PostProfWork Home Page

Summary: This stub provides a refreshed working version of the post-retirement profwork home page.

The Post in PostProfWork refers to my retirement from Ramapo College of New Jersey in July, 2015. Now outside my teaching curriculum, I set my sights on the interactions between climate crisis, capitalism, and Integral Ecology as I measure Overshoot Gap between load foisted on Earth by humanity and capitalism in particular and my special attention to Integral Ecology as a component of Social Capital that lowers the stress and increases the Carrying Capacity.

See Notes page and Works in Progress for updates.

PostProfWork

In 2007, while still offering courses in sustainability, I put out my manifesto, My Statement of Concern. I still pursue the challenge to devise a feasible global strategy, using the USA as my case study, to address the whole conumdrum. I like to think that I can offer a unique approach, hence the PostProfWork Project website. I have not altered the original manifesto.

  1. PostProfWork revives my initiative as a new build and support notes.
    1. Soften capitalism and expand Integral Ecology with the horizon provided by Climate Catastrophe. Do this with a clear-eyed realization of the history of capitalism. Measure by Overshoot Gap, similar to the well-known Footprint and a concept easily imagined by you, dear Reader.
    2. Design the current project as a simulated course layout where the sequence for the reader has been defined in HTML5. The website defines my thinking, keeps me involved, and offers the challenge of a flow project.
    3. So what I call Climate Catastrophe, Impacts, and Response (CCIR) offers a context and time horizon. My thesis: CCIR underestimates the rapidity of CC, the Impacts at regional levels where folks live their lives, and the complete shortfall in the response. I will focus on the USA but China, EU, and Asia in general will be essential. Specific attention to the coming elections and the utter failure of Congress must be kept.
    4. To come: cases, bibliography, curated links, glossary of key concepts, and miscellany with no clear destination.
  2. My existing writing on capitalism as NeoLiberalism stands in for the entire political economy piece, as nformed by the Longue Duree of Fernand Braudel. Of special concern: the explosion of shared but environmentally destructive economic growth since World War II. The site will develop in the context of the Overshoot Gap. As capitalism increases corporate citizenship and as technology improves, as population stabilizes, and as economic growth slows with small labor force and lower productivity, the stress on the Earth lowers the stress, thus shrinking the Overshoot Gap.
    1. See ProPublica bombshell on wealth and taxes.
  3. My existing website on Laudato Si' with /IE, Integral Ecology, as the engine.
    1. ThreeFolding within /IE, deprecated: not same high level as IE but absorbed by /LSi.
    2. Conversion from raw capitalism to Integral Ecology remains the key move. Track both in their tension as a dialectic.
    3. IE contained in Braudel on material culture & Livelihood and in local Commerce, two rich worlds within capitalism. The action, to Braudel, comes in the World and the long-term, both certainly important but must be confronted as with Engine No. 1 actions against ExxonMobil Board, seemingly successful.
  4. Comprehend climate change in this way: A Climate Catastrophe looms with impacts not clearly understood but with a response that so far appears far short of what might be done to prevent and to mitigate what I dub CCIR: Climate Catastrophe, Impacts, and Response. The climate component of the sustainability curriculum within which I worked relied on Environmental Scientists for climate change. I must fill that gap in my knowledge.

For a quick synopsis, see my GSW page. My prior home page and legacy 2007 manifesto linger.

The structure above fits ppw2 into the inherited directory structure. An overhaul of the directories will create a mess. The spirit of my effort will be, as usual, note-taking that I can recover, advance, and share. HTML5 provides the discipline and the home within which to compose my post-retirement focus. Welcome

Discussion of my Mission

Since my retirement in the summer of 2015, I have continued to ponder themes from particular courses, offered in class and on-line:

  • World Sustainability, a survey of the global scene organized around the concept of Social Ecology. See syllabus and schedule (thus sequence).
  • Ecology, Economics and Ethics, an upper-level undergraduate offering: syllabus and schedule.
  • Two graduate courses: Economics of Sustainability and the Business of Sustainability, a follow up to an MBA course, Business and the Environment.
  • My Public Policy offering still gets much attention, but although I turned toward sustainability themes, the Public Policy Cycle still assists my thinking on sustainability. With my permission, the site has been used at the Stanford Law School capstone seminar on public policy. See the legacy syllabus and schedule.

Ironically, since the Environmental Science faculty covered climate change, I largely ignored this essential topic. However, in retirement, I quickly realized that climate change would, as Naomi Klein evocatively claims: "This changes everything." So, here is how I merged my political economic background with imminent climate concerns:

  1. In May 2015, Pope Francis publshed his important Laudato Si'. I presented a lecture at a conference on the encyclical at Ramapo College in May, 2015, just as I was retiring. The propitious timing brought me to an ethical, ecumenical literature around the theory of Integral Ecology, close to the Social Ecology engine of our Sustainable and Environmental curricula. This opened an exciting theme and direction.
  2. Climate change understates the threat, as each succeeding official report demonstrates. The time horizon of 2100 lulls us to inaction. I moved the timeline to 2050. (Note: I was born in Jersey City, NJ, in 1945.) However, my prospective longevity and the acceleration of events (the Anthropocene regards the Post-World War II era as the Age of Acceleration), I compressed the timeline to 2030, more tangible and actionable (such as the key 2020 USA elections). So, given the trends, I adopt the framework of climate catastrophe, 2030 --- I am alarmed and I am not alone.
  3. I have harbored a keen interest in capitalism since being privileged to study the history of capitalism course with the masterful Dudley Dilllard at the University of Maryland in the fall of 1967. Professor Dillard has just published his magnus opus. We read many of the classics such as including Karl Polanyi and Max Weber. Since then, I rely heavily on the magesterial by Fernand Braudel.
  4. I joined a Ramapo team from the business school and the sustainability faculty around the future of capitalism at the New School. The focus of the conference presumed that capitalism could be supplanted with another form of political economy, during the height of the Trump Presidency. I wrote an abstract and a stub for my presentation, realizing that I would be an outlier with a more practicable approach. Laudato Si' references appeared an apostasy. However, as the conference neared, my Atrial Fibrillation returned, so I was forced to cancel.
  5. The spiral of Climate Catastrophe, Impacts, and Responses (CCIR) expands from the science of climate, which I have only perused, to the effects, including the systemic reaction --- which gets me back to capitalism, and, sadly, what Jane Meyer aptly calls Dark Money, such as the property owners of potentially stranded fossil fuel assets.
  6. As my interest deepened, I came across the Stern Report and then the green business book, Green Swans. I then wondered about a particular scenario that depicts the concern of this project: the need for massive infrastructure spending just as economic growth slows and fiscal crises of all sorts ripen. I borrowed the phrase Green Swans but see them lurking over the horizon of 2030. Beware.
  7. My preferred method of distribution extends my years of delivery of lecture notes on the Internet, which my students appreciated. However, I turn to HTML5 since a hiatus of about six years. I ask your forbearance for my errors and the clumsy build you will endure as I peck away at this challenging and massive self-inflicted mission.

So this confluence of events brings me to two major themes whose reconciliation provides my mission:

  • The future of capitalism as climate change intensifies, as inequality deepens, and potential authoritarian governments fester. Braudel's triadic economy fit well: material culture, commerce, and globalization.
  • The potential for Integral Ecology as a morphing of Social Ecology. The notion of Social Capital had emerged from the Ramapo business school discussion. The bending of the meaning of capital opened up new vistas.
  • Now, if globalization matured into a more democratic and responsible mode and as the prospects for Integral Ecology brightened, the new beginning of a post-Covid world might offer potential for benign real-world reform. That mission encapsulates this project.