“advocacy” articles

We must work together in pursuit of a just world. This declaration sketches an outline for a community that has this goal at its core. Justice proceeds from perceiving—and acting toward—the other as sister or brother. We must therefore pair the symbolic with the real, using each to reinforce the other in order to remain unified and engaged in this consuming effort. A just world extends to the elemental foundations of our lives and existence, and so coming together for justice must encompass the full expanse of reality. The community must carefully discern the nature of that reality, and at the same time it must provide associated symbols to extend across the limits that are themselves the foundations of that reality.

I've seen several powerful films in the last couple of months. Four of them brought me to tears. I want to share my experiences with you, in part so that you can determine whether you might also want to so spend your time and attention.

Panoramic views—where we strive to see both broadly and bravely—of both the destruction that we wreak on the world as well as the beauty of a potentially just world are each astonishing, although in quite different ways. Understanding the first can help us work for and teach effectively about the second.

If I am going to live in close cooperation with other people, then the resulting community should be based on a shared commitment to certain core principles. Herein I develop the principles that I value, providing a cursory motivation, where appropriate.

A year into its work, the Sustainable Cleveland 2019 project had its second summit this week. This article provides a summary and a critique of the events of the summit. Mainly, the summit emphasized the way that businesses and other communities can benefit from practices that are commonly labeled as sustainable, although it did not provide a framework for analyzing whether the result of these practices does lead to a sustainable society.

The first meeting of the Beyond Cleveland sustainability group was not very well attended, although we who did attend did have a meaningful conversation. I reflect on the implications of this meeting in this article.

I recently finished reading A People's History of the United States. In this article, I comment on the impact of this book, including its strong impact on me as well as some of the lessons that I learned about how resistance against oppression can fail.

If you believe that we, as a culture, are not living sustainably, then we must critically examine why we are not living this way, and we must work actively to fix this problem. Beyond Cleveland is one group working to increase understanding of the problem of sustainability as well as to plan action to solve it.

We are meeting formally for the first time on July 10, 2010.

A number of activities kept me busy this rainy weekend as I worked in a few venues to try to share ideas with and among others.

Two of my friends comment on my most recent article about growth.

I think that information wants to be free, and I want to live in a society that has healthy mechanisms for supporting the free flow of this information and the creative people who author it. But when they ask me to donate to support their work, I always cringe. I don't think we should buy the information that they produce, but rather that donations should still be purchases … of recognition, access, and other interesting intangibles.

The US military recently published a report in which they warn that Peak Oil is as near as two years away. They stress that this is a threat that should be met with “a massive expansion of production and refining capacity.” Paul Krugman just published a long article where he called our attention to the upcoming dangers of Global Warming. But he asserts that we still need to be able to grow our economy. US Energy Secretary Chu is right there to support traditional economic solutions, which are rooted in an assumption of growth.

Note to all: this does not add up. No growth can be sustained indefinitely, and it is this fact that requires our undivided attention.

I provide an overview of my thoughts on the problem facing society, why I find it compelling, and how I want to respond to it.