Dave Pollard's environmental philosophy, creative works, business papers and essays.

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	April 14, 2003

PUTTING THINGS IN CONTEXT: WHY I BLOG One of the great challenges in knowledge sharing, and in asynchronous communication, is to provide your audience with enough context to understand where your message 'comes from' -- what mental models, preconceptions, hidden agendas, historical baggage and motivations filter and taint what you say. Conveying this context makes it easier for the recipient of your message to internalize what you're saying more accurately and fully. It can also prevent misconceptions that lead to argument or disparagement of your point of view. For that reason, I thought it might be helpful to let you know not only who I am (in the sidebar About the Author ), but also why I blog -- what motivates me, on top of a heavy business workload, to spend at least 25 hours a week reading blogs and other resources, and writing my own blog posts. So here goes: I do this for three equally important (to me) reasons: Improve My Writing Skills: I love writing, and always wanted to make a living at it. By reading a lot on many topics, and practicing incessantly, I hope to learn to: write powerful, persuasive essays (like this one of Toby's) that stake out radical positions without sounding strident, write humour (like Dave Barry ), once I figure out what makes humorous writing funny, write clear, motivating, informative and actionable business essays, incorporate these 39 steps from Frederick Barthelme in my fiction writing, and  broaden my eclectic intellectual reach so I have more knowledge to draw on in my writing (the way Mark Woods can). Institute Weblogs in Business: As Chief Knowledge Officer of a large professional services company, I've been grappling with two major cultural obstacles to knowledge sharing - employees' reluctance to contribute their knowledge, and the absence of context sufficient to make knowledge that is contributed easy to assess, internalize and re-use. I think employee weblogs might solve both problems. Environmental Activism: Although the title of this blog is ironic, I am a hopeless idealist and really would like to make the world a better place. I'm about ten years from retirement, and plan then to dedicate my life full-time to environmental activism. I'm dissatisfied with existing environmental activist programs, which seem to me rear-guard, ineffectual, naive, inadequate, and often too little, too late to have major, lasting impact. I'm equally dissatisfied with the lack of coherent and actionable blueprints for environmental action, and I'm hoping that by blogging environmental manifestos like How to Save the World and The Third Way, SETI-like, I will be able to find like minds with whom I can work to drive a powerful, effective, broad-based environmental movement. For those that have read my posts before, is this helpful? Should we make it part of the blogger culture that each of us provide some context for our writing with both a bio and a 'why I blog' summary? 12:57:39 PM  trackback []  comment []

THREE ESSAYS ON IRAQ I've lost enthusiasm for writing about Iraq, but others that write better than I do have not. So here are three provocative recent essays from three different countries on the reconstruction of Iraq and "what comes next": In Hold Your Applause in the NYT, Thomas Friedman, writing from Umm Qasr, chastizes America for celebrating prematurely and excessively the 'success' in Iraq (thanks to Rebecca at Suddenly Routine for catching this, and to Kriselda for pointing us to Rebecca's great blog): America broke Iraq; now America owns Iraq, and it owns the primary responsibility for normalizing it. If the water doesn't flow, if the food doesn't arrive, if the rains don't come and if the sun doesn't shine, it's now America's fault. We'd better get used to it, we'd better make things right, we'd better do it soon, and we'd better get all the help we can get. In Don't Blindly Support the Troops in the National Post, Mark Kingwell, whose book I recently reviewed , explains how the ends really don't justify the means: This war is unjust by any measure considered valid in the long tradition of philosophical and legal argument that stretches from Saint Augustine, through Pufendorf and Grotius, to the Geneva Convention and the Nuremberg trials. It is an act of aggression, not defence; it is not being waged to restore peace; it was not the last resort. Whether it is about oil, imperial muscle-flexing or testing client-state loyalty in the New American Century -- or all of these -- matters less than the fact that it lacks basic ethical justification...If the admirable young are engaged, for whatever reason, in a cause which is not just, they are doing wrong. And our blind approval of their actions is equally wrong. In Iraqis Have Paid the Blood Price for a Fraudulent War in the Guardian, Seumas Milne laments the abandonment of Western promises to rebuild Afghanistan, reminds us that the WMD threat to the U.S. that was the pretext for the war has been shown to be fraudulent, and gives us a glimpse of what we can expect next: The wider global impact of this war was spelled out by North Korea's foreign ministry this week. "The Iraqi war shows," it declared, with unerring logic, "that to allow disarmament through inspections does not help avert a war, but rather sparks it", concluding that "only a tremendous military deterrent force" can prevent attacks on states the US dislikes. So now the Pandora's box of power politics and pre-emptive aggression is open. Every one of the eighty-one totalitarian regimes that may be on Bush's hit list will be scrambling to acquire sufficient weaponry to discourage America from attacking it next. And now India has announced that it is pondering a pre-emptive strike against Pakistan, arguing that their "justification for a pre-emptive strike on Pakistan is more compelling than America's justification for invading Iraq". Eighteen months to regime change in the U.S. and an end to this nightmare. 12:15:28 AM  trackback []  comment []

© Copyright 2004 Dave Pollard. Last update: 19/02/2004; 2:42:54 PM.