Recent Posts

Imagining Utopia

Members of the Kaweah Cooperative Commonwealth stand in front of the Karl Marx tree in what is now Sequoyah National Park (photo c. 1889).

I’ve been attracted to utopian thinking for as long as I can remember. The concept of utopia implies for some “perfectability” but I never really took it that way. […]

Social Democracy and Transitioning

January 29, 2010, 5 pm, San Francisco City Hall.

I spent three weeks in Scandinavia in late 2009. I’ve been to Denmark several times before (my mother hails from there), so I wasn’t expecting to have any revelations about how different life is there than here. To a great extent, things are quite […]

Seeing the Elephant in Copenhagen: A Blind Man’s Account

December 12, 2009 march of 100,000 through Copenhagen demanding Climate Justice and “System Change, Not Climate Change!” Note the power plant chugging along in the distant background!

It was impossible to be everywhere and know everything going on in Copenhagen, and any account can’t help but miss large parts of the story. There […]