It is National Teachers Day, a day of recognition for one of the most challenging and under appreciated professions. It is a day to stop for a moment the rush of our daily routines and recognize the degree to which good teaching builds a healthy, vibrant future for our families, our communities, and our democracy.
The Climate
There is a culture war taking place in the policy arena surrounding our education system: mayors and governors are demanding regimens of high-stakes testing, in hopes of revealing the quality of education available, along with reasonable means of improving that quality. Teachers are often seen as obstacles to reform, though they may be the most impassioned advocates for reform, and the minds best positioned to see what is needed.
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FuelFree.me is a project designed to help deliver the kind of information and resources needed to focus attention on building a 100% clean energy economy. The paradigm will be zero combustion, and the ability to power vehicles, appliances, computation, communications and the rest of our technological existence without carbon-based or nuclear fuels, hydrogen or other fuel sources.
Wind power is a good model, because it can be used as wind or as electricity generated from wind-driven turbines. But we believe it is possible to go beyond wind power, to build new technologies within a new landscape of energy-transfer mechanisms, to allow us to live the fullest, most intelligent human existence, without needing to burn or to waste resources of any kind.
El Yunque is a sacred place, and the only true virgin rainforest in the US National Parks System. It is the most biodiverse place on the island of Puerto Rico and should be valued by all people across the world as a location of global natural heritage. The rainforest preserve is now under threat from corrosive development projects, including housing, transport, energy and tourism.
The Protect El Yunque site is open to anyone who wishes to share their experiences of the beauty and energy of El Yunque, or to post updates on events, petitions, and efforts to halt all attempts to invade this tropical paradise with short-sighted development. (Se puede agregar information en inglés, en español, como quieran.)
Bill Barron is running as an independent for the United States Senate seat currently held by Republican Orrin Hatch, of Utah. Bill's commitment to our achieving our absolute best in terms of stewardship of the natural environment, conservation of wilderness, natural resources and life-sustaining ecosystems, is the foundation for a campaign that will give Americans of all political persuasions more of a voice in federal government policy than at present.
Support Bill Barron, and help to build a freer, greener future for us all: BarronforUSSenate.com
From the opening chapter of Global Academe: Engaging Intellectual Discourse, published January 31, 2012, by Palgrave Macmillan:
In the Marketplace of Illusion: The Public Intellectual in a Landscape of Mediated Humanness.
The question of what role the intellectual should play in society has evolved into an automatic controversy that summons the simplest answers and the most entrenched prejudices. The passion for showing off democratic tendencies while not devoting adequate energies to their exercise has led to an ingrained hostility toward successful thinkers who work to channel their energies into the production of analyses that might make evident the subtle truths the rest of us are living, that—by extension—means they issue to us an ethical summons, a call, a reminder of the commonness and the humanness of our special human frailties, of our obligations and of what would constitute a better social expression of our selfhood. [...]
The full and integrated self must be successfully concrete and also successfully intangible, an abstract potential actualization, filtration, flirtation or implementation matrix, a complex of complexes, a visionary accomplice capable of honest self-seeing and authentic self-propagation. “Conscious reflection is the doubling over of this dynamic abstraction on itself. The order of connection of such dynamic abstractions among themselves, on a level specific to them, is called mind” (Massumi 32). But how can one live the details, the would-be facts of the everyday, and also face the haunting existential crisis of coming to grips with the self as an insubstantial substance, the mind as a groundless ground? [...]
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Today, we launched the Poet Economist's Deep Green Daily, a paper.li newspaper, compiled from curated Twitter feeds related to green and sustainable policy and technology breakthroughs. The inaugural editorial note went as follows:
Deep green economics means thinking beyond sustainability, to forge a future that is not only characterized by a balanced relationship with nature, but by a thorough and civilization-wide commitment to a world in which the principle is not just respect, awareness and sustainability, but pervasive, mutual flourishing, and an economic model generative of more resources, and more quality of human life, not reliant on processes which undermine such aims.
Read the Deep Green Daily here...
On Saturday, Nov. 12, 2011, Ihad the great privilege of delivering the Building a Green Economy talk at the Energy Security conference in Corning, New York. I had the added privilege of headlining the conference with the great Bill McKibben, whose work organizing millions to raise their voices for responsible energy and climate policy is of inestimable value to all humanity. Thank you to all who attended, to the organizers, and to Bill for his work and his contribution.
We need a system of cooperative public-private infrastructure financing, a national infrastructure bank. But we also need to use that fabric of cooperative investment and output to foster specific areas of major improvement to our national economy. The model could be replicated across the world, but the US is uniquely positioned to deploy this solution and to vastly improve its chances of restoring vibrancy to the wider middle class by doing so.
Two parallel projects are necessary to make the infrastructure redevelopment and economic recovery strategy a success:
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a renewable energy infrastructure bank - to help target some of the wider funding options to the project of building a sustainable, smart energy economy, free of the massive externalized costs of carbon-based fuels
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an economic opportunity bank - to aggressively, specifically and persistently direct funds to businesses that are hiring, building capacity at the community level, and restoring real wage gains to the middle class
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On Tuesday, October 4, 2011, Joseph Robertson delivered the fourth Climate Talk, as a live webcast, presentation of his book, Building a Green Economy: The Economics of Carbon Pricing and the Transition to Clean, Renewable Fuels. The talk was intended to focus on the technologies and strategies that can allow for a smooth, rapid, intelligent, and prosperity-inducing transition to a clean-energy economy. Click here to view the slides and video.
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