New Clear Vision

If I Had Been Asked to Speak at Your Commencement…

by Jennifer Browdy de Hernandez

This is what I would have said:

It’s become a cliché to say that every day is the first day of the rest of your life, and yet like most clichés this one holds truth to it.

When you walk down that aisle today holding your B.A. diploma, achieving a goal which you have worked towards for many years, you will be stepping into your adulthood with all the rights and privileges, but also all the responsibilities that this maturity brings.

The year 2012, long prophesied as a time of great change and transition, is not an easy time to be reaching adulthood.

I don’t have to tell you that times are tough economically, or that our planetary environment is facing its own severe shifts due to anthropogenic global heating.  You have probably heard tell of a “sixth great extinction event” on the horizon, if climate change projections continue unabated on their current course, causing the heating and acidification of the oceans and resulting drought, floods, and violent storms on land. (more…)

“We Told You So…”

by Mary Sojourner

Spring 1973, Atlanta. My lover was a professor of psychology, a man more familiar with suburban angst and tenure and fretting about interest rates rather than whether the month is going to outlast the income. I was thirty-three, had lived with my three kids in communes for six years; started food co-ops and collective day care centers; and had seen my friends lug their hand-thrown pots, hand-dipped candles, and hand-woven shawls to craft fairs and tiny stores in the heart of the dying city in which I lived.

“You’re going to love this,” he said. “Underground Atlanta! It’s the next phase of what you and your friends have been creating.”

We descended by escalator into an inferno of neon and charm. “Dear God,” I said to my lover, “may you be wrong.” We were surrounded by chain boutiques, chain craft shops, chain yogurt stands, and what were then called fern bars — cutesy joints with fake antiques on their walls and menus some think tank had designed. (more…)

Immediate Action Needed on Climate Change

by Jennifer Browdy de Hernandez

Now if only President Obama could show the same leadership on climate change as he has just demonstrated on the divisive same- sex-marriage issue.

The same narrow-minded interests that made same-sex marriage such a boogeyman for the President are also controlling the GOP-dominated boardrooms of Big Oil, from Mr. Cheney on down.

Hot, Dry, and Merciless — Can We Keep the Flame of Hope Alive?

by Jennifer Browdy de Hernandez

Last week, turning the corner into the astronomical Spring, we went abruptly from warm winter to hot summer.  And I mean hot: it was 84 degrees Farenheit in western Massachusetts, brightly sunny, with puffy white cumulus clouds against a brilliant blue sky, unobstructed by any leaves.  No shade.

This day reminded me of a wax model: beautiful but blank.  The façade of beauty, with the crucial vital spark missing.

When I went for a walk up the mountain early that morning, the woods were eerily silent.  I remembered mournfully the spring mornings of my childhood, where I would be awakened by the joyful singing of the dawn chorus of thousands of birds each happily greeting each other and the new day.

Reaching the top of the mountain having heard only the distant cry of a single phoebe, I stopped to sit on a rock and listen for a few minutes.  All I heard was the dim rushing of the traffic on the road far below me, and the drone of an airplane churning its way across the sky. (more…)

As We Are Not Yet One…

by Jan Lundberg

As the modern age accelerates its downward spiral toward an uncertain outcome, we are divided in our outlooks and fears.  Yet, if we examine them, and if enough of us have a dialogue resulting in action, we might discover our apparent weaknesses in such a way to make us stronger.

More “haves” than ever sense an uncertain future, mainly that of becoming have-nots.  But when haves admit that deeper threats are getting close to engulfing humanity — ecological deterioration, famine over rising energy prices and water shortage — the future appears downright doubtful.

The have-nots have fears about the future too, but rarely about becoming haves.  That was so ’60s. The uncertain future of non-rich, insecure people can appear to them to be limited to severe lack of money.  But knowledge of ecological collapse and resource shortages are also appreciated by many of the poor, thereby putting almost all people in the same boat (today or very soon). (more…)

How Do We Face the Future Against Impossible Odds?

by Robert C. Koehler

My daughter went jogging to the lake. When she came back, she reported: “Dad, someone hung a bird in the Barbara tree.”

When I went out to investigate, sure enough, it was still there, a brightly painted, reddish-orange papier-mâché bird, daggling on a wire from a low branch.

I live in the far north corner of Chicago, half a mile from Lake Michigan. Some years ago, I donated money to the Chicago Park District and they planted a tree of my choosing (a linden) in honor of my late wife. This is the Barbara tree, which I visit regularly. It has no plaque announcing its name or status; it’s just a tree, barely more than a sapling, standing on a tiny rise in Loyola Park, overlooking the lake. About 12 feet away stands the Fred tree, a silver maple, planted in honor of my sister’s late husband, who died a year and a half after Barbara did. Both died of cancer.

I haven’t written about these deaths, or the nature of grief, in a long time. Life goes on, unfolding unpredictably every day. My long-ago sense of irreplaceable loss has been given over, in many ways, to the tree, to life, to my grown-up kid, to the column I write and to a wary optimism that love is shaping the future despite so many reports to the contrary. (more…)

Toward A World that Works for Everyone

by Jay Walljasper

You would expect Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business to focus its teaching on making profits from the world as it is instead of asking students to explore how to fundamentally change it.

But that means you probably haven’t met business Professor Leo Burke — a former entrepreneur, Motorola executive and, in his student days, manager of the Notre Dame football team.

At first glance, Burke ’70 hardly seems a rabble-rouser. Wearing tassel loafers, navy blue slacks, a tasteful blazer and wire-rim glasses, he looks exactly the part of a business professor. Yet when standing at the podium in an Executive Leadership Seminar — so slender it appears a strong breeze would carry him away — he sounds like a community organizer crossed with a moral philosopher. “When we are able to work out of our deepest values, we can work with a compassion for others that changes systems.” (more…)