Category: Life
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What is life?
Science, Order, and Creativity by Bohm & Peat This is a post in my organizing “between and beyond” series. Other posts are here. Science, Order, and Creativity by David Bohm and F. David Peat is a very interesting book which I warmly recommend! Here is my book review. The chapter on “What is order?”1 is…
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Michelle Holliday on thrivability
I tweet quotes from the books I read from my twitter account @janhoglund. Here is a compilation of the most retweeted and liked quotes from Michelle Holliday’s upcoming book The Age of Thrivability: Vital Perspectives and Practices for a Better World (in italics): … thrivability – the intention and practice of enabling life to thrive…
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Book Review: The Age of Thrivability
The Age of Thrivability: Vital Perspectives and Practices for a Better World by Michelle Holliday is a new book which will be released this fall. Michelle Holliday is a facilitator, consultant, researcher, presenter, and writer. Her work centers around “thrivability,” which is based on a view of organizations and communities as living systems. It’s this view…
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Cybernetics is a poor metaphor for living systems
Here is how Elisabet Sahtouris defines ecosophy and why she thinks that cybernetics is a poor metaphor for living systems: Ecosophy “… I give the word ‘ecosophy’ (oikos + sophia = oikosophia) the meaning it would have had in ancient Greece, had it come into use there: Ecosophy: wisely run household of human affairs or,…
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Alfie Kohn on love, motivation, and self-esteem
Alfie Kohn is the author of Punished by Rewards, which is a book about the damaging effects of rewards. Here are his thoughts on motivation, love, and self-esteem (my emphasis in bold): Motivation “When we deal with people who have less power than we do, we’re often tempted to offer them rewards for acting the…
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Carol Black on the wildness of children
Carol Black writes the following in On the Wildness of Children (my emphasis in bold): When we first take children from the world and put them in an institution, they cry. … But gradually, over the many years of confinement, they adjust. … The same people who do not see themselves as “above” nature but…
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There is another way
Here’s an excerpt (my emphasis in bold) from Russel Means’s most famous speech in 1980.1 There’s something deeper than just a rejection of Marxism from this radical. He has an entirely different worldview compared to all “isms”: “… Newton … “revolutionized” physics and the so-called natural sciences … Descartes did the same thing with culture.…
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Life-nurturing vs. life-depleting behaviors
The environment within which people work is key to the organization’s success. Life-nurturing conditions contribute to high creativity and productivity, while life-depleting conditions contribute to apathy and low productivity. Life-nurturing behaviors 1 Life-depleting behaviors 2 Listening Controlling Understanding Punishing Trusting Regulating Sharing Telling Clarifying Shaming Judging Rationalizing Notes: 1 These are some of the behaviors…
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The dancing rainbow within
Mae-Wan Ho’s new book Living Rainbow H2O is dedicated to the dancing rainbow within, which is made possible by the water that makes up all organisms. 1 Mae-Wan Ho writes (my emphasis in bold): “The organism is thick with coherent activities on every scale, from the macroscopic down to the molecular and below. I call…
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The organism is wildly uncontrollable and unpredictable from the outside
The organism is wildly uncontrollable and unpredictable from the outside. From the inside, of course, you know what you are doing. You know that your actions are not random or arbitrary. And … if you are a perfectly happy human being, you would feel absolutely spontaneous and free. — Mae-Wan Ho 1 Notes: 1 Quote…