Deliberation 4: A Manifesto for The Miracle Inn

Introduction

The Miracle Inn is a Community Interest Company dedicated to developing, supporting, spreading, and practising ‘culture-shifting’ approaches to education and environmentalism. As a CIC we will operate not for private profit, benefiting communities in west Wales, and the wider network of environmentalists and educators in the UK and globally.

Through our activities in west Wales, The Miracle Inn seeks to strengthen social capital and the nature connectedness of community groups, students and residents helping to create the foundations from which projects that benefit society and the local environment can grow.

Through our activities online and globally, The Miracle Inn seeks to support environmentalists to share, develop, deliver, and spread 'culture-shifting' approaches to environmental education and environmentalism.

Our manifesto [draft for comment]

To join The Miracle Inn is to join an organisation committed to six key areas of work. It is through this work that we will support and strengthen the communities and networks we serve:

1. On Neoliberalism:
   (i) Build acceptance, within the environmental movement, that neoliberal capitalism is likely ending.
   (ii) Collectively examine what this means for how the goals of social justice, climate stability, and ecological thriving are being pursued. 
   

2. On Environmentalism:
   (i) Support efforts to redefine what environmental education and environmentalism are, and need to be, at a time when (a) neoliberal capitalism is breaking down, and (b) the climate and ecological crisis is reaching and passing key tipping points.
   (ii) Workshop, co-develop, and profile the new ‘culture shifting’ forms of environmentalism that are emerging.
   (iii) Walk the talk: Demonstrate the new ‘culture shifting’ forms environmentalism by delivering them locally, nationally, and globally (see points 3 – 6)
   

3. On Hyper-Individualism:
   (i) Expose hyper-individualism as a key root cause problem that (a) drives extensive personal, social and environmental harms; and (b) inhibits the collective action needed to alleviate or reduce those harms.
   (ii) Actively campaign against the forces that exacerbate hyper-individualism. 
   (iii) Rein hyper-individualism in by addressing its symptoms (esp. Social Atrophy) and by developing its antidotes (Interdependence and Social Infrastructure).
   

4. On Social Atrophy:
   (i) Raise awareness and understanding of social atrophy as a specific, problematic, phenomenon associated with hyper-individualism.
   (ii) Amplify, develop and deliver actions and activities that rebuild our social ‘muscles.’
   (iii) Advocate for government and corporate policies that have the power to reverse social atrophy.  
   

5. On Interdependence:
   (i) Support adults and young people to (a) critique the idea of the ‘rugged’ independent self; and (b) explore what it means to think of oneself as an interdependent self.
   (ii) Support, network, and grow the emergent ‘Movement for Interdependence’.
   

6. On Social Infrastructure:
   (i) Promote and facilitate the use of existing forms of social infrastructure.
   (ii) Create and run new forms of social infrastructure.
   (iii) Campaign and advocate for high quality forms of online and real world social infrastructure.