The Right Way to Flourish

Here’s a novel way to start putting CSR into play. The writer, [Scott Cooney](http://greenoptions.com/author/scottcooney), was suggesting a strategy for dealing with the economic crisis. Cooney calls it a counterintuitive strategy. > Try this: empower your employees. Give them even more reign over your company. Task them with righting the ship. Elevate them, during this time of crisis, to the level of partner. Ask them to think like an owner. It may not resemble the usual CSR programs, but think about it–isn’t this the essence of responsibility to one of the critical set of stakeholders, the employees. I don’t think it… Read More

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Reading Ben Barber’s piece, [A Revolution in Spirit](http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090209/barber) in the *Nation*, questioning the future of capitalism, as we know it, woke me to an situation that was not available to me when I wrote my book. My underlying strategy in the book for transforming our present hyper-consumerist culture is a modest, subversive process to change present beliefs and values by encoding a sustainability set into commonplace artifacts and collective decision processes. My argument, a few years ago, was that there was no big crisis apparent in the public consciousness. I did believe such a crisis of unsustainability was indeed present,… Read More

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The New York Times magazine had a fascinating story this week about the effort that is going on to preserve the whooping crane, long a threatened species. The story covers tales of people dressed in crane suits and guiding young cranes by flying ultralights along their migration route. These are cranes hatched and raised for quite a while in a strange sort of captivity, being cared for, but at the same time being kept away from contact with human beings, at least from human beings not outfitted in a suit designed to mimic the cranes. The story about the cranes… Read More

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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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