David's message is down to earth and at the same time, upbeat. He talks about alternatives that are compelling because the conditions that create and support our current lifestyle are changing. He also plays music (humorous songs), shows slides and occasionally shows clips of films that he has produced.
Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic
David Wann presents the symptoms, causes, and cures for the social disease – affluenza – that impacts our health, families, communities, culture. Economy, and environment. This presentation updates the material in the best-selling book, Affluenza, that he and coauthors are now revising, and includes discussion grounded in the book’s study guide and affluenza diagnostic test.
The New Normal: Creating an Affordable Civilization
Highlights 33 high-leverage, mostly collective actions that can propel our dysfunctional society into a new anthropological era in which production and consumption are no longer obsessive-compulsive goals. With the flip of a paradigm switch, the era will be characterized by the real wealth of cultural richness, efficiency, time affluence, cooperation, health, expression, ecological design, and biological restoration – providing twice the satisfaction for half the resources per capita that we now consume. Includes music, slides, and discussion.
Neighborhoods on Purpose
The author of several books on sustainable neighborhoods (Reinventing Community and Superbia!) and producer of 6 videos and TV programs on New Urbanism, Smart Growth, cohousing, and sustainable communities (including one produced for then-VP Gore’s office and another that is now streaming on the Netfix website) David Wann shares his perspectives on how healthy, diverse, walkable neighborhoods can meet essential human needs directly, providing a high quality of life. Wann is a 15-year resident of Harmony Village cohousing community, which he helped design and now helps manage. Audiences learn how they can create a neighborhood culture, in any neighborhood. Includes slides and audience participation.
The Zen of Gardening: How to Grow a Gardener
David Wann is a Master Gardener and 30-year veteran of vegetable, fruit, and ornamental growing. Author of The Zen of Gardening and producer of the TV documentary, Sustaining America’s Agriculture, he presents tips, tools, and techniques with a dry sense of humor appropriate to the dry region where he gardens.
He uses 16 rules of thumb as philosophical footing, including:
1. If at first you don’t succeed, keep planting. Wipe the slate clean by burying the evidence or hauling it to the compost pile. Your Brussels sprouts may be covered with aphids from stem to stern, but nobody needs to know that. The spinach looks anemic? Now you see it, now you don’t. Lupine seeds never came up? Plant right over ‘em.
2. Think like a plant. Plants aren’t engineers, and they don’t know anything about last frost dates, inches of rain, or number of days to maturity. They just want to grow. Put them in the right places, and learn to read the signs of their vitality. Use your intuition. Weave together crop history, weather, plant vitality, and a cupful of compost to meet a plant’s needs.
3. Garden with all your senses. You may not be able to see a billion microbes in a handful of soil, or smell subtle chemical messages constantly being sent from plant to plant, but you can see a glow on the leaves of a healthy stand of chard. You can smell the richness of a well-rotted bucket of compost, taste the season’s first crunchy snow peas, and feel the feathery leaves of an asparagus plant.
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