LEARNING, SYSTEMS THINKING

Our task is to participate wisely in a world where collapse and rebirth are unfolding at the same time.

None of us has to do everything, but each of us can do something. In Jewish teaching, Rabbi Tarfon says, “It is not your duty to finish the work, but neither are you free to desist from it”—a line often associated with the work of repairing the world (tikkun olam). No one is asked to save everything; each of us is asked to take up our share of the work through whatever mix of creativity, care, and courage is available to us, right where we are.

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culture, story

We need a new story.

For centuries, many of us in the industrial West have lived inside a tale that casts the world as raw material and humans as its managers, consumers, and winners or losers. This old narrative has powered extraordinary innovation, but it has also delivered us to the brink: a heating planet, frayed democracies, mass extinction, and a pervasive sense that life is speeding up and thinning out at the same time. In that light, the question is not just what policies we adopt or which technologies we deploy, but what story we are living in—and whether it can still hold.

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learning, long view

The long game is not a strategy for winning; it is a way of belonging.

Social change unfolds over generations, not election cycles. Margaret Wheatley tells a story about colleagues who once met with the Dalai Lama while feeling deeply discouraged that their work for change seemed to have little impact. They asked whether their efforts would ever make a difference, given how dire things looked. With a smile, he replied: “Oh, don’t worry about that. Your work will bear influence in about 700 years.”

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culture, celebration

Joy and creativity are strategies for liberation.

The future needs our delight as much as our outrage. adrienne maree brown teaches that what we pay attention to grows, and that pleasure can be a strategy for liberation—a way of reclaiming our whole, joyful selves in the face of systems designed to numb, exhaust, and divide us. When joy, kindness, and love are chosen deliberately, the terms of the struggle begin to change. Most of us were taught to think of power as domination, extraction, and control.

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HABITAT, design

Design matters.

Design is often invisible but never neutral; it quietly shapes how we see, feel, and act together. It can make cynicism feel inevitable, or gently suggest that care is a given. The lines of a building, the way a room holds light, the ease or friction in a doorway or a website—all of these choices whisper instructions about what and who matters. When we move through environments that are coherent, gracious, and humane, it becomes easier to imagine that our shared life could be that way too.

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company, patronage

Information wants to be free, and it needs support to make it so.

In 1984, at the first Hackers Conference, Stewart Brand famously said, “Information wants to be free.” What he actually said was a little more nuanced: “Information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.”

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LEARNING, COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE

We are a lot smarter together.

The smartest person in the room is almost never the person who thinks they are. And in any case, the room itself is usually smarter than any single person in it — if we know how to work it. This is not a flattering metaphor. It is a finding. When groups are given the conditions to think well together — genuine diversity of perspective, real listening, shared stakes, and the freedom to disagree — they reliably outperform even their most gifted individual members.

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LEARNING, FUTURES THINKING

Education belongs at the center of any serious conversation about the future.

We have confused education with the delivery of content. For more than a century, most schools in the industrial world have been organized around a simple transaction: adults hold knowledge; children receive it. The measure of success is how much sticks. The tools are lessons, tests, grades, and credentials—a production line that begins with small children and ends, theoretically, with prepared adults.

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LEARNING, FUTURES THINKING

The living world is not a backdrop. It is a teacher.

We built our civilization on a single, confident assumption: that the natural world is a resource. Not a teacher, not a community, not a relative — a resource. Something to be surveyed, extracted, managed, and, if necessary, replaced. This assumption is so embedded in our institutions, our economics, and our education that most of us have spent our lives inside it without ever having to name it.

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LEARNING, personal development

Personal transformation and emotional health are not personal luxuries. They are critical civic resources.

It's relatively easy to describe the crises of our time in the language of systems: broken institutions, failed markets, collapsing ecologies, eroding democracies. But why are these systems failing? It is elucidating to remember that every human-built system is a pattern of relationships. Decisions are made by people who operate from the emotional capacities they have developed over a lifetime.

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LEARNING, systems thinking

The way we come together is itself a technology — and we can upgrade it.

Picture a meeting you have attended recently about something that genuinely mattered — a community problem, an organizational challenge, a question that required the best thinking of everyone in the room. Chances are it followed a familiar script. An agenda was circulated. A few people spoke most of the time. Someone at the front of the room held a marker.

