Organic

David Fleming
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(1) A model of cultivation which focuses on maintaining a fertile soil as the enabling condition for producing food and raising animals with resistance to pests and disease, making it unnecessary to turn to industrial pesticides and fertilisers. See Lean Food.

(2) A model for building a project, notably a community, which is based on a network of relationships built one step at a time: a form of emergence, in which outcomes grow out of the project in ways which no individual, including the leader or social entrepreneur, could have planned. This meaning of “organic” is in a sense the same as the first meaning above: it grows in the soil of a system which is allowed to develop its potential.

(3) A word used as a rhetorical device to endorse the inevitability of a totalitarian ideology. See Hyperbole.

 

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David Fleming
Dr David Fleming (2 January 1940 – 29 November 2010) was a cultural historian and economist, based in London, England. He was among the first to reveal the possibility of peak oil's approach and invented the influential TEQs scheme, designed to address this and climate change. He was also a pioneer of post-growth economics, and a significant figure in the development of the UK Green Party, the Transition Towns movement and the New Economics Foundation, as well as a Chairman of the Soil Association. His wide-ranging independent analysis culminated in two critically acclaimed books, 'Lean Logic' and 'Surviving the Future', published posthumously in 2016. These in turn inspired the 2020 launches of both BAFTA-winning director Peter Armstrong's feature film about Fleming's perspective and legacy - 'The Sequel: What Will Follow Our Troubled Civilisation?' - and Sterling College's unique 'Surviving the Future: Conversations for Our Time' online courses. For more information on all of the above, including Lean Logic, click the little globe below!

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