Your task
You need to define a plan of action to solve a challenge on your world. Use your creative thinking skills to come up with solutions. Consider what you know about your own world and other worlds. Explore where your defined ways of working will be an asset and where they might be a liability.
Draw up your plan on a flip chart ready to share with the Conference Delegates when they return.
The challenge: The failing harvest
Your main growing area has produced a much smaller harvest than expected. You have enough food and materials to meet essential needs, but not enough for everyone to have the amount and variety they are used to.
You need to protect the land so that it can recover for next year. However, some people are frustrated. They believe that strict limits will make your world seem harsh, controlling and superior to others.
At the same time, another world has asked if it can trade for some of your food and plant materials.
Consider:
- What must your world protect for the future?
- How will you meet immediate needs without exhausting your resources?
- How will you make a collective decision?
- How will you communicate limits without sounding morally superior or dismissive?
- Which world or worlds would you approach, and why?
- What specific help, materials, knowledge or support would you ask for?
- How will you approach them respectfully, showing that you want a partnership rather than telling them what they should do?
What has happened before
In the past, your world has responded to resource problems by working collectively, carefully limiting use, and asking everyone to contribute to the solution.
This has helped protect resources, but it has sometimes led to tension:
- Others felt your world was lecturing them about how to behave.
- People outside the community felt judged rather than helped.
- Some citizens felt that collective responsibility meant their individual needs were overlooked.
- Your world sometimes spent so long protecting the future that it struggled to respond warmly to immediate concerns.
- A community adept at working together.
- Knowledge of land, food, materials and long-term resource management.
- Practical skills: growing, repairing, building and conserving.
- A strong commitment to sustainability.
- People willing to take helpful action rather than merely discuss the problem.
