The individual does not actually suffer less, but somehow, human beings —across cultures, ages groups and regions— appear to have an almost inborn tendency to convince themselves that the one who suffers with others is somehow safer. This is, of course, rarely true. While yes, a young boy might survive because his older sister goes without food, two young children in a population beset with pervasive, persistent scarcity or political disorder, may be at significantly heightened risk of violence, or even enslavement.

Others suggest the phenomenon of psychic numbing is more to do with some sort of instinctual calculation of the worth of one’s efforts. If one seeks to help one lone child, one’s actions seem able; if one seeks to send a small amount to help millions, one’s actions may seem less able, less capable of ‘making a difference’.

There is a theory that this might be related to a long “prehistoric” period —far longer than the period which we refer to as “recorded history”— in which smaller tribal bands were the organizing principle of human society. We can understand safety in numbers, but we can’t conceive of how sending a few dollars, or writing a letter, will in any way contribute to easing the suffering of millions of people. Biologically, this just doesn’t compute in a cerebral infrastructure organized around tribal society.

Yet there are alternatives: there is the theory of an informational tipping point. The lone photo, with no information and no statistics, will spark great compassion. Adding statistics or removing the photo, or naming numbers that run into the millions, will lessen the likelihood of compassion across a large population. But when enough information is given so that the reader/viewer can comprehend in intellectually resilient terms the scale of a tragic crisis, the real energy of compassion is again motivated, perhaps more effectively than by any other means.

Social networking has allowed people to share information and to make donations with an ease of effort and on a scale of cooperative endeavor never before possible. This may be helping to ease the transition away from generalized psychic numbing and toward generalized charitable predisposition, as social networking sites help to shrink the size of the planet to the biologically comprehensible “village” scale, familiarizing people with their counterparts across the world.

How much of a role is there for social networking in solving this problem? How much of the problem is about resistance to new information about crises of massive scale? How much is a crisis of imagination? And are there examples of how we can do or are doing better in any given case?

• Join the discussion at The Hot Spring Network’s Crisis Policy Forum

Countering the rise of a global black market in stolen identities will require not just bold, innovative thinking, but a comprehensive awareness of the nature of media hyper-convergence, and the ways in which that process will affect our ability to interact with, judge, manipulate and keep safe from, the world around us. Standardization and atomization both present opportunities for would-be identity thieves, and so the major pro-consumer model must be centered on getting ahead and staying ahead, technologically, of those who seek to steal and misuse personal identity, whether digital, biometric or analog (like one’s signature).

Share the best practices and legal remedies for preventing identity theft, whether by digital means or wireless harvesting, or in the physical realm of paper, plastic and voice. What laws give consumers leverage in reversing fraudulent charges? What pending legislation will do the most to help protect the sanctity of individual identity? How can we leverage consumer technologies to protect against the most aggressive, innovative attackers? What can the credit scoring universe do to assist and protect consumers?

• Join or follow the discussion on the Hot Spring Network

Part of California’s renewables build-up process might well be, as Gov. Schwarzenegger suggests, a dynamic market in which renewable resourced energy is imported into the state. But part of California’s goal in doing this, admittedly, is to depend less on the volatility of imported energy. So there will have to be a major shift in the investment of public funds toward renewables infrastructure, within the state.

Keeping costs low is a priority, because to not bring down the costs of power generation for Californians means an already economically overstressed state will see itself pushed to the brink, as prolonged malaise —stemming from reduced consumer spending, sluggish credit markets and falling property values, and skyrocketing healthcare costs— nudges more families and small businesses toward bankruptcy.

To keep costs low, the state will have to both provide subsidies and channel federal green energy and infrastructure subsidies to new renewable energy-related projects. An end result of both building aggressively in-state and importing aggressively from out of state will be a significant reduction in the cost of renewable resourced energy, over time, and the eventual capacity to export a significant amount of energy from renewable resources.

This will give California a competitive edge in the coming age of battery-powered rechargeable vehicles (EV) and mandates for emissions reductions. Building and investing now for that later competitive edge will help the state and its residents (and businesses) save money later, when there is no longer any leeway in choosing between renewables and carbon-based fuels.

