some businesses were doing things very differently. Tom Peters charted this fast and furious experimentation in In Search of Excellence, citing case studies of companies that were outperforming their MBA-led dinosaur competitors, often led by mavericks like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates who were unafraid to do things differently. By the time he wrote Thriving on Chaos, Peters had systematised this welter of management innovations into 5 neat categories – People, Leadership, Innovation, Systems and Customers. This model makes sense – see if you can add to, or remove from it. It also makes it easy to teach.



The Leadership Challenge At the same time as Peters was writing Thriving on Chaos, his colleagues Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner were independently writing up research analysing the behaviour of thousands of leaders. In The Leadership Challenge they show that leaders engage in a range of behaviours which they also, interestingly, summarised neatly in 5 key categories – leaders Embody the Way, Challenge the System, Inspire a Shared Vision, Celebrate the Path, and they Enable Others to Act.

The Learning Organisation American business gurus are great at simplifying complex structures into these simple mental models. At the same time, around the end of the eighties, MIT professor Peter Senge saw that the days of monolithic hierarchical organisations were ending, and that, just as businesses were shifting from using dinosaur mainframe computers to networked desktop machines, so the more flexible organisations were shifting from rigid hierarchies to higher performance flexible networks. Ones that weren’t were being downsized and de-layered by asset strippers – you change or die. Senge’s breakthrough was to see that just as personal computers run on different software than mainframes, different competencies, knowledge and skill sets are needed to survive and thrive in human networks. In an insight gained in meditation, Senge described in The Fifth Discipline, his cognition of the five disciplines needed by individuals co-operating in a Learning Organisation. They are Personal Mastery, Team Learning, Systemic Thinking, Shared Vision, and Mental Models – the communication skills needed for packaging and passing on what you’ve learned. Senge’s works are the architectural template for the new organisational structure that will be built at Cumbria Environmental University. CEU will be a network of highly independent and yet totally synergistic think-tanks, each flying way ‘outside the box’ of the conventional wisdom, and pushing the envelope of research in their field, simultaneously teaching it to students in their faculty, embedding best practice in the daily life of the community, and passing it on to business partners.

Parallel Models of Development? There is a striking structural similarity in the works of Peters, Kouzes & Posner, and Senge, with each model having five main components. This seems beyond coincidence. Senge’s and Peters’ models dock quite nicely – Senge’s Personal Mastery fits Peters’ People, Team Learning in a network is the core Leadership skill, Shared Vision has the same integrating effect as Peters’ Systems, and Senge’s Fifth Discipline, Systemic Thinking (The ability to see the whole picture, to live outside the box) is the key skill for systemic Innovation. Finally, Mental Models are about communicating new paradigms and ideas with Customers – building brands, etc. Quite neat, but Kouzes and Posner’s five behaviours don’t fit so easily, being more of a fractal-like expansion on just one of Peters’/Senge’s categories – Leadership and Team Learning. So what is going on?

The Fundamentals of Progress This simultaneous evolution of congruent models of progress by business in the west was foreshadowed and predicted 15 years earlier in The Science of Creative Intelligence. SCI is the core course on consciousness taught by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi to westerners, to go with TM, his Transcendental Meditation Technique. In a block on general evolutionary principles, Maharishi describes five Fundamentals of Progress – natural principles of growth that will be found in every discipline, repeated in every layer from the subtlest to the grossest laws.

These sets of fundamental development principles evolved by different western business gurus in different fields dock perfectly on Maharishi’s Fundamentals of Progress – Stability, Adaptability, Purification, Integration and Growth, which act as a kind of Rosetta Stone to translate between different development tools. Mastery of any one discipline would make you at home with all – just as mastery of a single personal computer programme means you can run pretty much any other.



Towards an Integrated Approach Maharishi predicted that the principles behind the most ancient cognitions of the laws of nature – Indian Vedic Science, would turn up in the works of popular western authors. This seems strange on the face of it, but he is not saying they are nicking his ideas or studying Hinduism, so much as asserting that the most profound researchers will be diving deep into their own consciousness and coming up with the laws of nature in their field, which are the fundamental laws of consciousness. And that these are same everywhere, and were cognised by Vedic Rishis thousands of years ago. It is no surprise to discover the Fundamentals of Progress fit the ancient Indian Vedic model of nature – Prakriti (with a total of 8 layers – the 5 manifest ‘great elements’ and 3 unmanifest unified aspects of consciousness). The Prakriti model also aligns perfectly with the latest n=8 superstring / unified field theories in quantum physics. Conclusions: [1] that the deepest western and eastern models of nature are congruent, and probably equivalent, once semantic differences are removed. [2] that all development and evolutionary processes necessarily map onto this structure. So what we in the west call the Unified Field, is called consciousness in the East, and the smart money says they are one and the same. Many scientists still disagree with this ‘new paradigm’, but “no-one ever gained a competitive advantage by following the crowd.” Progress is for those who move. So it turns out to be no coincidence that the most popular models of development in the west have five main elements – it has to that way to match the structure of evolution in nature. Understanding this gives one a clear lead in creating an integrated development toolkit. It validates the models of Peters, Senge, and Kouzes and Posner, as well as many others, and gives a common framework for integration. This model can be used for diagnosing what’s needed, and allows one to improve and develop many of the models, because the foundation principles in consciousness are explicit.

The Development Toolkit A draft full toolkit has now been assembled, of the best western development tools to match Senge’s five disciplines. This will be the common development core course at Cumbria Environmental University. It’s a full kit of tools and techniques, and a common language for creating a Learning Community, built by integrating the most successful western applications for personal mastery, team learning, systemic thinking, shared visioning and mental models, with eastern techniques for developing consciousness. It’s will be hard to beat this theory of everything – the one western approach that comes close is Spiral Dynamics which matches this structure perfectly (of course) and adds to mental models. Many more models have been found in many different fields that are congruent with this structure, and this includes a reasonable sampling of religions and their practical tools to help people grow. The Five Pillars of Islam are an excellent case in point, as are Ashtanga (eight limbed) Yoga, the Eightfold Path in Buddhism, and the Chinese 5 Elements (+ Yin/Yang and the Tao – 5 +2 +1 = 8).

A Distinct Evolutionary Advantage – ‘Competition is for the Competent’ Our focus at CEU will be to use these tools for a multi-cultural common language around progress. This model will evolve and grow as a result of an ongoing dialogue, but the structure is unlikely to change much - this model of evolution has been good enough for the creation of the universe so far. Because most universities are fragmented into faculties and departments, and students attend very different courses, it is novel for students to attend a core programme in development – which includes personal growth, community, leadership, sustainable innovation, shared visioning and communication. It gives students an edge in integrating other courses; and CEU a lead in research around this holistic framework. CEU consulting work in business & government will also benefit.



16. Personal Effectiveness and Community Leadership

The Further Reaches of Human Nature Psychologist Abraham Maslow took the unusual step of working with people who didn’t have problems. He was interested to see if he could discover the signs, symptom and causes of psychological health, rather than mental illness. This is a key aspect of the positive change approach featured in the next section – put attention on the desired outcome, rather than the problem. This is not a soppy ‘feel good’ approach – if you have a burst car tyre, you still fix it. It does not ignore challenges or problems. In fact Maslow was able to document the exact sequence of the kinds of problems faced by high achievers – people who he termed self-actualised. This does not mean they were conventionally rich, but people who had started life with a vision – what Maslow called a Peak Experience – and then achieved or actualised it, whatever it may have been. In every case there was a series of challenges to be surmounted between the vision – the flash of insight or even mystical experience – and actualising this vision in the real, physical world. These self actualising people were all very much at ease with themselves and the world – in short, fulfilled. They have pursued a personal vision of happiness and achieved it – a rare accomplishment. The challenges are a series of needs that have to be taken care of in order to move to the next stage of actualising the vision. Maslow called it a Hierarchy of Needs. First, physical needs for survival, then safety needs for comfort, social needs, esteem needs, and what Maslow called being needs – spiritual needs. This hierarchy maps perfectly on the five Fundamentals of Progress model of development outlined in the last section, which is nice. The question is, for an environmental university, is there a way to finesse Maslow’s hierarchy of needs? To help people have a vision and actualise it efficiently, effectively, rather than struggle to figure it out alone?

The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People Some in the media dismissed Stephen Covey as a flaky New Age guru, after the success of The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. Nothing could be further from the truth – do journalists actually read the books? Covey studied 200 years of success literature, excised flaky materialist get-rich-quick mumbo-jumbo, distilling simple, honest, natural growth principles into a rational, and logical structure. To get results you must be prepared to do the work – this is Covey’s Habit 1 – Be Proactive. Effective people go for it step by step, they are not dreamers or reactive automata. This is the starting point – throw a six to begin the game. Covey has mapped out a chart through a territory he calls the Maturity Continuum – from early dependence, through independence (the false goal) to interdependence. Covey explains that we can only achieve anything in life through relationships, and then gives the principles for success, starting with 2 more habits which he calls personal victories (= Senge’s discipline of personal mastery) before going on to public victories – interpersonal habits / disciplines. Behind the terminology lie deep principles in nature… Habit 2 – Begin with the End in Mind – have a vision. Habit 3 – First Things First – know how to plan and prioritise. Each is obvious, but to really get this – to wire them in as proactive habits - may take a day of learning per habit and weeks of practice to overcome our earlier defective education in effectiveness. Whether parents or schools are to blame, paradigms still need to shift.

