Public space is a negotiation of rights and privileges, of claimed public and private space that extend not only to humans but to all species. It is both mind and matter. It encompasses what we think and what we do and what we believe. It means clearing the air through mindfulness , activism, and compromise. For that we need civility, fairness, and empathy. Honoring these words with actions is what will determine our survival.

The idea of public space - of mind and matters - has fascinated me for most of my life as an anthropologist and just out of inexplicable curiousity. With this website I continue to search and hopefully evolve Public Space Magazine (PSM) as I grapple with what public space means in terms of mind and matters helped by insights from others.

It is a critical task in my personal view because, as my three-year-old granddaughter would say, the planet has a BOO BOO.

Right now there are many good people doing good things that might help model our future as a species and teach us by example to respect the planet that houses us. There are also extremely detached, fearful, and greedy people entrenched in political and economic systems.

I believe that being public and learning to act to address both these realities requires starting from our places in space and time and from our web of relationships, The lesson to be learned is that "public" is a negotiation of rights and privileges as well as responsibilities; of claimed public and private space that extend not only to humans but to all species.

Right now there is some urgency. There are critical questions. The answers will affect us now and even more the answers will affect future generations. Subjects now in the foreground such as public ownership of the sky, the earth, the internet, climate change, and infrastructural changes are in fact weavings that are part of a whole beyond the temporality of rhetoric and iterative headlines.

My question behind the subjects I chose is how do we as individuals gain the right knowledge and find the energy to learn about these subjects beyond a reflection of our fears? I'm not just talking about "right" and "left" meanings. I'm respectfully talking about learning how to negotiate shared lived in realities together with more empathy. How do we pay our mortgage or rent next month, feed our children given rising costs, deal with hospital bills or perhaps the loss of dreams or hope? In our tiredness, how do we deal with these matters and still care enough about the world we live in to act in positive ways?

I believe we can learn about the shared benefits and responsibilities that go along with being part of a public. Perhaps as individuals and as a collective we can learn to carve out time for empathetic understanding and enlightened actions. Perhaps we will find a way to discover mutualities and through that learn to live with more civility so we can address global fires, wars without end, rampant disease, painful social divisions, and most fundamentally each other.

If we learn and then act well enough perhaps the BOO BOO will heal. Susan Crowell