Community Currency - 07/08/10

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Magic, Myth, Sustainability with Willi Paul, creator of Planet Shifter Magazine, an online magazine that focuses on teaching sustainability practices through the use of art, mythology, music and writing.

Willi Paul is an early online community pioneer and collaboration designer, including work in community analysis, goal setting processes, and digital-face-to-face decision making.

An appreciation of Joseph Campbell lead him to interview rock musicians and publish on the role of alchemic dynamics in mythology in popular music. He wrote the reservoir: rock music and mythology over a decade ago and continues to seek and creative the narratives and myths that help humanity through its own rites of passage to an Age of Sustainability, where nature and man can live in harmony. His article and new myth, co-authored with David Metcalfe: The Leatherneck Clan and the Black Sea Men: Building a Mythology Generator for the Sustainability Age explores the current crisis in the Gulf and how it beckons new heroes, new solutions, new narratives at a critical moment when an eco-disaster of almost unimaginable proportions threatens the Gulf, our country, the oceans, the entire biosphere.

Willi Paul is a Green Business Certified Consultant and strategic vision planner, writer and program designer for environmental planning, and has been involved with civil engineering and non-profits for over 25 years. His heroic passion, wide ranging technological and creative skills, fuel his work. He has done over 210 interviews spanning the gambit of art and sustainability including Ed Begley, Jr. on grey water systems; author Eric Roston on Carbon; Steve Kilbey (The Church) on rock music and mythology; and author Dennis William Hauck from the Alchemy Guild, and has a wealth of experiences, stories, and wisdom to draw from at planetshifter.com.

He wrote Who Has the Keys to the Mythological Reservoir? in preparation for this radio show. We discuss the power of music and lyrics, including the music of Rebecca Cross who wrote and performed the theme song for the Community Currency radio show.  We discuss the meaning of sustainability, sacrifice, story, myth, Cameron's film Avatar, the meta-narrative of the battle of Seattle where "teamsters and sea turtles" trumped the World Trade organization and the Story of the Battle turned into the Battle of the Story in the unfolding power-struggle of which we are all conscious or unconscious participants.