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Thread: 1/ An observation. Your snippet describing the way village women catalyzed this project? Of greater significance than 'especially touching', I sense. What do I mean? A decade ago, I found myself chatting with a group of professionally diverse scientists; among them, women. 2/ As relaxed conversation flowed, I put a question to a couple of them. "What do you think women bring to science?" I asked. Sussing I wasn't a sexist ass, but honestly curious, they pondered and conferred. "Collaboration," they answered. "We collaborate better than men." 3/ That’s a trait especially well-suited to the functional ecology of regenerative design, I find. Locally, say, take the Dry Farming Institute, an OSU-originated project characterized by an innovative approach involving an extraordinary diversity of participants and disciplines. 4/ Standing at the avant-garde edgeline of visionary approaches to water-use strategies in droughty conditions, the DFI has assembled an unorthodox, co-creative partnership of growers, extension educators, plant breeders, agricultural professionals, horticulturalists and others. 5/ Why pay notice? Well, for those of us involved, it's patently clear that coherently tackling a fundamentally holistic challenge at its roots, demands the fundamentally holistic approach of a social ecology mirroring universal ecological principles of mutualism and reciprocity. 6/ And where do women figure in the mix? Of course, Amy Garrett, the remarkable ag scientist who founded and promoted the effort, derives her confederate superpowers from a medley of qualities transcending gender, but the evidence of my ears and eyes consistently confirms that… 7/ …a great many women have played a significantly disproportionate role contributing to, defining and populating this fundamentally collaborative exercise in applied holism - their initiative as much a 'coincidence', as the women of Savargaon Tal in Maharashtra leading the way. 8/ Pay attention and it's clear the great planetary shift upon us announces an entirely new political reality, demanding a whole new way of relating with one another as much as the Earth. Yes, properly received, climate chaos arrives as a profound evolutionary ally to women. Quote tweet: An original avant-gardening collective, Food Not Lawns, and the Dry Farming Collaborative, are women-initiated and led. The collective, collaborative, action motif? Participatory. Around holistic challenges and responses, women tend to have the talents.