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For anyone concerned about the current global state of Democracy, which should be everyone, Audrey Tang, Taiwan’s Digital Minister, may be our greatest hope:

“I’m not here to make citizens transparent to government, I’m here to make government transparent to citizens.”

She has flipped Big Brother, proving that this very same unprecedented internet connectivity can be harnessed to cultivate and manifest the very best of us as well — connecting instead of isolating, confirming truths instead of spreading lies, distributing power instead of consolidating it.

Very much due to Audrey’s work, Taiwan shot from 31st to 11th on the Economist’s Global Democracy Index to become a “Full Democracy,” and Asia's most advanced democracy. At the same time, the U.S. dropped from 8th to 25th, now a “Flawed Democracy,” also due very much to one man.

Here’s a foundational story of how she started down this road. During the 2014 Sunflower Revolution in Taipei, students and dissidents peacefully occupied the Taiwan Yuan, or parliament, for 22 days protesting a trade deal with mainland China, or the PRC. Audrey flew in from Silicon Valley, borrowed a laptop, plugged into 300 meters of ethernet cable, and connected over 500,000 citizens and over twenty NGOs in a real-time dialogue towards what she would ultimately call “rough consensus.” The demonstration won the day and resulted in a new trade agreement, very much due to Audrey’s remarkable and unprecedented real-time connectivity. The students remained completely peaceful throughout and respectfully cleaned up the parliament before they left, unlike other Congressional occupations of late. Powerful people in Taiwan’s conservative government took note of what Audrey was doing, and called her in to talk... and so it began...

I’ve listened to this interview countless times while editing, and I’m still hearing new things, so the odds are she’s going to just lose you, both with the technology and her philosophy. So here are two quick shorthands for each.

Per the tech: Virtually everything referred to, from Distributed and Polycentric ledgers to Multi-dimensional spaces to reverse accountability assures transparency, and empowers citizens, inspiring openness, real-time action, and the deployment of people’s different viewpoints. It all encourages plurality as a way to demonstrate, as she puts it, “our shared values are hiding in plain sight.”

And all her philosophy, from calling herself a “post-gender, conservative anarchist” to the Lao Tzu and Taoist quotes sprinkled through this interview, are about cycling and returning power and voice to citizens, re-energizing the deepest, most fundamental precept of democracy: Power to the People.

View our complete show notes here: http://zioncanyonmesa.org/podcast-archive/steer-the-wind-audrey-tang-is-saving-the-world
https://oftaiwan.org/social-movements/sunflower-movement/
https://g0v.tw/intl/en/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audrey_Tang
https://theasiadialogue.com/2018/05/23/tsais-second-year-the-emergence-of-non-partisans-in-taiwan/
https://wtfisqf.com/?grant=&grant=&grant=&grant=&match=1000
https://www.snopes.com/articles/386830/misinformation-vs-disinformation/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadratic_voting#:~:text=Quadratic%20voting%20is%20a%20collective,voting%20paradox%20and%20majority%20rule.

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Craig Childs makes a point of going to the very places he’s writing about and immersing himself in them. In The Secret Knowledge of Water, he traces his very being into the rock itself by mapping waterholes in the Cabeza Prieta. In House of Rain, he follows the Ancestral Puebloans across the desert, walking in their footsteps to gain a particular kind of understanding. In Virga and Bone, he immerses himself in aridness and walks through it with curiosity directed at his very affinity for it. In Apocalyptic Planet he backpacks through cornfields in Iowa, among other similarly wild trips, because, as he puts it, “that’s the way I prefer to be in the world.”

In this episode, Craig joins us from the front porch of his home in western Colorado, with snowflakes swirling around him and ravens croaking in the junipers. He talks about how stories are not the place but show the shape of a place. He shares several examples of how stories tend to repeat in the same places over and over again simply because of the geology, or other mysterious (but possibly simple) factors science hasn’t yet caught up to. We decided to save ghost stories for another time.

We ask Craig to share his thoughts on the many obstacles that can keep us from connecting deeply to place today. He touches on social media, the internet, and other things that can remove us further and further from the land. This removal results in disassociation, Craig says. “We won’t remain disassociated as a species and survive,” he continues, “because then you don’t care about anything.”

We discuss the conundrum of being descendants of white colonizers, while at the same time being rooted in the places where fate has deposited us. Craig believes that we have a responsibility to give back to these places and their people who have given so much to us. Much of his work is an effort to do this. “I’ll be dead and gone before I ever really figure out what needs to be fed back to this place and the people of this place,” he says. “But at least I can get close, at least I can do my best.”

Finally, Craig reads from his journal, excerpts that may or may not make it into Tracing Time, his forthcoming book about rock art, to be published by Torrey House Press.

Craig Childs has published more than a dozen books. He has won the Orion Book Award and has twice won the Sigurd F. Olson Nature Writing Award, the Galen Rowell Art of Adventure Award, and the Spirit of the West Award for his body of work. He is contributing editor at Adventure Journal Quarterly, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Men's Journal, and Outside. He is a contributor to the blog “The Last Word on Nothing.” He has a B.A. in Journalism from CU Boulder with a minor in Women's Studies, and from Prescott College, an M.A. in Desert Studies. An occasional commentator for NPR's Morning Edition, he teaches writing at the University of Alaska in Anchorage and the Mountainview MFA at Southern New Hampshire University. He lives outside of Norwood, CO.

He is interviewed by Zion Canyon Mesa’s Ben Kilbourne.

