Society

Strategies and policies for advancing the environmental agenda

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Abstract. This post attempts to describe succinctly the relevant intellectual territory with respect to both macro and micro types of policies and strategies at both the national and the organizational levels. It also highlights similarities and differences between "policies" and "strategies". It does this to encourage those who are environmentally engaged to consider how their own environmental agendas could be advanced through the range of macro and micro policies and strategies identified, and their many variables. It also brings attention to some of the generic political and political economy obstacles which both policy-making and "strategy-making" actors and stakeholders typically face in the course of the complex and ongoing multi-actor processes of policy (or strategy) formulation, adoption, implementation and evaluation. An additional related objective is to provide an introduction and cursory review of the website "Cognitive Policy Works", identify some of the novel ways it works with policy-making actors and stakeholders, and bring attention to its excellent work on the "framing" of issues and the tacit "mental models" which may be in use.

Iraq 10 years on

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•An ‘Absolute Will To Forget’: Iraq Casts Shorter Shadow Than Vietnam •David Frum, the Iraq war and oil •Bombs kill nearly 60 on Iraq invasion anniversary •Hawks Defend War on Low-Key 10th Anniversary of Iraq Invasion •Search and Destroy: The rape of Iraq •Death and Dollars in the New Iraq

The first International Day of Happiness and the Importance of Wellbeing

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Wednesday 20th March 2013 was a historic day for global wellbeing, because the United Nations declared it the first ever International Day of Happiness. This signifies recognition of the relevance of happiness and wellbeing as universal goals in people’s lives around the world, and acknowledgement of the importance of these goals in public policy objectives.

the darkness around us is deep

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I don’t live in London anymore and it must have been years now since I walked past these stone fountains at Lancaster Gate. My parents ashes are scattered among the horse chestnut trees at the water’s edge and I have come to touch base in a hard winter, when it seems my world has come to a grinding halt. Your parents can give you good reasons for being here, so long as you don’t get waylaid by happy family stories and too much psychology. My father was a lawyer but he dreamed of being a travelling writer, my mother was a secretary and a wife, but dreamed of being an artist and living in a community. I have lived out their dreams.

The Illusion of Invincibility

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One of the wry amusements to be had from writing a blog that routinely contradicts the conventional wisdom of our time is the way that defenders of that same conventional wisdom tend to react. You might think that those who are repeating what most people believe would take advantage of that fact, and present themselves as the voice of the majority, speaking for the collective consensus of our time. In the nearly seven years since I started this blog, though, the number of times that’s happened can be counted neatly on the fingers of one foot.

Busting the Myth that Consensus-with-Unanimity Is Good for Communities, Part II

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The conflict in this real community I’ll call “Green Meadow” (first described in Part I of this article, Communities #155, Summer 2012) was between two community members who had frequently blocked proposals and a roomful of people who wanted to pass an Agriculture Committee proposal about a community site plan for future farms, pastures, and orchards. Passing the proposal would mean clearing more of their forest. The two frequently blocking members were committed to protecting the community’s land—to protecting the Earth—from the human impact of clearing more forest and implementing the proposed agricultural site plans.

Stronger Citizens, Stronger Cities: Changing Governance Through a Focus on Place

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A great place is something that everybody can create. If vibrancy is people, as we argued two weeks ago, the only way to make a city vibrant again is to make room for more of them. Today, in the first of a two-part follow up, we will explore how Placemaking, by positioning public spaces at the heart of action-oriented community dialog, makes room both physically and philosophically by re-framing citizenship as an on-going, creative collaboration between neighbors. The result is not merely vibrancy, but equity.

Re-claim the Future!

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We live in spectacular times. On one hand we have the incredible advances of medicine, art, science, education and entertainment. In the developed west, our material wellbeing and life expectancy have increased dramatically over the last century. In fact, if you have the means, you can have most of the things you could ever want. You can listen to a perfect digital reproduction of traditional Tibetan flute music, whilst watching wide screen 3-D images on the beauties of the lower Nile, eating authentic Chilean cuisine with fresh New Zealand kiwi fruit to follow. If you wish, you can even go there and experience them all in person. Modern life offers an incredible range of experiences which we all, to a lesser or greater degree, participate in.

Cut off from society, sports become junk

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Forget about the nobility of the Olympic spirit or old time sportsmanship. Today, professional sports is just Bread and Circuses for the Great Recession. If junk food contains little nutrition without the benefits of real food, then junk sports provide only empty entertainment without the benefits of real sports.

Is open source the solution to global warming?

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Two years ago, I stumbled onto an idea that just may be the solution to climate change or, more accurately, the paradigm through which innovative solutions will be widely implemented around the world that reduce our collective impact on the environment. No, it is not a “tech fix” in the form of new gadgets that people use. Nor is it a piece of legislation that places a price signal on carbon emissions (although that remains essential as part of the restructuring of our economic systems as we transition to sustainable models). Simply put, it is a way of sharing good ideas so they spread far and wide.

Afghanistan, Ecology, and the End of War

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Working with school children in Afghanistan, one experiences the great sweetness of the people there and the commonplace lack of ecological understanding of how the physical world works.  This absence of understanding is magnified by the striking deterioration of the Afghan land and the American effort to address these pressing problems with bombs and bullets.