...The concept behind the project, which Negroponte unveiled at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, less than two years ago, is as simple as its name: give all children in the developing world laptop computers of their own. If we achieved that, he believes, we could bridge what's usually termed the "digital divide." The laptops would offer children everywhere the opportunity to benefit from the Internet and would enable them to work with and learn from each other in new ways. OLPC, the nonprofit organization that Negroponte set up to manage the project, has taken responsibility for designing the computer and engaging an outside manufacturer to produce it. But the nonprofit is not going to buy the computers. That, at least for now, is the responsibility of governments, ...   more »

The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) program has just taken another step forward by shipping the first 10 computers from the manufacturer in Taiwan, to the US State Department for testing. This is the first batch of the $100 laptops for children in poor countries such as Nigeria, China, Brazil, Egypt and Thailand who have already placed an order for 1 million laptops... India was part of the program initially until Indian Education Secretary Sudeep Banerjee reversed the decision to back the OLPC project. ...   more »

Terence McKenna is a psychedelic explorer, ethnopharmacologist and theorist of time. Rupert Sheldrake is a controversial biologist, best known for his hypothesis of morphic resonance, the idea that there is an inherent memory in nature. Ralph Abraham is a chaos mathematician and pioneer in the field of computer graphics.

TERENCE: In our culture, we tend to move into cities that push nature away from us. In our mental environment, we do the same thing. Most people live within a very conventionalized set of notions that are deeply imbedded in a larger set of notions. When we go to the physical edges, such as the desert, jungle, and remote and wild nature, and when we go to the mental edges with meditation, dreams, and psychedelics, we discover an extremely rich flora and fauna in the imagination. This realm is ignored because of our tendency to see in words, to build in words, and to turn our backs on the raging ocean of phenomena that would otherwise entirely overwhelm our metaphors.
RALPH: It's true. We have to misuse our language even to talk about these things.
RUPERT: If we ask what has caused this blindness, we might answer that it's the satanic spirit of science. In the seventeenth century, the spirit of Satan was portrayed in Milton's Paradise Lost, with a whole taxonomy of various demons and fallen angels that acted as malevolent powers, such as Mammon, the demon of commercial greed. The primary sin of Satan and of the other fallen angels like Mammon was pride, the turning away from God toward their own self-sufficiency. This was the beginning of the whole humanist illusion that turned away from the spirit world and declared humans to be self-sufficient. From this point of view, all gods, demons, and spirits are projections of the human mind, creating a kind of anthropocentric universe.
TERENCE: Humans are said to be the measure of all things.
RUPERT: This is humanism. To adopt the alternative tradition of animism and to recognize the living spirits and souls of all nature is profoundly repugnant to humanism, yet it is the common ground of all human civilization, thought, and tradition. As in Goethe's Faust, the paradigmatic scientist sells his soul to the devil in return for unlimited knowledge and power. The guiding spirit of modern science, according to the Faust myth, is a satanic demon, a fallen angel called Mephistopheles. ...    more »

FORESTS are increasing in countries across the world after centuries of being destroyed for their wood and to make way for people, according to [new] research.
By measuring the density of trees rather than simply the area on which they grow, scientists have calculated that forests are increasing in almost half of the world’s 50 most wooded nations. -- Forests are still diminishing in some countries, such as Brazil and Indonesia. In others, such as China, they are now expanding, although world stocks are still about 2.5 per cent lower now than in 1990. ...   more »

... India’s current level of consumption (ecological footprint) is .8 gha (global hectares per capita) - already double India’s biocapacity of .4 gha, although it is significantly below humanity’s consumption level of 2.2 gha, which is 25% above the planet’s biocapacity of 1.18 gha. At India’s current level of exponential economic growth (7.5%) and population growth (1.7%), its economy will quadruple and its population will double by 2050. If Auroville doesn’t take this situation seriously and manifest a viable alternative infrastructure and economy that works, its real reason for existing, along with humanity’s as a whole, may never be realized. ...   more »

I felt this email from Frances Beinecke, the President of the Natural Resources Defense Council, was worth sharing.

