Yesterday I attended a meeting with the Agriculture Collaborative of the Mid-Region Council of Governments, a local organization in the middle Rio Grande valley of New Mexico.  The topic was global warming.  On hand to present their data were some great scientists from our local community, including climate scientist Dave Gutzler of the University [...]

Bill Mollison has said: "A crisis is brought on by people who don't want to do something for themselves...and people who want to control others, talk about Peak Oil and crisis because everyone else is panicking".  This is a nice definition of crisis. Undoubtedly, crisis is a human-made phenomenon. In Bolivia, "crisis" is a constant [...]

A quick technorati search this morning gave me a general idea of an issue that is on many people's minds: agriculture is responsible for a large percentage of greenhouse gas emissions. Just have a look here, here, here or here...four different bloggers posting independently of one another, on the same [...]

Reading over Chris Lydon's musings from the Symi Symposium in Greece left me feeling melancholy and despairing; and a thought that has been crystallizing in my mind just started running over and over again in my internal dialogue: our institutions are paralyzed by egotism, self-interest, and inefficiency. [...]

Innovation, by its very nature, is difficult to institutionalize. Innovation requires free and open environments where people can be creative, explore their own interests, and leverage available resources. Institutions rely on predictable processes so that when someone flips a switch or makes a phone call, they get the expected [...]