Category: Politics

  • Limits to Growth: on what Authority?

    Limits to Growth: on what Authority?

    In a recent blog post Professor Jem Bendell, author of the Deep Adaptation paper wrote a challenge to views expressed by John Foster of Lancaster University/ Green House UK Think Tank ( the latter’s strapline is “It aims to lead the development of green thinking in the UK.” I’m beginning to automatically view with caution…

  • Democracy: An Appropriate Scale?

    Democracy: An Appropriate Scale?

    I’m very grateful to live in a democracy , but its clear that democracy is struggling to deliver for everyone, everywhere, right now. Could that be because it has an appropriate scale? There is something about our culture in the Globalized North that we tip our hats to hierarchies of power, and expect the most…

  • Putin’s “Master Narrative”

    Putin’s “Master Narrative”

    The importance of stories and narratives in our sense-making and deliberative process cannot be over-estimated. Stories are “the primary form by which human experience is made meaningful…Narrative meaning is a cognitive process that organises human experiences into temporally meaningful episodes.” (Polkinghorne, 1988) “ You start to answer the age-old question ’ What am I to…

  • Go with the flow: PeoplePower turns up trumps

    Turning a frown into a smile amongst ordinary people working to improve their environment Today started badly there is no doubt about that. The US became even more of a theme park than usual and an Orange Man who hates almost everyone but himself had become President. Yet haven’t most of us known for some time that 21st…

  • Is the hijack of Christmas by consumerism a bad thing or has this modern religion done more for World Peace than the old ones?

    The annual Christmas urban melee for presents is over. Waistlines, expanded to bursting point are now forced into post-indulgence exercise programmes. New presents lie discarded and recycling bins are fit to burst with wrapping paper and packaging. Religious leaders typically bemoan the hijacking of the traditional message of Christmas by commerce in a festival of consumption, but recently I’ve had cause…