On your next trip to the grocery or drug store, take a few minutes and really look around you. Americans have a profoundly bizarre relationship with our wastes—we don’t think about them. Isn’t it time we started? Part 2 of 3.
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by Brandon Heckman
2009-04-29/Comment?
On your next trip to the grocery or drug store, take a few minutes and really look around you. How much of what they’re selling—food, drugs, packaging, knick-knacks, toys—is going to end up in a landfill and sewage treatment plant? How much of your money are you literally throwing away and pouring down the drain? Part 1 of 3.
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by Brandon Heckman
2009-04-28/Comment?
When the scope of the planet’s current crises are taken into full consideration, the human population’s economic crisis is merely one small catastrophic symptom among many larger and direr ones. All are caused by the same disease: Unchecked human consumerism. You could more generally call this, “cheating.” This pattern of taking inequitably and wasting inequitably is poisoning every aspect of life on this planet. If we do not reckon our cheating, our millennia of collective striving amounts to nothing.
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by Brandon Heckman
2009-01-28/Comment?
Cross-posted from our Vain Paradigm section, our 5-part investigation into our changing era through the economic lens continues—and broadens. How do we best promote sustainable relationships between ourselves and the world—and between ourselves, for that matter? Can we survive ourselves as “consumers?” Or is it time we become something else? “Exchangers?”
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by Brandon Heckman
2008-12-18/Comment?
We live in extraordinary times. Conditions will surely begin to look like a Depression shortly after the New Year. We at the Mindful Paradigm believe that what is happening to humanity right now transcends economic wobblings and crashes: We believe that our entire conception of worth and value face a complete reckoning to real human costs—and, more importantly, real planetary tolls. In Part 3 of 5 of this series, we examine the dynamic of the crumbling infrastructure of worth and value, and the impacts on our planet and on ourselves of distorted valuation.
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by Brandon Heckman
2008-12-13/Comment?
This week’s This American Life features a modern day “heretic.” It’s a fantastic examination of one man’s struggles with Christian faith, with its orthodoxy, with its scriptures, and with his own revelations. By extension, it’s an examination of America’s relationship to Christianity as well. Pentecostal Bishop Carlton Pearson challenges the notions of Heaven and Hell and finds, like Sartre, that “Hell is other people”—meaning, we create our own suffering, God doesn’t need to create that for us. Heaven is relief from that hell—and everyone is going there. It’s a worthy and challenging listen. Here’s the 30-second promo. You can listen to the outstanding full episode here. (Click on “Full Episode.”)
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by Brandon Heckman
2008-12-10/Comment? [1]
READING
Venerated by early environmentalist while disdained by liberals and conservatives alike, the late Edward Abbey was never a man to go with the flow. In this excerpt from the 1980 novel Good News read how Abbey foresaw many of the environmental problems we are facing today and what, if anything, we can do about them.
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by John Wright in MindfulParadigm
posted on 2009-04-19/Comment?
“Waitaminute. We still can’t fix Katrina, but they could find money for another Transformers movie? What the hell is wrong with us?”
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by Brandon Heckman
2009-06-02/Comment?
GQ reports on the covers of the Rumsfeld Worldwide Intelligence Updates in this troubling expose. The short of it? Biblical quotes on each memo’s cover present compelling evidence that many in the Bush Administration saw their war on terror as a religious crusade.
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by Brandon Heckman
2009-05-18/Comment?
Cornelia Dean reports in the NY Times
Global warming conjures images of rising seas that threaten coastal areas. But in Juneau, as almost nowhere else in the world, climate change is having the opposite effect: As the glaciers here melt, the land is rising, causing the sea to retreat.
Troubling stuff.
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by Brandon Heckman
2009-05-18/Comment?
