Editorials

How a new perspective changes everything

Published

2 years ago

October 13, 2019

Amazing how our perceptions shape our belief systems and our actions.

At age 23 I had a love for chicken. I mean I really loved chicken. Bar-b-qued chicken, fried chicken, chicken ala king, chicken wings or chicken drumsticks. I could eat chicken for almost any meal, even dessert.

By Steven Jay

It was mid June 1981. My parents were planning for divorce, and the idea of separation or divorce was unfathomable concept at the time Almost as unfathomable as what was about to materialize.

My maternal Grandmother and I had the idea of throwing a 25th Wedding anniversary party at the Manor in West Orange as a way to try to keep the family together.

Sitting together at The Family Table was never easy. Even though we all loved each other, there would be the family arguments, whether spaghetti was served in a bowl or a plate (and my Grandfather loved to yell and scream at that argument!) so instead of engaging in arguments, I did what any chicken loving boy would do.

I went back and forth to the buffet tables piling on those delicious chicken drumsticks.

Soon encountering our server, I was asked if I wanted something to drink.

“I would love a cup of coffee…and by the way these are the best chicken drumsticks I have ever eaten!”

Looking me straight in the eye she said:

“Oh that’s not chicken you’re eating!”

I was shocked. Mesmorized. And accepting my doubt. My curiosity overwhelmed me.

“How could that not be chicken? It looks like chicken and it tastes just like chicken! So what is that I’m eating?”

She looked me right in the eye with that ‘cynical look’and said

“Oh sure you’re eating frogs legs!”

Shocked and surprised that they passed the taste test, I went back for more, wondering what I would have done had I been told they were frogs legs before I actually ate them? And, thinking it was chicken, it was an easy meal to devour.

Amazing how are perspectives and what we think shapes our belief systems.

The Mobilized Storytelling project is designed to help people overcome misunderstandings and work better through a different perspective on our thoughts and in life. Be a part of the Mobilized Storytelling project. Find out more here.

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A note from the Publisher

New Report by National Academy of Sciences (USA): Social Media is Hazardous to Your Health

Published

3 weeks ago

June 30, 2021

Steven Jay

Why some biologists and ecologists think social media is a risk to humanity

At a time of information overload, when most people can’t decipher truth from fiction, when our world and corporate leaders bow down to the corporate interests that are destroying all life as we know it for their short term personal gains, there are billions of social media accounts attached to mechanisms that continue to amplify misinformation and corporate propaganda. All of this inflicts tremendous damage to all life and our life support systems.

The report is attached below. In Summary, it states:

Collective behavior provides a framework for understanding how the actions and properties of groups emerge from the way individuals generate and share information. In humans, information flows were initially shaped by natural selection yet are increasingly structured by emerging communication technologies. Our larger, more complex social networks now transfer high-fidelity information over vast distances at low cost. The digital age and the rise of social media have accelerated changes to our social systems, with poorly understood functional consequences. This gap in our knowledge represents a principal challenge to scientific progress, democracy, and actions to address global crises. We argue that the study of collective behavior must rise to a “crisis discipline” just as medicine, conservation, and climate science have, with a focus on providing actionable insight to policymakers and regulators for the stewardship of social systems.

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Editorials

Everything Connects

Published

1 month ago

June 14, 2021

Steven Jay

For the sake of planetary and personal health, business will have to change.

Special Presentation: Sarah Savory

Our existing systems of media and education provide a limited worldview. This reductionist worldview limits our ability to see and exist in the world properly, effectively and in total health.

For us to truly thrive as a species in harmony with the natural world, we will need to see the world as ONE LIVING BREATHING ORGANISM, and our part and place in the world as a part of this organism. This will require a shift in our thinking, in our action and in the ways we make our decisions. This very forward-thinking conversation will clearly identify where we are at, how we arrived at this point, what needs to happen, how we get there, what are the obstacles and how will we overcome these obstacles. And yes, business will have to change.

As Bucky Fuller said: “Nature is a totally efficient, self-regenerating system. If we discover the laws that govern this system and live synergistically within them, sustainability will follow and humankind will be a success.”

But humans don’t know how to manage the complexities of our world. The increasing social, economic, and ecological disasters we are experiencing across the world are the mounting symptoms of our not considering the whole and managing our societies, economies, and nature in isolation of each other when they are an inseparable whole – no person or nation on earth can have physical or financial stability without ecological health.

Sarah Savory has worked alongside her father, Allan Savory who created the Holistic Management Framework. In this exhilarating conversation, we’ll discover a new and improved decision-making process to enable us to manage and balance the inseparable complexity of human societies, economies, and nature. Remember, we’re all in this together

Sarah Savory

Sarah Savory is the single mother of 2 young children, Luke and Mika. She is the youngest daughter of Allan Savory, world-renowned ecologist and developer of Holistic Management (a decision making process which successfully guides us through the complexity we manage by ensuring simultaneously socially, financially and ecologically sound decisions.)

Sarah is following closely in his footsteps and has become a very successful Holistic Management Consultant and Educator in her own right.

In an effort to simplify the framework, she has written illustrated, educational children’s books on Holistic Management and has also broken new ground by teaching HM as a subject in Zimbabwean schools, with demand for education and educational materials growing rapidly and is now writing the first school curriculum for Holistic Decision Making and Ecological Literacy to be taught as a subject in schools.

