The Right Way to Flourish

Matt May offers an important prescription for moving toward sustainability in 2009. The path to sustainability can be much shorter and straighter if you follow his formula: create a “stop-doing” list. I suddenly realized that I had been looking at the problem in the wrong way. As is natural and intuitive, I had been looking at what to do, rather than what to not do. But as soon as I shifted my perspective, the vaunted Toyota Production System became for me a study of what wasn’t there, and of how and what to stop doing. The Lexus line of cars,… Read More

New Year’s imminent arrival is always a time to think about and make resolutions for the coming year. Take a moment and think about your own list. I am sure you will find almost everything is a sort of promise to stop doing things you consider to have negative consequences, even if the promise sounds like, “I will be nicer to my boss.” Now think more deeply, and ask yourself why did I choose this list of things. Almost all, although you may not use these words, will fall into the category of bad habits, and in some cases, habits… Read More

The Greenwash Brigade’s (a regular feature of [Marketplace](http://marketplace.publicradio.org/)) favorite [choices](http://www.publicradio.org/columns/sustainability/greenwash/2008/12/2008s_greenwashes_of_the_year.html) for 2008. My first choice from their list: > Fiji Water’s new green campaign: Yes, shipping water in container ships from a pristine aquifer in paradise is somehow green. [Really](http://www.publicradio.org/columns/sustainability/greenwash/2008/06/fiji_water_by_the_numbers.html)? Here’s another brand, [Bling H2O](http://www.blingh2o.com/), that would certainly qualify for their list.

Bob Herbert, without mentioning the word sustainability, has a great year-end message. What he proposes is a step in that direction. > I’ve got a new year’s resolution and a new slogan for the country. > The resolution may be difficult, but it’s essential. Americans must resolve to be smarter going forward than we have been for the past several years. > Look around you. We have behaved in ways that were incredibly, astonishingly and embarrassingly stupid for much too long. We’ve wrecked the economy and mortgaged the future of generations yet unborn. We don’t even know if we’ll have… Read More

As human beings, we are like other living creatures, the product of evolution. Whatever we have become, we are the end of myriad adaptations. Language was perhaps the most important evolutionary innovation in our phylogenetic history. With the tool of language and our cognitive skills we have produced technology that has brought us up to and into the modern age. With all its wonders, technology exacts a cost–the loss of our innate humanity–all the attributes that make us so different from the complex machines that increasingly come to dominate our lives. Now comes a new technological threat– the use of… Read More

I’m off for a while. See you next year.