Utopia or Oblivion: Only Our Best is Good Enough
For the third ClimateTalks roundtable event of the academic year, two faculty members will present advanced analysis of the climate crisis, from the historical, ethical and scientific points of view, and we will moderate a policy debate among students working on environmental issues.
The discussion will be framed by Buckminster Fuller’s admonition that our advanced industrial civilization was reaching a point where the choice between Utopia and oblivion was not only possible, but was a likely outcome of hyper-advanced “world-around” technologies, communications and commercial and political structures.
If we are in fact facing the need to provide water for 7 billion people, to secure the food supply against unprecedented stresses and a destabilized climate, if our routine consumption of basic resources is undermining the future sustainability of our civilization, what can we do?
We will examine key related questions and challengs and propose some ideas for how humanity can move forward in the midst of this complex crisis.
Villanova Reflects on, Mourns 1994 Rwandan Genocide
College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Villanova University
100 Days of Nightmare Rwanda 1994: 4/6. Join Rwandans worldwide to commemorate the start of the Rwandan Genocide. Special wristbands will be given out to remember our international neglect, show solidarity with the Rwandan people, and commit ourselves to preventing genocide. Will be joined by Carl Wilkens. The event will be held April 6 from 5-6 p.m. in Connelly Cinema.
Nuclear Crisis, the Folly of Drilling & How to Build a Clean Energy Future
Last Thursday, Citizens Climate Lobby’s Villanova group held a meeting to discuss the nuclear crisis unfolding in Japan and how this impacts future energy policy in the United States. The Villanova group leader also explained the usefulness of personal testimony in letters to Congress, in support of the Million Letter March.
The question of how nuclear power, or its deep fallibility, will affect the clean energy future is crucial, because the conventional policy response to a reduction in nuclear power investment is the expansion of interest in carbon intensive fossil fuels. We now have the technology to shift to a clean energy economy, and the responsibility to move our nation’s policy in that direction.
El cuarto número de la revista Naufragios ya está disponible en la nueva URL www.RevistaNaufragios.com. Es la edición del invierno de 2010-2011, e incluye una selección especial de poetas de Bolivia, contribuciones del taller literario Pinzon 9, de Villanova University, el grupo que edita la revista, y otros poetas invitados de varios países. Hay ficción nueva, ensayos y estudios académicos, y arte visual, como siempre.
The Space of Hope: Communication & the Human Bond
Essay by Joseph Robertson
Presented as seminar in Rosemont Room, on Thursday, January 21, 2010
For the Villanova University Freedom School Sessions
On the Question of Hope
In September, 2008, the question of hope, of what it is and why we need it, was coming to political prominence, due to an election campaign and a collective demand for significant change in the direction of US policy, on a number of fronts. As a result, the very idea of hope came under political attack. Political operatives that sought to ridicule the idea of a “change candidate” who could bring hope to the American people sought to make it appear that hope was a soft virtue, a wishy-washy ethereal promise, something one seeks only if one has no intent to act. It seemed to me this was both dishonest and also dangerous, because hope does not work like that at all, and because there had been a very responsible engagement with the topic, which held some promise in terms of waking a population that had not thought of being involved in shaping its own destiny.
Essay on Generative Economics, delivered by Joseph Robertson to the second ClimateTalks roundtable, at Villanova University, on Feb. 17, 2011.
Citizens Climate Lobby Launches New Groups in PA, NJ
On Thursday, February 24, Citizens Climate Lobby launched a new campus chapter at Villanova University, outside of Philadelphia, then another in central New Jersey, at a working dinner in Fair Haven, Monmouth County. Mark Reynolds, executive director of CCL, led both events, giving volunteers an opportunity to examine both fact and strategy related to shaping a viable, grassroots-based policy to transition the US economy to clean energy.
The Villanova event was a working lunch, with students and faculty joining Mark Reynolds, to hold their first official group meeting, to study key sources of information relating to the climate destabilization crisis and reviewing projects like the Million Letter March, the report Building a Green Economy, and the CCL National Conference in Washington, DC, as means of increasing citizens’ access to the process of making policy.
The Space of Hope: Communication & the Human Bond
Hope is not a mystical reality, not an elixir, not a character trait; it is a process of thinking toward, in living time, the ways in which what should be better might be. Hope is not a blind or blissed-out waiting-game for easy luck; it is a process of claiming responsibility for the energy and the material action that —in often halting steps, in often turbulent surroundings— bring us closer to what we aspire to. Hope is not merely a solemn prayer for a best result when all factors of circumstance are beyond our control; it is overcoming the problem of control, robbing Fate of its false power and starting from the place where you are.
La experiencia como adivinanza
La experiencia es algo común a todos los seres vivientes, así como única e incomparable en cada iteración, cada momento, cada recepción o desvío. Es lo que buscamos o fingimos no buscar; es el motor primordial de nuestros pensamientos, y es lo que los pensamientos pretenden definir, modificar, superar. La política es el combate estratégico de las ideas en relación a la experiencia humana prevista, o en la justicia, intenta ser la corrección de la experiencia anti-humana.
(Source: revistanaufragios.com)
