How Much Do Americans Really Know About Democracy? Turns Out We Could Learn a Few Things From Nature
This post is adapted from LaConte's article in the Fall/Winter 2011 issue of the international journal Green Horizon.
"Our capacity for democracy grows from our connection with nature. As we lose that connection, isolation, fear, and the need to control grow-and democracy inevitably deteriorates. It's easy to forget that a deep connection with nature provides the inspiration for genuine democratic thinking." -- Peter Senge in Presence: Exploring Profound Change in People, Organizations and Society
In my book Life Rules I make the case that the prognosis for global or even national-level solutions for the syndrome of economic, environmental and political/social crises we presently face is poor. I take the recent debt-ceiling fiasco as further proof of the pudding. Variously inept, corrupt, craven, bought and paid for, ideologically intransigent, and ignorant of or unwilling to face hard realities, our leaders are evidently incapable of comprehending or coping with the complexity of the issues before them. They fail to see, or at least fail to say that they see, the connections between and among these crises. They exhibit an almost pathological inability or refusal to recognize the seriousness of consequences of the convergence of these crises: economic and ecological breakdown and worldwide chaos. Full Article Here | AlterNet
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