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Introduction	Planets & Populations	Tribes & Nations
One Earth & Seven Seas	Full Text	People &Subsidiarity
Kingship & Peacecraft	Culture & Divinity	Diasporas & Jigsaws

HUMAN SCALE GOVERNANCE

Diasporas & Jigsaws

We have our politics of persons and our politics of place. But what is a North Atlantic tribe? The response of a pragmatist would be to hang out a 'League of Real Nations' banner and invite the nations of the North Atlantic to apply to join the club.

The argument would be that this process would provide the answer a few hundred applications hence.

And that is not a frivolous proposal. But there is another approach.

Human life has seen fit to confine itself to the shallow regions around the rim of the North Atlantic Ocean Basin. Because most of our ancestors came to where they are today by way of an extensive network of water trails, they tend to be huddled about the river estuaries.

So pulling in our geographers the first thing to be done is to put them together with our model builders so that together they can build us a decent three-dimensional model of our newly discovered bioregion, suitable for laying out in the local Fourth World Village Hall. That would give us our earth blood circulatory systems. River catchments and city regions is what we would have our eyes on.

Next we would turn to a list of cultural associations in North and South America. From this we would expect to get a pretty good cross-section of our ethnic mix. The Irish know a lot about the Irish diaspora, as do the one hundred and one other linguistically based cultural associations. Our many international organisations would be a great help to us here.

This would give us our family circulatory systems. Put the blood of our North Atlantic families together with the blood of the earth's circulatory system and I think we would see something emerging to which I could put the label 'North Atlantic Tribe'.

Finally we would call upon those with an entrepreneurial bent and encourage our 'League of Real Nations' to take shares in a company set up to produce maps such as the 'North Atlantic as seen from Dublin'. Within next to no time every village school would be learning geography by jigsaws. The brighter kids would be setting up software companies to model the movements of the bioregional circulations...organic models rather than mechanical ones.

We should make sure our league has shares in those companies too. After all money makes the world go round. Except now it would be our money. And the world would be turning the way we wanted it to...at its natural rate.

Meanwhile we would all be blood brothers smoking the pipes of peace together.

copies of this document may be obtained from

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e-mail: peteretherden@cesc.net
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