Having written about the impasse of an over-extended global economy on a collision course with an over-heating planet but at an impasse herself on what could be done, Heather stepped outside the box of conventional thinking. She traced her ancestral roots to the Highlands of Scotland and a pre-modern commons where her forebears had lived in direct and even right relations with the land. Combining academic research with walking the land these people had farmed and the upland pastures where they tended their sheep, cows and goats, she imagined her way into their way of living “together as one” with the land, which is what the word “common” originally meant: setting stints, or limits, on how many sheep any one family could send to the pasture, on how often field strips should be left to life fallow.
Heather recaps the highlights of this journey through time, and ends with some thoughts on what it might suggest for a revised edition of the Club of Rome classic, Limits to Growth.
Heather Menzies luncheon presentation to the Canadian Association for the Club of Rome (CACOR) on March 9th, 2016.
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