Physiological needs survivalSafety Needs comfort

Social needs emotional

BeingNeeds

Esteem needs

Peak Experience

Self Actualisation

Abraham MaslowThe Further Reaches of Human Nature

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs



Covey’s theme isn’t self-centredness, but principle-centredness – tuning into the laws of nature. In a ruthlessly competitive world, Covey’s fourth habit, the first interpersonal one, is Think Win-Win. Just getting this across as the optimum success strategy to a group of hardened sales people in a do-or-die corporation shows what bad habits we are in – when even the customer is seen as the enemy, to be beaten in the game. But Covey’s paradigm is provable, valid, and it can be learned. Covey’s 5th Habit is just as radical – Seek First to Understand and Then To Be Understood – in order to think win-win, I need to know what you really want. Interpersonal communication is vital. With all these in place, Habit 6 is possible – Synergise – the act of creation in which together we co-create something which transcends our personal ‘wins’, to create something that includes and exceeds both. For Covey, the act of creation comes from The Gap – the space between stimulus and response, in which the whole world of responses is possible, depending on your world view – on what your life is centred round. Covey teaches natural law – principle-centredness – instead of wealth, relationships, pleasure, possessions – as the basis for an effective life. Covey’s first habit – Be Proactive – means ‘throw a six to start the game’. His seventh, Sharpen the Saw, means loop back to the start, keep living the habits. Covey’s Habits 2-6 map on to Maharishi’s Fundamentals of Progress. Covey’s Gap is consciousness – the loom that spins our material universe, the source of synergy. Covey has cognised deep spiritual principles of growth.

The maturity continuum, growing from dependence to independence as a basis for interdependence, parallels the technology continuum, the shift from mainframes to personal computers that segues into the Internet. The implication is that to make best use of the Internet, an enterprise must have an interdependent culture. Which is why the dinosaurs find it hard to learn how to dance.

Five Disciplines for a Learning Community Peter Senge’s first discipline for a Learning Community in The Fifth Discipline is Personal Mastery. A learning community needs stable, highly effective people, with personal discipline. Unstable joiners are a drain on communities. Unstable people need therapeutic, not learning communities – if we provide this at CEU, it will be with a firewall from the learning environment. For personal mastery, perhaps surprisingly in a book by an MIT professor, Senge talks of Metanoia – turning within - the early Christian meditation technique. Modern scientific research on transcendental meditation shows it produces highly coherent brain waves, with signatures of both very deep rest and also heightened alertness. These are characteristic of emerging higher-order brain function, and correlate with positive qualities – higher IQ, creativity, moral reasoning, health, happiness. CEU will research and teach best practice in personal mastery and development, teaching the skills and competencies of personal mastery and interpersonal effectiveness, using models from leading thinkers and guest faculty like Senge & Covey.

Team Learning and Community Leadership Senge’s second discipline is Team Learning. This fits with Tom Peter’s sets of prescriptions for Leadership in Thriving on Chaos, and goes with Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner’s five leadership behaviours in The Leadership Challenge. But there’s a difference, in that leadership is a more macho concept associated with top-down hierarchical command-and-control organisations. The more flexible, networked learning community needs a self-organising structure for leadership, distributed through the community not just in special ‘leaders’; this is what Team Learning means.

Interdependence

Dependence

Independence

The Internet

Mainframes

PCs

Brainwave coherence in TM

Correlates with:� Higher IQ� Creativity - Ōaha!Õ� Moral reasoning� Happiness� Health- no worries!



And it means more than this, in the context of building a Great Group. In Organising Genius, Warren Bennis shows that groups of ordinary people sometimes shift to an extraordinary level of heightened rapport and performance. This has also been documented by psychologist M. Scott Peck who has a special knowledge of group processes. In The Different Drum, Peck describes a group process model which he calls The Four Stages of Community Building. Peck observed that at first people in groups often behave formally, with outward uniformity used to paper over inner differences. All singing from the same hymn sheet, and observing etiquette, for politeness. This stage, which Peck calls pseudo-community, preserves social norms, rather than challenging them. It is clearly not a learning state which is going to push any envelope. Peck observes a next stage which he calls chaos, when someone brave or challenging says something that rocks the boat. How is the group going to handle this? In a robust group (and this is why personal mastery is essential) people have the strength to handle challenges, and to ride with the punches. If people can’t handle this chaos, they may react by organising the group back into pseudo-community – this is how innovation is stifled in organisations – management can’t handle a Prague Spring, and the tanks roll in – the perceived rebellion is stopped, dissidents suppressed, and opportunity lost. With strong enough people or good facilitation, chaos can be held and allowed to take its course. People are encouraged to be authentic and say what they need to say, or listen with respect, without necessarily resolving differences. When this happens, after some time Peck observes a shift to his third stage of community – emptiness, in which differences are accepted and valued, even if unresolved. Then, the group may spontaneously shift to the exalted state of higher communication, order and effectiveness Peck calls Community. Groups shift into community at a moment’s notice in crises, but Peck has observed the stages, and trained facilitators to help ordinary groups make this shift. Peck describes Community as A Group of All Leaders, and this is what we are after. This is the state which Great Groups reach, in which they accomplish the extraordinary, and do things other organisations can only dream of.

Group Coherence. What Peck has observed and learned to facilitate has parallels in the quantum-mechanical world. Just as meditation creates brain wave coherences, this is replicated and expanded in advanced group meditation (the TM –Sidhi programme), creating brain wave coherence across the whole group – and creating coherence in others outside the group. Peck’s Community Building group process accomplishes something similar – authentic communication helps people tune in to each other’s brainwaves, and shift to a heightened level of awareness – coherent group consciousness. The shift from ordinary light to laser light, from normal wiring to a superconductor, is the shift from coherence (zero entropy, perfect order) at the microscopic level of life to coherence at the surface, macroscopic level of life, The DNA in our cells is already in a state of perfect order, but we only have an advantage if we can shift to access perfect order at the surface. Coherence is a state of frictionless flow, effortless learning and spontaneous right action. It is a creative state, fully in tune with inner nature. The perfect state for Team Learning and for being in a Great Group. We’ll use it.

A New Level of Consulting Practice Clearly, when we can access higher brain functioning at will, we have something of a competitive advantage over people still teaching and using classical development tools. Our semiconductors, microprocessors, fibre optics and high tech tools all rely on quantum mechanical coherence for their functioning. We are simply bringing this to play in our own lives, businesses and consulting. We will research and use community building, dialogue and group meditation for Team Learning.



17. Zero Emissions and Appreciative Inquiry

A synthesis of Stephen Covey’s Highly Effective People and Scott Peck’s Community Building (Highly Effective Teams) was instrumental in producing one of the most spectacular corporate turnarounds of the last decade. Unilever turnaround artist Tex Gunning took UVGN, a failing meat factory in Holland (hardly high tech), sorted out deep, systemic, quality and morale problems, then segued with upward take-over of the rest of Unilever’s food companies in Holland, doubling stakeholder value in five years.

- see To the Desert and Back by Phil Mirvis et al. www.tothedesertandback.com

Getting the Ducks in a Row Imagine a set of stepping stones with one missing in the middle. Crossing the river becomes much more difficult, and you are just as likely to turn around at step two and go back. This is what can happen with Scott Peck’s community building process. Readers of the last two sections will have noted a general evolutionary model with five elements, and that Pecks’ community building group process has only 4 stages. They map perfectly on the model, but in the order 1, 2, … , 4, 5 – with a middle step missing? This makes the step from chaos to emptiness too much like hard work, and it only succeeds in Peck’s model with strong facilitation or a very emotionally mature group. Peck’s model is weakened by this flaw, and by the failure to develop a process that works as a stand-alone product without strong facilitation. As a result FCE, his Foundation for Community Encouragement, underachieved and collapsed. Too bad, as Peck’s brilliant model is fairly easily tweaked, completed & rectified using the Fundamentals of Progress for diagnosis and tune-up.

To The Desert And Back Our formative consulting experience with Tex Gunning at Unilever in Holland shows that as you progressively teach a learning community the disciplines Senge recommends, the work group becomes more and more emotionally intelligent, and empowered, and a network of natural leaders emerges quite independently of the formal hierarchy in the organisation. Innovation becomes the order of the day. It’s very exciting for young people to be part of a great group, with a strong transition figure who allows free rein for creative energy and provides a resilient sounding board. We went in different directions after the ‘Top Teams’ community building training. Tex had rightly and intuitively insisted on adapting Peck’s model to make up for weakness, so his own natural leaders could facilitate their own groups. Peck’s FCE was unable to absorb this lesson, or the suggestion that their Team Training segues perfectly from Covey’s Highly Effective Individuals. Tex went on to visioning, FCE folded. I had my next task, to research tools for Systemic Thinking.

