Critical Thinking and Sustainable Behavior

Hi Adrienne,

If you are using the term "critical thinking" as it is defined here... http://www.criticalthinking.org/aboutCT/definingCT.shtml .... then I am working in that field. The book I know of that might help you is called "Total Responsibility Management", by Sandra Waddock and Charles Bodwell. (Greenleaf Publishing) It came out this year and makes the case for using the same thinking skills used in the quality management profession (sometimes called the "performance excellence" profession) when working on the corporate social responsibility aspect of a business. http://www.greenleaf-publishing.com/productdetail.kmod?productid=686
Please let me know if this helps.

Best regards,
Steve

PS I have no financial connection to this book.

Hi All -

Here's another perspective on CSR and critical thinking.

1. Corporate Social Responsibility is an impossibility. Double-, triple-, quadruple-, multituple-bottom lines - it doesn't matter, there's only one bottom line that counts (guess which one). TRM as much as admits it - responsibility is really all about damage control. CSR is a pretty face covering a desperate attempt to salvage the most brutal, exploitive and environmentally destructive economic system in human history: massive global centralization of resources and accumulation of wealth and power in an oligarchy. Call it capitalism, communism, socialism - a name is of no consequence except as propaganda to confuse and divide the wretched of the earth. Corporations are, by operation and definition, the embodiment of these processes (independent of the good intentions and humanity of many corporate employees, who are all interchangeable parts). The "good" news is that such an unsustainable system is collapsing of its own weight. The very bad news, in the form of climate change, peak oil, genetically modified organisms, remarkably sophisticated weapons of mass destruction, unchecked population growth, to name a few - is that billions if not all of us will perish in the process.

2. The Critical Thinking site is interesting, but wholly presumptuous that critical thinking must, by definition, be that of word-laden Western science and analysis. In just whose "universe" do these "universal intellectual values" exist? Are mechanistic reductions of reality better critical thinking than un-verbal or metaphorical spiritual insight into Earth as our Mother? I'm afraid that there's still far too much Empire in empirical.

Cheers,
Adam Sacks

From sunny Lexington, Massachusetts, US of A, on a beautiful, globally-warmed fall day that should have had its last hurrah a month ago