Society featured

Initial Report on the Transition US National Gathering and Movement Strategy Session

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The first-ever Transition US National Gathering (and the follow-up Leadership Retreat and Movement Strategy Session) was a great success! TUS staff, board, and our growing network of supporters and volunteers around the country remain hard at work integrating this amazing experience — including harvesting stories, videos, images and other artifacts — but for the moment, it feels necessary to give our blog readers at least a very basic sketch of the magic that we co-created in the Twin Cities this summer.

Racial Inequality Is Hollowing Out America’s Middle Class

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America’s middle class is under assault. Since 1983, national median wealth has declined by 20 percent, falling from $73,000 to $64,000 in 2013. And U.S. homeownership has been in a steady decline since 2005. While we often hear about the struggles of the white working class, a driving force behind this trend is an accelerating decline in black and Latino household wealth.

Anti-Pipeline Activists Across the country Unite to #StopETP

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The company behind the Dakota Access pipeline and many other damaging fossil fuel projects — Energy Transfer Partners — was the focus of nearly 20 actions spanning 10 U.S. states last week. The #StopETP protests, which took place on Friday and Saturday, included a flotilla on a Louisiana bayou, a blockade of pipeline construction equipment in Pennsylvania and a demonstration outside the Texas home of CEO Kelcy Warren.

Stop Talking Right Now about the Threat of Climate Change. It’s Here; it’s Happening

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Because we have burned so much oil and gas and coal, we have put huge clouds of CO2 and methane in the air; because the structure of those molecules traps heat the planet has warmed; because the planet has warmed we can get heavier rainfalls, stronger winds, drier forests and fields. It’s not mysterious, not in any way. It’s not a run of bad luck. It’s not Donald Trump (though he’s obviously not helping). It’s not hellfire sent to punish us. It’s physics.

Greed Has Poisoned Their Souls: The World at 1°C warming, August, 2017, (Part 2 of 3)

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Unless you are an environmental geographer or a regular reader of The World at 1°C, chances are you apply the term “natural disaster” to events such as Hurricane Harvey, the landslides in Sierra Leone which claimed 1000 lives, or any of the other countless climatic shocks felt over the last month. The fact is that nothing could be more unnatural…

Guiding the Evolution of Social Systems

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It is currently impossible to guide the evolution of entire societies. Yet this is exactly what humanity needs the ability to do in these turbulent and dangerous times. The litany of threats is well known — global warming, political corruption, conflicts and war, extreme poverty, extremist ideologies, and more — all intensifying in the waves of exponential change that now dominate the patterns of global change in the world.

How a Community’s Imagination Reshaped a Museum

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The programmes that we deliver in the museum, whether they be from schools to life-long learning, to graduate start-up businesses to whatever, how do those empower the makers of the future?  And we understand how making makes us feel better.  This is a building that was run in the early 18th century off one power source and produced 300 million yards of silk thread, a day, off a water source.  And now it’s run off a power station.  So it’s to open up that conversation about what is the future of that?

Climate Change’s Twin Towers: Eiffel and Babel

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Climate change is not the biggest problem facing the nation; talking about it is. Until we learn to do the one, the other may never be sufficiently solved to stave off the worst of its potential impact. The greatest of these may be a functioning federal government. Actually, talking about anything in today’s partisan charged atmosphere appears to be the problem of paramount prominence. I will focus here only on climate change.

Climate Change Opinion Polls: A Glass Half Empty or a Glass Half Full? Part 2

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Success is not a matter of wishing, however—if it were, beggars would be kings and I would be handsome and rich. Experience and the findings of attitudinal and behavioral research suggests increasing active voter participation requires a better understanding of how people receive, consider and interpret information.

In Other Tongues: Ecologies of Meaning and Loss

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I regret the lazy oversimplifications of our time. As our world becomes ever fuller withaccessible information, ever more porous, ever more pressing with demands for our attention, so our subtler semiotic capacities appear to stall before the task. Our attempts at interpretation and meaning-making are overwhelmed: more information means less meaning.

American Idiot: Rethinking Anti-Intellectualism in the Age of Trump

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A professor of national security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College and a former political adviser, Nichols argues that the country has shifted from a healthy skepticism of accepted knowledge to a proud, self-satisfied ignorance and active hostility to the very idea of expertise. Across American society, intellectual authority is resented, resisted and disregarded, with every opinion ostensibly holding equal weight.

Guiding the Evolution of Cultural Sciences

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We are living in a world where holistic, systemic crises threaten the future of humanity. And yet, there has been an historic pattern of fragmentation in the physical and social sciences needed to tackle them. I have taken on the life mission to guide the evolution of cultural sciences so that they become fully integrated with the dynamics 0f our changing Earth.