Last week, I traveled to Monterrey, Mexico to deliver a lecture about sustainability, I was very impressed with the degree that sustainability has spread on the Campus. They have an active program to green the campus, and many degree paths involving sustainability. That’s the good news. The downside is that, like virtually everybody doing sustainability, they are focused on reducing unsustainability. As a technological university, the underlying approach is to use technology to lighten our load on the Earth. At the same time the underlying causes for all the aspects of unsustainability—environmental damage and social distress—are mostly unexamined. My lecture… Read More
Continue ReadingThe Neuroscience of Care
I am teaching an on-line class, based on my first book, *Sustainability by Design: A Subversive Strategy for Transforming our Consumer Culture*. We are currently discussing the centrality of Being and care to flourishing. Flourishing and authentic Being are virtually synonymous. Both have the essential meaning as attaining the full human potential in the processes of life. Humans are constrained by both nature and nurture. Our genes set some limits on what we can do. Men, so far, cannot bear children although the current status of gender may change this. Very short women would find it exceedingly difficult to find… Read More
Continue ReadingNeed I Comment?
Another occasional post that speaks for itself. Greenwashing is still an issue. This linked NYTimes article suggests it is still a big issue. Although the article is about the continuing practice of making environmental claims that are either false or misleading, I picked up another case of the most misleading line, the use of sustainable as an adjective. > While plenty of companies are bringing more sustainable products to market, others appear less interested in environmental stewardship and more interested in bamboozling their customers. Automobiles and diapers have little to do with sustaining the health of the Earth. It’s all… Read More
Continue ReadingWhere Have All the Flowers Gone
The NYTimes carried this sad [article](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/17/opinion/our-vanishing-flowers.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=opinion-c-col-right-region®ion=opinion-c-col-right-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-right-region&_r=0) about the disappearance of many flower species. Given the intimate linguistic connection between flowers and flourishing, I experienced a deep sense of sadness as I read the story. Here’s the opening paragraph. > Ours is one of the most colorful relationships of history: We need flowers for our very survival, and in turn flowers — the plants that exist as crop cultivars or horticultural cut flowers or potted beauties — rely on us to reproduce and spread. But all is not well in this storied partnership: We who behold or nurture flowers are condemning… Read More
Continue ReadingFlocking and Flourishing
During my on-line class based on my books last night, I experienced a flash if insight. The class was about complexity; one of the two foundational beliefs I argue is needed to create a new culture of flourishing. One of the overheads I use is a (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aEaZHWXmbRw) of a Nova program on emergence. They use bird flocking, fish schooling, and human crowd behavior as examples of self-organization or emergence. What has been chaotic movement becomes orderly in just a moment. The secret to understand such behavior is to identify a set of simple rules that each individual is following that… Read More
Continue ReadingHuman Beings Are Not Machines
Excellent article on this topic in the Boston Globe. The difference is critical to flourishing. The machine computer brain already can do marvelous things, but cannot add the context needed for caring. Here are the punch lines. > Machines possess no capacity to will, create, and want. From inside the computational framework, powers like these can only be bracketed or dismissed. If widely accepted, the moral and political implications of such dismissals would be grave. What becomes of democracy, individual liberty, and the right to pursue happiness, if computer-man has no capacities for free choice and is algorithm-driven? > Scientific… Read More
Continue ReadingThink Before You Give Your Six-year Old a Smart Phone
Sherry Turkle has done it again. Her new book, *Reclaiming Conversation*, outdoes her previous book in showing us the dark side of all this wondrous new personal technology. Jonathan Franzen, reviewing the book in the New York Times Sunday Book Review Section captures it much better than I ever could. Here is the key paragraph from his [review](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/04/books/review/jonathan-franzen-reviews-sherry-turkle-reclaiming-conversation.html). > Her new book, “Reclaiming Conversation,” extends her critique, with less emphasis on robots and more on the dissatisfaction with technology reported by her recent interview subjects. She takes their dissatisfaction as a hopeful sign, and her book is straightforwardly a call… Read More
Continue ReadingHomo Economicus is a Cultural Artifact
The central thesis of my work is that modern cultures/societies have evolved on a set of fundamental beliefs that do not match the way the world works. Over time, while the institutions of society, based on these beliefs, have become more entrenched, complex, and powerful, they are failing to produce the normative goals of individuals and the larger collective society. This failure is being compounded by the appearance of unintended consequences that loom large enough to pose existential threats to the Earth and its life forms. If this is the case, then the way out of the situation is simple… Read More
Continue ReadingCreating Flourishing Change Agents
I dropped into a lunch a few days ago at the Tellus Institute in Boston to discuss an essay that is due to be published in their series on the Global Transition Initiative. The essay points to some little known passages in Karl Marx’s works, which illustrate his awareness of connections between the economic and the natural worlds, and of what he called the “metabolic rift” that capitalistic production would cause in the latter. Very interesting, but more universal than his critique suggests. All material forms of production burden the earth’s resources. He made what is obvious today, observing the… Read More
Continue ReadingThis Site Has Been Renamed
I have changed the title of this website as you can see. The url remains the same. *Flourishing By Design* is the theme of the story I am now telling. Although I have been correcting myself for quite a while, “sustainability” remains present in my past work. Going forward, I intend to stick with flourishing as the goal. As I have written, without a clear vision of the future we want, the concept and implementation of sustainability tend to keep the status quo in place. Ironically, the very use of sustainability arose because powerful, concerned people grew wary of the… Read More
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