New word, fresh from the fertile backrooms of my mind: P’optimist: an optimist with a pinch of pessimism to stay real. or what about… Sk’optimists: optimists with a dash of skepticism to not get all giddy. Cy’optimists: cynical optimists who dare not hope anymore. Also …
Donald Trump was right. There is a swamp. It’s not the ballast of the entrenched bureaucracies in DC that administer our laws. It’s the physics of planetary limits that will inevitably suck our civilization down into the graveyard of those that have gone before. How …
The white nationalists have found our town, a seaside village on a long, skinny island in Puget Sound, with a Naval Air Station in the north, an historic farming town in the middle and a parfait of cultures that have over the years chosen …
In the last eight months, I’ve hosted over 30 interviews with “cultural scouts” – people who scan for emerging trends and act for the common good. Historians. Philanthropists. Authors. Lawyers. Movement builders. Trainers. Politicians. Activists, Mostly center left. All self-reflective. Again and again I asked …
George and Ira Gershwin, in 1937, wrote a song called “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off” about a couple with irreconcilable differences, driving them apart. Like so many marriages going off the rails or on the rocks, the differences seem minor, but no one is …
“If you assume that there is no hope, you guarantee that there will be no hope. If you assume that there is an instinct for freedom, that there are opportunities to change things, then there is a possibility that you can contribute to making a …
Every day now I roll out of bed and go right to the high-performance morality gym. I have to. The multiple existential threats we face require moral dexterity, and as a Boomer I’ve gotten flabby. At the gym I train my mind, heart, body …
Is it too weird to say that, as bad as the first half of 2020 has been, it’s been a relief? A tiny virus has achieved what decades of activism could not: stop us in our self-destructive tracks. She essentially sent us to our rooms …
Think of it. I was born a mere 80 years after the end of the Civil War. My great grandmother, who I knew, was alive then. She took my great grandfather out to the territories to treat his tuberculosis. I used to think with …
You are in for a rare treat. In partnership with the Post Carbon Institute I’ve recorded a dozen interviews with cultural scouts on one question for this time of social, environmental, economic upheaval: What could possibly go right? I posted the introduction below on …
