Two books that I need to return to Inter-library Loan ASAP (or I get fined). Wanted to capture both of them because they are very different.

First, an analysis of the problems with both Right and Left-wing politics in England. The book is Red Tory by Phillip Blond. An excellent assessment of the problems with conservatism and liberalism. If only someone would write this analysis for the US. From the publisher:

Conventional politics is at crossroads. Amid recession, depression, poverty, increasing violence and rising inequality, our current politics is exhausted and inadequate. In “Red Tory”, Phillip Blond argues that only a radical new political settlement can tackle the problems we face. Red Toryism combines economic egalitarianism with social conservatism, calling for an end to the monopolisation of society and the private sphere by the state and the market. Decrying the legacy of both the Labour and Conservative parties, Blond proposes a genuinely progressive Conservatism that will restore social equality and revive British culture. He calls for the strengthening of local communities and economies, ending dispossession, redistribution of the tax burden and restoration the nuclear family. “Red Tory” offers a different vision for our future and asks us to question our long-held political assumptions. No political thinker has aroused more passionate debate in recent times. Phillip Blond’s ideas have already been praised or attacked in every major British newspaper and journal. Challenging, stimulating and exhilarating, this is a book for our times.

Next, a very different book that advances critical pedagogy: Critical Pedagogy, Ecoliteracy, and Planetary Crisis by Richard Kahn. From the publisher:

We live in a time of unprecedented planetary ecocrisis, one that poses the serious and ongoing threat of mass extinction. What role can critical pedagogy play in the face of such burgeoning catastrophe? Drawing upon a range of theoretical influences – including Paulo Freire, Ivan Illich, Herbert Marcuse, traditional ecological knowledge, and the cognitive praxis produced by today’s grassroots activists in the alter-globalization, animal and earth liberation, and other radical social movements – this book offers the foundations of a philosophy of ecopedagogy for the global north. In so doing, it poses challenges to today’s dominant ecoliteracy paradigms and programs, such as education for sustainable development, while theorizing the needed reconstruction of critical pedagogy itself in light of our presently disastrous ecological conditions. Students and teachers of critical pedagogy at all levels, as well as those involved in environmental studies and various forms of sustainability education, will find this book a powerful provocation to adjust their thinking and practice to better align with those who seek to abolish forms of culture predicated upon planetary extermination and the domination of nature.

Not too much to say about either one of these at this point. They both seem interesting and I need to give them a more thorough read if/when I need to.

A quick one from David Harvey and RSA Animate:

Three good bits of writing from David Harvey:

1. Cosmopolitanism and the Geographies of Freedom
2. A Brief History of Neoliberalism
3. Cosmopolitanism and the Banalities of Geographic Evils

Much needs to be written about sustainability and materialism.

I was reminded again today of the research of Rich Ryan and Edward Deci. And along that same line of thinking:

Those that are the most happy on their deathbed are not the ones who made the most money, but those that have had the richest relationships. Something worth exploring in terms of sustainability. Not sure how yet. Some research to chew on in the meantime.

So, I still need to figure out a way to highlight specific reads on the blog. Until I figure that out…

I’m currently reading Juliet Schor’s Plentitude after hearing her on The Diane Rehm Show a few weeks ago. I wrote about similar things last year and was largely unaware of Dr. Schor’s work. Here she is at Harvard Law School:

An excerpt from a paper that I wrote this spring:

By prioritizing investments, especially in environmentally sustainable practices, at the local level with local entrepreneurs using local or regionally produced goods, we could begin to change an economic system that requires high information and energy costs to maintain an unsustainable trajectory. Initial research (Ostrom, 2009) shows that smaller communities are able to sustainably manage natural resources when the rules governing such use are intimately tied to local conditions and local citizens have ownership in their creation and maintenance over time. These innovations are often stifled because our current markets are artificially propped up to favor the large institutions that also control political power. Rolling back their structural advantages would restore a more egalitarian level of competition to the market and would work to stimulate the growth of locally sustainable communities and bioregions.

And:

Many environmental problems result because our current form of capitalism, and the governments that regulate it, fail to account for environmental costs in accounting methodologies. Externalized environmental costs can be internalized into market pricing via the mechanism of proper cost-benefit accounting in governmental and legal decision-making. Pricing that accurately accounts for potential environmental degradation would disincentivize environmentally unsustainable market behaviors (Speth, 2008). Additionally, it would level the playing field for businesses that engage in more environmentally sustainable practices, as their goods would be priced more accurately in the marketplace. If carbon was priced into the transportation of goods around the world, the prices of those products would accurately reflect the cost to the natural environment. Because local economies would require less energy to maintain, this would incentivize the development of local-scale economies, which would also increase the social and economic benefits for individual citizens.