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Having created historical context for the pipeline in two previous podcasts, In Site now explores the pipeline itself. Jane Whalen, board member of Conserve Southwest Utah and Coordinator of the Lake Powell Pipeline Coalition, was the primary architect of their collective, incredibly thorough and detailed one hundred and eighty-six page objection to the pipeline (see link below). Quite simply, nobody involved with the pipeline understands it better than Jane.

We focused on the pipeline because the Zion Canyon Mesa intends to actively participate in critical issues directly facing our home here in Washington County. In these strange, unmoored and disturbing times, it seems that part of the problem is we simmer too long in disconnected online ethers, then break into reality off kilter, and with increasing violence. We believe that rooting firmly in our chosen landscapes and communities will provide an immediate level of stability and sanity, and suggest a path forward as well.

We prioritized the pipeline issue because it was one of about sixty projects nationwide that the Trump administration placed on their Fast Track. This greatly compressed some review processes and outright dismissed others; approval seemed imminent.

However, that suddenly and utterly changed when the six other states of the Colorado River Compact (see the previous podcast with Eric Kuhn) submitted a joint letter to Utah threatening lawsuits, saying there were any number of Compact issues needing resolution before even entering a Fast Track. Utah’s two pipeline proponents, the Utah Department of Natural Resources and the WCWCD, responded by immediately withdrawing for at least two years to address the Compact concerns. To Jane’s credit, the issues she helped raise in the Coalition review match those expressed by the other Compact states, so our review here will touch on these comprehensive concerns.

Finally, we want to act as an honest broker for respectful dialogue about such issues. As such, this podcast was originally going to feature a dialogue between Jane and WCWCD representatives Zach Renstrom, General Manager, and Karry Rathje, their Communications & Government Affairs Manager. We want to really thank them for their willingness to participate in this discussion. However, recent events allow us all to step back and take a deep breath. We hope that Zach and Karry will join us soon so they can speak for themselves.

At stake: do we, the citizens of Washington County, collectively want to invest perhaps $2Billion of our tax dollars into this project?

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Today we talk with Daniel Kemmis. Daniel studied both philosophy and political science, and names Plato, Rousseau, Jefferson, and Gandhi as his primary influences. He was minority leader and speaker of the house in the Montana State Legislature during the ‘80s, when the Sagebrush Rebellion was at its height. Later, he served as Mayor of Missoula. The intense dysfunction of those times, together with the fiercely contested land issues, inspired Kemmis to write the seminal book Community and the Politics of Place, and develop the Kemmis method for finding compromise.

Some years back, Zion National Park’s gateway community of Springdale was deeply divided from intense growing pains, verging on violence to where county sheriffs needed to attend town meetings. Zion Canyon Mesa’s Chairperson Louise Excell, together with artist Lynn Berryhill, created the “Embracing Opposites” conferences to address this division and invited Daniel to share his methods. Here, Louise interviews Daniel to discuss those ideas, the remarkable repercussions of “Embracing Opposites," then dive into his latest book Citizens Uniting to Restore Our Democracy, which he wrote as a response to these even more contentious times.

We recorded this episode on the eve of the 2020 election, but even after, it is clear that our country is divided, and our democracy begs for a practical path forward. One of Kemmis's lodestones is Jefferson's vision of educated citizens deeply involved in public life. He argues that our loss of capacity for public life parallels our loss of sense of place. "A renewed sense of community, rooted in place, and of people dwelling in that place in a practiced way can shape politics into a more cooperative, productive, and satisfying enterprise."

Daniel says that this sense of place and sense of community is made more difficult by the failure of citizens to insist that corporations adhere to certain standards for the common good. He argues that corporations cannot be citizens in a true sense and that their power over our lives thwarts our own efforts at active citizenship. “If a corporation is going to call itself and claim the advantages of being a corporate citizen, it must put its shoulder to the wheel, and help build. Left to themselves, of course, corporations are not going to practice citizenship in this way. The main reason is that they are not inhabitants in the same way that other residents of a place are. The corporations’ chief loyalty is not to the place but to the shareholders and executives who almost always live somewhere else.”

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“I’m interested in the ways that our social structures and technologies shape how we think and what we value.” C. Thi Nguyen

This podcast is the first of a series on “The Anthropology of Truth.” Today in the U.S., truth, facts, and science are under unprecedented assault. What is happening? Is this just old news for us, perhaps forever stuck in Plato’s Cave, mesmerized by the shadows? Or is there something about our high-tech and social media landscapes that act as accelerants and multipliers of our flaws? Throughout this series, we’ll explore different aspects of the Truth to see if we can figure something out. We can’t think of a better way to start laying these issues on the table than with the philosopher Thi Nguyen.

With a solid background in classic Western Philosophy, Thi unleashes Descartes’ “Evil Demon” onto our current tech and social media landscape, then considers the resulting mayhem. The Demon disrupts our lines of trust, and at every turn offers us a clearer, easier but flattened interpretation of reality. Thi brings the current assault on truth, facts, and science into focus by combining the dynamics of echo chambers, “moral outrage porn,” game theory, and the hazards of quantifying complex environments.

“I'm associate professor of philosophy at University of Utah. I’m interested in the ways in which our rationality and agency are socially embedded – about how our ways of thinking and deciding are conditioned by features of social organization, community, technology, and art practices. I’m also interested in the structures and nature of the interdependences we have with one another – and with our artifacts, practices, and institutions.” C. Thi Nguyen