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 and capitalism, adopting the tantalizing image of Green Swans on the Horizon, 2030. For a quick synopsis, see my GSW page. My prior home page and legacy 2007 manifesto linger.

PostProfWork 2.0 (PPW2.0)

The mission of my retirement period morphs as my thinking changes. The challenge laid out in 2007 remains active, however.

However, the embedded directory structure remains in place: "Don't break the web," the mantra of the HTML5 movement. So, this is how I plan to build on April. 3, 2021.

  1. /ppw2 as new headquarters, new build, work-in-progress: [start it with index];
    1. K vs IE with horizon CCIR. Need strategic insight and future horizon, say to 2030. Use MindMap to generate.
    2. /anth(ropocene) picks up in existing course notes, so [find notes and update];
    3. /CCIR within /ppw2 as service function;
    4. /cases, /support, /build(?); support holds bibliography, links, glossary of hard concepts.
  2. /capitalism stands in for the entire political economy piece.
  3. Existing /LSi as niche for /IE, Integral Ecology;
    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.

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

PostProfWork 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.
  • Ecology, Economics and Ethics, an upper-level undergraduate offering, and two graduate courses: Economics of Sustainability and the Business of Sustainability, a follow up to an MBA course, Business and the Environment.
  • My Public Pollicy offering still gets much attention, but although I turned toward sustainability themes, the Public Policy Cycle still assists my thinking on sustainability.

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: [f0 as H3 tag]

  1. 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.
  2. I have harbored a keen interest in capitalism since being privileged to take a marvelous 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, [f3]. We read many of the classics such as [f4] including Karl Polanyi. Since then, I have studied the seminal
  3. The spiral of Climate Catastrophe, Impacts, and Responses 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.
  4. As my interest deepened, I came across the Stern Report and then the BIS 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.