10 cool reads that crossed my path recently:

1. The Plastic Sea: “The simple fact is that when you drop a Styrofoam cup onto the street, you’re causing more damage than you would by dropping a stick of dynamite into the ocean. You set in motion an invasion of thousands of killer plastibots that will cause death and destruction for centuries to come.” See also A Primeval Tide of Toxins.

2. How Bush Makes Enemies: “Today, more from the muddled strategic thinking of the Bush administration than the actual threat from Al Qaeda, the “war on terror” has become an Orwellian nightmare: an ill-defined war without prospect of end. We are now nearly five years into a war against a group that was said to contain no more then 500 to 1,000 terrorists at the start (in case anyone’s counting, 1,776 days have now passed since 9/11; that is more than a full year longer than the time between Pearl Harbor and the surrender of Japan, which was 1,347 days). The war just grows and grows. And now Lebanon, too, is part of it.” I was just plain struck by these stats. Fundamentally, I want the killing to stop.

3. The New Organization: “Organisation man did bump into people in corridors, but he was cautious about networking. In his world, knowledge was power, and he needed to be careful about sharing out his particular store of it. He found comfort in hierarchy, which obviated the need to be self-motivating and take risks. He lived in a highly structured world where lines of authority were clearly drawn on charts, decisions were made on high, and knowledge resided in manuals.

Networked person, by contrast, takes decisions all the time, guided by the knowledge base she has access to, the corporate culture she has embraced, and the colleagues with whom she is constantly communicating. She interacts with a far greater number of people than her father did.” via

4. The Ecotone Archives 2003-2006: The archives of a placeblogging project I helped start three years ago.

5. Ten Essential Canadian books of fiction: “Imaginative works, our panel decided after vigorous debate, dive deeper into the national psyche than non-fiction. Here are 10 novels and books of poetry you need to read to understand the inner lives of Canadians, our fears and frictions, our cultural history.” The ten were derived from this list. In BC, The Tyee has a different opinion.

6. Hawaiian Folk Tales Index: “This is an anthology of Hawaiian folklore, including pieces by Thomas Thrum and other writers. This includes many articles which were originally published in difficult to obtain journals and now-rare books. All were written in the late 19th or early 20th century, and are mostly based on first-hand oral traditions. Chapters cover topics such as resemblances to Biblical stories, myths of the gods and goddesses such as Maui and Pele, historical legends, topographical folklore, and the folklore of fishing.”

7. Starry Night in Beirut: An improvisation for bass clarinet (I think) and bombs.

8. Playing the Right Thing – Chris Corrigan: “I think Chris Corrigan is one of the best guitar players in Canada. The integrity and good taste he brings to every note knocks me dead. But I’m almost reluctant to make this disclosure, lest the Wide World catches on, and he gets snatched away from the East Coast.” Nice, but this is NOT about me. For years people have been asking me if I was this Chris Corrigan. We both play Celtic music, we’re both on the radio from time to time, we both live on islands. About time we recorded something together, eh? (I sound like this, by the way).

9. Answers for Young People. Tim Berners-Lee, the man who invented the world wide web, has a lovely page explaing the web, and his life, for young folks.

10. Kati Sarinnen on unschooling and uniqueness. My new friend, a lovely writer and a reflective thinkiner on gardening and life learning:

“I know from experience what it is like to be the parent of a child that does not fit the mold, cannot meet the expectations at the exact time and in the exact way educators at a certain time and in a certain place require. This is to teach that a child with unique talents and wisdom is a failure. And that is so wrong.

The world is deprived of that child if the parents and child give up and don’t realize that that child has so much to contribute, in a different point of view, in creativity, in skill sets, that a narrow approach shuts off, if we allow it. What the world needs, what industry and business need, (what they say they need but behave in opposition to, far too often in actuality) is a person with a fresh perspective, creative insight, skill in independent problem solving! The child whose spark is not extinguished in most school experiences, will go on to do great things in this world — and maybe not in the way we expect.”

Ten new bits and pieces for your surfing pleasure:

