The Right Way to Flourish

When I began blogging now almost 5 years ago, I generally picked up something from the news or another website and commented on it, using it to make my case for sustainability. All was new to me and I had no trouble finding grist for my mill. Although I still bookmark a lot of stuff to blog about, I no longer am able to stay fresh. So little has changed. Business still doesn’t get it. I have yet to see anything that remotely suggests that firms, large and small, are doing anything other than reducing sustainability. I guess I will… Read More

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Almost everything I write is connected to sustainability, but sometimes that connection follows a winding and tenuous path. Sustainability, a word found increasingly in public conversations but poorly understood and stated, denotes the ability of a system to attain and maintain some desirable condition, but connotes a sense that the world is doing anything but that. Flourishing is the end that I assert is the best single concept for driving individual and collective behavior towards an almost universally shared vision. Flourishing creates images of full development, robustness, satisfaction, and other norms shared by humans in all cultures at all levels… Read More

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The last few weeks have been taken up with getting ready for summer, leaving not enough time to keep up the blog. The annual move to Maine is always fraught with opening one house and vacating another. There are usually a few weeks where something is in the wrong house, but it always settles down. This summer is more complicated because I have Andy’s and my new book to tend to. It’s exciting to have actual copies to send off. The worrying starts, wondering if anyone will buy a copy, much less read the book. After three decades of opening… Read More

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One of the longest, continuing study of human development has been in the news lately with the recent publication of George Vaillant’s Triumphs of Experience. For the past thirty years Vaillant has been the director of the much-heralded Grant Study, named for the donor W. T. Grant, eponymous owner of an early chain of discount stores. The Grant study, begin in 1938, has followed 268 Harvard undergraduates throughout their lives, monitoring their physical and mental health and their successes and failures in life. Since the study was restricted to white, upper class subjects, any conclusions need to be very carefully… Read More

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The Marathon bombing has spawned a spate of articles about violence. I have not written much about this subject in my books and other pieces on sustainability-as-flourishing, but it should be quite obvious that the subjects are intimately intertwined. People can flourish in a culture where violence is rare and not systemic, but not in one where violence is part of the system, the culture. There is a big difference between events that are rare and random, and events that are normal, an embedded part of the cultural system. Violence is inherently a form of domination, a condition which is… Read More

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Let me begin with a reminder about the origin of Earth Day that I cribbed from the web [site](http://www.earthday.org/earth-day-history-movement) of the Earth Day Network. > The idea came to Earth Day founder Gaylord Nelson, then a U.S. Senator from Wisconsin, after witnessing the ravages of the 1969 massive oil spill in Santa Barbara, California. Inspired by the student anti-war movement, he realized that if he could infuse that energy with an emerging public consciousness about air and water pollution, it would force environmental protection onto the national political agenda. Senator Nelson announced the idea for a “national teach-in on the… Read More

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No, I don’t mean that sustainability has arrived, only that I have gotten my copies of Andy and my new book. It looks great. Your copies should be shipping from wherever you ordered them in the next week or so. I am looking for comments on the book at any time.

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I have made several attempts at writing a post following the bombing at the Boston Marathon. It’s too close to home for me to be able to compose my thoughts sufficiently clearly to put them out for public scrutiny. But I do owe something to this blog. The word, cowardly, keeps coming up in my mind. Technology, my favorite bete noire, enables such cowardly acts by separating the actor in time and space from the consequences of whatever action is being taken. By this assertion, I do not mean to condemn technology, only to point out, as I often do,… Read More

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What’s the matter with Kansas? Much more than Thomas Frank found to write about in his 2004 book of the same name. I discovered that he took the title from an 1986 editorial by William Allen White chastising Kansan Populist leaders for adopting policies that discouraged investors from coming into Kansas. Well, Kansas continues to act against its interests. I came upon a [story](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-04-09/kansas-s-self-destruct-button-a-bill-to-outlaw-sustainability.html) on the Bloomberg website telling of a recent bill introduced into the state legislature to outlaw any public action connected to sustainable development. Tom Randall, the article’s author leads off with: > Kansas, I love your… Read More

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All the various news media have been full of stories about the sad state of our US educational system. I heard a report yesterday on NPR that besides the terrible performance of our poor kids in school, the middle class students were not much better. We lag the rest of our peer nations in math, science, and other subjects. I am finishing Jonathan Kozol’s screed, The Shame of the Nation, about how we educate out poor minorities, particularly black children. The book is one of the sources for a course I am taking. Tom Friedman keeps writing about the need… Read More

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