The worldwide coronavirus outbreak is not the first world war, nor the great depression nor the second world war. For those with an awareness of history, we know that those events were horrific and challenging times that we got through and fortunately came out stronger on the other side. The worldwide coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak and […]
Author: Peter Milsom
COVID-19 Sustainable Lessons 02: References
GPM Global is dedicated to ensuring that our posts are transparent and fact based from sources that can be trusted. Providing these references can also take up a lot of space and distract from the blog post. We have provided the detailed sources for our COVID-19 Sustainable Lessons below. References [1] Carboni, Joel, et al. […]

How we can empower our children, and not rob them of the ability, to dream of a better future.
As part of being a parent dealing with current school challenges, I have had a number of worrisome conversations with teachers recently about the ability of their students to dream of a better future. When asked to write about their future or humanities future, a consistent observation is that many (if not all) of their […]

Lessons for Change from Bungee Jumping
I went bungee jumping over twenty years ago in Ottawa at the Great Canadian Bungee Jumping site at Wakefield, Chelsea Quebec. During that memorable experience I was reminded of several important lessons that I believe are valuable for change initiatives. For context, “Visualize an amphitheater of solid limestone, 200 ft. high, surrounding a 160 ft. […]

Pollution – Why we replaced horses with automobiles
Henry Ford never said people wanted faster horses, “what they wanted was less horseshit” (Flowers, 2014). It was a little more complicated than that, but you get the general point. The lesson of this post is that too much of anything can be bad, and we need to look at the whole asset life-cycle system […]

Two Technologies that Could Regenerate Our Planet
“Hope is being able to see that there is light despite all of the darkness.” Desmond Tutu With all the conflicts and problems and noise these days it is healthy to dream about how better our future will be. This post comes from a vision of our sustainable / regenerative future from the 1960’s courtesy […]

An Approach for Sustainability for Everyone – The Scout vs. the Warrior
“A new idea is first condemned as ridiculous and then dismissed as trivial, until finally, it becomes what everybody knows.” William James, 1879 For those who have accepted and endorsed the importance of sustainability and social responsibility issues like the importance of dealing with anthropogenic climate change, livable wages, the problems with waste etc., there […]

The Playbook Series: Global Warming
This is a follow on post to “Keep on scammin’ on: The evil brilliance, success and recurrence of The Playbook.” The strategies from The Playbook have been employed by industries that are under threat of losing profits when scientific evidence proves that their product causes significant harm to the public, society or planet in some […]

A Warning about Models
Due to the complexity of sustainability and social responsibility, we use a lot of models. One of the key lessons learned though is that “colouring by numbers does not guarantee success”. It is important to realize the limitations and constraints of models, and the fact that they should always be re-evaluated, particularly when new information […]

How our Perception & Politics impacts our Understanding of Sustainability
Perception is reality. We have heard that many times. One definition of perception “is the organization, identification, and interpretation of sensory information in order to represent and understand the presented information, or the environment.” The key with perception though is that people generally believe perception is fact, and not just an opinion or option. This […]