Saturday Links for the Week – March 31, 2007

Women Fight Stress Through Companionship: A UCLA study suggests that hormones produced by stress, which in men trigger fight-or-flight responses, in women also trigger a female bonding response. There is strength, and safety, in numbers committed to a common cause.

No Longer Out of Touch: Mike Morris tells his personal and slightly troubling story of how reconnection to the land generated renewed respect for it, and everything living on it: Excerpt:

The Road to a Community-Based Economy: Bill McKibben joins the bandwagon, hoping his descendants will have the sense to realize that community self-reliance offers the only way to cope with looming and cascading social, economic and ecological crises.

Huge Bee Die-Off Linked to GM Corn: Not yet proven irrefutably, but until recently neither was the connection between human activity and global warming. Monsanto does it again, and this time the consequences for farmers who don’t grow from sterile trademarked seeds, and for wild plants everywhere, could be catastrophic.

The Looming War Against Iran and the Looming US Debt Crisis: Jeff Vail makes the connection. A half trillion dollars in high-risk US mortgage debt coming up for renewal over the next two years at much higher interest rates. And Bush determined to start yet another catastrophic Middle East war, this time with nukes. Yet the stock market is at record highs. Students of history are shaking their heads.

Not a Nation as We Know It: John Robb explains that the concept of a ‘virtual’ caliphate, which underlies much of the political and religious ambition in the Middle East, is utterly different from our notion of a nation-state, in that it has no firm borders or boundaries, political, social oreconomic, and is less hierarchical than rhizomic.

Latin American Assesses Gonzales: And they don’t think any more of him than we do.

We Don’t Know What We Need: Roger Schank’s observation that we need to observe and converse and understand what people need, instead of just asking them, has applications far beyond business.

When Global Warming Floods the Coasts, Will You Be Underwater?: Check out this Google Maps mashup to see. Thanks to Dale Asberry for the link.

(Corrected): Hear me blather live April 26 at 11am EDT (GMT-5h) during an online forum on innovation. Get free tickets by e-mailing me or requesting them in the comments below (I have 20 to give out). More on this soon!