Written by John.  (each post byline will be linked to the writer’s bio section.

Strategy focuses on the following: how do you get from what your Thought informs and inspires you to think to the Action that leads you there, or could lead you there? What barriers stand in the way? What can you learn about your Thought as you apply it to Action and how can you adapt your Thought accordingly? What actions may get you there, what don’t? What adjustments make sense, what don’t? These are huge questions and should preoccupy the minds of thinkers and doers alike. But strangely enough, there is a dearth of serious thinking about this. Many are content with doing the thinking, and many do it well. And by the same token, many are happy with just concentrating their efforts and energy on practical actions, and do it well. But the gap between them — that puzzling, risky, complicated terrain — receives by comparison little serious attention. One notes, for example, the brilliant and startling new book by David Orr, Down to the Wire: Confronting Climate Collapse. It’s very good, but little if anything about how actually to go about getting out of our terrible fix to a better place. Somehow, just uttering the Thought seems to many of our intellectuals to be sufficient.

So we are introducing as a new category a section on Strategy: Getting There from Here (or not). The reader will note that the three articles in the following pages dealing with strategy in some fashion are all illustrations of what not to do. But one can learn from these negative examples, too. We expect in future issues to have more articles of a positive kind – as we have had, to a limited degree, in previous issues. We also hope to have more Action articles in forthcoming issues than we have in this one.

We are delighted by our five Thought pieces in this issue and hasten to note that, in addition to doing some very serious and inspiring thinking, they also to some degree, if only by implication, deal with the puzzling question of how we can, should, must! go about getting there from here.

JR