From Omnivore’s Dilemma:
“Cheapness and ignorance are mutually reinforcing.” —Michael Pollan, author, Omnivore’s Dilemma
“We ask for too much salvation by legislation. All we need to do is empower individuals with the right philosophy and the right information to opt out en masse.” —Joel Salatin, livestock farmer
“Don’t you find it odd that people will put more work into choosing their mechanic or house contractor than they will into choosing the people who grow their food?” —Joel Salatin, livestock farmer
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by Brandon Heckman
2009-04-16/Comment?
Dreams, Myth, Hallucinations, and Art are not “the message” but are interfaces with the message, in the same way a computer display is only an interface to the microprocessor’s otherwise-unintelligible truth of the toilings of thousands or even millions of electric switches. The interfaces should never be confused with the message or messenger, nor as the truth of reality. They are merely interpreters of one facet of reality that is otherwise unintelligible to us. Yet our culture has confused countless interfaces for the truths they represent; this is the source of immense and significant strife.
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by Brandon Heckman
2009-04-15/Comment?
Moyers has long been a voice of courage, grace, reason, thoughtfulness, and curiosity in American journalism, and he has throughout his career held a deep conviction that the American people in and out of his audience are as intelligent and hungry for knowledge, insight, and understanding as he is. Despite the glaring fact that his industry peers have embraced a “wisdom” that presupposes the opposite of Moyers’s fellow Americans in recent years, dumbing down their content and advertising to idiot-proof levels of “consumability,” Moyers has persevered in his faith in his fellow Americans.
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by Brandon Heckman in Heroes
posted on 2009-03-13/Comment?
Should is a powerful and nearly-effortlessly seductive aphrodisiac in our approach to perception. In rational minds, should is the genesis point from which measurements and judgments are made. But rational minds remember that should is a tool and nothing more—certainly not the truth. As with all tools, ordinary Americans have a relationship to should made uneasy by our forgetting of its tool-nature. We confuse it with the truth of things, see what we think things should be well before we see them for what they are. Indeed, we’ve come to equate should be with what they are—despite the fact that the two do not often coincide. This leads to many of our greatest human dilemmas.
The world is begging for us to see it on its terms. Isn’t it time we stopped confusing what we think it should be for it really is?
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by Brandon Heckman
2009-04-22/
Venerated by early environmentalist while disdained by liberals and conservatives alike, the late Edward Abbey was never a man to go with the flow. In this excerpt from the 1980 novel Good News read how Abbey foresaw many of the environmental problems we are facing today and what, if anything, we can do about them.
(read the full post)
by John Wright
2009-04-19/Comment?
Judging by the astronomical growth of the pharmaceutical industry in the last few decades (and in the last decade most notably), prescription drug use in Western Society is pervasive. What kind of a culture have we created that it’s constituents—people like my family members—have to take mood- and mind-altering drugs every day to stay sane enough to participate in it? When examined through the lens of widespread psychiatric medication usage, it’s hard to argue that something isn’t very wrong with our culture.
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by Brandon Heckman
2009-04-14/Comment? [2]
The New York Times posted an excellent op-ed piece by Hot, Flat, and Crowded author Thomas Friedman. In it, Friedman swiftly dissects and assesses this moment in human and global history and, with his peer Paul Guilding, annouce that 2008 is the year of the Great Disruption—“when both Mother Nature and Father Greed have hit the wall at once.” Check it out.
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by Brandon Heckman
2009-03-10/Comment?
In a striking and moving interview with journalist Bill Moyers, Parker Palmer of the Center for Courage and Renewal asks us as viewers a profound question: “What happens when we don’t learn to hold the tension between what is and what we know to be possible?” See the remarkable interview here.
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by Brandon Heckman
2009-02-28/Comment? [1]
Poet and sculptor, Christine Auden, expands her meditation on ignorance and contemplates our own limits of knowing. “It would be ignorant to think you could know all of a person’s motivations for speaking or know all of the life that has brought them to this speech; in turn, it would also be ignorant to believe that they understand all that has brought you to your response. Words can only promise more words—not understanding. In promising more words, though, they promise you a way to know the reality of another’s life.”
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by Christine Auden
2009-02-04/Comment?
