The Right Way to Flourish

After I wrote the last post, I read the full text of the Kaiser report on media use by 8 to 18-year old children. The part describing the impact on learning and feelings was especially troubling. I know that there are many who do not buy the arguments I make in my book, based largely on psychology or philosophy, that technology has the potential to submerge one’s sense of worldliness and understanding of what it means to be human. The Kaiser study provides some convincing data that this danger is quire real. Here are the key findings. > **Youth who… Read More

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I saw a couple of reports a few days ago that were quite disturbing. I know that children have been spending more and more time in front of some sort of screen, but I was shocked by the actual numbers involved. Neilsen Company, based on survey data, [reports](http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/media_entertainment/tv-viewing-among-kids-at-an-eight-year-high/print/) that preschoolers, ages 2 to 5, spend 32.5 hours in front of a television screen. I guess their thumbs are not yet developed enough to allow them to devote additional hours to texting. The next older cohort, from 6 to 11, spend a little less time, 28 hours on the average. Neilsen… Read More

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One of the underlying themes of my book is that unsustainability has arisen as an unintended consequences of our current cultural paradigm. For sustainability as flourishing to appear, the beliefs and norms that constitute that paradigm have to change. One of the critical beliefs to change is that of what it means to be human, from a picture of an individual as a consuming machine fulfilling a set of insatiable needs to a human whose existence is manifest by the satisfaction of a set of cares or concerns. One of the categories is care for the world which include most… Read More

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The results of the Massachusetts Senatorial election are just in. The Republican, Scott Brown, trounced his Democratic opponent, Martha Coakley by about 53% to 47%. This counts as a trouncing given the demographics of Massachusetts and the recent history of this seat. (Disclosure: I am a life-long Democratic voter.) I am disappointed by the results, but that is not what I want to write about. This election demonstrates the complex nature of our political system, and the effects of rigidity on the dynamics of the system. The theory of democracy is that the majority rules unless the process would disenfranchise… Read More

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On last Friday and Saturday, I taught a couple of classes at the Marlboro College MBA for Managing Sustainability in Brattelboro, VT. I’m teaching a course called, “Exploring Sustainability,” to both the entering class and the second-year group, but in separate sessions. I am using my book for the reader. It’s a chance to observe how the book works as a text. This weekend is the first of three “intensives” that will take place during this trimester. Except for these more traditional classes, the course is taught via the internet, using a pedagogical web program called Moodle. > Moodle is… Read More

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I’m back from Pittsburgh and a talk to the first workshop on green chemistry in a series organized by the Rachel Carson Homestead. I haven’t been to Pittsburgh for some decades and still have badly out-of-date memories of the city with its steel mills and other heavy industry. Instead I found a very clean, imposing modern city and enthusiastic attitude about the future. But some things never change. The chief topic of conversation at dinner the night before the talk was a massive project to capture natural gas trapped in the coal deposits in the region by fracturing the strata… Read More

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I’m off today for a short trip to Pittsburgh to speak at a workshop on green chemistry and other topics related to green design. The event is organized and co-sponsored by the Rachel Carson Homestead Association. It’s that connection that made this an attractive invitation. Created in 1975, The mission of the Rachel Carson Homestead Association is to preserve, restore, and interpret Rachel Carson’s birthplace and childhood home; and to design and implement education programs and resources in keeping with her environmental ethic: Live in harmony with nature Preserve and learn from natural places Minimize the effect of man-made chemicals… Read More

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Watch this. It is a remarkable rendering of the choice we have ahead of us.

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Jacob Weisberg has an [interesting piece](http://www.slate.com/id/2240858/) on Slate (Also in Newsweek) pointing to the several “causes” of the economic collapse. > There are no strong candidates for what logicians call a sufficient condition—a single factor that would have caused the crisis in the absence of any others. There are, however, a number of plausible necessary conditions—factors without which the crisis would not have occurred. Most analysts find former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan at fault, though for a variety of reasons. > I am not so much interested in the arguments per se, but in Weisberg’s conclusions about them. Collecting the… Read More

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Orion Magazine, one of my favorites, has a long [interview](http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/5227) with Kevin Kelly, founder of Wired Magazine. I subscribed to Wired from the start, but dropped it after about a year. Not because of the content. I found the format so off-putting that I had trouble reading it. My friends assured me that disorder was the wave of the future. Reading Kelly’s comments in the interview, I probably would have dropped it at some time because of its contents as well as format. Even granting that Kelly likes to shock people, I found his beliefs about technology not only outsized,… Read More

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