She is a part of Africa Centre For Holistic Management’s new training and education team and she is part of a new, global policy task force which is focusing on breaking through in government policy. Sarah and her father recently met with President Mnangagwa to begin talks about working with the Zimbabwean government to develop the first ever agricultural policy using the Holistic Management Framework.

Sarah spends the rest of her time writing articles, giving presentations and being interviewed both locally and internationally.

A personal note from Sarah to our youth – you are the key to the future:

Holistic Management involves introducing people to new scientific insights that will not only help them to better understand the incredibly complex social, economic and ecological connections in nature and how earth’s ecosystems function, but teach a new way of managing which makes sure our decisions flow with the unpredictable, ever-present and constantly changing variables of that complexity.

Managers learn how to make decisions or develop polices in a way that guarantees they never lose sight of the whole picture and the fact that our physical and financial security and stability are intricately connected and entirely dependent on the health of our environment – the only economy that can ultimately sustain any nation is one based on healthy soil and the plant’s ability to turn the sun’s energy into food because everything we use or consume comes from the land.

When it comes to making a change and adapting to new knowledge and thinking, history shows us that most adults and institutions are almost incapable of it. I truly believe the key to the future lies in educating our children, rather than pinning all our hopes on the possibility of “old dogs learning new tricks.”

Let’s give young people the solutions and show them how vital it is to look at the whole picture and to focus on and address root causes instead of symptoms.

If we can have school leavers going off into the world ecologically literate and capable of successfully managing and balancing the unavoidable social, financial and ecological dimensions of their decisions, rather than being stuck as we are now, on a hamster wheel reacting or adapting to the inevitable and increasing symptoms of our current management, they will be proactively making decisions in a new way that will bring about the physical and financial stability we all want, reversing the current problems and preventing any more knock-on symptoms further down the line. When we do that, it will change everything.

Arts

Chautauquas and Lyceums and TED Talks, oh my!

Published

2 months ago

June 4, 2021

Daniel Franco

We are aiming with Mobilized to create a vibrant forum for ideas. “Big deal”, you might say, there are already places for that.

Well, you’re not wrong. There was, in the earliest days of the web, a loose and wild forum called The Well. The great and powerful Google had as it’s mission the goal of “bringing all the knowledge of the world to every person”… before it pivoted to a new goal of just making money off of what it knows about us. That change was a real pity. There have been sites such as Wiser Earth, which aimed to be a global directory of people and non-profit organizations so that collaboration could happen on a larger scale than ever before. It lasted about two years, sadly; not long enough to create a legacy. Huffington Post had a good run in its’ early days, sharing ideas widely and helping to boost its’ contributors in the public’s mind.

What’s important to know, is that as of this writing, there is not really a widely recognized forum online or in ‘meat-space’. There are print publications such as YES! magazine, Tikkun, The Sun Magazine, and The Utne Reader, all of which which reach a population of hundreds thousands. Great, but their reach could be even more broad, in my humble opinion. Within social media sites there are plenty of good ‘groups’ but they also don’t reach enough folks outside of their own memberships.

Probably the most popular comparable live events right now are the TED talks, which do serve a valuable purpose. Sadly, they also tend toward the ‘Gee-Whiz‘ and the ‘Shiny New Buzzword‘ in their contents. Mobilized really wants to focus on the proven, the existing, and the hidden. There are already, all over, groups doing wonderful work, but too many of them are laboring in obscurity.

So, how do we do that? Well to begin with, we’re not trying to be a technology startup. There is no secret sauce, no fancy algorithm at work here. Almost all the underlying code behind Mobilized is made with off-the-shelf parts, such as WordPress. There is zero reason to re-invent the wheel, and frankly the notion that one must do so has tripped up several earlier attempts at building a successful progressive community. We take the approach of using the tools at hand to build our house.

Secondly, we are going into the future with an eye firmly on the past. And that leads us to the point of this essay, a look at how America became America. We can take many lessons from the past. One of our best ideas as a nation was the Chautauqua movement. It had it’s heyday from the 1870’s right up until the beginning of World War II. In part, it helped spawn a Lyceum movement, the Vaudeville traditions in the theater world; and had an effect on the earliest days of the motion-picture industry. Here’s why it was so popular: the average person, anywhere in the land, could go to a Chautauqua when it came to their town, and engage in spirited discussion with the brightest minds of the day. It was direct, person-to-person, and offered a mix of local and national ideas and people; presented on a rotating basis. So ideas could be hashed out and spread rapidly. And they did. In no small part due to these two movements, the Robber Barons of the Gilded Age were defeated. The Great Depression was tackled too, and along the way no less than Susan B. Anthony, Teddy Roosevelt and Mark Twain became huge fans. No part of society could, or wanted to, ignore the notion that average people could teach other average people.

Mobilized aims to help bring that back into common understanding. In the present era, there may well be a place for tents and lecturers setting up in farmer’s fields. There certainly is a crying need for an educational platform that is accessible to the masses. And now, there exist enough robust tools for us to re-create the ethos of a Chautauqua on the internet.

We, the people, when it really mattered and the stakes were high, collectively taught ourselves how to better ourselves. Now, in every corner of the world, the stakes are once again pretty high. It is time for a new Chautauqua movement, and this one will be truly global. So step right up, come on inside our virtual tent. Welcome to the show.