What’s more, California-based Tesla Motors will be releasing the most high-performance EV fleet ever built, for the mass commercial market, in a one to two-year time-frame. Having achieved not only that goal, but also having successfully integrated a robust renewable resource-based power grid with a network of EV “filling stations”, would put California at the global forefront for clean energy economic development.

This is more than just a fashionable claim the state could make in search of green subsidies and good PR: building a robust renewable resource economy could allow California to become one of the first major exporters of a top-priority commodity in the economic matrix of coming decades: electricity with little to zero environmental impact, a resource that will have not just moral and legal value, but economic incentives tied to it.

• Join or view a discussion on this topic at The Hot Spring Network

The Hot Spring Network (TheHotSpring.net) is a project of Casavaria Publishing, aiming to connect ‘idea people’ across the world. You can use The Hot Spring Network to connect with friends or to seek out people in your field or in a field of interest, to post links or share ideas, publish your own blog posts or share research, media or information generally.

The Hot Spring Network is linked to the publication The Hot Spring (TheHotSpring.com), which aims to produce meaningful analysis of bold new ideas in paradigm-shift fields of research, including media hyper-convergence, advanced ecology, economics, food supply, human health, crisis policy, cutting-edge publishing technologies.

We aim to not only function as a social network across disciplines, borders and interests, but also to formulate a revolutionary new kind of intellectual property preserve. Working from the philosophy of the Creative Commons —which allows creative people to share their work through flexible licensing choices—, we hope to establish a new standard whereby great ideas can be pooled into one productive research base in which all material contributors will share a part.

Check our ‘Rights‘ page periodically for updates on the progress of this project and information about how you can use The Hot Spring Network to distribute your ideas, pool your work with that of others and work toward forging the solutions we all need in order to shape a better future.

For now, feel free to message, blog and share links, expand your connections on the Network, invite friends, join groups and discussions, and help us turn The Hot Spring Network into a vibrant community of information and debate. If you have any questions or would like provide input about how you think the site and its service could be improved, please contact us at thehotspring@casavaria.com or message the Network Director here.

According to a NASA report, hypoxia is so extreme in some areas, that total anoxia (zero oxygen availability) can be found, allowing for no animal life to exist. In the Mississippi River delta, feeding into the Gulf of Mexico, it is thought that agricultural waste is creating a glut of nutrients for phytoplankton, which leaves excess organic matter for bottom-dwelling bacteria to feed on.

“When the fertilizer reaches the ocean, it just becomes more nutrients for the phytoplankton, so they do what they do best: they grow and multiply. Which leads to more organic matter reaching the bottom, more bacterial respiration, and more anoxic bottom water.”

The water becomes anoxic because bacteria use oxygen and give off carbon dioxide, depleting the oxygen other life forms require to sustain life.

We need responsible, enforceable agricultural waste policies, clean water regulations, oceanic industry controls, and international consensus to put an end to these harmful outcomes of unchecked industrial farming, fish production and fossil-fuel use, all of which contribute to or feed back into the vicious cycle of oxygen depletion in the world’s oceans.

• Join the discussion on The Hot Spring Network

Publishing models determine which texts are made available to a wide audience, and by what means. New media, like this social network, are providing new opportunities, but the crossover between print and digital media will provide bold new opportunities for making the best new ideas available to the people who can do the most with them.

Share your ideas on what you would like to see to make news media, research materials, conceptual innovations and basic statistical evidence, and/or writing that expresses new ways of thinking, available for your consumption.

• The Hot Spring Network’s Discussion on ‘New Publishing Models to Speed Ideas to Application’

“Cognitive science has revealed a human brain notable for its plasticity. It is not unreasonable to speculate that the Internet not only shapes itself to the mind but shapes the mind to itself”, writes Ana Menéndez in this month’s Poets & Writers magazine.

What can we do to impede the erosion of some of our most prized social-intellectual habits of mind, rooted in organic brain structure and in social networking (from campfire to empire, parliament to newsprint, to Twitter and The Hot Spring Network), while taking advantage of the power of the web?

• Join the discussion at The Hot Spring Network