[Printer Friendly Version]

Current News

Ecovillages: A Practical Guide to Sustainable Communities

How we choose to organize our relationships both reveals our values and shapes them. Bringing mindfulness and intentionality to those relationships has been a centerpiece of my work for twenty years, so it should be no surprise that I have an abiding interest in the topic of "intentional community". In my opinion, one of the very best books on the subject is Jan Martin Bang's Ecovillages: A Practical Guide to Sustainable Communities. The critical focus that makes this book important to me is that it deliberately avoids fallacious and destructive division that most of us make between "life" and "work". Many intentional communities focus only on living together, rather than on working together. My own career has focused on the latter, but it's still an artificial distinction that reinforces damaging patterns of labor organization, economies, and human relationships. Human beings evolved in a context of shared Life-Work and this book shows how it's still possible. Starting with the kibbutz and then extending to examples from around the world, the book takes a practical and ecological approach to design, production, economics, and decision making. There are so many people who have been looking for better ways to live, and from this book we can learn a lot from their experiences. Posted: 6/30/06; 1:41:19 PM #

Common Fire: Leading Lives of Commitments in a Complex World

A number of years ago, a dear friend and colleague of mine and I started work on a book entitled Selling Out. We wanted to understand why so many activists don't sustain their work over a lifetime. We decided along the way that we needed to study people who had not given up, in order to determine what was different. The research never got funded, but I'm pleased to see that the team of Daloz, Keen, Keen, and Parks did. They published their results in the (far more positively titled) book Common Fire: Leading Lives of Commitments in a Complex World. In order to choose the people they studied, they developed these four criteria: (1) commitment to the common good, (2) perseverance and resilience, (3) ethical congruence between life and work, and (4) engagement with diversity and complexity. The causal themes they discovered are revealed in some of their chapter titles: connection & complexity, community, compassion, courage, confession, and commitment. Originally published in 1996, I didn't read this book until it was given to me by a colleagues at the University of Michigan in 2003. It helped me decide to return to doing personal counseling and it helped reground me in my own work. I highly recommend it. Posted: 6/30/06; 1:29:46 PM #

Project Corpus Callosum

The Nation recently held a Student Writing Contest in which they asked students to send in an original, unpublished 800-word essay about what issue defines their generation. Out of 700 entries, the winning essay was Project Corpus Callosum by Sarah Stillman of Yale University. She effectively uses the metaphor of the portion of our brain that connections our left and right hemispheres to describe a fundamental challenge: How can our knowledge of injustice be effectively wed to our passion to change it? Posted: 6/30/06; 1:13:38 PM #

The Constitution Still Reigns

It's been a long time since I woke up to news about the U.S. Supreme Court that didn't make me angry. Indeed, this morning's news brought tears of relief to my eyes. Yes, it's true that there are at least three justices (probably four, but Roberts was not part of the decision) who support dictatorial powers for the U.S. President. But there are still five for whom The Constitution Still Reigns. This horrible period of American nascent-fascism isn't over (I'm using Lawrence Britt's 14 Defining Characteristics to inform my choice of that word), but at least there isn't an argument any more about whether the rule of law or the Geneva Conventions apply to this so-called "war on terror". We can be justifiably proud of the organizations who fought for this ruling and relieved by the reinforcement it provides to the pillars of American civil society. This gives us something to celebrate on this coming Fourth of July. Posted: 6/30/06; 1:05:43 PM #