“Control oil and you control nations; control food and you control people” Henry Kisinger. I fully intended to just do a localized food growing post, but I watched a short news interview with noted Indian sustainability scholar-activist Vandana Shiva, and ended up exploring yet another rabbit hole – that of Read more
The title of this post, Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics, has been attribute to Mark Twain when he was commenting on the role of politicians in our lives, whose job it seems is now to cover up, white wash, or simple mislead people as they go around doing their daily Read more
“The Great Reset is an attempt to create a plausible impression that the huge winners in this system are on the verge of voluntarily setting greed aside to get serious about solving the raging crises that are radically destabilizing our world.” Naomi Kline The above quote comes from an article Read more
I have spent many posts recently emphasizing connectedness. The only people I have ever met who say they do not want to be connected are people who are angry and hateful at the negative aspects of the world as it is currently experienced by them. Loneliness is a modern disease Read more
“Grapes must be crushed to make wine. Diamonds form under pressure. Olives are pressed to release oil. Seeds grow in darkness. Whenever you feel crushed, under pressure, pressed, or in darkness, you’re in a powerful place of transformation and transmutation. Trust the process” Lalah Delia. You are not responsible Read more
I have been reading a lot these past few months, on all kinds of media (Left, Right, Mass, and Alternate), about something called the ‘Great Reset.’ This ‘Great Reset’ agenda sounds OK on the surface until one looks more closely at what is being said and who is saying it. Read more
As most of you will realize in reading my blog, I spend more time talking about our collective cognition as the problem and not just the technological problems we create through our lifestyle choices. Environmental Educator David Orr talks about how we try to tweak ourselves out of our problems Read more
Only through illumination of the past does a new future become visible. Here is where I take an incredibly complex idea and distill it down to an essential 100 words. I have been sat at my computer this past first week of January 2021 observing all the incredible goings-on. Obviously, Read more
When people are afraid of losing something they need either physically or psychologically, they can be controlled. People with nothing left to lose can be dangerous to those in charge. The controllers placate them with enough things in their lives so they fear what little they do have may be Read more
There is no shortage of great thinkers and researchers who have illuminated the risks being imposed up on us with consumerist worldview. Michael Pollan has clearly expressed the problems with our industrial food systems (see earlier post Relocalization and Community {Jan 2018}). Avoiding processed food and non-organic produce is a Read more
In May 2020 I talked a bit about vaccines (posts Vaccines: part 1-5). With the push to release the Covid-19 (C-19) vaccine, in keeping with my current risk theme, here is a long update summary from what I have studying within and outside the mainstream. I am posting early this Read more
(I have been asked to list the dates {month, day, year} for previous posts I refer to in my blog to help readers find them without having to scroll the now lengthy list of blog posts on this site.) First, let me reiterate my key comments from the last four Read more
In the last post I emphasized how despite all the technological advances (and actually because of), we do not live in a risk-free world, and never will. I love hearing people quote anecdotal stories of gramps who smoked 40 cigarettes a day and drank a quart of whiskey a day Read more
Quoted material without a citation is from my Environmental Communication textbook. In general, we accept risks we choose to accept (or do not know about), complain about risks that are we know are imposed up on us, and bemoan when faced with Acts of God. It is the middle group Read more
In my last post I outlined how experts and everyone else view risk differently. Risk experts like to talk about numbers that reflect mortality and morbidity, while non-experts view risk on a set of personal heuristics (outrage factors) to decide if a risk is acceptable or not. What is considered Read more
“To know what life is worth you have to risk it once in a while “ John-Paul Sartre It has been fascinating to observe how government officials have been drafting up all manner of draconian laws to ‘protect’ us all from a virus (Covid-19), and even more fascinating to observe Read more
I am not a doomsayer, but we are on the cusp of an economic crisis unprecedented in human history. We’ve had major depressions like the one precipitated by the 1929 stock market collapse, and several major recessions during the last 200 years, but what we are looking at now is Read more
“Progress is impossible without change, and those that cannot change their minds cannot change anything” George Bernard Shaw. For many years, in my Sustainable Living textbook and when I was at conferences talking about my positive views of a sustainable world, people would come up to and ask why I Read more
“The first day or so we all pointed to our countries. The third or fourth day we were pointing to our continents. By the fifth day, we were aware of only one Earth.” Sultan bin Salman bin Abdul-Aziz Al Saud, STS-51-G Space Shuttle astronaut. I caught a headline the other Read more
A bit of a later post this weekend – we have a firestorm blazing in the forests just 8 miles northwest of us, raining ash and pouring smoke in red-orange hues over our homes. More like a scene from Lord of the Rings and Mordor than a quiet Colorado town. Read more
“Creativity is the power to connect the seemingly unconnected.” William Plomer. I am always surprised when I would introduce an innovative idea to a group I was working with and receive the reply, “it won’t work” because we don’t do things that way. Whether this is in science or in Read more
Some men see things as they are, and ask why. I dream of things that never were, and ask why not. Oscar Wilde. How we look at the world is central to how we allow ourselves to think beyond the limiting mental boxes we live within. For many decades we have been expanding Read more
I am going to get a tad esoteric in this blog post but I do so to point out just how our thinking has become so dogmatic and inflexible. I am going to talk about incredible new energy research technology in the next post, but first some background on why Read more
“Our world is divided is not divided by race, color, gender, or religion. Our world, is divided into wise people and fools. And fools divide themselves by race, color, gender or religion.” Nelson Mandela I saw a neat quote on the Sustainablehuman.com website. “The goal of life is not to Read more
“The greatest fear in the world is the opinion of others, and the moment you are unafraid of the crowd, you are no longer a sheep, you become a lion. A great roar arises in your heart, the roar of freedom.” Osho Have you ever wondered why peer pressure is Read more
What I am observing at this time, as are so many of us, is a lot of protesting and activism on behalf of something or other. There are a lot of reasons that everything all over the world seems so chaotic at this time, but change is in the air Read more
“The truth is like a lion. You don’t need to defend it. Let it loose. It will defend itself.” St Augustine. A quick diversion from empathy to talk more about scientism, but pertinent to it as I will show in the next post. I have talked about scientism a bit Read more
In previous posts I have written about empathy and leadership (e.g. Spiritual Crisis is the World’s Greatest Problem Part 2 – Cultural Sensitivity and Empathy) but I would like to revisit it again through a frame of empathy. Civic mobilization requires that we understand and address the underlying problems that Read more
The contentious atmosphere that pervades our societies with all the anger and frustration should be of concern for everyone. So, today’s post, with the title given, is the transcript of an oral presentation I gave at an international conference in Montreal in 2009. Modern consumerism prevents people who benefit from Read more
In two previous posts (Biomimicry 1 and 2 – Learning from Nature – BioEngineering a New World) I talked a little about Janine Benyus and her Biomimicry concepts. The key point I want to reiterate here is that the new wave of technology will by definition have to be focused Read more