If you found your way here…

chances are you’re concerned about the dangerous path humanity is on. Continuing with business-as-usual means big trouble, now and for generations to come. In principle, we can still change course. But avoiding the worst and achieving the best of what’s possible at this point requires immediate and transformative action.

You may already be working — as teacher, researcher, activist, or some other kind of change agent — to help us transition toward a brighter future. Either way, you’re probably familiar with some of the difficulties of this work. How to coordinate so many different efforts? How to deal with conflicting values and goals? How to make change? Where to begin?

There’s no getting around it. The race to Transition is an Olympic-level challenge. And so far, we have not been up to the test.

There are several things holding us back, but at the heart of them are distorted views of ourselves, each other, and our place in the world.

Ultimately, our ability to guide socio-environmental change more intentionally in a positive direction depends on a better understanding of how reality works.

In short, we need new ways of seeing and being. This blog is meant to help.

Informed by more than 20 years as an interdisciplinary teacher-scholar in sociology and environmental studies and by my recent book, Beyond the Knowledge Crisis, “Getting to Know Reality” strikes at the root of our crises: the problematic paradigms shaping the systems within which we operate and through which we impact the world and its inhabitants.

In it you’ll find mind-shifting insights, along with resources to help you develop and use them in practical ways to:

• Better understand the human condition and our current predicament
• Cultivate a sense of orientation in an otherwise disorienting world
• Highlight entry points for action to make positive change
• Guide class design, development, and planning
• Facilitate collaboration across disciplines
• Inform socio-environmental research
• And more

Although changing how we think may seem insignificant in the face of the massive challenges we face, “paradigm shift,” it is widely agreed, is the foundation on which any hope of a successful Transition rests.

So, if you’d like to better understand what “changing the paradigm” actually means, or you want to be part of making positive change happen, or you could just use a little help navigating the interdisciplinary tangle of socio-environmental studies—or all of the above—then this blog is for you.

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