I'm writing from the charmingly antique southern German town of Freiburg. The city, and the area as a whole, prides itself on being green.

As you drive into Freiburg, it's hard to miss the enormous windmills on nearby ridges, generating power, and the uncountable solar panels mounted on the southern roofs of the quaint gingerbread houses.

It reminds me of the town of Swindon, England. Residents there militated to have four windmills built on a ridge near their town. They point to it proudly. It wasn't all that hard, they told me. All it took was will, really, collective determination. And seven million borrowed British Pounds of course, which the town bond is paying off. But the windmills will pay for themselves, as everyone knows, by powering 2500 homes. So did the banks that helped them.

Seeing all this makes me wonder, well, why don't we see this in America? Read more

In my first blog, “In Praise of Self-Examination”, I suggested that We (humanity) are locked in entrenched, collective and individual Conflict and that no less than a “transformation of consciousness” is necessary for us to resolve and transcend our common, dualistic, either-or/ black-white conflicts. The Call to Global Spiritual Citizenship (GSC) echoes this in its opening statement: “Humanity is being called to a new way of being that reflects the reality of our essential oneness. Embracing such a transformation of consciousness can inspire genuine cooperation and generate solutions that satisfy both our deep spiritual longings and our practical needs”.

Name a collective challenge, and it’s a good bet that the loudest arguments over it are about the role of government: to what degree are government regulations, policies and programs the cause of the problem, and to what degree should they be part of the solution? With the possible exception of religion, the issue of government involvement in the private sector seems to be the leading source of polarization in American life. Can we all just shut up and agree that government is sometimes part of the problem and sometimes part of the solution?

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In the last 30-40 years of political discourse in the US ever more heat is being generated and ever less light. According to Paul Ray and others, the electorate is about evenly divided between traditionalists, businessmen and pluralists, each having about a third of the electorate. The job of someone running for office is and has been to capture one of the ends and some of the middle, and that has been the way it has been going. In normal parlance the job of each party is capture enough of the independents. I would say this is a dead end. What this approach ignores is that life in a democracy is not a win or lose game where the winner dominates and the loser sits it out -- but rather our democracy is a place we all live. The question arises: how is it possible to meet the needs of nearly 300 million Americans in a complex and interconnected global era where the needs and wants of 6-7 billion people must be addressed?

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