Should New York City Sue Mayor de Blasio? Will New York City’s mayor stop personally doing what the city is suing tobacco companies for? Last week, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio explained why the city was suing five fossil fuel companies: For decades, Big Oil ravaged our environment. They knew what they were peddling was lethal, but they didn’t care. They used the classical Big Tobacco playbook of denial, denial, denial, and all[…] Keep reading →

In this country, mentioning any deviation from capitalism flips people’s thoughts to communism and socialism. This black-and-white thinking explains why Reagan and Thatcher opposed Nelson Mandela fighting Apartheid, instead supporting a blatantly racist regime. In fact, they supported a party infused by supporters of Nazis. We throw the term Nazi around today to mean figuratively, but I mean literally. The creators of Apartheid included people who actively and violently supported[…] Keep reading →

Meeting with Frances Hesselbein means talking about service. Her touchstone phrase is “to serve is to live.” All the men in her life served in the military. She taught at West Point and led me to my co-teaching for three days last fall. By contrast, when I grew up, I associated the military with the draft, whose compulsory nature seemed unconstitutional. My sense of community has changed—I would say matured.[…] Keep reading →

My series answering the New York Times’ Ethicist column with an active, leadership approach instead of an analytical, philosophical perspective continues with “What if My Mother’s Extramarital Cravings Are Linked to Dementia?” My mother is in her mid-50s, which is the time at which people can develop frontotemporal degeneration (FTD), a form of dementia she is at risk for. Symptoms of FTD include a lack of inhibition or social tact[…] Keep reading →

Tanner clearly has just as much fun in the second conversation as he did the first one. And that’s the fun of the conversation but talking about what he did, he went beyond just modest size changes. If you hear he’s already getting into leading people right away. It’s about responsibility. It’s about people changing or not. I mean he does but not everyone does. You get to hear about his[…] Keep reading →

Have you thought about who is leading in the area of climate research? I don’t mean who is doing the most research or the best research or publishing the most. I mean from a leadership perspective: who is leading people, setting direction, creating a vision, and motivating others to act toward a goal? What is the goal of climate research if not to figure out how to set policy for[…] Keep reading →

One of my top resources on the environment is the book Limits to Growth. Reading it was revelatory. They approached the environment the way I thought made sense, then created a model, researched the numbers, plugged them in, and got answers. What made sense was what they call a systemic approach—not to look at one of all the interacting parts, but to look at the whole system, including how the[…] Keep reading →