Review: Peak Everything: Waking Up to the Century of Declines

5 Star, Consciousness & Social IQ, Culture, Research, Economics, Environment (Problems), Environment (Solutions), Water, Energy, Oil, Scarcity
Amazon Page
Amazon Page
5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent Primer, Narrowly Focused, Provokes Reflection
October 16, 2009
Richard Heinberg

I was tempted to limit this book to four stars because it fails to properly recognize, among many others, Buckminster Fuller, e.g. his Critical Path and it provides only passing reference to such foundation works as Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update and Human Scale, but place it at five stars for two reasons: 1) excessive negativity by other reviewers; and 2) a superb primer for the public ready to get past Al Gore's hysteria, the venom surrounding The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World, and connect in a very easy to read and understanding elementary counterpoint to The Resilient Earth: Science, Global Warming and the Fate of Humanity.

Another important reason for attending to this book and respecting its author, apart from him many prior works including the globally recognized The Party's Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies, is the endorsement of two of the top ten (in our view) in this arena, Lester Brown (Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization (Substantially Revised)), and Bill McKibben (Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future).

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Review: Global Ethics–Seminal Essays

4 Star, Consciousness & Social IQ, Education (General), Philosophy, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution
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Amazon Page
4.0 out of 5 stars Important Essays, Left Me Blase
October 13, 2009
Thomas Pogge and Keith Horton, Editors
The three best things I can say about this volume:

1) A heroic work that carefully selected important essays on global ethics from the past 40 years (the book itself, Australian in origin, is published for the first time in 2008).

2) Part of a Paragon Series on Philosphy that is utterly mind-boggling–if only they would make it digital and provide some visualization tools and navigation tools, they could be on to something HUGE.

3) The editors make a very substantive case to the effect that poverty is the central ethical issue of our time. This corresponds to the United Nations High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges, and Opportunities, whose report, A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility–Report of the Secretary-General's High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change, concluded that poverty was the greatest threat to humanity, easily rising above infectious disease, environmental degradation, inter-state conflict, civil war, genocide, other atrocities, proliferation, terrorism, and crime.

Other aspects of this book that captured my attention and tie in elsewhere:

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Review: Betrayal: How Black Intellectuals Have Abandoned the Ideals of the Civil Rights Era

4 Star, America (Founders, Current Situation), Atrocities & Genocide, Budget Process & Politics, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Consciousness & Social IQ, Culture, Research, Democracy, Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class

cover betrayal

4.0 out of 5 stars My Head Hurts–Time for a Black Caucus on Black Power
October 7, 2009
Houston A. Baker
My head hurts. After enjoying and reviewing Waiting for Lightning to Strike: The Fundamentals of Black Politics yesterday evening, I was not anticipating the firestorm of erudite adjective-laden brow-beating that this author delivers. Minus one star for beating several (black) horses to death, and as Reviewer Carter notes, not without meriting some of the same himself.

First off, this is a book that had to be written and must be read. There are, amidst the “wordier than thou” broad brush critiques, some real gems, some really engaging turns of phrase. It is unfortunate that the nature of the inquiry demands fairly personal explicit attacks on avowedly great black intellectuals, but there is some meat here.

Page 104: “Centrist territory is a rhetorical demilitarized zone where honest, committed, and historically informed proclamations on cause and effect regarding race, culture, morality, and gender in the United States can be studiously avoided, fudged, or simply made to suit the audience on hand.”

High points for me as a reader (white, Hispanic, seriously-angry populist):
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Review: Conscious Evolution: Awakening Our Social Potential

Consciousness & Social IQ
Amazon Page
Amazon Page
5.0 out of 5 stars A Theological Masterpiece–A Practical Manifesto
September 20, 2009
Barbara Marx Hubbard

Although the author has written a more recent book, Emergence: The Shift from Ego to Essence, the later book is focused on helping the individual, while the book being reviewed focuses on the larger matter of social engineering.

I was growing up in Asia at the time that this extraordinary person was getting herself nominated, along with Geraldine Ferraro in 198, as a Democratic candidate for Vice President, and this book serves as both a practical statement of needs and next steps to achieve conscious evolution as a species in the aggregate (see also the book edited by Mark Tovey with 55 contributors, Collective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World at Peaceand as a very self-effacing overview of the extraordinary life and social network of the author. I am tempted to speculate that hers was the first social network of consequence in modern times.

The core strategic idea in this book is that we are now capable of coming together across all boundaries at all locations to discourse on Conscious Evolution.

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Journal: God is Us, We are God

Consciousness & Social IQ, Religion & Politics of Religion
Full Story Online
Full Story Online

Hats off to the Wall Street Journal for commissioning a pair of essays, short extracts of which are offered below.

