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May 2012

The Greatest Dialogue and Deliberation Resource Center

Many of you already know about the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation (NCDD). But I’ll bet most of you have not checked out NCDD’s incredible (as in unbelievably gigantic and useful) online Resource Center. It is my own first stop wh…

Emerging EcoNomics #2: The Emerging New Economy Movement

AlterNet has published an excellent article that seeks to summarize the “new economy movement” – at least from a progressive perspective – including sustainability, community, co-ops, localization, collective ownership, stockholder activism, corpo…

Consensus: Manipulation or Magic?

The consensus process strips away all the extraneous issues and allows people to speak to each other. Most of the time, people learn that the other side is not as “wrong” as they initially thought. – Karl Ohs, late Montana Lieutenant Governo…

Ernest Callenbach, Last Words to an America in Decline

Ernest Callenbach’s ECOTOPIA and its prequel ECOTOPIA EMERGING were major books in my developing thinking about how a sustainable society might evolve. ECOTOPIA, the more famous of the two, provides Callenbach’s overall vision of what might be pos…

Wholesome capitalism?

What would wholesome capitalism look like? “Wholesome” means healthy, in the sense of something that promotes physical and moral well-being. Wholesome capitalism would take into account the wholeness of people and the social and natural world we l…

A New Co-Intelligence Initiative: Let’s Talk: Our New Economy

My intern Patrick Maxwell and CII president John Abbe have initiated a project I’m quite excited about. In high quality dialogue they plan to engage local people together about their personal concerns in today’s rough economy – and then to expand …