1. Grupthink: “GrÅ«pthink is a new way to ask and explore open-ended questions with the rest of the world. Anyone can ask a question or post a topic at GrÅ«pthink, and everyone can respond. Here’s where it gets even more interesting: Anyone can respond with new answers, and those answers can be voted on by everyone else.” At the moment it seems to be fixated on rather superficial questions, but that could change. via
2. The Big Here: “You live in the big here. Wherever you live, your tiny spot is deeply intertwined within a larger place, imbedded fractal-like into a whole system called a watershed, which is itself integrated with other watersheds into a tightly interdependent biome. (See the world eco-region map ). At the ultimate level, your home is a cell in an organism called a planet. All these levels interconnect. What do you know about the dynamics of this larger system around you? Most of us are ignorant of this matrix. But it is the biggest interactive game there is. Hacking it is both fun and vital.” via
3. Network Organizing – A Strategy for Building Community Engagement: “Across the country there is a fundamental condition that consistently undercuts even the most successful community development efforts: chronic disengagement…Our response to this situation is a “network organizing” strategy that connects people to each other and to opportunities for people to step into public life – from the neighborhood group to the City Council – in a way that feels safe, fun and productive. Our approach is a hybrid of many of the established practices of community organizing. The principal twist is the application of network theory, a set of ideas that come from the technology and economics fields but that are proving useful for understanding and shaping our community environments. Applying this thinking to our work has helped us to challenge some of the common obstacles to genuine engagement, and shape a strong demand environment for change.”
4. ConsensusPolling: “…is about winning together or refusing to play the game. Because it can be a laborious process, it is most appropriate when a group of individuals must collectively solve a problem that affects them all. It seeks to avoid voting for VotingIsEvil (see VotingIsEvil) when such a vote would generate winners and losers and thus divide the community that must support the result of the collective decision.”
5. Technophilia: Find great podcasts: “You could spend hours scouring the end of the very long tail for quality podcasts, but thankfully, there are a few sites that have already done the heavy lifting for you, including podcast search engines, directories, and roundup sites. Keep reading, and I’ll show you how to find some of the best, most interesting, and must-listen-to podcasts on the web.”
6. Getting Out of the Way – Naomi Aldort:”My husband and I are often complimented on our children’s behavior and demeanor. People think that we discipline them. We don’t. It is ourselves we discipline.We meet our children’s needs, provide for their protection, and expose them to life’s possibilities. We do not, however, meddle in their play, their learning, their creativity, or any other form of growth. We love, hug, feed, share, listen, respond, and participate when asked. Yet, we keep our children free of insult and manipulation resulting from “helpful” comments and ideas – influences to which children are so sensitive in their state of dependency.”
7. Bo Lozoff at The Zoo Fence: “We need to start asking ourselves some searching questions about why life seems to be of so little value to our kids. From a spiritual perspective, one sentence can sum up the whole thing – not only our own and our kids’ problems, but our planetary problems too, from pollution to wars:

   Human life is very deep, and our dominant modern lifestyle is not.”

8. Informal Learning » The Power of Dialogue: “What habits do we need to let go of in order to have true dialogue? When does facilitation draw attention to the process or the moderator rather than furthering the inquiry? How does dialogue emerge from among a group of strangers, and what conditions are the most evocative for true inquiry? What role does individual ego play?”

9. A Cooperative Solution: “Cooperatives typically cannot move without taking the time and effort to bring all participants to the table. As Arie de Geus says, “This involves more brains and more time up front – and therefore would seem to take an awful lot longer. But everybody who has worked with this system will tell you that the gain made in the implementation, both in speed and quality, outweighs by far the decisions made in conventional companies.” via

10. Imagining the Tenth Dimension: “In string theory, physicists tell us that the subatomic particles that make up our universe are created within ten spatial dimensions (plus an eleventh dimension of “time”) by the vibrations of exquisitely small “superstrings”. The average person has barely gotten used to the idea of there being four dimensions: how can we possibly imagine the tenth

I’m throwing some love out to Jordon Cooper who got accused of plagerism because helinks to things without saying where he got the link. So here are ten pieces of linkage for you, discovered recently, from a variety of sources:

1. Funding strategies for progressives
2. James Howard Kunstler interview at Worldchanging: “Anybody can put a poster of the Rocky Mountains in their basement and go down there and sit and feel groovy about it, but meanwhile their town is crumbling around them.”
3. Nipun Mehta on Organic Orgnaizational Growth: “My vision for any holistic organization would be one that anchors itself in the spirit of service and compassion, one where each of its constituents are rooted in being that change, and one where there is humility and openness for all that our conscious awareness can’t grasp.”
4. A Taoist take on activism: “We have to do a lot of work on ourselves to make sure that the people who are making change in the world are making that change from a place of strength rather than weakness,” Legault says. “And that strength is comprised of a strong spiritual grounding — whatever spiritual grounding that is — and that we act from love and compassion rather than fear, hatred and anger.”
5. Social innovation conversations: Podcasts with worldchangers.
6. Choose your seatmates wisely: “We show ourselves in moments of system failure and panic and change and difficulty and crash-landings, not calm.”
7. Watching the Wizard of Oz with Pink Floyd:”After the BLACK &WHITE MGM Lion roars for the THIRD (3rd) time IMMEDIATELY hit the play button on the CD player. Be sure to turn down the sound on the TV because the dialogue and original soundtrack are not necessary for this experiment. “The Dark Side of the Moon” will provide all the sound you need.”
8. Down with Jazz: A short story by Dervala Hanley
9. The Spirit of the Game: “Spirit of the Game has to be on the rise, in ultimate and beyond, because technology has brought us an era where survival means valuing brains over brawn. It doesn’t matter anymore that my teammates can tackle your teammates to annihilate your key player. Because it can’t matter anymore that my country can blow up your country – everyone knows the devastation caused by nuclear weapons, and knows we’re ALL worse off if balance is lost. If the games we play reflect society, then there’s a damn good reason why kids should learn the negotiation skills ultimate teaches. We’re their examples”
10. Incredible photos of the shapes of a flock of 1,000,000 European starlings