Emergence is attracting growing interest in the sciences. This paper argues understanding emergence in social science requires different approaches than in the physical sciences. The argument makes use of contributions by Elizabeth Fox Keller, Thomas Kuhn, Jane Jacobs, Michael Polanyi, … Read more
The meaninglessness of the term “free market” in contemporarty political debate
Exploring economic freedom as if freedom and people actually mattered
Powerful TED talk on health, food, and what corporate agriculture is doing to us
I am linking to a powerful TED talk about the state of American food and health. It is particularly revealing at showing the absolute contradiction between putting profit ahead of everything and the complex moral relationships that make up human … Read more
An argument for why abortion should be the right of the woman, and everyone else has no standing at all on the issue.
“Unexpected Harmonies: Self-Organization in Liberal Modernity and Ecology” The Trumpeter, Journal of Ecosophy, 10:1, Winter 1993, 25-32.
Understanding Democracy, part III: Democracy as a spontaneous order
I was out of town at our first “Cosmos and Taxis” conference in Vancouver, BC. Now that I am back I am picking up my series of mini-essays on what democracies are and why so many do not understand them.… Read more
Understanding Democracy II: Fallacies about majority rule
Deep Ecology and Eco-Feminism
Deep ecologists and ecofeminists share far more in common than where they differ. However, scholars within both perspectives have tended to exaggerate inevitable differences in terminology and traditions of analysis into supposedly significant differences in kind. Some ecofeminists criticize deep … Read more
Before the Farm – and After
Based on reasonable extrapolations from both the historical evidence and surviving hunting and gathering societies, our earliest forbearers generally lived in relatively small usually mobile groups. This mobility was not universal. Permanent communities could exist where fish, game, and edible … Read more