The Fifth Discipline The whole point of Senge writing his book was to say one specific thing, which is that people in business don’t know how to think systemically. They don’t see the big picture, they don’t think holistically. Senge illustrates this three ways. First with an exercise, The Beer Game, which shows that business systems are designed for failure and are not self adaptive. Then by giving examples of innovations that are not simply linear, but bring together a holistic collection of design elements, such as the DC-3 Dakota transport plane. Finally - Senge’s own book is such an example, because while talking about one key discipline, he integrates the other four that fit together with it. Senge also says this model is probably the DC-3 version and a jet plane might be possible. We were inspired to build the jet, by finding the best western tools that are practical expansions on each of Senge’s disciplines, and by integrating these directly with the eastern Vedic techniques for developing consciousness appropriate for each of these disciplines – so far, Covey’s Seven Habits and meditation for Senge’s Personal Mastery, and Peck’s community building and the group process of meditation for Senge’s Team Learning. Time now to tackle Systemic Thinking, which although Senge calls it his fifth discipline, is actually third in the natural Vedic progression. So Tex has skipped a step and gone racing ahead. No great error as long as come back & fills in.

Tex Gunning



Systemic Thinking Tools What do you do if an American Business Professor tells you, and proves to be true, that you are incapable of thinking in a particular way, and that it is vital for a sustainable future that you change. In most cases the answer is roar ahead regardless. Some companies heard Senge and changed. The trouble is that at the time, most of the genuinely systemic thinking tools were living on another planet and speaking another language. I had the privilege of attending a course on Permaculture, developed by Australian Bill Mollison – a truly systemic methodology, using very deep observation of nature to distil and apply natural law and growth principles, to see all the interactions in an ecosystem, and learn to think and work with them. But how does that fit in a chemical plant? Permaculture works with a different mind set, and a different language from business. Could these principles still apply? Hard to get a permaculture course going in a business so instead we tried a Covey Seven Habits course with environmental groups in Lancashire. Sure enough, they all said the Seven Habits are the exact principles of sustainable development, expressed in a language business can access. So far, so good. Then a long search followed for a systemic thinking tool business can understand, that fits the five fundamentals model. The research took in Bionomics, Factor 4, Factor 10, Chaordic Systems, Natural Step, BS19000, and more. And the winner was:

Zero Emissions Developed By Gunter Pauli while working at The United Nations University in Japan. Formerly with Ecover and a Euro MP, Pauli is a charismatic autocrat, a man with a mission and a vision. He wrote two books, Breakthroughs and Upsizing – More Wealth, More Jobs, and No Pollution that carry the message of zero emissions. Briefly, if you can do something with no waste it is sustainable. Actually, that’s pretty easy to understand. But a simple case shows we don’t do it: Beer is a common enough product. Malt + hops + water+ barley -> Beer. Easy. But there’s waste water, and waste grain. In fact only 6% of the biomass of the barley is converted by the yeast to alcohol. The rest goes to waste. Landfill, or burned, or fed to cattle who, well, fart it out as methane. Look what happens when you add in zero emissions and really think what might be possible in an integrated biosystem. A brewery in Namibia grows mushrooms on the grain waste, which creates a cash crop and converts cellulose to protein. Then worms, fed on that, feed fish in a fish farm. This waste then actually does feed cattle who create biogas that… And so on and so on. And the point is all this is done with free ingredients that would have been waste. Why don’t we do this? Because our western MBA thinking says “think core products”. Our marketing people aren’t thinking about anything like the production process and what other jobs and profit could be created. They simply aren’t wired that way. The Namibia example is quite outrageous, but even easier is to take the waste and use it as a flour substitute. Bake bread, and for every litre of beer you get a kilo of bread, pretty much for free. Crazy not to do this, eh? In Namibia now, they have a law that says if you want to open a new factory, you must either (a) have an environmental impact statement or (b) have it be a Zero Emissions plant – because there is no environmental impact. But how do you get to this point? Namibia also now has a university where MSc students learn the Zero Emissions methodology.



The Zero Emissions MSc Programme The concept of Zero Emissions is dead easy and obvious. The practice takes some smarts. You look at your processes for waste. You see where they could be used as an input. You make breakthroughs (needs research, and smart people). You cluster businesses so waste from one is input to another. You replicate. ZERI works by using very experienced old souls who know how nature works, Multi-disciplined scientists, and using them to teach a new generation of science students not to over-specialise, but to cross-train, co-operate, and work in multi-disciplinary teams. It’s Masters education, but different from what we know. This is explosive for business, except we don’t know how to do it. Most businesses are so focused on their core process that they have no idea what their wastes could be used for, and are in any case too functionally fragmented to be able to make the decision to change. That’s where a new university comes in acting as a consultancy. It has the overview, the freedom to conduct research, to import processes that already work, to help structure synergistic clusters. Fulfilling these roles, an environmental university can facilitate a whole new generation of sustainable industrial growth.

An Entire Regional Economy Cumbria being what it is, let’s briefly look at what happens when you add zero emissions to an entire agricultural economy. In this case study, the coffee economy in Colombia, hard hit by globalisation, and with heavy sanctions against diversifying into the other main profitable cash crop – cocaine. When you drink coffee, you’re only drinking about 0.2% of the actual biomass of the crop. Knowing that, a whole riot of other cycles can be built in. Mushrooms, worms, cattle food, cattle, biogas, and other cycles that yield bananas, bioplastics, natural pesticides and so on. The whole economy shifts from a single cash crop, monoculture, to multiple cycles that includes subsistence food crops alongside the cash crops for export. The farmers – bottom line – are not being screwed any more. This looks easy in an agricultural system and of course zero emissions is easiest with natural systems. This is good news for Cumbrian sheep farmers. But ZERI methodology works equally well in industry. In Japan billions of yen are spent on ZE research. The first zero emission electronics park opened, with plants clustered for zero waste.

Sustainable Development Sorted So it turns out that the dilemma that faced the USA in 2000 – Bush vs. Gore – economic growth or sustainability, was based on a false premise – that sustainability was incompatible with growth. It isn’t, as long as your growth is conducted with no waste. The research results are in – wherever zero emissions scientists have sought to make breakthroughs they have succeeded. Actually, this is a principle of consciousness – seek and ye shall find. Knowing this, unsustainable industrial development is obsolete. We should realise that we never need to trade pollution for jobs again.

ZeroEmissions

Process

ZeroEmissions

Process

WasteStart where anywaste is being

made

ClusterBring togetherbusinesses so

waste streams are inputs

DiversifyReplicate Zero

Emissions processes in the biosystem

InputsDiscover where

Waste could be Used as input

BreakthruFind ways to convert

waste into inputs- wealth & work

Zero EmissionProcess

Growth

Integration Purification

Stability

Adaptability



A New Model of Sustainable Growth When a ZERI Expert was invited to be keynote speaker at a conference on rebuilding East Timor soon after it became independent, the government in exile had already set a goal of having both economic growth and sustainable development – knowing it was impossible. But they got a ZERI consultant – seek and ye shall find. In the dialogue it turned out the tourism minister ran the coffee plant, with 6,000 tons of waste a year. What to do? Grow $2.5 million worth of mushrooms. The point is that even the politicians got it. An Australian ministerial adviser got up and said ‘this is what we need for smart government’ – their version of ‘joined-up thinking’. Politicians are smart - he could instantly see that he could sell this easy idea to the voters – no more pollution with zero emissions – and that way get re-elected. And at the same time he wouldn’t have to put too big a squeeze on his donors, because the message is ‘sharpen up a bit, and make more profit’. It’s good for voters, its good for business, and very good for universities, who teach the methodology, and do the research to make the breakthroughs. Hence CEU’s programme for R&D partnerships.

Sharing This Vision This vision has to be popularised in society. There’s no need for environmentalists to be opposed to business, and saying we have to make less impact, when in fact all we have to do is make no waste, and then there isn’t a limit to growth anymore. The book that shook the Club of Rome in the 60s, the Forrester-Meadows Report The Limits to Growth, is outdated using zero emissions technology, because it was based on the premise that growth must mean rising pollution. This would still be true, but with zero emissions, our industrial production can take a new direction. The question is, how to get people to build this into what they are doing. What is the change process?

