PROVOKING THOUGHT WHEN WE NEED IT MOST.

To understand how we get the future that our children need, want and deserve, we are obliged to challenge our usual ways of thinking, seeing, reacting, deciding, and doing. Here are some wise reminders worth pondering as we look to a different future. (Get yourself a comfortable chair; to be read slowly and pensively ; – )

You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete. – Buckminster Fuller

Every tree, every plant in the meadow seemed to be dancing; those which average eyes would see as fixed and still. – Rumi

Scientific principles and laws do not lie on the surface of nature. They are hidden, and must be wrested from nature by an active and elaborate technique of inquiry. – John Dewey

Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.― Jane Jacobs

The power of a new mobility concept depends not on how well it solves a given, targeted problem. But on how many problems it (partly) solves. – Marco Te Brömmelstroet

Raise your words, not voice. It is rain that grows flowers, not thunder. – Rumi

Education is not the filling of a bucket – it is the lighting of a fire. – W.B. Yeats

If we knew what it was we were doing, it wouldn’t be called research, would it? – A. Einstein (attributed)

Finally, George Bernard Shaw on unreasonable people and progress:

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

And to close, a Haiku to remind us all to listen,

the great art is to
listen to the softest voice
even in the wind

# # #

Eric Britton
13, rue Pasteur. Courbevoie 92400 France

Bio: Founding editor of World Streets (1988), Eric Britton is an American political scientist, teacher, occasional consultant, and sustainability activist who has observed, learned, taught and worked on missions and advisory assignments on all continents. In the autumn of 2019, he committed his remaining life work to the challenges of aggressively countering climate change and specifically greenhouse gas emissions emanating from the mobility sector. He is not worried about running out of work. Further background and updates: @ericbritton | http://bit.ly/2Ti8LsX | #fekbritton | https://twitter.com/ericbritton | and | https://www.linkedin.com/in/ericbritton/ Contact: climate@newmobility.org) | +336 508 80787 (Also WhatApp) | Skype: newmobility.)

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