I’m off to a research methods class for most of the day, but wanted to pass along two related bits of information regarding human interaction and the Earth. The first is from Ezra Klein’s excellent policy blog:

The basic story here is that assets have recovered so much more quickly than the broader economy that in 2009, “the millionaire class held a larger percentage of the country’s wealth than it did in 2007.” In other words, inequality has actually gotten worse.

And then, a history of the business of climate science denial:

These opponents of science are free-market fundamentalists, unwilling to accept that global warming and many other pollution-induced ills are market failures, and that government action of some kind will be needed to address it. Market fundamentalists believe that free markets are the solution to social problems and government intervention can only do harm. The reality, however, amply demonstrated by experience, is that pollution is external to the market system — there’s no cost to dumping waste into the air and water. And as Lord Nicholas Stern has recently noted, global warming is the biggest market failure of them all. But this is yet another truth that the free market fundamentalists prefer to ignore.

And here we are. Those with power maintaining the status quo, at great social and environmental cost. How’s that working out these days? In future posts here I will begin to lay out a different social and environmental future, but for now, off to class.

Hey, I remember this space.

Whelp, it’s been about a year since I started the PhD program. It’s now summer and I have some breathing room. I am throwing around the idea of getting back on the blogging horse, but for slightly different reasons than before. Allow me to explain.

In the past I used this space to reflect on issues around teaching and policy and whatnot…mostly a way for me to make sense of the world. I don’t expect that to change, but I now have a different need for this space…I think. One of the things that I have noticed about this whole doctoral-work thing is the sheer amount of material that passes through my brain on any given day. I worry about capturing all of it in some place. Perhaps this is a fruitless endeavour and the information costs are just too high at this level of complexity, but I see this blog transforming into a place where I can both store resources and ideas and make sense of them somehow. I generally find that I am usually bouncing around one or two “meta” concepts in the midst of all the other noise, and I want some way to capture these ideas over time. If that makes sense.

So, I know some of you out there have more experience than I do in the realm of blog design and whatnot. Some questions, in no particular order:

1. How do I add a sidebar where I can store current reads over time?
2. Is there a YouTube/TED sidebar for storing interesting videos?
3. What should this look like in addition to the things I’m suggesting above?
4. And finally, should I even do this in the first place?

I need to carefully think about the cost-benefit of capturing ideas over time versus, you know, actual available time to write something outside of course requirements. I’d love to know what you think.

To be continued…

It was almost a year ago that paleoclimatologist Eugene Domack said to me “there is no ‘fixing’ this. Right now we need to figure out how to adapt.”

A really spectacular bit of Ayn Rand analysis from Jon Chait at The New Republic:

The association of wealth with virtue necessarily requires the free marketer to play down the role of class. Arthur Brooks, in his book Gross National Happiness, concedes that “the gap between the richest and poorest members of society is far wider than in many other developed countries. But there is also far more opportunity . . . there is in fact an amazing amount of economic mobility in America.” In reality, as a study earlier this year by the Brookings Institution and Pew Charitable Trusts reported, the United States ranks near the bottom of advanced countries in its economic mobility. The study found that family background exerts a stronger influence on a person’s income than even his education level. And its most striking finding revealed that you are more likely to make your way into the highest-earning one-fifth of the population if you were born into the top fifth and did not attain a college degree than if you were born into the bottom fifth and did. In other words, if you regard a college degree as a rough proxy for intelligence or hard work, then you are economically better off to be born rich, dumb, and lazy than poor, smart, and industrious.

Where to start on this one? I actually had a teacher tell me the other day that “all poor kids are lazy”. She’s been teaching for about three decades. I was really stunned and immediately called her out on it. And yet this idea persists. This piece places that comment into a larger ideological frame, and one that is incredibly disappointing, especially for a teacher to hold.

I’ve always felt that the Left in this country gets it wrong when they talk about how “if we only had social structures that were just, everything would be Utopian”, and the Right gets it wrong when they say, as Ayn Rand did, that “personal responsibility is the only thing that matters”. I know that those are gross oversimplifications, but it seems that we would all get a lot more done if we had more conversations that negotiate the middle. How do we create educational structures and policies that are both just and allow for individual hard-work to be rewarded? What does that even look like? Help me understand this. What am I missing?

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

Carl Sagan, Mogwai, and amazing film scenes in a video about our insignificant significance. Good times. Happy weekend.