Appreciative Inquiry (AI) Fourth of Senge’s disciplines for a learning community is Shared Vision. In a old fashioned hierarchically organised business, strategy is set at the top, and executed at the bottom of the hierarchy. The general issues the orders, and the troops merrily set off towards the machine guns. It never did work so well, did it? But in a network, how do we design strategy? Who tells everyone to do zero emissions? How do I get you to do something for me? Covey’s win-win thinking helps, but there’s actually a whole process for enabling groups to dialogue and come up with great ideas, better than they would achieve as individuals. It’s called Appreciative Inquiry and it works like this. The charming assumption is that we all have some kind of positive core of good experiences. Given Maslow’s research on peak experiences, and the science that shows there’s a unified field, this turns out to be a fair starting point. In the five step 5D Appreciative Inquiry process, we first set a direction for inquiry. What’s the situation we want to change. If it’s a problem, define it in terms of the solution. War? Well, what about people’s positive experiences of peace? We set people to interview each other, and lo and behold, we get amazing stories. Another positive outcome is that people get to know more about each other and learn things they might never have known. This is AI’s Discovery phase. Then groups meet and start to look for common shared themes. Because we are all humans, this works. We start to Dream what might be possible and set targets for further exploration. Then we go on to set some pretty outrageous propositions about a desired future - ‘we never fight anymore’. This starts to Design the future – not with a business plan, but by doing something more powerful – creating images of what we want. We focus on the desired outcome, not a problem we’re trying to solve. Amazingly, it works, better than problem solving ever did. Again it uses the same principle of consciousness – seek and ye shall find. Then we start to Design how to achieve the desired images. And it works… We have summarised Appreciative Inquiry here. If it sounds simplistic or naïve, don’t be fooled. Just as big corporations are using something that sounds idealistic like Zero Emissions to make

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Dive!Choose the positive

as the focus of inquiry

DesignCreate shared images for a

preferred future

DestinyFind innovative ways to create

that future

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stories of life-giving forces

DreamLocate themes,

Select topics for further inquiry

“ The Positive Core ”

Growth

Integration

Purification

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Adaptability



profits (OK, eliminating waste, creating jobs and increasing biodiversity are side effects) people are using Appreciative Inquiry to create shared images of how to do things better, whether in business, or in government, or in communities. AI is used for strategic planning, for conflict resolution, for counselling, for environmental consultation. And, as we say, a whole lot more. AI was designed by a David Cooperrider, a PhD student at Case-Western Reserve University in Cleveland Ohio, and it’s actually based on profound theories of positive change and social construction, which replace the old problem-solving models we have – the language of social; deficit that labels problems and makes them hard to go away. AI sets goals, and achieves them.

These two diagrams illustrate the difference between the classical approach to change that is draining and ineffective, and the new quantum-mechanical approach that takes the positive and builds on it to achieve what people want, and so energises people. Why not do things like this?

ZE and AI at CEU We’ve already looked at two methodologies for personal development and enhancing relationships – personal mastery, and building community and leadership – team learning. Now, these are seen to be the foundation on which two more tools come in to play to achieve sustainable change in the world. Appreciative Inquiry is actually one example of a family of tools for Shared Vision, and for achieving positive change ‘at the speed of imagination’, as one book on AI puts it. Without understanding how systemic thinking tools work, and how to think holistically, it’s hard – impossible actually - to create the most exciting and beneficial shared vision. As an example, Tex Gunning at Unilever used shared visioning to achieve a legacy of growth, and profits do keep on rising. But if they had Systemic Thinking as a resource at the Dream stage of visioning, what then? They might have formed images of a food company that educates its customers with foods that promote health and longevity. Chicken Tonite, Liptonice and Cup-a-Soup are great high-profit snack foods, but a real legacy of growth is about growing people & health, not just profits.

An Integrated Toolkit Both Zero Emissions and Appreciative Inquiry are being used to achieve amazing results in different places around the world. And so are The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People and Community Building. Apart from Peter Senge and Tex Gunning, few people have thought to understand that these are tools that works together and can be used together to achieve far more.



Just as Microsoft Office is a very balanced set of tools that work together to achieve almost any desired result on a computer, these tools of the mind can all be used together to achieve pretty much any desired result in a society. Using these together and in concert, and having them as a common language for change and development will give our students a huge advantage at CEU. And it will enable us to go into consulting situations with tools that outperform anything any other teaching or consulting outfit has on offer, and to be absolutely certain of that. For clients, we can guarantee positive results in any situation except terminal decline. And even then, there’s rebirth!

Inside-Out Change This is because our tools work at every level of change and they work in an integrated way. So we can go in and see what’s needed, what would give fastest results, and start to teach it right away. And we do mean teach, rather than apply, say. Stephen Covey explains that you can’t impose change. People carry on doing what they’ve always done until they see things differently. So change has to start from the inside out. So to improve my relationship with others, first I work on myself and my personal integrity and effectiveness. If I’m more trustworthy, others will trust me. By working from the inside on the effectiveness of teams, we can achieve a transformation in an organisation. And if we work from our communities, we can transform the environment. These tools we have been looking at work at every level of this hierarchy of circles that expand from self, through relationships, groups, organisations and community, all the way out to the environment.

Return To Rio If we go back to our Rio Earth Summit Agenda 21 model, we now see that instead of overlapping circles, we have constructed a toolkit that makes these circles completely concentric. Individual growth is the basis of societal growth. Working in teams in organisations or networks, we create economic growth. Using the tools of zero emissions this is without waste, and using tools like appreciative inquiry, the shared enterprise is working to achieve everyone’s goals. Scaled up yet again to the level of the community, we find we are enriching our environment. Fully integrated growth.

Vedic Tools This completes the full mental toolkit. For the next stage of evolution of society - covered in the next section on peace, sustainability and evolution, we will complement our mental tools with tools that work directly at the level of consciousness. We’ve already mentioned individual and group meditation. Just to complete the picture, the section on health care mentions Ayurveda, the traditional natural health care system of India. It’s a deeply systemic view of the human body. Working with this, one starts to see the body not just as a collection of organs, but as a perfectly balanced and potentially self-organising system, that also integrates fully with nature. The result is a kind of consciousness that is fully awake to wholeness – perfect for systemic thinking. In the same way, the Indian Vedic culture, which was sufficiently advanced 5000 years ago that they could do plastic surgery, split a hair longitudinally 60 times, and had an model of the solar system so advanced that a village astronomer could forecast solar and lunar eclipses exactly from the ‘orbit’ of the ascending and descending lunar nodes known as rahu and ketu. Because we only started to figure this out 400 years ago, we simply don’t believe these 5000 year old texts. Start to learn these classic models – it’s surprisingly easy – and you understand man’s place in the cosmic cycles. And that is the perfect consciousness for doing shared visioning. So at CEU we will integrate the best western tools, and synergise them with eastern consciousness techniques.

Return to RioHow Much Overlap?

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EnvironmentEconomic

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?!

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Is it Rio?

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Integrated - Perfect Overlap?



18. A Global Vision

Shared Vision The vision of Cumbria Environmental University is build a place where people can come and discover their own vision, and learn how to achieve this in the context of a learning community. Unfortunately there is a Catch 22 in this, as the university’s vision may not match your own, and would then be imposing one from outside - people have their own goals, and are increasingly reluctant to buy into someone else’s idea of what may be best or right for them. “Better death on one’s own path than life in that of another”, as the saying goes. Rather than be paralysed into inaction by a kind of mental Gordian knot, we have to cut through this into satisfying action. The answer we have chosen is to plan to build a place with a continuous ongoing dialogue about finding personal vision, and about building shared visions at the same time. We take as our starting point a current synthesis of enlightened visions, and the best tools we can find to date for building shared vision and actions collaboratively, such as appreciative inquiry and open space. Fortunately, the experience of using these tools is that, given a chance to participate in a visioning process, we all have some inner peak experience to contribute, and we are ourselves enriched by sharing this with others and hearing about their own ‘positive core’. The outcome tends to be something that includes everyone’s vision, and which everyone feels is part of them. Interestingly, this is not some kind of soppy, gooey, impractical utopianism – these tools can work in situations of deeply rooted conflict to produce practical initiatives that resolve the core conflicts, and processes that enable people to dig themselves out of the holes they or others have created. The same positive change tools, based on a theory of social construction, work just as well in business and other areas of society, and are indeed being show to dramatically outperform the most effective problem solving tools hitherto used by the most successful corporations. These tools will be at the core of the university’s programmes for personal growth, social regeneration, business development and environmental reconstruction, pretty much guaranteeing success.

World View No man is an island, etc… Einstein referred to the ‘profound illusion of individuality’, indicating his belief – indeed his understanding – that at some deep and fundamental level we are connected. Our western models are of a material world structured on subtler and subtler layers of elementary particles, energy fields, space-time and an underlying unified field – the superstring. An emerging new science shows startling parallels with the ancient Indian Vedic worldview of nature, Prakriti, as a progressive manifestation from cosmic spirit of self, intellect, mind, space-time, and the subtle and gross energy and matter fields. Many scientists now believe that these models are the same. There are many consequences of this emerging view, as there are whenever a major ‘paradigm shift’ occurs. But this shift is the most fundamental one possible, to the idea that consciousness itself is the fundamental field in the universe. The material paradigm suggests consciousness is an interesting side effect resulting from material evolution by random mutation and natural selection, that happens to have resulted in sentient beings. But even the material model is now based on an underlying transcendent field. If consciousness is this start point, it is far more likely that conscious beings will emerge –an altogether simpler and far more profound model of conscious evolution. If we are ‘shifting the poles’ of our world view – from matter as the prime mover to consciousness as the main player, the consequences are bound to be the most profound. And as always in science and entrepreneurship, the opportunities will be greatest for those who understand the new model and the practical opportunities it presents, and run with it rather than stay stuck in the mud.

