Engaged Ecology: Seven Practices to Restore Our Harmony with Nature
It has rained steadily through the night, a gentle hushing sound in the thick tree canopy. In the morning light, crickets thrill and every leaf trembles and gleams. Soft mist gently rises as the creek gushes along its deep habitual groove in Rose Valley, a place as beautiful as it sounds: my home.
Amid such grace, one might forget the planet is in chaos. Wars rage… and the trees grow slowly.…
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…
Shahzor Ali Memon
Shahzor Ali Memon is an avid changemaker who has started a lifelong journey in reaching out to underprivileged communities. At 18 years old and just a high school graduate, Shahzor has mentored many marginalized students in remote villages of Pakistan. Recently, Shahzor recruited other ambassadors for a venture called Youth for Enlightenment and Welfare (YEW), which he fundraises for schools that…
Dennis Kucinich
Having been elected to Cleveland’s City Council at age 23, Dennis J. Kucinich was well-known to Cleveland residents when they chose him as their mayor in 1977 at the age of 31. At the time, Kucinich was the youngest person ever elected to lead a major American city.
In 1978, Cleveland’s banks demanded that he sell the city’s 70 year-old municipally-owned electric system to its private…
Chung Hyun Kyung
Associate Professor Chung Hyun Kyung, graduated from Ewha Women’s University in Seoul with the B.A. (1979) and the M.A. (1981). She holds the M.Div. from the School of Theology at Claremont (1984), a diploma from the Women’s Theological Center in Boston (1984), and the Ph.D. from Union Theological Seminary (1989). She is a lay theologian of the Presbyterian Church of Korea, as well as once having…
The Biology of Wonder | Finding the Human in Nature
Of course, the animals need humans. They need us like old parents, against whom we have revolted for a while and who one day, weakened, deprived of their former power, request to be protected by us.
~ Brigitte Kronauer1
Subjective Feeling as the Moving Force in All Life
For 150 years, biology, the ‘science of life,’ made no great effort to answer the question of what life really is. Biologists…
Earth-Based Wisdom: Learning the Original Idea from the Living Earth
Traditional cultures “are what shaped us and caused us to be what we are now,” writes Jared Diamond in The World Until Yesterday.1 All the necessities of modern living—electricity, store-bought food, pharmaceuticals, cars and planes—are relatively new. But much of yesterday is still with us, and we might take a lesson from those traditional cultures that remain indigenous to relearn how to live…
Lifecycle of Emergence: Using Emergence to Take Social Innovation to Scale
Despite current ads and slogans, the world doesn’t change one person at a time. It changes as networks of relationships form among people who discover they share a common cause and vision of what’s possible.
This is good news for those of us intent on changing the world and creating a positive future. Rather than worry about critical mass, our work is to foster critical connections. We don’t…
A Dark Night of the Soul and the Discovery of Meaning
Anyone may go through a period of sadness or challenge that is so deep-seated and tenacious that it qualifies as a dark night of the soul. Not long ago I was giving a talk at a university when a man shouted at me from back in the crowd: “I’m terribly depressed. It’s been years. Help me.” I shouted back my email address. In his voice and body language I could see that this man was not caught in…
Coming Back to Life | Chapter One: To Choose Life
Coming Back to Lifeby Joanna Macy andMolly Young BrownNew Society Publishers2014
To Choose Life
Excerpted from Chapter One
We live in an extraordinary moment on Earth. We possess more technical prowess and knowledge than our ancestors could have dreamt of. Our telescopes let us see through time to the beginnings of the universe; our microscopes pry open the codes at the core of organic life;…