Dave’s Saturday Links – Seven Interesting Ideas

A few sites with some interesting ideas worth thinking about:

Three Principles Behind All Creativity Tools: Directed Creativity suggests that all creativity tools have three underlying concepts: (1) Attention (focusing on things you normally take for granted, (2) Escape (get outside normal thinking patterns or preconceptions, or just get outside), and (3) Movement (explore, discover, connect, just follow ideas where they lead you).

Standards for Social Justice: Two organizations, Social Accountability International (SA8000) and the Fair Labor Association (FLA) each suggest guidelines for, and certify and monitor compliance with, standards for acceptable organizational standards for working hours, compensation and conditions, employment standards, forced and child labor, health and safety, workplace punishment, and collective bargaining rights.

Defining Tomorrow’s Company: A British group sponsored by some of the UK’s biggest companies is organizing events and debate on how corporations can become responsible to employees, the community and the environment as they are to shareholders.

Debate vs. Conversation: Alan Stewart explains why debate, the “clash of differing opinions”, is a much less effective means of sharing and transferring knowledge and ideas than intelligent conversation. I can see Jeremy Heigh‘s brows furrowing.

Caretakers for Art: Amanda Koh has a brilliant moving-to-gift-economy idea for making art affordable to everyone. Where else could it be applied?

The Worst Places in the World: Jumping on the Google Maps bandwagon, Sprol is a fascinating blog that shows aerial views of some of the horrible things man has done to our planet, with some well-researched commentary. The picture above is from this site, showing Las Vegas sprawl. Imagine how this area will do when the oil and water run out. Oh, the green, naturally, is a golf course.

Ken Wilber vs Stan Rowe: The field of ecological philosophy/psychology has two main streams of thought. The more popular one is espoused by Ken Wilber (A Theory of Everything), a very bright but annoyingly arrogant thinker who argues that all animate matter in some sense a ‘member’ and in other senses a ‘constituent’ of a hierarchy of communities. An alternate point of view is espoused by the late Stan Rowe (A Manifesto for Earth), who argues in favour of the ‘deep ecology’ model that the Earth is a single super-organism of which each living creature is simply a part. A recent article in Trumpeter by Michael Zimmerman contrasts and tries to reconcile the two views. It’s heavy-going stuff but every once in awhile theoretical discussion can be enlightening, and these guys are intellectual heavyweights. I bet Jon Husband has something to say about this.

1 Response to Dave’s Saturday Links – Seven Interesting Ideas

Rayne says:

April 25, 2005 at 09:47

Since you’re still waiting for Jon H., I’ll pipe up on the question of ecology. It seems to me that these two lines of thought are not divergent (Wilber v. Rowe); they’re very much like the concept of “particle v. wave”. Why cannot ecology be both? Zimmerman dances all around this concept, sidles up to it, but never really says this succinctly in his Trumpeter piece. A failure of a particle affects its wave action; the failure of the smallest sub-particle can affect the wave of the component to which it belongs. The failure can be observed at both the level of the particle and at wave level. So simple, it seems to me, to resolve these two lines of thought, Wilber and Rowe; seems so obvious that we humans can have an affect on particles below our level or plane, and on the entire wave of action that is our environment.