Mission Having said the above, there is an important piece of work to be done as foundation to any kind of emerging global civilisation. This is that the great problems besetting mankind – poverty, famine,



disease, injustice, conflict, etc, are entirely inappropriate to a vision of mankind as an emerging highly evolved being, and should be sorted, pronto, without further ado or political dissembling. So the founding mission of an environmental university must be to tackle these problems at source and of course that is not by treating the problems, but by introducing their solutions en masse – integrated development that creates wealth, health, jobs, higher education, freedom and justice. Nevertheless, just for the record, our mission is to join with others to eliminating these blemishes. There was a sign in Bill Clinton’s campaign room which read “It’s the economy, stupid.” – meaning the economy was the issue. Well, for us, these are the equally self-evident central issues we face:

• Famine • Shelter • War • Human Rights • Disease • Water • Education • CO2 Levels • Poverty • Work • Soil Depletion • GM Foods

Principles for Uniqueness Whether you believe you can do something, or that you cannot - you are right.

Individual Excellence. There is a principle in Education, that we pick an area where a child is good at something, and develop that, and out of this come a world of possibilities. This is far more effective for developing than focusing on weaknesses or trying to correct negativity. Giving a child a label can result in self-fulfilling prophecies. Better to pick on a unique strength, and nurture that. Institutional Excellence. This principle transfers to the field of education itself – schools are now being encouraged to pick an area of excellence, as this will create excellence in other areas. It allows for more diversity too, instead of uniformity. City Technology Colleges show how excellence can be wired in at the start. There is a danger in education, to homogenize, to blend into the bland, to create commodity products that all look alike, and are assessed on a single scale. When we focus on performance tables to the exclusion of all else, we miss the opportunity to be unique. Regeneration. In economic regeneration, two apparently conflicting drives can also be seen. Uniqueness can create a terrific pull, so we want flagship, World Class projects. But it is very difficult to create something entirely new. We want something 'like the Eden Project' or 'like Tate Modern'. By definition, these have already been done, and any attempt at a second can only be second best. Cumbria ‘Eden’ must be about what Cumbria has that's unique, and build on that. The Ingredients: Cumbria wants economic regeneration. It wants a university and to improve higher education. Cumbria wants flagship projects to create jobs and put Cumbria on the map. Cumbria already has a world class reputation as one of the most beautiful places on the planet. And people are more and more concerned about the environment and developing quality of life.

Our Unique Vision Cumbria Environmental University is a new kind of university that stands out from the others and doesn't even compete on the same scale. It doesn't exist physically yet, and there's nothing like it on the planet to compare with. But just from the name, right away you sense it is right for Cumbria, and it has a unique appeal. The name gives you a sense of some new vision, a breath of fresh air. And you got that:

• Before you even know it has a purpose-built eco-village campus. • Before you realised it teaches regeneration and economic renewal. • Before you have discovered it was self-funding, is sustainable and profitable. • Before you have found out that it pioneered a new eco-construction industry. • Before you found that businesses flock to it for leadership training and creative input. • Before students found out they can study there and pay off their loan before they graduate. • Before you discovered it's the world's leading centre of think-tanks on development. • Before you learned about the curriculum uniting the best approaches from around the world.

And that’s the point – the idea immediately feels right, and taps right into other people’s visions.



19. Peace, Sustainability and Evolution At Cumbria Environmental University, we will proactively seek to promote peace. We do not accept that violence is inevitable or that terrorism can only be countered through destroying the terrorists. If people feel helpless and unable to change the way the world works, or to replace dysfunctional systems with positive solutions, it’s only because they haven’t tried the new tools.

“I like to believe that people in the long run are going to do more to promote peace than government. Indeed I think that people want peace so much that one of these days government had better get out of the way and let them have it.”

- Dwight D Eisenhower, Allied Supreme Commander WWII, US President

The Need for Peace Sustainable environmental development involves creating positive feedback loops in society, our economies and nature, so that there is no waste, and the output from everything goes to feed something else, to do something useful. The tools and technologies for doing this are well known now and well understood, and it is fun helping others help themselves to self-sufficiency and beyond. Nothing could be more rewarding, but it needs peace to be able to do this. Hard to drill a well with bullets flying, or plough a field if it’s mined, or reap a harvest if people are using the machetes to chop off limbs. This is madness and it has to stop. Why not sooner rather than later?

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its labourers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children... The cost of one heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than thirty cities... We pay for a single fighter plane with half a million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than eight thousand people. This, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.

- Dwight Eisenhower, Chance for Peace address, April 16, 1953 The war industry operates on anti-sustainable principles. The output from the production system goes only to maim, kill, and destroy, and in order to keep the supply chain stocked and renewed, current inventory must be used up. And it can only go towards destruction, nothing good is created from the outputs. How the system works and violence is sustained is that the armament industry is very profitable, and funds lobbying efforts in a positive feedback loop. What to do? How to stop?

How an Environmental University can Help Build Peace The principles of personal effectiveness – to think Win-Win, to Seek First to Understand, to look for Synergy – all these equip us to defuse situations of conflict. This is just as true for the process of dialogue and community building – listening with respect, hanging in through ‘chaos’, and seeking to build true community. When we add in the methodology of Zero Emissions we’re really getting somewhere – we know how to eliminate waste and create jobs, wealth, hope, new energy – and eliminate apparent conflicts between needs for growth and sustainability. With the positive change tools of appreciative inquiry and open space we are able to join with others and create truly shared visions. Individually, all these tools have been used to reduce conflict. So in concert?.. But there is more. We are shifting out of a machine based industrial age and into a knowledge age. Everything written about in the last paragraph is a tool, but a knowledge tool, a tool of the mind. Some people feel it is enough to go to a university and learn how to learn – it puts you in stead for life. But here we are learning a wide range of mental tools that, interestingly, have the most practical and concrete applications. Using these mental tools, our students and faculty create wealth and housing - we are working well outside normal academic boundaries and having fun. All of these mental tools function using the mind. We’re working with the basic human operating system here – the mind and consciousness, and all these tools run on this mind stuff. Maslow’s peak experience, Covey’s Gap, Senge’s metanoia, Peck’s inviting spirit, Zero emissions’ making breakthroughs, Appreciative Inquiry’s positive core. All are different aspects of consciousness.



The Information Age and the Consciousness Era In The Awakening Earth (published in the USA as The Global Brain), physicist, psychologist and meditation teacher Pete Russell puts one of the most lucid and clearly reasoned cases for understanding evolution in the context of consciousness. Drawing on the works of Teilhard de Chardin and Maharishi Mahesh Yogi he shows evolution is not primarily about matter mutating wildly at random and bludgeoning itself forward by natural selection through survival of the fittest. More that matter is an expression of the underlying unified field, and that material evolution is a headlong rush to manifest and actualise the most fundamental qualities of this unified field – consciousness and intelligence. Humanity emerges because we are in the design of the cosmos. This smart model of evolution apparently conflicts with the classical Darwinian model of mateial evolution, but like most good new scientific models, it supersets the earlier classical models rather than replaces them. Yes, there is competition at the surface, and massive diversity, but it is still an expression of the underlying unified field, which has deep unity, harmony and intelligence. We are victims, as Einstein says, of “the profound illusion of individuality”. In reality, evolution is fully creative and intelligent, and progressing to manifest ever higher levels of consciousness. This central diagram in a rich book was strangely left out of the US Global Brain edition. Pete says the publishers wanted to save money - it’s reproduced and extended here with his permission. It shows the waves of mankind’s evolution, and how they accelerate as we home in on the goal. We also see the process matching Maharishi’s model, the Fundamentals of Progress, and it is the same process Maslow shows as individual evolution. This is a fundamental principle in biology – ‘ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny’ – the evolution of the individual mirrors the evolution of the entire species. We started out as hunter gatherers, establishing a kind of stability by populating the whole earth. Then we adapted, developing agriculture and settlements, notably by the great rivers – the Indus, Nile, Tigris and Euphrates, travelling by sea – the water element comes to the fore. The industrial revolution is a form of purification, developing empowering tools and technologies. Steel, steam, coal, oil, electricity – five different aspects of the element of fire. Next the information revolution, knowledge travels through the air, by aeroplane and radio, creating an integrated global village for the first time. So far so good? Russell’s model makes it easy to conclude we are on the cusp of an accelerating plunge into the fifth wave, growth - with the fifth element of akasha - space-time.

Psychotechnologies – Tools of Consciousness The simple, rational deduction to be made is that our most productive and most highly leveraged tools - which have already shifting to knowledge and the mind, will increasingly be using tools of consciousness itself, the underlying field on which mind is based. And the people who understood this best were the ancient Vedic civilisation, who, in the absence of phones, TV, jets, the Apple Macintosh and cappuccino, developed a complete science and technology of consciousness – by diving into mind-stuff and cognising directly how it works – creating Vedic Science – literally, truth. Russell, who has translated the Upanishads, classic Vedic texts, liberally quotes The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. The first few sutras explain that thoughts, vrittis, are fluctuations in chita, the mind stuff, and mind is most powerful, most concentrated, when it is still in Samadhi, deep meditation. Tools that function at this level of still mind, in the unified field, beyond space-time, are highly leveraged. So, there is mileage to be gained checking the nuggets and gems to be found in the treasure trove of Vedic consciousness literature. At CEU, Sanskrit, the language of the Vedas, will be a research language – it is already known to have an ideal structure for Artificial Intelligence.



