Environment (Solutions) – Public Intelligence Blog

2009/12/062009/12/06

Review: The Living Universe

5 Star, Communications, Complexity & Resilience, Consciousness & Social IQ, Cosmos & Destiny, Culture, Research, Economics, Education (General), Environment (Solutions), Information Society, Intelligence (Collective & Quantum), Intelligence (Extra-Terrestrial), Intelligence (Wealth of Networks)

Evolutionary Activism Takes On New Life

December 6, 2009

Duane Elgin

I was led to this book by Tom Atlee, whose earlier book, The Tao of Democracy: Using Co-Intelligence to Create a World That Works for All completely redirected my thinking in positive directions, and whose new book on Reflections on Evolutionary Activism (soon on Amazon, now at the Public Intelligence Blog) pointed me toward this book as well as Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny, Holistic Darwinism: Synergy, Cybernetics, and the Bioeconomics of Evolution and other books on cultural evolution.

In the face of the almost complete collapse of the post-World War II political, economic, and social paradigms (see my free chapter on Paradigms of Failure at the Public Intelligence Blog or within Election 2008: Lipstick on the Pig (Substance of Governance; Legitimate Grievances; Candidates on the Issues; Balanced Budget 101; Call to Arms: Fund We Not Them; Annotated Bibliography), I feel POSITIVE, and this book and the many human minds and hearts this book represents are the reason I am confident that Conscious Evolution: Awakening Our Social Potential and Integral Consciousness and the Future of Evolution are on the immediate horizon.

Paul Hawkin's captures the spirit of WHY this book on the Living Universe matters–his most recent book, Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming is the tip of the iceberg.

The greatest value for me of this book is that it is a superb overview of many different concepts from both science and the world of religion–this is a sense-making book not a simple book.

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2009/12/052009/12/05

Review: Holistic Darwinism: Synergy, Cybernetics, and the Bioeconomics of Evolution

6 Star Top 10%, Best Practices in Management, Change & Innovation, Civil Society, Communications, Complexity & Resilience, Consciousness & Social IQ, Culture, Research, Decision-Making & Decision-Support, Democracy, Economics, Education (General), Education (Universities), Environment (Solutions), Future, Games, Models, & Simulations, History, Information Operations, Information Society, Intelligence (Collective & Quantum), Intelligence (Public), Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design, Survival & Sustainment, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution, Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized)

Beyond 6 Stars–And a Seventh for Accessible Pricing

December 5, 2009

Peter A. Corning

I could spend a lifetime reading and re-reading this book, and each of the cited sources, and not waste the time at all. This is one of the most extraordinary works I have encountered, and while I cannot do it justice, I will summarize it. Four other books that join this one in framing my third and last stage of life:
Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge
Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny
A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility–Report of the Secretary-General's High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change
The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, Revised and Updated 5th Anniversary Edition: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits

Bottom line: Humanity can evolve, must evolve, and the Whole Earth, Co-Evolution concepts that Stewart Brand and others pioneered (not mentioned here), that indigenous people's everywhere have understood for centuries, are a natural path for us all. We *can* create a prosperous world at peace.

Short version of the book: Synergy is cool again, synergy and self-organization complement each other and are distinct; bioeconomics is hugely important and supports the premise that the whole is larger than the sum of the parts and that interactions and exchanges can and should be done for the whole, “beyond selfishness,” cybernetics rules, information is the space between, and ethics is both a form of cybernetics and a cultural adaptation that helps the whole evolve and persist.

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2009/11/292009/11/29

Review: Ecological Intelligence–How Knowing the Hidden Impacts of What We Buy Can Change Everything (Hardcover)

5 Star, Best Practices in Management, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Change & Innovation, Complexity & Resilience, Consciousness & Social IQ, Culture, Research, Economics, Education (General), Environment (Solutions), Information Operations, Information Society, Intelligence (Collective & Quantum), Intelligence (Commercial), Intelligence (Public), Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design, Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Survival & Sustainment, True Cost & Toxicity, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution

From 4 to Five for Gifted Story and Amazon Price Cut

November 29, 2009

Daniel Goleman

I chose this book over Ecological Intelligence: Rediscovering Ourselves in Nature and seeing the author's note about this other book “by a physician, Jungian analyst, and poet” am certain I made the right choice.

The author's “big idea” is called “Radical Transparency,” what the rest of us have been calling “Open Books for decades. I like it, and in the context of his elegant story-telling, I buy in. This book also goes to a five because it is an Information Operations (IO) books, ably focused on data, information, and information-sharing as well as collective sense-making. He author anticipates most of us becoming “active agents” for change, armed with information as Thomas Jefferson understood so well.

