The Occupy movement has focused public attention on the vast and growing disparity of wealth and power in the US, and increasingly in other affluent nations. You’ve all seen the statistics — essentially all of the increase in real wealth and income over the last 40 years has accrued to less [...]

I spent much of my professional career developing and implementing Strategic Plans. The hardest part of this was that most people didn’t (and still don’t) know what ‘strategy’ is: the choice among alternative courses of action, not the determination of goals and objectives. It’s about how, not about what.
Most of the ‘strategic’ plans I was [...]

For the last year or so I’ve been involved with our local Transition Initiative, and have communicated with many members of Transition initiatives around the world. Several of my articles on Transition-related topics have been published by web sites (like Energy Bulletin) that focus on how we can cope with [...]

For most of my life, I have struggled intermittently with depression (the Noonday Demon), and anxiety (its Accomplice). And in my practice to become more present, I have been trying to better understand, recognize and articulate strong negative emotions that come up for me from time to time, and which sometimes [...]

Some things I’ve noticed lately:

The NYT, and the few other mainstream media that still have a shred of credibility remaining, have recently been filled with Op Eds and editorials urging various powers (corporations, Obama administration, Supreme Court) to do (or not do) things. But these urgings have an [...]

So it’s another year, and one year since I first read Ran Prieur’s warning that when you have, at last, the time and opportunity and freedom to do nothing, nothing is all you will want to do, and you may then remain depressed for a long time before you finally discover [...]

What I came up with was a list of 65 abilities (diagrammed above) that tended to fall into five main types:
Knowledge: Acquired information that is essential context for understanding how the world works and how we might do things better.
Innate Capacities: Inherent abilities, aptitudes we’re born with (evolution has selected these qualities for survival for [...]

[Keith Farnish thinks it's useful, perhaps even necessary, to get angry at the perpetrators of the destruction of our world. He believes it can shake us out of our lethargy and our sense of helplessness. I've never found anger particularly useful, since I usually end up feeling that the objects of [...]

I was researching some of my old posts the other day and realized there is a synergy among three of them that I hadn’t recognized before. This article will attempt to pull them together to create a theory for why we do what we do.
The three articles are:
1. From last December, my [...]

A few days ago I was interviewed by Steve Patterson for his regular podcast program Two Beers With Steve, as we talked about complex systems, dependence on industrial civilization, transition, resilience and steady state economics. Steve is well-read and a terrific interviewer, and there are some great podcasts on his [...]