There is an unfair trick that scientists committed to the last paradigm (whichever it is) always use to erect temporary barriers against the unstoppable, nutrient-laded floodwaters of the new. And that is to erect a preposterous (or an obvious) proposition, claim those working on the new idea are committed to (or opposed to) this proposition, and ridicule them for that, instead of checking out the new paradigm scientifically. See Thomas S Kuhn’s classic The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, for a run down on the rough passage new ideas – especially good ones – usually get. For happy surfing on the waves of change, don’t have your money or ego riding the old one.

A New Synthesis “Life drinks order from the universe” – Erwin Schrodinger, A New Science of Life

As this synthesis of ideas shows, we are at a time of integration in many fields, a great synthesis of things previously seen as extremes, or to be opposing – science and religion, economic growth and sustainability, materialism & spirituality. The old order is making a fine death rattle, with a nice series of deliciously outrageous doublethink propositions – e.g. that war is the only way to stop terror, and those committed to peace are unpatriotic and hopelessly unrealistic. That biotechnology and genetically modified foods are the only way to end world hunger. That multinational corporations (mandatory focus: continuously increased profits) are the way to end poverty. That representative democracy, where people give their power to lobbyists by electing politicians, guarantees freedom. That sustainable development would mean an end to growth, the end of life as we know it. And so on. Enough already? Sheesh. Time to take Ike’s advice – grab the reins, before the coach runs over the cliff. The way to stop war is to bring peace. The way to end hunger is grow healthy food. The way to end poverty is to empower individuals to create their own wealth. Freedom is guaranteed by people taking charge of their own lives and systems of self-governance, especially by raising consciousness. Growth can be unlimited and unrestricted as long as all development is conducted without waste. Q.E.D. We already have a good set of mental tools that could easily create peace, if we had the resolve, and politicians got out of the way. The answer must be to invoke the next generation of technology and tools – one level further leveraged. Psycho-technologies – the technologies of consciousness.

A Technology of Peace

“War begins in the minds of man” – UN Charter “Peace also begins in the minds of men” – Maharishi Mahesh Yogi

“In the vicinity of Yoga, negative tendencies settle down” – Maharishi Patanjali, Yoga Sutras To get the show on the road is surprisingly simple, in fact, completely without effort. How does the wave become Ocean? Easy – settle down. In physics, every equation finds a solution in a path of least effort. Patanjali explains that yoga is settled consciousness, the ocean of mind at rest, and that in the vicinity of yoga, negative tendencies disappear. Is this true or is it gobbledygook? If it is true, how big a yoga disappears how much negativity, in what vicinity, and how to make it?

The Maharishi Effect – 1% We have perfect order at the level of the DNA in our cells, which operate at zero entropy. The trick is to stabilise this on the surface level through practice of meditation and yoga sutra techniques. Maharishi conducted some empirical tests in the 70s and 80s to check out how much Yoga could be created, and with what result in terms of reducing negative tendencies. In 1974 the first studies showed that 1% of people meditating in a town or city could affect negative tendencies – reducing crime, sickness and accidents. Researchers called these positive results The Maharishi Effect.

The Renaissance, with thebirth of materialism, led to aschism between Church andState, Science and Religion.

In 20th Century, a new worldview emerged from the fall ofmaterialism and the newscience - quantum mechanics.

In the new Millennium a newcosmology combines theUnified Field & consciousness.

Religion MaterialismC17

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Kavach – Invincible Shield It may seem impossible that one could prevent negativity from appearing. How do you stop a terrorist with a bomb. Surely we are powerless? It may be what the weapons industry wants you to think, but it isn’t so. That’s classical thinking – in the quantum mechanical realm things work differently. And the mind is quantum mechanical. When you set up a field of perfect order, it excludes disorder, it is as simple as that. If you set up an ordinary electrical conductor, it can be disrupted by outside influences. If you set up a superconductor, it responds perfectly – disruptive influence cannot even penetrate – its called the Meissner effect. In consciousness the same effect is called Kavach – shield. In theory it is possible to be invincible.

Meissner Effect An Example of Invincibility in the

Quantum Physics of Superconductivity

ORDINARY CONDUCTOR

In an ordinary electrical conductor, incoherent, disordered electrons allow penetration by an external magnetic field.

SUPERCONDUCTOR In a superconductor, coherent collective functioning of the electrons spontaneously excludes an external magnetic field, and maintains its impenetrable status.

This example of invincibility is not unique in Nature; parallel phenomena of invincibility can be found in many aspects of the physical and biological sciences. In each case, it is found that the ability of the system to resist disorder is always based on coherent collective functioning.

Starting with the 1% effect, Maharishi took groups of westerners and piled on the yogic techniques – trying out a Yoga Sutra group practice that he called the TM-Sidhi technique. The results were startling – a Horizon Program is long overdue. He found that as with superconductors and lasers, the effect quadruples when you double the size of the device – in this case a roomful of yogic mediators. The effect is based on the square of the numbers meditating in a group, so you only need a group the size of the square root of the number of individual meditators it would take to create the same peace effect. So a city of 10 million people needs 100,000 individual meditators (1%) to create an upward trend, but a group of advanced meditators only the square root of that size – 100,0001/2 = 316 – to have the same effect. Less than a 747-full to sort out all of London.

Creating Coherence with Groups A rather larger number, less than 800 would be enough to create positive trends for the entire UK, or 1600 for the USA, 3000 for Europe. Only 7-8,000 for the whole world. The cost would be trivial compared with keeping an army that size anywhere in the world, so it’s a good deal. But as yet governments are not convinced. Why? However cynical one may be, the answer is to check it out. Maharishi already did tests, so all that’s needed is to examine the research reports conducted by third parties. The experiments were various, including taking planeloads of TM-Sidhi meditators to trouble spots (Beirut, Zimbabwe, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Cambodia, Iran) for a month or so at a time and using third parties, unaware of the numbers and timing of the groups, to independently monitor deaths, violence and the like. Then statistically correlate using time-series analysis. Or move a meditation group from precinct to precinct in an American city (Atlanta) and monitor the crime statistics as they would eerily edge away from the anonymous band of western yogis. The piece de resistance was when on 4 occasions, groups of 7000 were assembled for 2 weeks. In every case, the predicted results were obtained. This research is no longer in doubt. Scientific journals publish these results, even with disclaimers saying they can’t believe the new theory but can’t fault the scientific method. When results confound the old model, smart scientists look for new models. Maharishi is pushing ahead to create a world-sized group in India, and we plan a Cumbria-sized group at Derwent Forest. That only needs 50 people (100 x 252 = 250,000). If 800 meditate, that would create positive trends for the whole UK. All 3000 and we’ve taken care of Europe. Does it sound fanciful? The two longest term experiments make us feel confident of results…

7000 meditators outside the ‘Golden Dome’ at the Christmas 1983 ‘Taste of Utopia’ Course, Fairfield



Experiment Number 1 – Maharishi International University First, in 1972 Maharishi established Maharishi International University in Iowa, buying a derelict campus from Parsons College. He cajoled meditators to move from their nice places on the East & West coasts to a godforsaken failing agricultural community in the heart of the mid-west Bible Belt, comprising 8000 sceptical Iowans, not famed for their mysticism (Field of Dreams came later). It took Maharishi a lot of persuading. People arrived in dribs and drabs. Some became faculty, others students. More came to town, joined twice-daily group meditation in purpose-built wooden domes, and looked for work or started businesses. Slowly the community grew and took shape. At the start of 1989 Maharishi said it would be his ‘Year of World Peace’. He predicted that when America achieved its ‘Super-radiance Number’ – the magic 1600 needed for national Kavach – it would become invincible. He made four specific predictions of what this would mean in practice: • An end to superpower rivalry – “America will find itself without an enemy” • The end of international terrorism • The opening up of international trade • And he predicted that the Berlin Wall would come down

To imagine his followers glibly believed all this is far from the truth. At the time Maharishi’s predictions seemed so outrageous. In any case the community continued to expand and soon there were around 1600 meditating in the domes in the morning, and 2000 in the evening. The atmosphere softened noticeably in the town, and communism just went away. The USSR simply collapsed, the wall came down. Meditators in the domes watched on TV in amazement like the news commentators, but with great awe – Maharishi’s experiment worked and they were a part of it. It was a wonderful feeling. By the way, this is not Maharishi’s endorsement of capitalism versus communism – he says they are the two extremes of materialism, at a pole from spirituality, so the second boot has yet to drop. After this, over some years the group dwindled, people drifted back to the coasts. Fairfield is still an island of economic success in the farming Midwest. But the numbers halved, and this reduced the effect below the threshold needed for peace. America was, without knowing it, at risk. Except that Maharishi did issue a warning. Today, Fairfield is held up at State level in Iowa as the desired model of economic regeneration. And they are building a new town nearby on the Vedic model.

Maharishi Warns World Governments – Predicting 911 What is Happening In Yugoslavia Can Happen to Any Nation at Any Time Can you imagine if bombs began to fall on Washington D.C., and to destroy the high-rises of the money markets of New York? Will NATO be able to prevent this? When this happens it will be beyond the power even of the wealthy to save the situation. When our house is in uncontrollable flames, it is too late to dig a well to get the water. Better to prevent the house from catching fire in the first place. A new approach to creating peace is urgently needed—one that prevents war. And if such an approach exists it must be tried.

