Tragedy of the Commons - 25 Feb 2006

Y'all come to discuss the tragedy of the commons at 9 am, probably in Room 3 at Trinity UMC, Wilmette, IL. Larry handed out a reading packet, but it's all online as well! Here goes

Wikipedia article (a nice summary with additional links at the end)

The seminal article by Garret Hardin "Tragedy of the Commons"

Same article as published in Science magazine - with additional material

See how it works: two interactive games that demonstrate the "tragedy"
The Bunny Game and
The Nuts Game - played on a coffee table with your "friends"

Descriptive summary article in The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics (a freedom advocacy think tank)

Daniel McFadden in Forbes, linking the ideas to the digital/internet world

Bruce Yandle for The Independent Institute (also includes a Spanish translation)

Robert Lucky in IEEE Spectrum - particularly on World Wide Web applications

R. De Young's essay on durable common pool resource managment

That seems like a lot of freedom-oriented tosh, so I'll complement it with
Something from Sojourners - proud to be a bunch of left-wing evangelicals.
And something from Whole Earth (formerly Review)

Peace be with you,

Chuck

Meeting Report from Saturday, January 14, 2006 on Collapse

Larry led another thought provoking discussion. I recall that 13 of us were present. The starter question was to recall an instance of "landscape amnesia" in our life.

Larry connected our reading of Collapse with Tragedy of the Commons - our topic for next time, March of Folly - for the meeting after that, Groupthink, Tipping Point, Wisdom of Crowds, Blink, and zero and non-zero sum games.

Other's made connections to John Stossel on public education, Science and Theology News, and the following books (Amazon links)

Shelter of Each Other and Reviving Ophelia by Mary Pipher

The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James

Jihad vs McWorld by Benjamin Barber

Constantine's Sword by James Carroll

We closed the meeting with Larry leading a call and response of "The Vietnamese Prayer" sorry, no text yet.

Ev's Notes

Ev had a number of interesting events and items for the group on Saturday January 14, 2006.

Julie Galambush, author of The Reluctant Parting will speak at First Congregational Church of Wilmette, on Thursday, January 19, 2006 at 7:30 pm. Follow up sessions will further discuss the book. No charge.

Ev also recommended The Jewish Christian Rift. Ev is part of a Christian, Jewish, Moslem dialog goup.

She says that The Great Story connects well with her beliefs.

Other books on Ev's mind include The Mind In The Cave and An Alchemy of Mind. Ev was working the spiritual side of things to complement our discussion of Collapse.

She passed around a catalog of Earthwatch expeditions, an recommended them.

If you want to help investigate the recently returned star dust, check out http://stardustathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/

That stardust may contain evidence of the polymerization of hydrogen cyanide possibly as a precursor to other organic compounds (or life?).

She remembered Cliff Matthews - a member of our group while a professor at U of C. Cliff was mentioned in this sermon from May.