You and I have got a lot to celebrate -- finally!
We have fought so unbelievably hard for six long and difficult years to defend our environment against a House and Senate leadership that has endeavored -- often on a weekly basis -- to sacrifice our natural heritage for the sake of Big Oil and other powerful special interests. ...consider this: of the "Dirty Dozen" (the 13 members of Congress targeted by the League of Conservation Voters for the poorest environmental voting records), nine were defeated.
On the flip side, eight out of nine of the League's "Environmental Champions" won their races. Dozens of candidates -- from both parties -- who ran on forward-looking energy policies were chosen by voters. At least 20 pro-environment challengers unseated anti-environment incumbents in the House. And Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger won strong voter support by signing a Global Warming Solutions Act.
Last Tuesday may well go down as one of the greenest days in American political history. ...   more »

I'm posting the following interview with Peter Senge and Margaret Wheatley, by Melvin McLeod, the Editor of the Buddhist magazine Shambhala Sun, to provide a bit more depth on Peter's views than given by my partial transcript of his 5-minute 'QuickTalk' that I posted a few days ago ...

Increasingly, we’re directly incorporating into our work different practices that have been around for a long time, such as various types of meditation. It started with the work on dialogue. We found that dialogue often involved silence, and so maybe we needed to actually cultivate the capacity to sit in silence. And guess what? That started to look a lot like traditional forms of meditation or contemplation. ...   more »

This is another experimental audio file. It's a 5-minute talk by Terence McKenna, a cultural anthropologist who spent many years doing participant observation research with indigenous tribes in Central and South America. The experiences he had with the Shamans of those tribes led him to believe that humanity is in the midst of a major cultural transformation that's being mediated by an "Attractor that lies ahead in the temporal dimension."

"Human history represents such a radical break with the natural systems of biological organization that preceded it, that it must be the response to a kind of Attractor, or dwell point, that lies ahead in the temporal dimension... It's almost as though this object in hyperspace, glittering in hyperspace, throws off reflections of itself, which actually ricochet into the past––illuminating this mystic, inspiring that saint or visionary––and that out of these fragmentary glimpses of Eternity, we can build a kind of map of not only the past of the universe, of the evolution and ingression into novelty, but a kind of map of the future. ...   more »

Millions of children may have suffered brain damage as a result of industrial pollution, scientists will say today. -- American and Danish researchers describe a "silent pandemic" of disorders including autism, attention deficit syndrome, mental retardation and cerebral palsy caused by chemical pollution. ...   more »

This is the website of SoL's (The Society for Organizational Learning) Sustainability Consortium. Their tagline:

"Our purpose is to build the learning capacity to achieve economic, ecological, and social sustainability."

This is an interesting website, an example of a new kind of social and organizational global collaboration grounded in net-savy individuals who are recursively informing and empowering one another. If you're interested in sustainability issues, consider plugging into this group ...   more »

This posting is an experiment re listening to audio files on SCIY. The initial file we've posted was recommended by Rich. It's a 5-minute "QuickTalk" by Dr. Peter Senge, the Founding Chairman of the Society for Organization Learning (SoL), on the impact of globalization in today and tomorrow's world. I recommend listening to this; Peter has a way of saying things that can awaken us to new ways of thinking. -- And please let us know (by commenting to this article) how the audio quality sounded to you. Thanks! ~ ron ...    more »

NAIROBI (Reuters) - Kenya urged a 189-nation climate change conference on Monday to do more to tackle global warming, which is threatening to undo recent successes in the fight against poverty. -- Kenyan drummers and dancers started the annual November 6-17 U.N. talks of 189 nations, which are also due to seek ways to overcome deep divisions about extending the main U.N. plan for curbing warming - the Kyoto Protocol - beyond 2012. ...   more »

All of the world's fishing stocks will collapse before mid-century, devastating food supplies, if overfishing and other human impacts continue at their current pace, according to a global study to be published today by scientists in five countries. ...   more »