In 1999 at the time of Kosovo, Maharishi issued this warning in full-page advertisements published in major world papers (see .pdf in appendix). Again, many meditators thought he was going over the top, but it turned out to be eerily accurate, given 9/11. Maybe our western governments don’t understand what’s going on, or have a reason to cover up a reciprocal interest in terrorism, but Maharishi seems to have a finger on the pulse and is offering a solution. Worth exploring, surely? The cost of a perpetual World Peace Coherence-Creating Group is only a $1 billion. Pretty cheap compared with the cost of even a tiny war. Why don’t we at least check it out? If governments haven’t the courage, surely some billionaire philanthropist would like to try this, if only to safeguard his own investments. Failing that, we have to do it ourselves.

A Trabbie breaks through… Painting on a memorial section of Berlin Wall

http://maharishi.invincibledefence.org/



Experiment Number 2 – Skelmersdale UK On a smaller scale than Fairfield in the USA, Britain’s meditators sought to set up a group meditation centre. They were offered council homes in Skelmersdale New Town, took 50, bought an old factory with space for meditation and moved in, at around the time Courtaulds had cynically pulled out because their new town development grant had expired. Unemployment was 40%. The community went to nearby Liverpool and asked for funding, claiming they would reduce crime and increase employment – at the time Liverpool was equal worst city with London, for crime in the UK, with the Toxteth riots and so on. No funds were forthcoming but it was an intriguing idea. Within a few years the community had grown, Crime had fallen in Liverpool so it was equal least with Sheffield. Newspaper articles about Skelmersdale carried headlines “From Doom Town to Boom Town.” Skelmersdale was known to be the cushiest number in the Lancashire police force – the police felt safe to drive 1 per car. Scientific research by Dr. Guy Hatchard linked the shift in crime to national indices on the cost of crime, and showed that for every hour someone spent in ‘The Dome’ meditating in Skelmersdale, Liverpool’s economy improved by £3000 - good value for money. The TM community in Skelmersdale have a ‘Maharishi School’ that wins national awards.

By the way, it should perhaps be mentioned that CEU is an independent partnership venture without any affiliation to the TM movement or Maharishi. But Maharishi’s ’movement is certainly a source of inspiring models, good ideas, and proactive experiments. We will welcome TM meditators as much as anyone who can make a practical contribution as faculty or students – meditator or otherwise. We only need a sprinkling of meditators to create coherence in our group, just as only a proportion need work on the forest to make that right, and not everyone needs to become an organic gardener. Each to his own. But yogic meditation only takes a small part of the day, and students will get credit for practicing.

The Zero Ladder These ideas may seem bizarre, but at the gap between one era and the next, the new ideas always seem strange at first. While perfection seems impossible in the material world, at the quantum mechanical level it is the norm. Light doesn’t slow down, and electrons don’t get tired and lose their energy. Professor Carl-Göran Hedén of the World Academy of Sciences has noted a progression of technologies that do set out to achieve the impossible. Starting with the total quality movement in manufacturing which shifted gear with the idea of Zero Defects. It may sound an impossible ideal, but it forces people to think differently, to make breakthroughs in that direction. Next came Zero Wait – the just-in-time delivery system that makes production inherently more adaptable. Hedén sponsored development of what he saw as the next step Zero Waste, acting as mentor to Gunter Pauli who was researching zero emissions at the UN University in Japan. After this, Hedén postulated the idea that we must shift eventually to Zero Conflict, which is what this section has been about. This kind of idea does not fit in with classical thinking – surely there is always going to be conflict? But when we move our ideas to the quantum world, using tools and technologies of consciousness, peace seems attainable, even inevitable. The progression of ideas in Professor Héden’s Zero Ladder is congruent with Maharishi’s Fundamentals of Progress model, especially when we add in the step of zero entropy in information – and its practical result in Zero Noise – instant accurate access to information, as we’ll have on an Internet with no spam! As the Fundamentals of Progress is Maharishi’s model, it shouldn’t be a surprise to find that the technologies he has revived from Vedic Science also match the Fundamentals of Progress – and that he has introduced them in the order his evolutionary model suggests. Transcendental Meditation establishes a level of inner stability and personal mastery, and the dynamics of group meditation raises a group to a level of high adaptability – in the direction of invincible. Ayurveda, the Vedic system for health , purifies the physiology, and Jyotish is about creating a consciousness integrated with natural and cosmic cycles, capable of right timing and avoiding danger. Stapathya-Veda – the science of establishing in space-time - is a universal, cosmic, architectural system, for creating appropriate designs for growth in any field.

Zero Defects-- TQM

Zero Wait-- Internet

Zero Conflict-- World Peace

Zero Inventory-- J.I.T.

Zero Waste-- ZERI / NC

Carl- GoranHeden

Zero Ladder

BrahmanPURE CONSCIOUSNESS

Unified FieldOF ALL THE LAWS OF NATURE

Stability Integration GrowthAdaptability Purification

Meditation Jyotish StapathyaVeda

Group Practice Ayurveda

ElementOf Progress

VedicTechnology



20. State of the Planet – David Attenborough

Serendipity and Grounded Theory Anyone doing research is usually following hunches and playing with the data and developing hypotheses all at the same time. There is a formal model of ‘how science is supposed to be done’ that is taught in universities, about forming hypotheses and then rigorously testing the ‘null hypothesis’. But that ain’t really the way it works in real life. Fortunately a very smart American Social Scientist, Barney Glaser, has had some insight into this and come up with a new model of research – Grounded Theory. I was put in touch with this by Ilse Debler who also introduced me to Appreciative Inquiry when that was the required next step. Barney Glaser validated for me that the way I was doing my own research was right, and therefore it had to lead to a desirable synthesis. This is such an interesting model, and it flies in the face of everything about the scientific method at university. We are supposed to be totally objective, yet in reality most real advances are made on insight, gut feel, and intuition. These are all subjective, about consciousness. Science’s guilty secret. Sometimes Einstein had to wait years before he could express mathematically things he had simply intuited. And Einstein himself tilted objective science with relativity – showing all laws of nature are invariant with respect to the observer. This all makes sense in a mature model of nature that integrates objectivity (the unified field), with relativity, and subjectivity (consciousness). Vedic science explains that objects (chhandas), the act of observation (devatta) and the observer (rishi) are all aspects of wholeness (Samhita). And there’s more, but that’s a good start. For now, it is a relief to have a model of scientific research that expects serendipity – Jung’s synchronicity, Covey’s synergy. And this homily is leading up to the piece of serendipity that tries it all together.

More and More Fives The development models mentioned in this proposal are simply the tip of the iceberg when it comes to looking at integrated development systems that work and seem to have five elements. In researching these ideas, we came across model after model that mapped onto the five elements. From Gabriella Roth’s five forms of dance, to a five stage intervention in psychotherapy. Five fingers, five senses, five organs of action. It goes on and on. Maharishi explained it like this: when you dive deep in the laws of nature in one field, you start to find them everywhere. Nature’s GUI.

David Attenborough One night on TV I heard an unmistakeable voice say “the five causes of the environmental crisis’. With mounting excitement I watched State of the Planet with David Attenborough. I grabbed a pen and paper – Instant hypothesis – I expected they would map perfectly on the fundamentals of progress. I knew that each cause of a problem would relate to absence of a corresponding element. Why? Because we’re living at a time of great stress in both planetary consciousness and the environment. If things are off balance in the ecosystem, it has to relate back to a current weakness in consciousness. If the general mechanism of evolution has five levels, when things are fouled up, we’d expect to find something wrong at every level. 1. Habital Loss a fundamental reduction in ecosystems, undercuts the stability of our biodiversity 2. Next Attenborough talks about introduced species wreaking havoc - adaptability gone wrong 3. Pollution is a major problem - it’s what happens when the element of purification is missing 4. Similarly what does lack of integration mean in the environment: islandisation/fragmentation. 5. Last, what would be a breakdown of the element of growth? Attenborough – over-harvesting. These pairings seem apt and clear - problems in the environment link directly to imbalances in consciousness and a more profound model of evolution. This endorses the logic of the framework of CEU’s core courses in development. Our core development programme uses nature’s design to strengthen and restore these elements at the fundamental level – in consciousness – and at every other level in individuals, society and the economy. Global problems we seek to solve, link to the development program we plan to introduce. We are encouraged by the completion of this network of links in the conceptual model. With our paradigm validated, we are ready to go ahead with CEU.



