Thinking Outside the Box

[This is an email that I sent to Danielle Forrest, who addressed the adjunct faculty at an administrative meeting at the beginning of the fall semester at Front Range Community College, in her capacity as the administrator of a new program, Veteran Services, August 16, 2012. She spoke rather strongly against singling out veterans in class, which I can understand; but she crossed the line when she said that "liberal minded" instructors should "keep their opinions to themselves" about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. So I wrote her this email the following day...] Dear Ms. Forrest, I am an adjunct faculty member in the Behavioral and Social Science department at FRCC's Larimer campus, and attended the required in-service meeting last night, where I heard your presentation about the new veteran services that is being offered. I have taught environmental economics there since fall 2009. While I agree this type of service is needed and will help some veterans, ...

[This is a comment I made at bobedwardsradio.com on 12 Aug 2012, the website for the excellent radio show by Bob Edwards, well known for his decades of broadcasting at NPR.] Dear Mr Edwards, I listened with rapt attention to your show this weekend, "The Betrayal of the American Dream." I teach environmental economics at a local community college (part-time), and am keenly aware of the issues the excellent authors were so eloquently discussing, and fully intend to read their book to help me in my own local activism to help raise awareness of the public about these and other issues. Your well respected show is one of the few sources in mainstream media for such sensible discussions. Consequently, I hope you might consider interviewing two other excellent authors, whose ideas also concern these deep societal problems: David Korten (see davidkorten.org ), and Riane Eisler (see www.rianeeisler.com ). If you are not already aware of their excellent work, I believe you, and your...

[This was a letter to the editor I submitted to the Colorado Daily, Daily Camera, Boulder Weekly and Denver Post, Aug 7, 2012, as well as the Lafayette City Council.] Dear Lafayette City Council members, As a Lafayette resident, I have observed with growing alarm that fracking is getting closer and closer to our town. A new five well drill site was started this week, just a few miles north of us, near Hi 52 and Niwot Road, by the infamous Encana. You can see pictures of this new drilling activity at http://www.facebook.com/groups/151428164981130. Due to the great uncertainty surrounding the short-term risks of air and water pollution from fracking, and the longer term implications for the overallocation of our precious water supplies in Colorado, the placement of poisonous and carcinogen fluids deep into the earth from their disposal wells, and the placement of more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, I would like to see the Lafayette City Council pass a moratorium on any new fr...

[This is a letter to the editor I wrote in April 2006. I include it here only to show how I was thinking about the structural unemployment problem created by global capitalism at that time.] To the Editor of the New York Times The article 'Academia Dissects the Service Sector...' (April 18, 2006, page C1) was interesting for what it omits. Attempts by American universities to develop interdisciplinary approaches to coping with economic globalization – aided by willing multinationals with their own idled engineers – is unconvincing. Beneath the sophistry that an ever more “complex” economy requires ever more “complex solutions” to keep high-value jobs at home is the simple truth of increasing global unemployment. When the current fever of wage arbitrage between nations is over, this is is the real problem with economic globalization which every nation, no matter how “developed”, will need to face – witness Europe and restive France. Simply put, increasingly less people ar...