Posts by: Joseph Robertson
Simon Sinek has a simple but powerful model for inspirational leadership all starting with a golden circle and the question “Why?” His examples include Apple, Martin Luther King, and the Wright brothers …
Natalie Jeremijenko’s unusual lab puts art to work, and addresses environmental woes by combining engineering know-how with public art and a team of volunteers. These real-life experiments include: Walking tadpoles, texting “fish,” planting fire-hydrant gardens and more.
See Natalie Jeremijenko speak at LucidNYC, on February 22, 2012 View her work at the [...]
We are moving through a period of global economic transition. The new economy will favor complexity over hierarchy, and work with ecosystems and civil society, to achieve a more harmonious relationship between individuals and their environment. There are certain key points that will define this progress and build resiliency and generative capacity into the global economic system…
From the Courthouse News Service:
A broken underwater wellhead has been dumping 4,000 gallons of oil a day into the Gulf of Mexico for seven years, and neither its owner nor state or federal governments have informed the public or seriously tried to stop it, six environmental groups claim in Federal Court.
Lead [...]
We are moving through a period of global economic transition. The new economy will favor complexity over hierarchy, and work with ecosystems and civil society, to achieve a more harmonious relationship between individuals and their environment. There are certain key points that will define this progress and build resiliency and generative capacity into the global economic system:
Amid intense and gathering pressure from the grassroots to the state government of Nebraska, to a national coalition of activist organizations, tens of thousands of demonstrators and an intensifying drumbeat from leading scientists, Nobel laureates and concerned public officials, Pres. Barack Obama this week ordered the suspension of the Keystone XL pipeline project. The pipeline would carry tar sands oil from Alberta, Canada, to the Gulf of Mexico, for export to other nations, and would run through some of the most sensitive and important fresh water systems in the US.
“Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the trouble-makers, the round pegs in the square holes, the ones who see things differently: they’re not fond of rules, and they have no respect for the status-quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify, or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them, because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world—are the ones who do.”
Today, the UN officially recognizes the arrival of the 7 billionth person on the planet. Never before have so many human beings been alive simultaneously. Never before has the Earth’s carrying capacity been so intensely taxed, as more people than ever before are moving into advanced stages of industrial urbanization. Even as we mark the arrival of the 7 billionth person, the average individual human being is demanding more resources than at any time before.
The city of Oakland is experiencing a deep crisis of conscience, amid what appears to be the moral confusion of its administration. The mayor, who had marched with the Occupy Oakland demonstrators, has now ordered not one but two paramilitary strikes against nonviolent protesters, in which tear gas, “flash-bang” grenades, rubber bullets and powerful sonic [...]
The European Union has reached an agreement to relieve Greece of half of its sovereign debt, and to boost the Eurozone bailout fund to €1 trillion. The agreement may well be funded, in part, by non-European governments, even private investors, but it shows a new commitment to the Union as such, even amid a surge [...]
With gasoline prices at record highs in 2008, 2009 and 2010, 2011 has looked like a microcosm of the longer oil-market trend: consistent increases in pricing, fuel costs hurting small business and the middle class, slowing the pace of economic growth in the US, and—maybe most strangely of all—no national policy to motivate [...]
The Occupy Wall Street movement—now being called “the American Autumn”, after the Arab Spring, or the September 17th movement, after the day it got started in lower Manhattan—is now completing four weeks on the scene. Yet we can still be astounded to hear so many incredulous “experts” unable to understand how a grassroots [...]
We need a system of cooperative public-private infrastructure financing, a national infrastructure bank. But we also need to use that fabric of cooperative investment and output to foster specific areas of major improvement to our national economy. The model could be replicated across the world, but the US is uniquely positioned to deploy this [...]
Steve Jobs was not a run-of-the-mill CEO. He was not the usual technology wiz. He was not lost in the abstract. He was not working for gain alone. Steve Jobs earned immense wealth and achieved some of the most pervasive influence over human events in recent decades, through the strength and passion of [...]
A people-centered investment bank could work like a clearing house for good ideas that deserve serious investment but would be ignored by conventional high-finance institutions. It could align with cutting-edge technology innovators of the kind that are too young, marginal or maverick, to have given up their intellectual property to major conglomerates and who might just be looking for an opportunity to become the next generation of entrepreneurs, with a mind to generalized improvement of socio-economic conditions.
The World Bank hosted its annual Civil Society Policy Forum last week, and the clear, and very conscious, theme of the meetings was the connection between high-level transparency, stakeholder outreach and the building and securing of a functional and reliable civil society. In recent years, stakeholder outreach has been moving to prominence in the deliberations of global development bodies, like the UN agencies, the World Bank and IMF and the OECD.
Project Quipu is an endeavor to create a global economic forum, a user-made atlas of economic information, reporting, negotiation and planning, in order to craft a more relevant, human-scale model for economic information and application. The quipu [pronounced keep-ü] was a system of strings, knots, colors and patterns, created in each case by [...]
The fossil fuel saturation problem, known to states like Texas as an ongoing “energy emergency”, means we need to be actively searching not only for alternative fuels, but also for investment opportunities where we can build in drivers of more generalized prosperity, i.e. a restored and strengthened middle class, and accelerating returns in productive capacity.
There is a myth permeating our nation’s energy policy and energy economy, which holds that renewable sources of energy cannot meet our outsized electricity demand, let alone power our entire economy. That myth is not only entirely untrue; it depends on the flawed assertion that the only way things can be is the way that they have been. The fact is: we can more easily achieve sustained energy independence with clean energy than by any other means.
What priorities would you like the World Bank to focus on, to motivate fair and sustainable recovery, alleviate poverty and foster civil society and democracy?
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