CORE NUGGET: Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is not done for most things, but when done right, it is mainly data and it tracks impacts on human health, ecosystems, climate change, and resource draw-down, for every single component and every single process including transport, packaging, etcetera. Toward the end of the book when the author talks about how an LCA commons is emerging, and quotes Andy Ruben of normally ultra-evil Wal-Mart as saying that LCA innovation “is the largest strategic opportunity companies will see for the next fifty years,” I am seriously impressed.

2009/11/282009/11/28

Review: Not by Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution

5 Star, Change & Innovation, Civil Society, Communications, Complexity & Resilience, Consciousness & Social IQ, Culture, Research, Environment (Solutions), Future, History, Information Society, Intelligence (Public), Intelligence (Wealth of Networks), Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design

Boring, Original, Don't Know Enough to Give Less Than Five Stars

November 28, 2009

Peter J. Richerson and Robert Boyd

I found this book boring, and not nearly as breath-taking and inspiring as Robert Wright's Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny, which altered my perception of everything else, and is right up there with E. O. Wilson's Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge as one of my most respected readings.

Both Wright and these authors acknowledge Richard Dawkins and The Selfish Gene: 30th Anniversary Edition–with a new Introduction by the Author as being instrumental in getting the academy to think new thoughts.

However, and despite other's averaging a four, I feel such a sense of respect for what these two authors have done (with a superb bilbiography and a good index) that I cannot qualify this with less than five stars.

The two nuggets for me, with my interest in Epoch B leadership and self-organizing communities, came at the end:

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2009/11/282019/09/06

Review: Nonzero–The Logic of Human Destiny

7 Star Top 1%, Asymmetric, Cyber, Hacking, Odd War, Best Practices in Management, Change & Innovation, Civil Society, Communications, Complexity & Resilience, Consciousness & Social IQ, Cosmos & Destiny, Culture, Research, Economics, Education (General), Education (Universities), Environment (Solutions), Future, Games, Models, & Simulations, History, Information Operations, Information Society, Insurgency & Revolution, Intelligence (Collective & Quantum), Intelligence (Public), Intelligence (Wealth of Networks), Media, Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design, Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Politics, Religion & Politics of Religion, Science & Politics of Science, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution, Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized)

7 Stars–Nobel Prize (Of Old, Before Devalued) – Life Transformative Insights

November 28, 2009

Robert Wright

QUOTE: “Non-zero-sumness is a kind of potential–a potential for overall gain, or for overall loss, depending on how the game is played.”

This book is one of the most sophisticated, deep, documented, and influential I have ever read, right up there with Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. Published in 2000, this book has NOT received the marketing promotion or the public attention it merits.

THIS BOOK HAS SUBSTANTIALLY ALTERED MY PERCEPTION OF EVERYTHING ELSE.

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2009/11/262009/11/26

Worth a Look: Books on Real Wealth Economy

Capitalism (Good & Bad), Economics, Environment (Problems), Environment (Solutions), Worth A Look

Agenda for a New Economy: From Phantom Wealth to Real Wealth

Today's economic crisis is the worst since the Great Depression. However, as David Korten shows, the steps being taken to address it do nothing to deal with the reality of a failed economic system. It's like treating cancer with a bandage. Korten identifies the deeper sources of the failure: Wall Street institutions that have perfected the art of creating “wealth” without producing anything of real value: phantom wealth. Our hope lies not with Wall Street, Korten argues, but with Main Street, which creates real wealth from real resources to meet real needs.

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2009/11/262009/11/26

Review: Global Warming False Alarm–The Bad Science Behind the United Nations’ Assertion that Man-made CO2 Causes Global Warming

5 Star, Communications, Corruption, Crime (Government), Economics, Environment (Problems), Environment (Solutions), Games, Models, & Simulations, Information Operations, Intelligence (Government/Secret), Intelligence (Public), Media, Misinformation & Propaganda, Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Politics, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Priorities, Science & Politics of Science, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy, Survival & Sustainment, Threats (Emerging & Perennial), True Cost & Toxicity, United Nations & NGOs, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution, Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized)

Righteous Good SLAM of IPCC Fraud & Intimidation

November 26, 2009

Ralph B. Alexander

I read a lot, and I confess to have been among those who “bought in” to the celebrity alarmism of Al Gore, but I never displaced the totality of the threats to Earth for an obsessive focus on carbon emissions. Among the three books I have always recommended that are far more balanced than anything by the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are:

High Noon 20 Global Problems, 20 Years to Solve Them
The Future of Life
Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization (Substantially Revised)

That having been said, I was generally supportive of the Kyoto Treaty and the concept of carbon reductions.

Then I read The Resilient Earth: Science, Global Warming and the Fate of Humanity and within weeks, read Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming (Vintage) and finally, just the past week, noticed the Hacktivism that outed all of the fraud and deception in the Climate Research Unit central to the IPCC (Climate Change Fraud is now a global meme).

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