Eye Am Sharing

Outline for conceptual foundations for work in rural tourism, diversification and economic development. Here you can scroll to the bottom of this page to see these topics. This link is provided until I have the opportunity to describe each of these diagrams with hyperlinks.

Amenity Value is a concept I developed while working with rural places, and presenting that the "inherent value" for tourism development connects to the nature, history and culture of "place". As a geographer, we look at the relationship between humans and the earth. This graphic describes the flow of the process of realizing these "values" for sharing and attracting visitors as an economic engine.

These concepts tie closely with my ideas that I call "the rural urban nexus" and also Jim Kimmel's focus "interpretation" - i.e. "telling the story of the place". For a tremendous set of instructions for effective interpretation, click here.

The Big Picture - after working in rural economic development, and studying individual and community empowerment, as well as obstacles to the process of advancement, this concept came to me, to describe in one page the general movement of information, community development, etc.

Core to success, "moving from the competitive to the creative". This concept is best described in the book by Wallace D. Wattles, The science of getting rich. (click here to download a pdf version).

There are several things that I would "upgrade" in this today, as this was conceived back in about 2005, when I was deep in my work with Cooperative Extension, and also personal studies. Too much to describe for this overview, but two points 1) Maslow's Heirarchy of needs is inherently flawed and needs to be flattened, and 2) the word "hope" must be changed and moved through the stage of belief, toward "feeling knowing".

This diagram works as a starting point from what many would call the "status quo" towards the greater vision empowered through the Reverence for Life perspective. When time permits, I will revisit this discussion.

After working in Van Horn, Texas for a couple of years, I realized that community development has some very basic elements. It's a lot like basic rocket science - simple.

Best elucidated in the book Systems Thinking, there are two basic parts in human endeavor 1) human beings, and 2) engineered solutions.  These two things come together in business and community  - yet they operate very differently.

Converting the Capital
Because our society and culture has been focused exclusively on deriving economic value from the various human activities, it is necessary to "reverse engineer" out of these myopic systems. So, a general interpretation from the existing perspectives is useful to build a bridge to systems that place Reverence for Life as the foundational ethic, or principal, as espoused by Albert Schweitzer in his book, Philosophy of Civilization.