The Earth is typically thought of as nothing but stuff — an idea so commonplace that it’s hard to imagine it having any kind of history at all. It’s “just the way the world is.”

The very act of being creative is a kind of defiance of the dominant, deterministic model that shapes the university and so much of the world.

If the natural sciences adopt a more inclusive worldview — one that does not deny the role of values and meaning in the world and that can do justice to more of the scientific evidence — we will be in a much better position to respond wisely to our crises.

Jesus called for a fundamental shift from the service of money to the service of God. “Repent, for the Kingdom of God is at hand.” I translate Jesus’s message into “Seize an Alternative: An Ecological Civilization Is Possible.”

The conference should be of keen interest to those teachers who have been concerned that in a time of desperate crisis, the vast majority of so-called “education” proceeds as if the only matter of importance was the production of value-free scholarship and proper credentialing for service to the economy that is destroying the ecosystem.

The entire conference is about ethics in the broad sense. It is seeking to define what we should be working for and how this can be done in many contexts and areas of life.

Why is our current civilization so non-ecological? And, what are the changes in many fields that could jointly bring about an ecological civilization?

“Seizing an Alternative” means a society that prizes life more than money and lives in integration with the whole, that is, as a responsible part of the natural system.

Today many agree that we need a “paradigm change.” The “Seizing an Alternative” conference is about encouraging and implementing such a change.

“When I worked at the World Bank,” Daly writes, “I often heard the statement, ‘There is no conflict between economics and ecology. I still hear that a lot today. Is it true? Is it possible?”

Number 1 of the rewrite is, “Thou Shalt Not Ruin Civilization’s Climate.”

John said that he had never been able to see the man in the moon. Malcolm responded that he had always been in love with the man in the moon.