July 2014: The New & Ancient Story
July 30th At the airport the other day I had a conversation with another passenger, who asked what I did. I told him I’m a public speaker. On what? Oh, the crisis and transition our society is going...
View ArticleAugust 2014: The New and Ancient Story
August 1 The Little Things that Get Under my Skin I am sometimes told that my optimism is powerful because I am also no stranger to despair. My deep conviction that a more beautiful world is possible...
View ArticleMystery solved
A bunch of you have been getting emails from my personal email account with the full text of each essay I post to this site. Even if that post is a Dutch translation! I finally figured out why it is...
View ArticleLet’s be honest: real sustainability may not make business sense
Wouldn’t it be nice if the best business decision were aligned with the best ecological decision? Some people say that often it already is, and that if corporations would only wake up and see it, the...
View ArticleThe End of War
Feedback from my lecture at the Green Party annual meeting has been trickling in, and it seems that the talk wasn’t as well-received as I thought at the time. The people who walked out in the first...
View ArticleA Beautiful World of Abundance
Scarcity is one of the defining features of modern life. Around the world, one in five children suffers from hunger. We fight wars over scarce resources such as oil. We have depleted the oceans of...
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A Miracle in Scientific American
In the latest issue of Scientific American, Michael Shermer describes an amazing and beautiful synchronicity that happened the day of his wedding, just this summer. I hope you read the article, but to...
View ArticleThe Waters of Heterodoxy: A Review of Gerald Pollack’s “The Fourth Phase of...
In The Fourth Phase of Water, Gerald Pollack offers an elegant new theory of water chemistry that has profound implications not only for chemistry and biology, but for the metaphoric foundation of our...
View ArticleA Neat Inversion
As an American visiting South Africa I was struck by the near ubiquity of domestic servants among white South Africans. Households that are in all other ways decidedly middle class have at least one...
View ArticleShadow, Ritual, and Relationship in the Gift
A friend recently asked me a question I get a lot: “How do you manage payment for your time and workshops?” by which she also meant, “How can I do that in a way that works practically and feels right...
View ArticleImagine a 3-D World
On our way to see the latest installment of The Hobbit, I asked my 10-year-old Philip and his two friends, “Don’t you wish that the real world were 3-D just like the movies?” “Yeah!” they said with...
View ArticlePresentation to Uplift Festival, 12.14.2014
“The truth goes in and out of stories, you know. What was once true is true no longer. The water has risen from another spring” – Ursula K. LeGuin As individuals we are in transition between two...
View ArticleThe Woman Who Chose to Plant Corn
This article originally appeared in Resurgence Magazine: Not long ago, a Diné (Navajo) friend of mine, Lyla June Johnston, sent me a one-line email: “I am not going to Harvard… I am going to plant...
View ArticleQualitative Dimensions of Collective Intelligence: Subjectivity,...
This article appeared in Spanda Journal (v. 2/2014) Abstract: This essay plays with two definitions of collective intelligence, drawing on two meanings of the word “intelligent” that bring to bear...
View ArticleLa croissance ne peut pas nous sortir de la dette, quoique fasse la Réserve...
Le Président de la Réserve Fédérale (Fed) Ben Bernanke a déclaré au symposium de Jackson Hole que la banque allait aider à promouvoir une reprise économique forte. L’engagement de Ben Bernanke, le...
View ArticleThe Need for Venture Science
I just spent several hours down a rabbit hole. The topic was the “electric universe,” an unconventional cosmological theory that emphasizes electromagnetism rather than gravity as the primary...
View ArticleOn Immigration
This post has been translated into Chinese. I recently received the following question from my contact form. I’ve decided to answer it in public, because similar concerns are woven into the...
View ArticleSustainable Development: Something New or More of the Same?
This article first appeared in the Huffington Post Two years ago when he was 14, my son Matthew grew six inches. Last year he only grew two inches, and this year he has only grown half an inch. Should...
View ArticleAn Experiment in Gift Economics
In the year 2008 I was facing hard times. I was earning maybe $300 a month from book sales, I wasn’t known yet as a speaker, and I couldn’t really get a job because I was a single dad staying at home...
View ArticleFor Whom was that Bird Singing?
“A thrush had alighted on a bough not five meters away… then began to pour out a torrent of song… Winston watched it with a sort of vague reverence. For whom, for what, was that bird singing? No mate,...
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