Vigilant servant leadership

Summary

Over the last 70 years the Organic community has espoused a set of principles on which to farm, grow and live by. We have actively advocated the lifestyle, technologies and means to resolve many local and global issues which are now the titles of best-selling novels and treatise of recent times, Cradle to Cradle and Biomimicry to name a couple (Benyus 2002, McDonough & Braungart 2002). A carbon economy is exactly what we have espoused for decades. It is nice to feel we were right.
Continuing on a theme in the previous editorial, it is also very frustrating times. It is difficult to celebrate when generations of work is not acknowledged, or actively ignored. The symptoms of frustration abound; little or no research funding for Organic systems approaches is proportioned to our value to the food chain or calculated wider environment benefits and definitely less for the organisations that may organise it. While at the primary school level of education we have some success, we find there is diminishing support at the tertiary level. The situation is not better, it is worse. How could this be? How could we have permitted this to happen? Have we been absorbed, or peaked as a culture, accomplishing what we set out to do. I suggest not; the fun is just beginning, and so too the challenges.