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CIVICS, SOCIAL INTELLIGENCE

How shared hardship reveals our innate capacity for belonging, agency, and interdependence

Sebastian Junger has spent much of his life moving toward the places most of us avoid—storms, war zones, the thin edges where systems fail and people are forced to rely on each other. In Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging, he turns from the question of how we survive those moments to something more intriguing: why, inside disruption, so many people feel more awake, more necessary, more alive than they do in the steady drift of ordinary life.

Book: Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging

HABITAT, INTEGRATED DESIGN

Harvesting rain is now both smart design and smart building

As climate volatility increases, architects and urban designers face mounting water challenges. Well-designed rainwater harvesting systems can cut potable water use by up to 55% in commercial buildings and 30% in homes. With 36% of major cities now experiencing water stress—driven by rapid development and expanding hardscapes—rainwater is no longer just runoff, but a resource to design with.

ARTICLE: Rainwater Harvesting 101: Integrating Aesthetics & Sustainability In Architecture

company, cooperatives

Mapping how cooperatives have rooted economic life in shared ownership, mutual aid, and place‑based cultures of care

Modern co-op history is often told as beginning in 19th-century Europe. Yes, the Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers in 1844 England is significant for codifying principles that still guide co-ops today. But this narrative sidelines much older cooperative traditions in Africa, Asia, the Americas, and Indigenous communities.

ARTICLE: Mapping The Cultural Heritage Of Co-Ops: What Should Be On The List?

learning, collective efficacy

What people think they can do together can shape outcomes as much as any policy or formal plan.

Albert Bandura was one of the most influential psychologists of the 20th century. Long before “social emotional learning” or “mindset” became common language, he argued that change is a process of learning—how people gradually develop new ways of thinking and acting.In a 1961 paper called Psychotherapy as a Learning Process, Bandura upended the idea that behavior could be explained by any single cause.

CIVICS, PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY

The news feels hopeless; my neighborhood doesn’t.

I know I speak for millions when I say that, in a time when the daily news feels endlessly bleak, I’m hungry for reminders that ordinary people still have real power close to home. Writing in Ms., Kerani Mitchell offers exactly that, with a tapestry of examples that give both context and inspiration to the question, “What can I do?”

ARTICLE: The Antidote to Despair Is Finding our Role in Community Building

COMPANY, ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE

A regenerative, ‘soil-to-soul’ approach to R&D, manufacturing and distribution ties business growth to healthier ecosystems, collaboration across the industry, and a values-led workplace.

Davines takes both their B Corp certification and their slogan—For a Good Life—very seriously. Rooted in a family legacy that treats the business like a living being, Davines has long seen sustainability not as a marketing angle but as the only acceptable way to operate, framing “good life” as a balance of environmental, social, and economic wellbeing.

ARTICLE: Healthy Soil, Healthy People: How Davines Inspires Beauty from the Ground Up

HABITAT, INDIGENOUS WORLDVIEWS

How Indigenous-informed architecture reframes design as reciprocity.

Indigenous worldviews treat land, buildings, and communities as living relatives in a web of kinship, not as inert assets or technical problems to solve. When those worldviews lead design, architecture stops being a delivery mechanism for services and becomes a practice of renewing relationships—between people and place, past and future, human and more-than-human worlds.

ARTICLE: Architecture by, for, and with America’s First Communities

NATURE, ECOLOGICAL WISDOM

The many benefits of investing in relationships, diversity, and reciprocity

In her first book, Finding the Mother Tree, Suzanne Simard argued that forests are not collections of isolated trees but living, communicating communities connected by underground fungal networks. In her new work, When the Forest Breathes, she extends that idea into a broader thesis: forests are relational, self-renewing communities whose health depends on cycles of reciprocity among trees, fungi, soil, and people—and if we learn from those relationships, we can redesign forestry, climate policy, and even our own communities around regeneration rather than extraction.

BOOK: When the Forest Breathes

HABITAT, BIOMASS

How upcycling plentiful, underutilized biomass into building materials can help solve America’s housing crisis, create jobs, and boost domestic manufacturing

In a 1995 The Atlantic cover story, Amory B. Lovins and L. Hunter Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute introduced the ultra-efficient, hybrid-ready “Hypercar” concept to a mass audience—two years before Toyota launched the Toyota Prius in Japan and five years before it reached global markets. In retrospect, the article anticipated a major shift in the auto industry.

