On Saturday, Nov. 12, 2011, I had 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 … Continue reading Building a Green Economy – presented at Corning Energy Conference
The four coordinated hijackings, resulting in three deliberate attacks and one downed passenger jet, took 2,977 innocent lives and sowed fear and dismay across the world. They were acts of unconscionable evil intended to not only harm innocents and terrify the wider population, but to destabilize American democracy itself, and derail a people’s journey through … Continue reading 9/11 Should be a National Day of Reflection & Reaffirmation
We’ve all had conversations where someone has fallen into the temptation to argue that simplicity is the most necessary quality for anything that can stand the test of time. But the natural world builds resilience into systems of all kinds by fostering unrelenting complexity; the key feature that makes complexity work is the intelligence with which diverse and competing interests fit together to achieve the wider aim of standing up against external threats, decay and decline.
In the landscape of public policy, this means rethinking our attitude about the problematic complexity inherent in dealing independently with a wide variety of diverse and competing stakeholder interests. It is, of course, easier for those who have to decide what adjustments to make, regarding any policy or practice, to exclude most stakeholders and only answer the needs of those whose interests fit simply and comfortably with their own. But then, that is not democracy.
Continue reading “Respect for Complexity Makes Democracy Possible”
The Poet Economist 