Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Even though many stereotypes have blurred, some parents today continue to hold narrow views of what it means to be a girl or boy. We may be shocked and disgusted by stories from the #Metoo movement but perhaps such actions are the result of stereotypes that encourage boys to be dominant and girls to be submissive.
In this tumultuous world, one thing seems certain: today’s dire threats to our democracy did not arise out of nowhere. Every culture thrives, or not, on whether its core narrative—the causation story we tell ourselves—enhances mutual gain or spurs division. And, the narrative driving today’s unfolding catastrophe feeds the latter.
In short, the climate futures they describe obscure the fact that the impact of climate change will ultimately not be determined by levels of CO2, but by structures of power. In other words, the exact impact of a climate disaster will depend on political decisions, economic wealth and social systems.
We may be meeting our schools’ curriculum targets, but in many cases we are still missing the larger aims of environmental awareness, our essential inter-connectedness and inter-being with the planet we live on, and thus many teachers, and their students, are not acting out of deep ecological understanding or deep ecological commitment.
Spirituality came easy for me, being “normal” was hard. As a child I was allowed to wander alone in the woods, old farm buildings, pasture, and along the creek. We lived in the small house on my grandparent’s farm, while my grandmother and uncle lived in the big house. I would tell my mother I was going over to Grandma’s house and head off exploring.
Perhaps from living in a non-disaster-affected context for a while; perhaps from taking systematic action to reduce my emissions, so an action-oriented perspective has come out naturally; or perhaps, simply from talking more about it, and connecting back into local loves. Good conversation needs laughter too.
What I’m trying to say is, wealth and power are incredibly tightly concentrated and to look at a grossly unequal system and say every person has equal responsibility to fix the mess we’re in just doesn’t make any sense. We all have some power and some responsibility, but some have much more than others.
New Year predictions are getting more and more popular. In a world that is growing ever more complex and confusing, we seem to be increasingly eager to get some hints about what lies in the fog just ahead of us. Yet what we need is probably less to get some clues about what might be coming up next than to acquire a more acute consciousness and comprehension of the road we are travelling.
A recent conversation with a fundamentalist Christian has left me wondering why it seems we fail to recognize the dangers of extremism? Christians who deny the reality of climate change, who believe that humans have a God-given right to exploit the earth no matter the consequences pose a danger to society. I think it’s time we talk about that.
What happens in the brain when we’re being imaginative? Neuroscientists are moving away from the idea of what’s called ‘localisationism’ (the idea that each capacity of the brain is linked to a particular ‘area’ of the brain) towards the idea that what’s more important is to identify the networks that fire in order to enable particular activities or insights.
Recently, I spoke with John Marion, the executive director of Common Cause Rhode Island, who, since 2008, has led the organization. He has successfully spearheaded numerous pieces of democracy reform through the legislature during his Common Cause tenure, including online voter registration, a law strengthening the state’s Ethics Commission, and more recently, automatic voter registration and risk-limiting post-election audits.
In our time of unprecedented interdependence and existential risk, we face a common predicament and an uncertain destiny. As the global quandary deepens and awareness spreads, the conviction that root-and-branch social change is needed to circumvent perils and seize opportunities draws more and more of us.