REPORT: Building with Biomass: A New American Harvest

learning, personal development

Embracing the challenge of renewal in personal and political life

Parker J. Palmer is a writer, educator, and activist whose work sits at the intersection of spirituality, education, community, and democratic life. A lifelong Quaker, he doesn’t celebrate Easter in a traditional liturgical sense, but engages it as a season and symbol of resurrection, resistance, and renewal. In a recent essay, he reflects on how “resurrection” can feel more threatening than comforting, both personally and politically, because genuine new life asks us to leave behind familiar forms of “death-in-life” and risk change.

ARTICLE: Threatened with Resurrection

communications, social messaging

Caring for any coastal country means caring for the marine systems that sustain its forests and biodiversity.

“No Blue, No Green” is a two-phase environmental design campaign by Droga5 São Paulo for the SOS Oceano. Its core message—“without the ocean, there is no life on land”—is distilled into the line “No blue, no green.” Phase one, launched at Rio Ocean Week 2025, removed blue and green from Brazil’s flag, turning a national symbol into a stark environmental warning.

ARTICLE: No Blue, No Green Campaign by Droga5 São Paulo Uses Screen-Printed Art to Defend Brazil’s Oceans

LEARNING, personal development

The greatest danger we face is psychic numbing—the impulse to shut down our capacity to feel grief, fear, and outrage about what is happening to the Earth.

Though she first wrote it in the late 1990s, Joanna Macy could have written this essay for these unsettling, surreal days, when the confusion isn’t whether things are bad, but how an ordinary person could possibly respond.In her quiet and stedfast voice, Macy says that the greatest danger we face is not climate chaos, war, a president who demeans others while abusing power for profit, or billionaires who hoard wealth while others struggle for basics.

RESOURCE: Personal Guidelines for the Great Turning

learning, emotions

Motivation, curiosity, and values are not add‑ons to learning; they are its engine.

Mary Helen Immordino‑Yang is a psychologist and neuroscientist who studies how emotion, culture, and social relationships shape learning and brain development. In two decades of research she has learned that it is neurobiologically impossible to separate deep thinking and durable learning from the feelings and meanings that surround them. Her book Emotions, Learning, and the Brain is a collection of research‑based essays showing that deep thinking and durable learning emerge from our emotional and relational life, not from cognition alone.

BOOK: Emotions, Learning, and the Brain. Exploring the Educational Implications of Affective Neuroscience

habitat, energy

War is not healthy for children, living things and centralized fossil fuel energy systems.

Once upon a time, Russia was the EU’s largest gas supplier, providing around 40–45% of its imported gas. Then Russia decided to invade Ukraine and gradually turned off the taps and saw key pipelines sabotaged, triggering a massive price shock that exposed just how dangerous it is to lean on giant fossil fuel projects that can be turned into weapons overnight. More recently, the war in Iran has hit a different set of fossil fuel chokepoints, with fighting around the Strait of Hormuz slowing or blocking shipments that normally carry about a fifth of the world’s oil and a large share of global LNG, driving up prices and forcing Europe back into crisis mode just a few years after the Ukraine shock.

ARTICLE: Co-operatives and the Global Energy Crisis

LEARNING, relational intelligence

"The thread running through every phase of our development is relational."

Isabelle Hau is executive director of the Stanford Accelerator for Learning and author of Love to Learn: The Transformative Power of Care and Connection in Early Education. She cares about what happens to children when no one is paying attention to them. Now she's applying that interest to the question of what happens to all of us when we stop paying attention to each other.

ARTICLE: Welcome to the Era of Relational Intelligence

CIVICS, CITIZENSHIP

"Maybe changing the world is more like caregiving than it is like war. Too many people still expect it to look like war."

Thich Nhat Hanh once suggested that “the next Buddha will be the Sangha”—not a lone savior, but a community practicing together. Rebecca Solnit takes that insight as both spiritual and political. In a recent interview about her new book The Beginning Comes After the End, she argues that the strongest counterweight to Trumpism and climate crisis is not a heroic leader, but civil society itself: ordinary people who, over time, quietly bend the world in new directions.

INTERVIEW: Rebecca Solnit Says the Left’s Next Hero Is Already Here

COMMUNICATIONS, DESIGN

Essential tools for architects, artists, designers, developers, engineers and makers

I wish there were more books like Universal Principles of Design. It’s a field guide to the invisible forces shaping how we live, decide, and relate. Its premise is simple but consequential: design is a powerful force. When we understand and use it well, it supports our intentions; when we don’t, it works against them. Structured as short, two-page entries, the book reads less like theory and more like a shop manual for human environments.

BOOK: Universal Principles Of Design, 200 Ways to Increase Appeal, Enhance Usability, Influence Perception, and Make Better Design Decisions