Earth Time
Perhaps you’ve noticed that for many months now the tip for the week has been
frozen in the last century! Time for catch up.
My hiatus is the result of an uneasy feeling I was beginning to have about my
work. Why are we spending so much money and seeing all our best and
brightest talent going to yet another e-commerce start-up? And why is Axioun
supporting this seemingly ethic-less e-biz take-over of the internet? Does the
world need another dot.com shopping site? I think not.
I took a break from my usual consulting practice to begin reading about life and
the environment. I started with Fritjof Capra’s The Web of Life -- a must read for
any human alive today -- and followed that with Theodore Roszak’s
Ecopsychology. I’ve gone on to read about biomimicry (Janine M. Benyus), the
biological basis of consciousness (Antonio Damasio’s The Feeling of What
Happens), why children need wild places (Gary Paul Nabhan and Stephen
Trimble’s The Geography of Childhood), and heart-wrenching tales about our
lost natural resources (Carl Safina’s Song for the Blue Ocean, Jane Claire
Dirks-Edmunds’ Not Just Trees, John Murray’s Seacoast Reader, Ric
Careless’s To Save the Wild Earth). Of course, these books illuminate the tip of
the iceberg; I recommend all of them.
Here’s my conclusion -- our biggest human challenge is reversing the
destruction of our environment. We need to change our consciousness; we
need “macro-mind.”
So now what! What can one person do? My first answer is Planetwork
(www.planetworkers.com) and the conference we are planning for May 12-14th
at the Presidio in SF. Check us out to see how you can get involved in one of
the most exciting gatherings of IT/eco-minded thinkers and doers ever.
And stay tuned here for more about this and other current Axioun projects -- the
21st Century Axioun, the one using IT and strategic planning tools in support of
the earth.
