Climate Change

Watch as 1000 years of European borders change (timelapse map) from Nick Mironenko on Vimeo.

dkchristi wrote:

It's irrelevant that borders changed in the past or the polar ice caps changed.  What is relevant is that all is changing now and is a threat to species we value.  How far do we want to go back?  Does that make us any less culpable for our profiteering and destruction of the universe.  I think not.

Domenic Pappalardo wrote:

The only country climate change would benefit is the UK....These Englanders want SUN. I think it is the Englanders who are making climate change. They do it at night when people are asleep.

Don Stephens wrote:

Domenic Pappalardo wrote:

The only country climate change would benefit is the UK....These Englanders want SUN. I think it is the Englanders who are making climate change. They do it at night when people are asleep.

Shelagh need only smile and Great Britain has Sunshine! 

             

dkchristi wrote:

The temperatures overall, over the oceans and the land masses of the earth, are higher than they would be without our interference. Period.

Abe wrote:

It seems that talking about Climate Change is on par with talking about Religion or Politics.

Quote :

www.schwarzassociates.com
Moving From Either/Or to Both/And Thinking

Try this quick experiment. Place your hand above your head as if you’re going to trace a circle on the ceiling with your index finger. Now, trace an imaginary circle in a clockwise direction. While continuing to trace the circle, slowly lower your arm so that your finger comes down to your eye level. Keep on lowering your arm until your finger is at your waist level. Now look down at the circle you’re tracing. What’s the direction? Counter-clockwise!

How can that be? The answer lies in one word: perspective. You continued to trace the circle in the same direction, but your perspective on the situation changed when you shifted from looking up to looking down at the circle.

What does this have to do with your leadership team? Team members often have different perspectives on the same situation. That’s natural because team members occupy different roles and therefore have access to different experiences and information. There’s a saying, “Where you stand depends on where you sit.” How we see things depends on the vantage point we’re looking from.

Unfortunately, when it’s time to make decisions, teams often have a hard time integrating different and seemingly opposite perspectives. They get stuck in either/or discussions. In an either/or discussion when people see things differently from you, you assume that either you’re right or they’re right, but you can’t both be right. So, everyone argues as hard as they can so their view will prevail. As a result, teams make decisions that ignore part some of their information or perspective. Because the decisions don’t reflect the complexity of the situation they’re trying to address, implementation suffers.

But as this simple experiment shows, saying that the circle is either moving clockwise or counterclockwise doesn’t represent the full situation. Teams that want to make good decisions move beyond taking one perspective. They apply both/and thinking. They ask the question “How do we make sense out of multiple perspectives that seem at odds with each other?” They figure out how people who have seemingly opposite facts both have valid information. By digging deeper to make sense out of what seems at odds, teams do the hard and work of problem solving.

Next time your team is thinking that only one perspective can be valid, remember that imaginary circle you drew.

Originally published March 2012

Quote :

Both-And, Not Either-Or
by JIM MANNEY
Ignatius was always dealing with polarities: the divine and the human, the individual person and the corporate body, mission and community, spirit and law, charism and institution, the universal and the local, and so forth. The temptation or easy option, when faced with such polarities, is to choose one over the other. Such an either-or approach simplifies life, avoids uncertainty, and lessens stress. But it is flawed. It ignores the complexity of life even on a purely human level, and still more, the profound mystery of God’s plan for his creation.

Ignatius, by contrast, embraced a both-and approach. He acknowledged that he had to take with equal seriousness the divine and the human dimensions; the rights of the individual person and of the corporate body; the imperative of outgoing mission and the necessity of a nurturing community; the priority of spirit and the need of law to enshrine it; the spontaneity of charism and the continuity achieved through institution; the soaring universal vision and concrete local commitment; God speaking within each human heart and God speaking through the Church. If all this brought tension, then so be it!

Brian O’Leary, SJ

- See more at: http://www.ignatianspirituality.com/10254/both-and-not-either-or/#sthash.HDjGFS1l.dpuf

Quote :

www.thehighcalling.org
Moving From Either/Or to Both/And

I was festering one day over a work situation which I had instinctively interpreted as a zero sum game. By that, I mean there were two players and only two potential outcomes: a winner and a loser.

This win-lose attitude was naturally accompanied by a generous barrage of negative thoughts, driven by a desperate need for survival and self-preservation. I had to grab my piece of the pie, because, as everyone knows, there is only so much to go around.

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is how life is played out in the hyper-competitive workspace. Whether it's building market share, or seeking approval from a boss, or deciding how to spend the afternoon, we tend to see things in terms of limited choices and mutually exclusive options.

This two-dimensional thinking bleeds over into our personal lives as well, and even into our politics and theology. We like to organize everything into nice, neat categories: democrat or republican; tree-hugger or capitalist; jock or nerd; predestination or free will.

Scientists tell us that putting things into hard categories makes life easier, because it gives us a frame of reference for interpreting the world. It’s like telling ourselves the same old stories, until it’s all we see. But sometimes I wonder if all this dichotomous thinking is also a sign of immaturity, or stagnation, or spiritual laziness.

Maybe the hard-wired thinking is not so much to blame as is our culturally entrenched Western thought, with its linear thinking and process orientation and sharp corners and lines around everything. We are all educated from early childhood to be analysts, moving from A to B to C.

I heard about this philosophical concept called Antinomy, which says that two contradictory and opposing ideas can both be one hundred percent true and valid at the same time. It’s like holding on to a paradox, which requires a light grip,and a penchant for being comfortable with not knowing all the answers. Apparently the ancient Eastern cultures like the Bhuddists and Hindus find it much easier to practice this type of thing, to hold a belief in two contradictory thoughts.

Ironically, God created our entire universe filled with paradox. Take quantum mechanics, for instance, and the strange little photon, which makes up the beams of light that stream down upon us in all its glory. It has properties of both a wave and a particle, which any good scientist will tell you is impossible, because they are mutually exclusive. But there it is anyway, dancing and sparkling and doing its thing. God sure is tricky.

Have I been snookered by everything I ever learned into an either/or view on life, when there was an opportunity for both/and?

Rather than getting hung up on polarities and extremes, author Margaret Wheatley suggests, “Humility and curiosity shift us to center. Just by being curious, we move toward the middle ground, with its fertile promise of new ideas and new relationships.”

This is the type of thinking Harvard Business Professor Michael Porter is proposing with his “Shared Value” theory, an approach where both business and society come out ahead, rather than one succeeding at the expense of the other.

So, what if there really is enough pie to go around, for everyone, all the time? I could kick myself, because so often I approach life with a limited, constrained point of view, which is really just a mentality of depletion and impoverishment. That's no way to live.

What would happen if I opened my mind and spirit to the possibilities of greater, more creative alternatives? Well, for one thing, I would probably not be on a frantic rampage to outmaneuver a colleague, or weasel my way towards a more favorable position at someone else's expense.

I would pray more. I would take deep breaths, and think higher thoughts. I would look for a better outcome for everyone.

I’d start telling myself a different story.