It’s Blog Action Day today. I’m not going to talk about climate change per se, since I’ve recently been accused of writing ‘too much like a scientist’ (no, not on my blog… never on my blog, I hope) and I can’t really talk about climate change (you know, CO2, atmospheric gases and all that. But [...]
Posts under ‘Socio-Environmental’
"Greening a nation"
So there I was, parked at a table full of local and international Shell employees (they were kind enough to sponsor a table and I was there courtesy of the Singapore Environment Council), a youngling challenged to bridge that vast age, experience and sectoral gap in making conversation with people who were asking me about [...]
Recession may be the jolt
According to the Archbishop of Westminster, the economic downturn could be the very thing that brings us to our senses. “It’s the end of a certain kind of selfish capitalism,” Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor said. “This particular recession is a moment – a kairos – when we have to reflect as a country on what are [...]
Decline of Mankind
The tragedy of the human race is being played out, Wolf Meynert began. Let us not be blinded by feverish enterprise or technological prosperity; these are but the fever patches on the cheeks of an organism already marked by death. Never has mankind experienced a greater upsurge to its life than today; yet find me [...]
'Realpolitik'
One must acknowledge Singapore’s uniqueness and intellectual interest… does not seem to obey the basic rules of political science… is the only affluent nation in the world that is not a genuine liberal democracy. It has had a one-party rule and a semi-authoritarian regime for forty years, but has maintained long-term economic growth… the government [...]
Eco debt
“Is humanity facing a looming ecological credit crunch?” – so asked Dr Chris Hails, Editor-in-Chief of the Living Planet Report and WWF-International Director of Network Relations, during his talk on Tuesday. A rhetorical question, no doubt, for the answer is a resounding yes.
He presented the findings of the Living Planet Report 2008, with an emphasis [...]
The stakes are too high
The global financial networks of the new economy are inherently unstable. They produce random patterns of informational turbulence that may destabilize any company, as well as entire countries or regions, regardless of their economic performances.
At the existential human level, the most alarming feature of the new economy may be that it is shaped in very [...]
Union of the sciences
From the lack of a true social theory comes the debilitating failure of the social sciences to communicate with the natural sciences and even with one another… the disciplines of both need to be defined by the scales of time and space they individually encompass and not just by subject matter as in past practice, [...]
Moral conflict
Paul Ehrlich, the distinguished Stanford University biologist who won the prestigious Crafoord Prize of the Royal Swedish Academy of Science, believes that every ethical system originated in the human mind, a biological entity. He does not think, like many dualist philosophers, that there are moral truths out there, waiting to be discovered, that are distinct [...]
Human behaviour, a chaotic system
Just as the speck of dust is at the mercy of many forces, so is human behaviour. We are pushed and pulled in all directions by many different biological, cognitive and cultural forces. Some of these may oppose one another, and some may pull in the same direction. It is entirely possible that two instinctual [...]