Acknowledgments This proposal owes a lot to so many people that it is hard to know where to begin. My own story started with the Forrester-Meadows report The Limits to Growth and Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring, and my own vacation experience as a young chemist at an agricultural research centre in Kent, working on the unexpected negative side effects of industrial pesticides & chemicals. It turned out that a spray that kills fruit tree bugs would kill the tree itself after a few years. Oops. Best not get a job as a chemist then, I felt. But it turned out that I was a natural computer whiz. So began my 70s decade, learning the ABC’s of business, marketing and computer system design in Procter & Gamble’s ‘management nursery’, followed by a sabbatical in Switzerland learning to teach TM and Science of Creative Intelligence with Maharishi, and an exhilarating time in London marketing APL computer timesharing – an early form of personal computing with worldwide email. The 80s saw me in Silicon Valley to take part in the emerging personal computing revolution, and to see how venture capital and high-tech models lead to intense, fast-paced innovation and new business models. Then 3 years of computer consulting and construction at Maharishi International University in Fairfield, Iowa where a new kind of consciousness-based education was being born, and the pioneering community was playing with both world consciousness and entrepreneurship. Returning to the UK at the start of the 90s the time came to make sense of all this and build a synthesis, but first the tools had to be assembled. As a rookie consultant I got gigs teaching Tom Peters’ Creating Value for the Customer and got to see how American Thriving on Chaos models transferred to the UK – or not, as the case may be. I noticed Tom’s business prescriptions and the Leadership Challenge models of Kouzes & Posner were congruent – with both Peter Senge’s 5 Disciplines for Learning Organisations and Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s Fundamentals of Progress. Initial search for systemic thinking tools led to permaculture pioneer Rod Everett, at Middlewood Environmental Centre in the Forest of Bowland. Derek Taylor at Lancashire County Council made a grouping of environmental centres for Agenda 21, and Graham Pinfield sponsored a Covey Seven Habits of Highly Effective People training led by Jeff Pitt, now sadly deceased. Jeff invited me to help with Covey trainings and Learning Conferences at Unilever in Holland, and I looked into Scott Peck’s Different Drum model with Community Building in Britain, and took it to Unilever. The question at the Covey course “How do we show people how to live more environmentally?” took me to the Centre for Alternative Technology, Findhorn, and the idea for an eco-village at High Carley, near Ulverston. Margaret Bell helped with this research, and we met Joe Hendry and his work towards a federal, collegiate University of Cumbria. Research into systemic thinking tools led to Schumacher College, Gunter Pauli and Zero Emissions. A ZERI article in Positive News led to marketing for ZERI at World Expo 2000, and that led to consulting in Australia and East Timor. ZERI at World Expo 2000 in Hannover, was a roller coaster ride, with 20 staff and 100 student guides from around the world, showing what’s possible with Zero Emissions tools, the power of community, and need for a viable business model. Thanks: Gunter Pauli, Simón Vélez, George Chan, Volker Wehrmann, Anders Karlsson, Dagmar Albrecht, Colombians, Swedes, everyone… The last piece of the jigsaw was Shared Visioning. Ilse Debler pointed me to Appreciative Inquiry, and a research methodology, Grounded Theory from Barney Glaser – helpful and affirming for anyone wanting to understand their own exploration. Returning from ZERI to regroup at Middlesex University, Jenny Smith organised work and seminars; helped me get to Taos, USA, to learn AI, and Argentina to teach it; and dialogues with Peter Critten and other staff and students helped to organise experiences, theoretical models, and practical tools into a logical conceptual structure. In October 2001 Jack Stopforth at Cumbria Inward Investment Agency told us about Broughton Moor, and we accelerated building a team to deliver self-build construction and co-housing finance for an environmental campus; talking with local people; dialoguing the core syllabus, think tanks, economic regeneration, social rehabilitation, and environmental toolkits. We have well over 400 direct contacts, and they have many more. And everyone has his or her story. So thanks to all…

- David Saunders, Tordown, Glastonbury, February 2004



Appendices Documents are mostly MS Word Documents (.doc) or in Portable Document Format (.pdf). To download any of the appendices, click on the appropriate link below.

Documents in the Appendix:

Download All 11 Appendices 1.9 Mb .zip file 1 A Review Of Higher Education in Cumbria by Sir Brian Fender. The 1992 Fender Report to

the Higher Education Funding Council, prepared at the request of Cumbria County Council 2 A Different Future – The Consequences by Andrew Oswald, 2002. A Warwick University

economist reports to university finance directors on the future funding of universities in the UK. 3 Common Sense Reality and the Built Environment – Sense and Sustainability by Dave

Hampton, chairman, UK Construction Industry Council Sustainable Development Committee. 4 The Sixth Element – An Integrated Approach to Leadership by David Saunders. Linking

different development models to a single consciousness-based paradigm of natural evolution. 5 The Sixth Element – Stages of Evolution by David Saunders. PowerPoint slides to go with

the Sixth Element paper above, and/or workshops on the Fundamentals of Progress model. 6 Return To Rio – Expanding the Covey Model by David Saunders. December 1977 paper

showing how Stephen Covey’s Habits of Highly Effective People apply to Sustainability. 7 Learning from Nature – The Zero Emissions Research Initiative by David Saunders.

Overview article from Positive News explaining how Zero Emissions works, with examples. 8 Zero Emissions – Technology Strategies for Sustainable Livelihoods by Gunter Pauli.

In-depth paper on Zero Emissions written for the United Nations Development Programme. 9 Appreciative Inquiry by David Cooperrider and Diana Whitney. The developers of

Appreciative Inquiry give case studies and explain their positive change methodology 10 Zero Conflict – A Technology of World Peace by David Saunders. After the September 11

2001 terrorist attacks, alternatives to war based on experience taking in peace experiments. 11 Proposal for Permanent World Peace, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi - advertisement offering to

help governments solve problems of war, violence and terrorism with Vedic Defence. (pdf) All documents are copyright by their original authors, and are reproduced here for convenience. Everything else copyright © 2004 Cumbria Environmental University Initiative



Background Documents

CEU and High Carley documents. Download all these documents as a single .zip file (700Kb) Cover Letter sent to Derwent Forest Partnership with the CEU Proposal, Jan 30 2004.

January 2003 Newsletter - overview of gradual progress, and hopes for more. 2 pgs.

CEU PowerPoint Slides - by Marcus Brierley for July 2, 20002 meeting with Mark Fryer, leader, Allerdale Borough Council, to present overview of project. 500Kb.

July 2002 Newsletter and August 2002 Newsletter - about progress. 1 page each

CEU Overview – describes CEU at Broughton Moor with eco village, university woodland, farm, visitor centre and eight core faculties. Prepared with Marcus Brierley. April 2002, two pages.

CEU Proposal plus Letter of Interest and Track Record of Era Ltd. - response to Allerdale Borough Council Dec. 2001 Development Guide for Broughton Moor. February 2002, 3 pgs.

Cumbria Environmental University – Imagine It - vision for a University of Cumbria based on Dale Campbell-Savours University of the Lakes and Zero Emissions. March 2000, 4 pgs.

ZERI Village and University - developing the idea of a Zero Emissions eco-village, and environmental university. Zero Emissions methodology explained. October 1999, 5 pages.

Guardian Competition - early thinking about the economics of an eco village, based around the High Carley idea, for a Guardian competition. February 1999, 3 pages.

South Lakeland Business Awards - brief bullet point description of High Carley eco-village project. Written in hope of getting a grant for development work. December 1999, 2 pgs.

High Carley Initiative - the first document on an eco-village proposal, intended to be based at the derelict TB hospital site at Hugh Carley near Ulverston, South Lakes. November 1997, 5 pages.

Living Space. Spreadsheet to estimate available living space on Earth per person. Feb. 1996.

Derwent Forest Partnership Documents The Derwent Forest Development Guide 3Mb .pdf file, published November 2003.

Site Photographs, Aerial Pictures and Plans 15.5 Mb .zip file, 57 .jpeg and .pdf files from the Derwent Forest Development Guide CD..

Allerdale Borough Council documents Download all these documents as a single .zip file (5.2Mb) RNAD Main Report, for Allerdale Borough Council on acquisition of site. 15 pages, 152Kb.

Archaeological Assessment. 18 pages - 2.6 Mb pdf. – (includes two large graphics.)

Ecological Report excerpts. 40Kb

Landscape Assessment. 32 pages with pictures. 2.6 Mb.

Local Plan Extract. 3 Pages, 36Kb.

Phase 1 Land Quality Assessment. 31 pages, 152Kb

Service Infrastructure Assessment - nothing usable is in place. 1 Page, 28 Kb.

Traffic Infrastructure Executive Overview - the roads need work. 1 page. 28 Kb.



Version History This page is to keep a record of development of this proposal. The following documents can all be downloaded from the Cumbria Environmental University Initiative website http://www.ceu.org.uk. Click on the links below to download a document.

Earlier Versions of the Cumbria Environmental University Proposal CEU Proposal version 0.91. Latest version – first revision. Feb 16 2004. 62 pages, 3.7Mb.

Various edits + re-sequence some sections, plus additional sections: • Main Points • Introduction • Market Research on Cultural Creatives • State of the Planet – David Attenborough • Acknowledgements • Appendices • Background Documents

o CEU Documents o Derwent Forest Partnership o Allerdale Borough Council o Version History

CEU Proposal, version 0.9 . First draft, v0.9 beta. Feb 2, 2004.

First drafted in January 2004 and submitted in response to the Nov. 2003 Development Guide issued by the Derwent Forest Partnership. 53 pages, 20 sections, 2.9Mb.