Author: jehren

In my daily screening of my Internet subscriptions (links to all the blogs I want to scan), I came upon two articles back-to-back on the Daily Green. The dissonance of the headlines is loud and clear. The first is on a familiar subject in this blog, GoodGuide, “GoodGuide Becoming Essential Green Shopping Buddy.”. The second is becoming all too familiar, but in an entirely different vein, “January Marks New Record-Low for Arctic Sea Ice.” GoodGuide is a, Internet-based system of rating consumer goods designed to assist buyers concerned about the specific product’s impacts. The heart of the message in the… Read More

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Thanks to Greenbiz, I found this website advertising green or eco-friendly dentistry. Here’s what the originators of this practice say: Every aspect of our space has been designed to maximize your comfort, and to reflect our commitment to environmentally sound business practices. We’ve checked around, and believe we’re the first eco-friendly dental office in the country. Sustainability permeates every aspect of our practice from biocompatible dental materials, to walls finished with paint that doesn’t contain nasty volatile organic compounds (VOCs). Their written materials refer to green, eco-friendly, environmentally sound, and sustainability. I added the emphasis. It’s too bad they abuse… Read More

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I mildly dissed Davos and the folks there in my last post. Today I read a longer and far more pointed screed by Umair Haque. I have just started reading his new book, *The New Capitalist Manifesto*. Haque criticizes the Davos “process” as representing a form of corporatism that has failed to produce its promised prosperity. While he does not refer to sustainability explicitly, his arguments point to essentially the same set of underlying issues I do. I appreciate his fearlessness. I am always amazed that the Harvard Business Press hosts his blog. Here’s just a small sample from this… Read More

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Greenbiz headlines a new global sustainability initiative: 54 CEOs Help Launch UN Program to Ramp Up Sustainability Chief executives from 54 companies around the world have joined forces with the United Nations to launch a new program aimed at raising the bar for corporate environmental, social and governance performance. The announcement came from this year’s Davos World Economic Forum meeting, which venue should raise some suspicions about the motivations and objectives of the program. More information can be gleaned from the UN pages describing this initiative. In January 2011, the United Nations Global Compact will launch a new platform for… Read More

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I read an intriguing story in Citizen Renaissance the other day about the upward trend in trust for institutions in the UK, but not in the US. The shift of Trust in institutions from West to East continues, as the emerging economies of Brazil, China and India begin to translate their economic strength and authority into tangible Trust numbers. Meanwhile, the US – now officially a sceptical nation – dips to a new Trust low, pretty much alongside Russia. Together with the UK and Ireland, the US sees a (not unexpected) freefall in Trust for its Banking Sector since 2008… Read More

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I am not the only one who questioned the idea of winning the future. Jamais Cascio, one of the best-known futurists on the Web, agrees. Here’s a bit, “When thinking about the future, ‘winning’ is a terrible metaphor.” His whole piece is at Open the Future.

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The themes of the President’s State of the Union speech that stood out most for me were: we can win the future and many references to the American Dream. I voted for Obama and am a loyal Democrat, but I cannot accept all this rhetoric as a positive steps toward the goals I believe I share with him. I appreciate the need to tread lightly upon the steps of political correctness, and offer a positive image at the same time. But “win the future” is a very poor rallying cry. Ontologically and grammatically, it is doesn’t work. We might be… Read More

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The Boston Globe carried a story yesterday about a the efforts of a group of scientists working to release the secrets of plant genomes. The aim, says the author Carolyn Johnson, is to figure out what makes dark chocolate so good and solve other mysteries of taste and flavor. > “We can breed potentially for types of plants with higher levels of a certain kind of flavor — fruity notes, raisiny notes, nutty notes . . . it will help us to understand the genetic basis of flavor,’’ said Mark Guiltinan, a professor of plant molecular biology at Pennsylvania State… Read More

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Picking up from the last post, the second question David asked a few blogs ago was to clarify my statement, “Sustainability, based on flourishing, is a vision rising from a world of unfulfilled promises.” I need to lay out a few premises underlying this statement first. One clue comes from this famous verse from Robert Browning’s poem “Pippa Passes” that I used to lead off the first chapter in my book. > The year’s at the spring > And day’s at the morn; > Morning’s at seven; > The hill-side’s dew-pearled > The lark’s on the wing; > The snail’s… Read More

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David commented on the last post asking me to expand on two statements: 1) Flourishing needs a non-dominating culture to appear. 2) Sustainability, based on flourishing, is a vision rising from a world of unfulfilled promises. I’ll take on the first one today. Flourishing, as I have been using it, refers to a state of Being in which the individual realizes a sense of wholeness or completion or perfection. The cares of the world recede for a moment or more. The positive psychologist, Mihaly Csikszentmihali defines it as “flow,” a condition of “being completely involved in an activity for its… Read More

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