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Welcome to the GERG Newsletter, Volume I, Number 1
With the help of Muriel Adcock, U.S. Managing Editor of World Futures, I am launching this as the first of a series of informal Newsletters designed to help us as a group of friends and colleagues overcome the distancing effects of living far away from each other. This issue, as well as several to come, is dedicated mostly to sharing information among GERG members about our research and scholarly activities. The Newsletter, however, can also carry formal or informal essays and announcements that GERG members choose to share with each other. As founder and President of the U.S. Club of Budapest, Muriel has agreed to post these newsletters on the Club website, www.cobusa.org .
It is both exciting and rewarding to learn of the activities of other GERG members. We all know that the GERG membership includes an impressive array of research and scholarship, but this is not equivalent to actually learning what projects our peers are perusing. Several members responded to my request for information about their current professional lives and several others expressed an interest in doing so in the near future. To those who responded, I thank you, and to others, I hope you soon find time to give me some material about yourselves for the next issue. It is apparent from the material in the following paragraphs that we have much more to productively share with each other than many of us realized.
Responses to my request for personal information came in a variety of forms, ranging from informal personal letters to formal brief CVs. I include these below with only minor editing.
Bob Artigiani
History Department
U.S. Naval Academy
artigian@usna.edu
A letter:
I doggedly stick to writing this "book" that never seems to make enough sense to be called done. But it is the one thing that all our work really means to me-have we found a science that makes sense of our experience without wrecking our humanity. My working title is Science, Hope and History: The Evolution of Human Meaning. In it I try to be both realistic and optimistic. Sticking close to the historical facts provides the realism, and the theory provides the hope. But our current policies and situations are sorely taxing my commitment to theory! Meanwhile, just patiently working out the details in application to historical episodes can reveal whole new worlds of meaning that really take my breath away. I think there are ways to solve some of the oldest conundrums around that are so simple in form it is just marvelous. So I guess the truth is if I never get done I will never quit simply because the trip is so wonderful.
John A. Broadbent
University of Technology Sydney
john.broadbent@uts.edu.au
A recent member of GERG, give us a short CV to introduce himself:
John Broadbent graduated with a BSc in Botany, Microbiology & Chemistry, specializing in Botany. He then completed a PhD in microbial genetics, later supplemented with a Graduate Diploma in Environmental Studies. He worked with the UK Ministry of Overseas Development on secondment to the Nigerian Stored Products Research Institute (1966/71), then as microbiologist with Davis Gelatine (Australia) Pty. Ltd. between 1972/74. Between 1974 and 1996 he worked as an environmental scientist, first as the coordinator of a joint Australian/Queensland Museums faunal survey of East Australian rainforests and then, from 1978, as an independent environmental consultant on faunal concerns in south-eastern Australia. Also in 1978 he joined the then Sydney College of the Arts as a part-time lecturer, becoming a Senior Lecturer at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) in 1988. During this period he published almost 80 works of various kinds.
John became interested in evolutionary systems thinking in 1996, particularly as it relates to design. At present, his work is concerned mostly with contextualising evolutionary systems thinking into design in various ways. This has led to the publication of eleven conference and journal articles to date. John currently offers a semester-long elective on evolutionary systems thinking to architectural students and a two-semester elective on 'Design and Sustainable Human Futures' to design students at UTS. This latter program, which is based in evolutionary systems thinking, is regarded as a minor study for students and should be extended to four semesters in 2004.
Duane Elgin
Websites: www.awakeningearth.org and www.ourmediavoice.org
dwane@awakeningearth.org
Professional activities:
In addition to speaking and workshops on themes ranging from sustainable ways of living to the evolution of planetary civilization (see my website: www.awakeningearth.org ), I've been continuing my activism around media accountability (see the website: www.ourmediavoice.org ). Importantly, for the past year I've been experimenting with using the internet to create pioneering "telecourses" that enable small communities of learners to come together from around the world in weekly, live conversations by phone and stay in touch during the rest of the week through internet conversations. As bandwidth allows, I intend to begin using streaming video as well (for example, I am conducting experiments using streaming video with a group a thousand miles away).
Here's a quick overview of my initial telecourses:
Planetary Awakening and Personal Authenticity: This telecourse explores the human family's transition from adolescence to our adulthood and how we can each live with greater balance and wholeness as we move through this unprecedented rite of passage.
Voluntary Simplicity: This telecourse explores the challenge of connecting and aligning our outer lives with our inner sense of purpose and meaning. We will examine ways of living that are in harmony with the Earth, the human family, and ourselves.
Living in a Living Universe: This telecourse explores the stunning view that our universe is a living organism which in turns transforms our view of ourselves, the human journey, our sense of ethics, and our way of living.
I am working in partnership with different portal sites to distribute these courses (for example, see: www.evolve.org and www.simpleliving.net/telecourse ). I would be happy to share more about any of these activities that are of interest to the GERG members.
Lastly, I'm continuing to write about the deep structures of evolution and how we can become more consciously self-guiding as a species-civilization.
