Went through Google, Google News & the NY Times website looking for coverage and discussion of the climate conference recently hosted by Bolivia, the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth.
See the  summary & comment by Naomi Klein in The Nation.

News of the conference  is essentially isolated to within progressive/left publications and blogs. No NY Times coverage. Didn’t find any discussion & debate about conference findings in sources with a point of view different from Morales and conference participants. The one mainline US media story I came across was in Time magazine, entitled “Bolivia’s Morales: Eating Chicken Makes You Gay?” with a link to “world’s worst-dressed leaders” ahead of any mention of climate issues.

I found out about the conference only because I read The Nation. Thank you Naomi Klein.

Note the combination of mainstream media control over information + interest groups talking only to themselves within publications and blogs that circulate among like-minded people, making engagement with the complexity of issues e.g. those raised at the conference almost impossible. There is no conversation.

Any genuine framework for effective action has to take into account the limits of rationality and go beyond them. How? Frank Rich’s column today points to the problem, but doesn’t provide answers:

[The White House party gate-crashing] was a symbolic indication (and, luckily, only symbolic) of how unbridled irrationality harnessed to sheer will, whether ludicrous in the crashers’ case or homicidal in the instance of the Fort Hood gunman, can penetrate even our most secure fortifications. Both incidents stand as a haunting reproach to the elegant powers of logic with which Obama tried to sell his exquisitely calibrated plan to vanquish Al Qaeda and its mad brethren.

Juxtapose this insight with the instability Tony Judt describes in his current NY Review of Books essay:

…Before 1914, it was widely asserted that the logic of peaceful economic exchange would triumph over national self-interest. No one expected all this to come to an abrupt end. But it did.

We too have lived through an era of stability, certainty, and the illusion of indefinite economic improvement. But all that is now behind us. For the foreseeable future we shall be as economically insecure as we are culturally uncertain. We are assuredly less confident of our collective purposes, our environmental well-being, or our personal safety than at any time since World War II. We have no idea what sort of world our children will inherit, but we can no longer delude ourselves into supposing that it must resemble our own in reassuring ways.

These indicate starting points for strategic thinking and effective action, and for personal decisions about how and when to engage with issues and events.

Kauffman is saying that the following sort of analysis is useful, in fact essential, but also inherently incomplete and insufficient:

From Ostrom, Elinor, Marco A Janssen, and John M Anderies. 2007. Going beyond panaceas. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 104, no. 39: 15176-15178, p. 15178:

The study of the governance of SESs [social– ecological systems], and of sustainability science more generally, is an applied science like medicine and engineering, which aim to find solutions for diverse and complex problems. In diagnosing problems, the applied scientist examines attributes of a problem, layer by layer, and focuses on traits that are thought to be essential in a particular context. When an initial solution is adopted, considerable effort is made to dig deeply into the structure of the problem and to monitor various indicators of the system. On the basis of this information, applied scientists change their actions and learn from failures. The study of SESs, however, is not yet a mature applied science, but as the articles in this special feature attest, excellent research that can form the foundation for a mature applied science does exist.

Diagnosing the multiple processes occurring in complex, nested SESs is far more challenging than recommending a favorite cure-all solution to a simplified picture of all fisheries, all forests, or all terrestrial ecosystems. If sustainability science is to grow into a mature applied science, we must use the scientific knowledge acquired in the separate disciplines of anthropology, biology, ecology, economics, environmental sciences, geography, history, law, political science, psychology, and sociology to build diagnostic and analytical capabilities.

So, what sets of attitudes, skills, and experiences are appropriate for engaging with these problems, for being an effective, ethical actor and public leader? What practice, in the Buddhist sense? The answer calls for bringing together the analytic and the reasoned with the ethical and the poetic (are these the right terms?). We return to the question of the relationship between contemplation and action, of the ultimate and historical dimensions, of emotion and logic, heart and head, body and spirit, the necessity to become whole. This is expressed in the Shema, yes?

In his Tillich lecture at Harvard this year, Stuart A . Kauffman says, “Reason is an insufficient guide to living our lives. … Therefore, we need all we’ve got. We need reason, emotion, intuition, imagination, story …” (Spoken at 48:20 minutes into the recording.)

From the press release for his Reinventing the Sacred: A new View of Science, Reason and Religion:

Kauffman asserts that it is time to break the Galilean spell – the faith that all aspects of the natural world are governed by natural laws – that has driven science for the past four centuries. With examples ranging from DNA and cell differentiation to Darwinian preadaptation, consciousness, and human technological advances, he argues that not everything that happens in the universe is governed by natural laws. The evolution of the biosphere, human economic life, and human history are partially indescribable by natural law, he writes.
Further, science alone simply doesn’t have the ability to predict the complex processes that occur every day. According to Kauffman, we do not lack sufficient knowledge or wisdom to predict the future evolution of the biosphere, economy, or human culture. Rather, it is that these things are inherently beyond prediction. We live in an emergent universe in which ceaseless unforeseeable creativity arises and surrounds us, writes Kauffman. And since we can neither prestate, let alone predict all that will happen, reason alone is an insufficient guide to living our lives forward.

More support for bringing the Buddhist notion of “practice” into the practice of effective public leadership:

from Feleppa, Robert. 2009. Zen, Emotion and Social Engagement. Philosophy East & West 59, no. 3 (July): 263-293.

In the past two decades a number of researchers in psychology, cognitive science, and philosophy have converged on a different understanding of the place of the emotions in action, one which emphasizes the important role they play in framing the context of decision making: sorting the relevant from the irrelevant, identifying salience, and directing decisions when uncertainty prevents definitive judgment. I shall argue that this view of the more complex integration of reason and emotion makes clearer why self-liberation is fundamentally a matter of liberation from judgmental habit and inflexibility, and lends support to Hershock’s advocacy of a Mahâyâna view that emphasizes compassionate engagement with others.

Will be worth bringing in more of Lakoff’s take from the neurological/cognitive perspective, to see where it fits with the idea of liberation and the ethics of compassionate engagement.