“The most important ally in creating a new sustainable world is one with hard skeptics that have a fully open mind to all possibilities. Pseudo-skeptics (of which the majority belong) are irrational in that they automatically dismiss anything that does not fit their highly specified worldview without even making a Read more…
When I was still teaching about sustainability, I sometimes used the simulation program Sim City. The first time I used this program was back in the early 1990s. (SimCity is a city-building and urban planning simulation game.) What becomes clear from doing this kind of simulation is that there are Read more…
I have made a big deal about us all needing to be involved as active participants in manifesting a new and better future. I get a lot of comments from friends and students about what kind of political and economic system this involves. Whatever comes out of this transition it Read more…
I am amazed that I have to actually say this but the transition requires us to make a decision away from the consumer paradigm. WE don’t have to leave all the creature comforts and luxuries behind – let me dispel that ridiculous notion straight away – but we have to Read more…
As an academic, in a university setting, I found myself leading a sustainability degree program and the charge for many sustainability projects and situations that I felt needed change on campus and within the local communities. I would not say I am a person who aspires to be a leader. Read more…
In the previous post I outlined how one of the most pressing problems of the day in 1899 had been the widespread accumulation of horse poop, but how that had been resolved by the adoption of a new technology – the automobile. This also highlighted another problem of technology in Read more…
Just a couple of weeks ago I attended a City Council Meeting to support a local measure to have the Power Company in my area commit to 100% Renewable Energy by 2030. I sat patiently to the agenda of the many items that the city council have to deal with Read more…
News stories that you hear from the mainstream that are not negative tend only to revolve around new positive technological innovations. That is the creativity that excites us. We get excited by things that work well and improve conditions. Yet, the many positive stories that show social systems where people Read more…
Imagine, if we were contacted by an alien race, what is the story we want to tell about humanity? Would we want to emphasize the brutality or the humanity of our species? Think about the message we sent out into the cosmos on two golden phonograph records aboard the Voyager Read more…
If we see everybody as ‘same to me’ or ‘other than me’ we find that this creates either compassion or fear respectively. What separates communities that work and have resilience is that they bond together for the benefit of the whole. Community expert Mark Nepo uses the analogy of Aspen Read more…
One of the greatest challenges we face (as I have talked about earlier in this blog) is that of education for a flourishing future. Scholar Sir Ken Robinson makes a big point about how our educational systems are not designed for fostering creativity or critical thinking (I recommend any of Read more…
The last five posts were a story of how we globally came to be bamboozled by American Hyper-Consumerism. The problem is not so much consumerism as the economic drive that forced a tragic and mindless lifestyle onto people with the hollow promise of a wonderful life but gave instead loss Read more…
Many scholars support the idea that all we need to do to solve the world’s problems is to reform what we currently do and just promote more laws and regulations to curb humanity’s worse tendencies. As a broad generalization, many reformers perceive that humans will only behave sustainably if they Read more…
I was reading an overview of a U.S. governmental financial report the other day and it quite categorically said that the country’s economy is doing well! I almost fell off my chair in aghast disbelief of what I was reading! So, I pondered what the report was saying and probed Read more…
I was listening to a short U-tube talk by Vandana Shiva, a brilliant philosopher from India. She really put things into simple perspective. It got me to thinking again how we transform the world to one we want to see – I’ve talked about this several times in this blog Read more…
POPULATION, ECONOMICS, CHOICE and MORALITY I didn’t get to complete my thoughts on this in the last post because of a keyboard problem. Countries that have invested in female education and family planning have demonstrated major drops in total fertility rates. Regardless of which counties are used as comparisons (e.g. Read more…
Computers are wonderful things – until they aren’t. For those following this blog, my apologies. My programs needed some fixing, and I was on the road in Florida without access to program support. There’s a metaphor there somewhere about modern living and the inherent problems we have? (see further down). Read more…
I decided to subtitle this post a world of possibilities. There are many options for us and many are more desirable than what we currently have. I didn’t say probabilities, which are more likely occurrences, because to get to probabilities we have to have more firm intention of what we Read more…
I was clearing out boxes of books I had brought back home from my academic office after I retired and came across ‘The Mis-measure of Man’ by Stephen Jay Gould. In this book Gould lays out the rationale and justification for how scientists used ‘good’ science to ‘prove’ that intellect Read more…
“Change never comes from the powerful and proud [the hierarchy] – they have too much to lose and too little to gain. Change always comes from the common and humble – we have little to lose and much to gain. John Ikerd” If we are to transform the way we live, Read more…
What makes the Leaver worldview unique is that it is completely community oriented. Our current westernized culture thrives on competition, individualism, and reliance on authority to solve problems. I need to be careful here – I am NOT condoning some Ayn Rand way of looking at the world, that is Read more…
When I first started working at a university for a living at age 18, I worked with an incredibly diverse group of people with all kinds of personalities. Overall, we all got on well, we had to for the place to function. Some people kept their distance and some were Read more…
“I used to think the top environmental problems were biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse, and climate change. I thought that with 30 years of good science we could address those problems. I was wrong. The top environmental problems are selfishness, greed and apathy…and to deal with those we need a spiritual Read more…
Aldo Leopold, in his A Sand County Almanac book published in 1946, said, “There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm. One is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other that heat comes from the furnace.” And “The last word in ignorance Read more…
I started this blog to get people thinking for themselves. I have done some down the rabbit hole material, but I find I fall in to the trap of being merely reformational in what I say much of the time. I realized this when I picked up the latest Read more…