Riane Eisler
The Center for Partnership Studies
eisler@partnershipway.org
Riane Eisler's latest book, The Power of Partnership, has received the Nautilus Award for the best self-help book of 2002. Behind the award lies a pioneering move of considerable significance. Contrary to the customary focus for self-help books solely on a perspective on personal development avoiding politics, economics, or any of the uncomfortable larger questions facing our species, Eisler received the award in recognition of her expanding this popular category into politics and global social action. Her book Tomorrow's Children: A Blueprint for Partnership Education in the 21st Century, which applies the general evolution perspective to a re-alignment of K-12 education, is currently being translated into Urdu to begin the needed move into Arabic languages. She is also heavily engaged with Nobelist Betty Williams in launching SAIV, the Spiritual Alliance to Stop Intimate Violence, and the Initiative for a Caring Economy.
David Loye
Founder of The Darwin Project
loye@partnershipway.org
News about GERG is about to go global thanks to the work of co-founding member David Loye. Just published by SUNY Press, with already a Chinese edition in prospect, is The Great Adventure: Toward a Fully Human Theory of Evolution. Edited by Loye, covering the full sweep of evolution from cosmic and biological through cultural, moral, and spiritual evolution the new book fulfills the originating purpose for GERG with an intensive look at what a "full spectrum, action-oriented" theory of evolution should look like and how to build it. Authors of chapters include GERG members Ervin Laszlo, Stanley Salthe, Riane Eisler, Ray Bradley, Sally Goerner, Ken Bausch, Aleco Christakis, Monty Montuori and Allan Combs, with chapters by Loye on the long ignored humanistic completion by Darwin for his theory, anticipating Maslow and humanistic psychology and summaries of the 17 foundations and 10 guidelines for building the new "full spectrum, action-oriented" theory identified by GERG members in their chapters. The book is designed for general readership and to serve as a text for launching new distance learning courses in GERG-oriented evolution studies.
To advance the expansion and updating of theory outlined in The Great Adventure, Loye has organized The Darwin Project, with a Council composed of nearly 50 leading American, European, and Asian scientists and educators including GERG members Laszlo, Eisler, Combs, Montuori, Salthe, Goerner, Bradley, Csikszentmihalyi, Krippner, Bausch, Christakis. Besides details on new distance learning and on campus courses using the new book, The Darwin Project website shortly to go online will include a segment with photos of GERGites, list of members, and brief history of GERG. Both the new book and website include a library of books by and widely cited by GERGites, with the website to serve also as an online book store promoting the expanded and hopeful new perspective on evolution GERG represents versus the reductive and destructive old Pseudo Darwinian paradigm.
Temporary URL for the website is: http://home.gwu.edu/~cgbridge. It will go online on January 1, 2004 at www.thedarwinproject.com.
Mika Pantzar
National Consumer Research Centre at Helsinki
mika.pantzar@ncrc
I am currently acting as a head of research in National Consumer Research Centre. My current research interests deal with the "ecology of things". In the latest Journal of Advertising I dealt with the histories of the washing machine and mobile phone in PostWar Finland. Just now I am preparing an article about lifestyle products. In this article I am focusing on different modern items such as sunglasses, training shoes, sport equipment, and jeans in relational terms, meaning that I am interested the ways different items and practices have historical tendencies to integrate with each other. A bigger project for which I am responsible in our governmental organization is "Manufactured leisure." In it we scan trends in the leisure cluster. I am still taking a lot from the general evolution perspective although my readers do not necessarily recognize it. Changing division of labour (or rather evolution of consumption) is my interest although I use terminology of social shaping technology. In the Finnish context and articles I still make explicit references to my good friend Vilmos Csanyi and other GERG members. In international journals it is difficult to get articles accepted making references to GET. The programme and goals of GERG are very much manifested in my research orientation. Therefore I am very much interested in following the path GERG is going to choose. Best wishes to all my old friends and new people in GERG
Stan Salthe
City University of New York, Emeritus
Currently: Visiting Scientist in the Biological Sciences at Binghamton University
ssalthe@binghamton.edu
My connections at Binghamton University are more with the Systems Science group (Howard Pattee, George Klir) in the Engineering Department [my anti-Darwinism (which amounts to a denial of any but a relatively minor role to natural selection in organic evolution) is an unseemly presence in any North American Biology department]. With long standing connections to both Systems Science and Semiotics, I now feature myself as an independent scholar helping to revive Natural Philosophy (Philosophy of Nature), a discourse that withered away, more or less (except in Thomistic philosophy and Marxism), at the turn of the last century. Its role is systematic, not critical, aimed at constructing a contemporary mythology for our culture based in scientific knowledge. See my WEB pages at http://www.nbi.dk/~natphil/salthe/ . This is a Natural Philosophy site managed by semiotician and theoretical biologist Claus Emmeche in Copenhagen.
Recently I have become more involved with thermodynamics as a way of grounding our mythology in the Big Bang within the framework: {physical world {material world {biological world {sociocultural world }}}}. This has aroused the interest of a number of ecologists in my work. As well, I have in the last decade joined Koichiro Matsuno in an inquiry into internalism, an attempt to construct an alternative perspective on the world to that taken within science, which we identify as 'externalism'. My most recent authored book, Development and Evolution: Complexity and Change in Biology (MIT Press, 1993) presents what is still my general conceptual framework.
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