Tuesday, August 28, 2012

Processes for Councils

Back to Web of Life:

The beauty of Councils of All Beings is that there are no set ways to do it. All kinds of process and activities are very powerful. Here are write ups of both old and new pieces of the work to inspire you.

Evolutionary Journey - Future Human Visualisation

ECO-MILLING — John Seed
We are here because our world is in distress ...
Of course you can make up different steps for the milling, but the ones I commonly use are:
1. Walk around fast looking at the ground. 
2. Slow down, watch your breath. 
3. Start to make eye contact. 
4. Take a couple of minutes each to share ... maybe something important/transformative that's happened to you in Nature. Or: Here is a person living on planet Earth at the same time as you. Share with them something you love about yourself, and something you love about the Earth.

5. Person "A" put up your hand. Put the palms of your hands together and person A lead, person B follow. After a couple of minutes, "person B lead, A follow". After a couple minutes more: "now, without stopping your movement, continue but with neither leading nor following.

6. Look into this persons eyes and let the thought arise in your mind that here is a person who loves Nature, that's why they're here for this weekend. Consider the millions of people who are doing something else (e.g....), but this person is here out of that love of Nature and desire for her wellbeing. Allow whatever feelings may arise in response to this thought (pause for a minute). Now, dropping this thought, allow the thought to arise in your mind that here is a person who has great knowing about what's happening to our world ... they know which mighty power dropped which bomb on which other mighty power in August 1945 ... they know which countries are preparing to do far worse even now ... they know (whatever you want to fill in here). Once again, allow any feelings to arise in response to this thought. Now consider the dangers in the world that this person inhabits. They could die of a cancer as a result of the poisons spewing into their environment. They could die in a nuclear holocaust. Indeed, this could happen at any moment and without warning. In fact, these could be the last pair of eyes that you'll ever look into. Again, invite any feelings that may want to arise in response to this thought.

7. Take this person's left hand in yours and begin to explore it. Feel the texture, the heat/cold, moist/dry, explore it with great wonder, as if you've never felt anything like it before. The skin, bones, knuckles, sinews, strong opposable thumb etc. Now, see what this hand can teach you of it's history. Is this a hand that has done a lot of hard manual labour? etc. Now allow this hand to take you back, see if you can feel the hand of the child that once was this hand, the baby, now even further back, can you feel the paw in this hand? the claws that led to these nails... the fin... can you feel the very dust of stars of which this hand is composed?... Now, with your eyes still closed, without words, say goodbye to this hand and start milling again.

8. Blind walk. Person A lead, B follow. This is about trust and about opening to your senses other than sight. Five (or 10) minutes each way. Person A, a few times in the course of the blind walk, when you see something that you want to share with your partner, position them so (model this), move their head into position and then squeeze their shoulder. Person B, when you're shoulder is squeezed, open your eyes for just a second, like a camera and take in what person A is sharing with you.

Monday, August 27, 2012

Organizations and the Natural Environment: Thirty-Five Years of Research on Business and the Natural Environment. Part 2: The 75 Seminal Articles of the Field

Organizations and the Natural Environment: Thirty-Five Years of Research on Business and the Natural Environment. Part 2: The 75 Seminal Articles of the Field


I then collected citation counts (as a measure of influence) for every article using Googlescholar (again, ISI and Scopus did not list all the articles in the sample).  Articles were then sorted along two criteria: absolute citation counts and normalized citation counts by year.  The first measures the overall impact of the article.  The second takes into account the fact that older articles will gather more citations than more recent articles.  
Table 1 offers a list of the 75 most highly cited articles in Business and the Natural Environment ranked by normalized citations per year.  Those articles with a higher normalized rank than absolute rank may be considered to be up and coming articles relative to their peer set (presuming their citation trend continues).  Those articles with a higher absolute rank than normalized rank may be considered to be sun setting in influence relative to their peer set.  Ideally, one would also develop a measure for the yearly trends in citation counts to observe if an article is declining in influence.  
Immediately, readers may quibble over what constitutes an article in B&NE.  The first article appeared in Nature in 1997 and caused quite a stir when the 13 authors analyzed 17 ecosystem services and determined a value for nature estimated at between $16 and $54 trillion per year, with a likely figure of at least $33 trillion.  This is followed by more commonly cited B&NE journals (likeAcademy of Management ReviewOrganization Studies and Administrative Science Quarterly).  Remaining near the top of the list are seemingly classic articles on the topic by Michael Porter and Milton Friedman.  
As you peruse the list, you will be hard pressed to find articles from the fields of finance and information technology, notably low in B&NE coverage.  You will also be hard pressed to find articles from Business Strategy & the Environment, theJournal of Industrial Ecology or Organization & Environment, three specialized journals that feature a lot of B&NE research as measured by number of articles.  
Again, I offer this list and these questions merely as provocations for further discussion over the state of the field of Business and the Natural Environment.  I offer the same limitations of this list as I offered in the tables in Part 1.  Does this list of 874 articles offer a fair representation of the field? Can we compare citation counts between multiple disciplines (i.e. engineering, economics and management) in any absolute way? And, how do overall citation counts differ from citation counts within the field of B&NE? In terms of the creation of a B&NE field, how do we capture the common streams of discourse?  And is there even one stream of research represented by these articles?  Are we even talking to each other?

Thursday, August 23, 2012

A Winning Way to Deal With Waste - ScienceInsider

A Winning Way to Deal With Waste - ScienceInsider
on 15 August 2012, 2:00 PM 


A solar-powered toilet that turns urine and feces into hydrogen and electricity has won a $100,000 first prize in the Reinvent the Toilet Challenge sponsored by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The prize was announced yesterday at the foundation's "Reinvent the Toilet Fair" in Seattle, Washington, which continues today and showcases dozens of projects that aim to create an inexpensive and eco-friendly alternative to the flush toilet. Researchers are expected to use more than 50 gallons of soy-based synthetic feces to demonstrate their prototypes during the 2-day fair.
The flush toilet is convenient and hygienic, but the technology has its drawbacks: It uses clean water to flush away a potential source of nutrients and energy, and it’s prohibitively expensive for many of the estimated 2.6 billion people who lack access to sanitation. The Gates Foundation launched its toilet challenge a year ago, funding eight projects that aimed to invent a toilet that could be operated for 5 cents per user per day while recovering salt, water, nutrients, and energy.
The winning design, developed by Michael Hoffmann of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena and his colleagues, uses solar power to run an electrochemical reactor that breaks down human waste to produce hydrogen gas. The gas can be stored and used to run the reactor at night or on cloudy days.

EndNote - Thomson Reuters Community

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