One of the longstanding traditions on this blog is that when there are five Wednesdays in a month, my commentariat gets to propose topics for the fifth Wednesday post, and whichever topic gets the most votes ends up becoming the theme I write about for that post. That’s landed me in a pickle or two…
Tag: ecology
A Prayer for Nonbelievers
I was ten years old when The Limits to Growth first saw print. I have a dim memory of seeing a newspaper article or two about it, but I had other things on my mind in 1972—my parents got divorced that year, and an already difficult childhood promptly got much worse—and several years passed before…
The Future is a Landscape
I’ve been reflecting of late about the way that our habitual expectations about change blind us to the way that change actually happens. One of the most important of these is the frankly weird but pervasive notion that the future is a single place, where only one kind of thing happens. It’s always “The Future,”…
The Arc Of Our Future
In last week’s open post, I noted that I didn’t have anything in particular planned for this fifth Wednesday of the month, and asked my readers what they wanted to hear about. Quite a few subjects got brought up for discussion—among others, the novels of Hermann Hesse, Carl Jung’s concept of synchronicity, and the metaphysics…
Heating Up The Political Climate
Yes, we need to talk about climate change again, and it’s probably necessary to start with a point I’ve made on this blog several times already: anthropogenic climate change is real and serious, and it’s being exploited by political and corporate interests to push a dubious agenda on the public. Many people these days don’t…
The Next Twilight of Environmentalism
Well, it’s about to happen all over again. I’ve been wondering how soon a certain marriage of convenience in contemporary cultural politics would come messily apart, and now we’ve seen one of the typical warning signs of that impending breach. Those of my readers who are concerned about environmental issues—actually concerned, that is, and not…
A Conversation with Nature
There are many ways we can talk about the deeper roots of the crisis of our time, setting out from many different vantage points; as Charles Fort pointed out, one measures a circle, beginning anywhere. This week I want to start from that very curious branch of science called “invasion biology,” and more specifically with…
A Wilderness of Mirrors
Bloggers may take a month off now and then, but the world has a less flexible work schedule, and keeps on churning out days and weeks at the same unremitting pace. The last month was no exception to that rule, and it so happens that the days and weeks in question were unusually well supplied…
May 2018 Book Club
This week’s post is the latest of a monthly series of open-discussion posts focusing on books I’ve written or recommend. Our theme for the present is Mystery Teachings from the Living Earth, and this week we’re discussing “The Spiritual Ecology of History” (pp.119-131). I’d like to ask readers to keep their questions and comments focused…
April 2018 Book Club
This week’s post is the tenth of a monthly series of open-discussion posts focusing on books I’ve written. Our theme for the present is Mystery Teachings from the Living Earth, and this week we’re discussing “The Spiritual Ecology of Initiation” (pp.101-118). I’d like to ask readers to keep their questions and comments focused on that…