They Sang with a Thousand Tongues: The Poetry of Diversity

Let me tell you a story about how the world began. I promise you the story is not completely untrue. Yoruba elders say that when the world began, there was only sky and water. The Supreme Being, Olórun, ruled the firmaments, while the Divine Feminine, Olokun, was master of the raging seas. One day, Obatala, a son of Olórun, grew restless and sought to create a world between primal sea and…

Mystical Anarchism: A Journey to the Borderlands of Freedom

On Beginnings They say it takes a certain type of personality to be a radical. Questioning of the status quo, anti-authoritarian, angry perhaps, undoubtedly rebellious, critical rather than accepting of what is. Complex analyses and algorithms are deployed to compare shared psychological traits, relationships to authority figures, level of socio-economic privilege, and even birth order. If any…

Regenerative Development: Going Beyond Sustainability

Sustainable Development is a half-vast approach to vast problems. Its purpose, to make life on this planet sustainable, is a noble disguise for the maintenance of the status quo. When the status quo includes hundreds of millions of acres of degraded to destroyed farmland and leveled rainforest, depleted to exhausted fisheries and aquifers, toxic-choked streams, decreasing biodiversity, and a…

Regenerative Economies for a Regenerative Civilization

“There is nothing more difficult to plan, nor more dangerous to manage, than the creation of a new system. For the creator has the enmity of all who would profit by the preservation of the old system and merely lukewarm defenders in those who would gain by the new one.” — Niccolò Machiavelli Einstein once said, “It is the theory which decides what we can observe.”1 I believe this…

On Regenerative Systems: A Critique of Regenerative Capitalism

In his powerful essay on Regenerative Capitalism, John Fullerton describes breakthrough thinking, which moves us away from ideological divides that tether us to a worldwide economy that is destructive of human values to a system that supports people and planet, in the vein of Paul Hawken and Amory Lovins. Conventional economic design places us at the mercy of abrupt climate change and social…

The Case for Restorative Narratives:

The phrase ‘future of journalism’ is often uttered in media circles these days—and understandably so. Everyone wants to learn how to save parts of the industry that are struggling financially, and they’re attempting to figure out how to best prepare themselves and their news organizations for the years ahead. To prepare for the future, many news organizations have experimented with innovative…

Sharing the News: The Transformation of Journalism in the Digital Age

Bringing a sharing economy to the newsroom is the most significant transformation wrought by the digital news revolution. We know that the transformations wrought by revolutions often take decades, and that will probably be true for the news revolution as well. If we peer beneath and behind the frantic efforts of legacy media to simply stay alive, we can see the roots of a news economy that…

Recent Major Shifts in Science and Religion:

The global context of ‘living transformation’ took several historic, albeit hopeful, turns in 2015. These promise to develop pivotally as 2015 transitions into 2016. In September, Pope Francis addressed the United Nations and the US Congress. As the UN convened, he joined more heads of state there than have ever attended—as the UN adopted a revised millennial development agenda. Francis’ Papal…

Women Cross DMZ to Make Peace in Korean Peninsula

Women’s Hope to End Longest Forgotten War Thirty international women peacemakers from 15 countries walked across the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea on May 24, 2015, International Women’s Disarmament Day. Our purposes were: To call for the end of the Korean War by changing the armistice into a permanent peace treaty To facilitate the divided family in North and South Korea…

Aligning the Personal, Political, and Planetary to Create a Transformative Future

For several years, I worked on a memoir in which I tried to make sense of my privileged childhood and how my personal experience was shaped by the politics of my era, as well as by the experiences of my parents and earlier generations. Then, in 2011, I suddenly woke up to the destruction of the environment and the reality of climate change. I started a blog, ‘Transition Times,’ as a way to…