All posts by Jim Selman

Wisdom in Action

Common Cause: Climate Justice

By Rick Fullerton | Bio

On my way to a candlelight vigil for climate justice, I wondered who else would show up. It was minus 5 Celsius and with the wind chill it felt like minus 25—bitterly cold by any measure. Hardly a day to be concerned about global warming. Yet some 200 committed souls braved the cold—some on foot, some on bicycles, and others (reluctantly) by car. By the time I arrived, the vigil organizers had thankfully decided to move the event inside. Once out of the cold wind, I was impressed by the strange bedfellows who had come together to express their commitment to the future of the planet.

The event’s ad hoc planning group represented many faith groups, but this was not your typical ecumenical gathering of various Christian denominations. Leaders in this service of reflection were Canada’s aboriginal first nations, Jews, Pagans, Muslims, Christians, Unitarians, and Buddhists. Clearly, the vision of a sustainable future was sufficiently broad and inclusive to attract people of many faith traditions.  

The service itself blended periods of quiet reflection

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Leadership

Redesigning the World: Listening to Youth

By Shae Hadden

Jennifer Correiro, executive director of TakingITGlobal, sent me an update of her activities at Davos last week. As a Young Global Leader, she has been involved in an initiative to bring recommendations from teenagers in over 20 countries to the Global Redesign Initiative of the World Economic Forum. More than 2,000 people between 8 and 25 took part in an online forum

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Fearless Aging

A Woman’s Perspective: Why Sex is Better as an Elder

By Elizabeth Brown

  1.  We’ve already experienced what works and doesn’t work for us regarding sex. And now we know it is about passion, trust and playfulness…and an expressed intimacy.
  2. Sex becomes a sacred expression of our body and our soul. It takes maturity to know the two bring a satisfaction unsurpassed in being fully expressed and joyful.
  3. We listen, with pleasure, from a desire to know and satisfy our partner.
  4. It is easier to be playful and open to

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News

Clean Energy Week

The National Coalition of Organizations has declared February 1-5, 2010 to be Clean Energy Week, as organizations from across the U.S. hold a variety of events to encourage and support the passage of clean energy and climate policies now pending in Congress. The objective is to engage the Administration and Congress in taking action on the top environmental and economic priorities of the American people:

  • Climate
    solutions
  • Renewable energy
  • Energy efficiency.

Check out the wide range

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Fearless Aging

7 Reasons Why Elders Make Great Lovers (and have better sex)

By Jim Selman | Bio

There is an old joke that says, “Sex after 60 is better than ever, but the mounting and dismounting aren’t so pretty.” If you’re laughing, you know what I’m talking about. If not, you’re still young enough to have something to look forward to. I attended a conference recently featuring Steve Pavlina, the number one blogger on personal development. The topic was about expanding traffic to your blog and one of his ideas was to write about something ‘timeless’, something that lots of people have in common and that breaks the mold of everyone’s expectations. Well, my writing has been about transforming our notions of growing older and to encourage intergenerational dialogue, so what better topic to muse on than SEX.

I know it’s kind of weird to think about our parents and grandparents ‘doing it’, but the fact is that they do. We just tend to avoid discussing that it happens among our Elders. While Elders are usually older than we are, that’s not always the case. In some cultures, the young are the Elders, since they are more connected to what is important to the community than the old. As I have been saying on this blog for the last few years, we need to get real and be open across

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Health

We Run Green: Do YOU?

By Lauren Selman | Bio

Do you want to get lean while
staying green? Whether you’re a runner, a competitive cyclist, a
recreational yogi or a vacation skier, there might be a more
sustainable way for you to exercise. 

Recently, I was inspired by LuluLemon’s blog posts considering not only what we wear on our bodies but also how
we wear our clothing. The author of the blog, challenged herself to
dress for both work and for working out with only two bottoms to choose

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Learning

Why Don’t We Ever Learn?

By Jim Selman | Bio

As we watch the devastation in Haiti on television, the world recoils at the horror and the suffering, mobilizes its resources and tries to clean up the mess and help the survivors. The media forages, looking for who to blame (usually corrupt or incompetent politicians). We’ve witnessed this scene following earthquakes countless times: in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake 2008 when 69,000 died in China; in the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake when 230,000 died in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India and Thailand; in the 2005 Kashmir earthquake where 86,000 died in Pakistan; in the 1923 Great Kanto earthquake when 142,800 died in Japan; and even in 1908’s Messina earthquake when 100,000 died in Italy. If we think about the hurricanes, volcanoes, fires, tsunamis and famine, it seems the “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” are doing a fabulous business these days. The fact is that natural (and some unnatural) disasters happen all the time.  But if you look at the impact of these events in developed countries and compare them to the impact in underdeveloped countries, the contrast is shocking.

The reason for this has been clear for a long time. The extent of damage in any earthquake depends on many variables, including the magnitude of the quake and the aftershocks, what type of soil buildings are on and the distance of population centers from the epicenter. Underdeveloped or developing nations face particular challenges—especially when dealing with high population density areas—because they lack the necessary infrastructure to respond. In addition to this factor,

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