Hello! This is my first post on Vision of Earth. Glad to be here. On November 9th & 10th, SCIC (Saskatchewan Council for International Cooperation) hosted an event in Saskatoon called Harvest and Hunger (introduced in our earlier post: Harvest and Hunger: Brainstorming the future of the world food system). SCIC is an umbrella organization that represents […]
Tag: Books
Harvest and Hunger: Brainstorming the future of the world food system
Harvest and Hunger The Saskatchewan Council for International Cooperation is hosting an event in Saskatoon on November 10th called Harvest and Hunger. The event sets out to answer three questions: Who controls the world’s food? Who has power in the global food system? Who doesn’t? What are people doing – both in Saskatchewan and around […]
Ben’s Interview on Radio CKUT 90.3 FM
Ben Harack was interviewed on the Ecolibrium radio show on CKUT in Montreal. Topics were Moving Planet, Saskatchewan’s sustainability, and peer-based cross-disciplinary efforts towards sustainability.
Curtis Dorosh: Green living, building, and volunteering
How to live green? Build green buildings? Put our efforts towards a better future? Curtis Dorosh has spent much of his life trying to answer these questions. Collected here are some of his answers.
How trolls and extremists are damaging our public discourse
Trolls and extremists contaminate our public discourse with falsehoods, logical fallacies, irrational argument, poisoning the well, false expertise, and the creation of de-facto knowledge. Individuals must learn to resist the onslaught of ideas driven by these sections of society.
How can you deliberately change your society?
How do people try to chance society? Why do these methods work? How can they be resisted? Progressive and regressive change can depend on many of the same basic techniques.
Our global human tribe: How we must extend empathy beyond our religion and nation
Jeremy Rifkin implores us: “to begin rethinking human nature. To bring out our empathic sociability, so that we can rethink the institutions and society and prepare the groundwork for an empathic civilisation.”
Media speed’s negative effect on politics
The advent of intense media speed and opinion masquerading as news have had some damaging effects on our political system. This is especially evident in the coverage leading up to and during elections.
Why does ‘meaning’ mean so much?
Meaning is a perceived property of the universe that makes one bit of matter more significant than another.
Epidemic of ‘news’ that is not actually news
Our news media today is full of things that are not actually news. What are they and why is this so?
The dangers of news media speed
We have an ever-accelerating journalism cycle that is making mistakes, shortening our attention spans, presenting opinion as news, and trivializing our political debates. Media literacy is the only reliable cure, and we all need to learn it. Fast.
Media we find worthwhile
The Vision of Earth team has decided to begin briefly reviewing media that we find compelling, interesting, or useful. A lot of media exists that has enriched our lives immensely. This project is an effort to share that richness with you the reader.
What is the ladder of economic development?
The ladder of development is a useful concept that we first found in Jeffrey Sachs’ excellent book ‘The End of Poverty’. This concept provides a useful framework for the discussion of economic development with regards to poverty reduction. This is a conceptual tool, not necessarily a framework for understanding all of economics.
How do we define poverty?
Every country has people living in poverty. Here we will distinguish between people living in extreme poverty, moderate poverty, and relative poverty ((Jeffrey Sachs. The End Of Poverty. Excerpt available from Google Books.)). A person in relative poverty has consistent access to the basic necessities of life, while those in extreme or moderate poverty do not. Extreme Poverty People […]
Review of ‘The Measure of Man’
This book was published in 1954, amid what the author, Dr. Joseph Wood Krutch, calls ‘The Age of Anxiety’. The world had just suffered through two wars that heavily eroded the optimism that had existed at the beginning of the 20th century. The tremendous destruction had seriously shaken the ideals of the world. This led […]