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It’s Time to Get Serious About Systemic Solutions to Systemic Problems

April 3, 2015

It’s Time to Get Serious About Systemic Solutions to Systemic Problems

It’s getting harder and harder to be an optimist. A deep economic crisis has given way to a profoundly unequal recovery. Climate catastrophe is steadily unfolding across the globe. And the work of building a racially inclusive society appears to be stalled — indeed, in many areas, to be losing ground. All of this in an age of unprecedented technological progress, which has manifestly failed to keep its promises. If there is one saving grace, it is that the pain caused by these interconnected failures make it possible — for the first time in modern history — to pose the question of system change in a serious fashion, even in the United States, the faltering heart of global capitalism.

To pose the system question means first and foremost to point out that long, failing trends are anchored far more deeply in political-economic structures than conventional political debate suggests. It is to ask how the system is built, for whom, and how it operates to recurrently produce the decaying outcomes we are experiencing. There is, in fact, no shortage of people today to tell us that something is wrong, that things are built to work for the wealthy, for the white and for those far from the frontlines of climate and social calamity. Such diagnoses are increasingly commonplace and harder and harder to contest.

It is no major leap from such anguished complaints to recognition that the system itself –American corporate capitalism — is generating the outcomes we witness; that we do, indeed, face a systemic challenge, one manifestly not responsive to traditional political approaches and strategies.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

 

 

Richard Gould: Learning From Ancient Human Cultures | Peak Prosperity

October 20, 2014

Richard Gould: Learning From Ancient Human Cultures | Peak Prosperity.

Richard Gould is a Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at Brown University (where I was his student) and one of the foremost experts on hunter-gatherer societies. In the 1960s, he and his wife spent years living with the aborigines in Australia’s Western Desert, observing first-hand their way of life. Through study of these people and many others around the world, his work focused on understanding how human culture and behavior adapts to environmental stress, risk and uncertainty.

We’ve invited him to this week’s podcast to discuss what insights ancient cultures may be able to offer in terms of “natural human behavior” that may fit well within our specie’s blueprint. Humans lived sustainably, with their food systems and each other, for many millennia. And yet, in today’s modern age, we have infinitely “more” than these primitive societies, but have much less general happiness (and are fast-exhausting our resource base, to boot). Are there best practices for being human that we can perhaps re-learn from our cultural predecessors?

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Olduvai IV: Courage
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Olduvai II: Exodus
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