Karen Armstrong says we need God to grasp the wonder of our existence

Most cultures believed that there were two recognized ways of arriving at truth. The Greeks called them mythos and logos. Both were essential and neither was superior to the other; they were not in conflict but complementary, each with its own sphere of competence. Logos (“reason”) was the pragmatic mode of thought that enabled us to function effectively in the world and had, therefore, to correspond accurately to external reality. But it could not assuage human grief or find ultimate meaning in life's struggle. For that people turned to mythos, stories that made no pretensions to historical accuracy but should rather be seen as an early form of psychology; if translated into ritual or ethical action, a good myth showed you how to cope with mortality, discover an inner source of strength, and endure pain and sorrow with serenity.

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Review: Toxic Workplace!–Managing Toxic Personalities and Their Systems of Power

5 Star, Best Practices in Management, Communications, Consciousness & Social IQ, Leadership

Amazon Page
Amazon Page

Timely, Pointed, A Good Starting Point,

July 21, 2009
Mitchell Kusy
I read this book in the process of obtaining two other books that are being used in a mid-career leadership course, Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes are High and The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable (J-B Lencioni Series).

Although a bit over-hyped and not the complete picture, I consider this a valuable book that is the equivalent of a Social IQ primer for an organization instead of an individual.

I was raised in the command & control environment and would be classed an over-achiever, with documented performance equal to the next four of my peers combined. Never-the-less, I see in myself toxic elements that have been allowed to run rampant in counter-productive ways. The book focuses on insulting and bullying behavior rather than “voices not heard.” On the latter see The Deepening Darkness: Patriarchy, Resistance, and Democracy's Future as well as Pedagogy of the Oppressed and All Rise: Somebodies, Nobodies, and the Politics of Dignity (BK Currents (Hardcover)) for sharp critiques of patriarchal “rankism” and lost knowledge.

What concerns me especially that is NOT covered by this book is the inability of organizations to “hear” the frustration of their high-performers. Looking back over twenty years what I see is a two-way failure: I have been screaming and shouting about organizational pathologies and the failure of leadership, and those affected have refused to engage–they “shut out” both critics and those offering alternative views. The US National Security Council, to take one specific example, is filled with brilliant people who, in the words of Daniel Elsberg lecturing Kissinger (see my review of his book, Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers “are like morons” who limit themselves to their Top Secret tid-bits and close out all those who actually have “ground truth” to offer.

The bottom line for me on this book is two-fold: first, we all need to recognize personality traits that may be good in isolation but are toxic when “unheard” or unchecked, and second, We the People, the “stockholders” in our dysfunctional government, must demand that it modernize away from the rigid hierarchical bureaucracy and toward the open space democracy that is now possible (see the books below).

Similarly “social IQ” of a corporation, beginning with a rational “not to exceed” multiplier for CEO salaries versus lowest-paid employee salaries, must become a feature of stock evaluations. Not only must corporations now embrace “Green to Gold” and “Cradle to Cradle” “Natural Capitalism”, but they must achieve “Integral Consciousness,” grow “The Knowledge Executive,” and LISTEN to their “Exemplary Performer(s).” All quotes are book titles.

Toxicity begins in the White House and Congress as well as the Boardroom. When they shut themselves off from the public interest and instead pander to special interests, they are poisoning democracy and strangling the Republic. ENOUGH!

This book is well-titled, well-organized, and just right for our times.

See also:
The Tao of Democracy: Using Co-Intelligence to Create a World That Works for All
The Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million People Are Changing the World
Counterculture Through the Ages: From Abraham to Acid House
Collective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace

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Journal: Collective intelligence at a time of global crisis – Tom Atlee

Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Collective Intelligence, Complexity & Resilience, Consciousness & Social IQ, Democracy, Intelligence (Collective & Quantum)
Tom Atlee
Tom Atlee

Tom Atlee's research and thought innovations span from the conscious evolution of social systems to collaborative dynamics to a host of other ideas centering on group, social and political dynamics. He has worked with a number of leading authors on their books including ‘Awakening: The Upside of Y2K'. More recently Tom Atlee has been exploring and writing about collective dynamics.

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Tom is one of the 8 US Collective Intelligence leaders, one of 25 (or more) global leaders of collective intelligence and bottom-up deliberative dialog democracy.Ā  He received the Golden Candle Award at OSS'04.

OSS '04: To Tom Atlee, founder of the Co-Intelligence Institute, for his sustained leadership in the vanguard of an informed democracy. His book, The Tao of Democracy: Using Co-Intelligence to Create a World that Worlds for All is in the best traditions of Thomas Jefferson, who said ā€œA Nationā€™s best defense is an educated citizenry.ā€

It can safely be said that he has had more influence than any other person on the migration of the original Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) movement away from serving governments and toward achieving its righteous role as public intelligence in the public interest.

Co-Intelligence Institute
Co-Intelligence Institute