In my journals I have page after page of large and small ideas, research ideas, notes to myself, and occasionally share them. Here’s one from today.
– The philosopher’s puzzle of whether a tree that falls in the woods makes a sound, posits that someone walking in the woods discovers a fallen tree, and wonders whether […]
Brad mentioned Catton’s theory of response to overpopulation as “We much learn to live in harmony with natural systems…”, which is true enough, but in the details talks about human values and not about how nature physically works. It’s a major “red flag” to talk about solving physical system problems in terms of […]
James Greyson said:
Phil, Do you think it helps to distinguish between modest returns (which could be part of a flow of money) and big accumulations of wealth (which seem to take money out of circulation and to often redirect flows of money destructively)? I wonder whether a slight tweaking of the language here and there […]
There’s been a real “soul searching” discussion within Harvard Business School about it’s responsibility in having trained many of the people whose business practices got the world into our present still worsening economic crisis, and it was reported today on NPR. It seems they have discovered they should teach business leaders to take some responsibility, […]
In response to Vic’s comment on ChangingNormal thread “Language and Metaphor”
Phil,
Let’s work with this … for me, myth is ‘not’ what the world is made of. And shifting to story and reality are intermixed: Story is how we describe reality as we know it. It is also how we descibe the possibility beyond reality, which […]
On a ClimateConcernGroup thread, “Can 350.org save the world?
In response to Maria Guzman’s:
–
Admirable efforts, but of dubious efficacy. Nothing is likely to make a real difference until everyone in the industrial societies personally feels the impact of a disaster in the making. How long this will take is hard to predict.
http://tinyurl.com/pobspv
Maria Guzman
–
Maria,
I think what […]
On a 5/14 Global Foresight thread Wolfgang Spendel had said:
Phil,
I call it Capitalism Plus. The old rules don’t work anymore. Many of multiple persuasions are in denial about the lack of utlility for business as usual. Given the load on the planet and the desire for many to improve their standard of living we have […]
On the CCG list RML had posted a good article on how public engagement is critical to solving climate crisis, ignoring the special problem that science still trys to describe uncontrolled systems with control theory…
RML,
Well, one of the major barriers to using science to communicate the choices available to individuals is that scientific models, […]
On the LCA list Simon asked: Are there any tangible examples of where something meaningful was created (not necessarily materially produced) by humans undertaking a “whole systems accounting” approach? I had offered the obscure example of one of my proud little examples, a whole system account of money exchange in a 1985 paper […]