The Right Way to Flourish

From the New York Times February 23, 2009. On-line edition front page about 10pm.

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Joel Makower began a recent piece with this question: What is it with pollsters and green consumers? Why do nearly all of the surveys seem so gushingly optimistic, even during pessimistic times? That’s a question that’s been nagging me the past few weeks. He starts to answer his own questions, pointing out that the results of many of the survey results he lists are suspect. Some were done by companies with a strong interest in the outcome. And there are some that are simply misleading or so badly articulated that the happy outcomes reported may be figments of the poor… Read More

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Andrew Revkin has another not-to-miss piece. The message is stark and not to be put off even as the global economy keeps cratering. Flourishing has little possibility to show up until we put the Earth back into working order. The nub of Revkin’s piece starts with a quote from Todd Stern: “This not a matter of politics or morality or right or wrong. It is simply the unforgiving math of accumulating emissions.” Todd Stern, the new United States special envoy on climate change, clearly understands the “bathtub effect” that experts say makes the rising human contribution to the atmosphere’s greenhouse… Read More

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My wife looked at my recent post about Twitter, and said it reminded her of a story by E. B. White she used to read to her students back when she was teaching long ago. With his tongue firmly in his cheek, White wrote about the need to condense what was being written everyday into ever shorter pieces so that readers could keep up with writers. The ultimate result should be obvious, but here are a few paragraphs from the essay to savor. The whole essay, titled Irtnog, has been posted elsewhere. It appeared in 1927 in a collection of… Read More

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On the NYTimes Dot Earth blog, Andrew Revkin writes:. Two reports out today on conflict and the environment mesh in a disturbing way. One, from the United Nations Environment Program, asserts that persistent conflicts within states most often relapse when the root cause is scarce natural resources and environmental issues are not incorporated into efforts to forge peace. The other study, “Warfare in Biodiversity Hotspots,” has been published in the journal Conservation Biology. The authors find that “more than 80 percent of the world’s major armed conflicts from 1950 to 2000 occurred in regions identified as the most biologically diverse… Read More

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Welcome to Twitter Nation. What was once an easily avoided subculture of needy and annoying online souls is now a growing part of the social and media landscapes, with Twittering tentacles reaching into the operations of major newspapers, networks, corporations and political campaigns. With this lede, Alexander Zaitchik launches into a welcome screed about the impact of Twitter. Readers of this blog will already know that I am very skeptical that computer-based social networking technology produces positive outcomes. In spite of claims that Twitter radiates messages that reveal how the twitterer is doing or feeling, the tweets lack any significant… Read More

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Maybe the light of sustainability is beginning to dawn. With the economic system collapsing more and more in spite of the biggest infusion of new capital ever, and the environmental world becoming sicker everyday, people are starting to realize that both losses play havoc with their psyches and their ability to flourish in general. A couple of articles today focused on this growing human concern, but from two different perspectives. Both illustrate the importance of the human dimension of sustainability as flourishing, and recognize the interconnectedness of our health and that of the environment. The first raises questions about the… Read More

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Front and center on the online Times today is a story headlined, “The Body as Billboard: Your Ad Here.” The copy speaks for itself. TERRY GARDNER, a legal secretary in California, returned home from work recently to find two police officers waiting. They said her brother had told them he thought she might be having a breakdown because she had shaved her head. Ms. Gardner, 50, said in a telephone interview that she had told the officers that she was fine and had shaved her head for an advertising campaign by Air New Zealand, which had hired her to display… Read More

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David Brooks wrote today in the Times about the American Dream, as he often does. He was summarizing the results from a Pew survey asking “where Americans would like to live and what sort of lifestyle they would like to have.” The first thing they found is that even in dark times, Americans are still looking over the next horizon. Nearly half of those surveyed said they would rather live in a different type of community from the one they are living in at present. In short, Americans may indeed be gloomy and hunkered down. But they’re still Americans. They… Read More

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I mentioned in a blog a few days ago that I participated in a workshop on Learning and Leadership for Sustainability, sponsored by Society of Organizational Learning and led by Peter Senge. I was part of the resource team and offered a short discussion of the concept of sustainability developed in my book. Other than that I was just like all the rest of the attendees. Now some 10 days later I have had time to reflect and gather my thoughts. I took home many lessons, but one in particular stands out as reinforcing something I already had come to… Read More

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