Welcome Back
Announcing some changes
Welcome back to Pose Ponder, everyone. This past week seemed especially busy and long, maybe because it’s spring(?). In New Mexico, spring means gorgeous days of sunny 70-degree weather, quite a bit of wind (!), mixed with the still-occasional snow squall. My lilac bush is in bloom, a hummingbird peeped in the window the other day, and my garden plans and plantings are getting sorted.
I hope you had a good week closing out April!
Pose Ponder’s publishing cadence is 3 weeks on, 1 week off. As always on my week off, I’ve been pondering where I want the writing to go and how to make everything better. Here’s the intention and “vision,” keeping what I think is working and improving the rest.
There will continue to be daily posts according to a weekly cadence, with Mondays, Wednesday, and Fridays being lighter and more resource and engagement oriented. At the beginning and end of each 3-week push the first Monday, like today, will be a sort of “meta” letter announcing what’s coming up, and the last Friday will continue to be an “index” of sorts to pull together related content. Other Mondays and Fridays will continue to offer findings (“what I’m reading”) and resources. Not being an expert, I have to lean into my layperson status, which means I’ll curate links to high quality work already out there rather than try to reinvent the wheel. There is already just so much available. Wednesdays will focus on engagement within the Substack community.
For Tuesdays and Thursdays, on the other hand, I want to dive deep into producing substantive, original content. Here the focus will rotate each week:
Week One: Pondercraft (lifelong learning)
Week Two: A1-A2-A3 topics, including guest posts
Week Three: A4 topics, books, studies, wisdom traditions, “PPE”
The Pondercraft experiment, focused on lifelong learning for the Anthropocene, exists currently as a dormant second publication on Substack. Pondercraft will move into the main Pose Ponder publication and get posts during Week One. I want to spend a couple posts each month on strategies for developing skills, getting reading under control, organizing research and information, and cultivating mindset — all this for the sake of being better lifelong learners, to become a better human. I am working on revamping so many of my own ongoing self-education practices. So that’s Week One.
I’ve found it helpful to sort Anthropocene issues and topics in general into four main areas:
A1 is for big megatrends that, in effect, define the Anthropocene as a long term, historical phenomenon. Megatrends are the hockey-stick shaped exponential graphs that track human population growth, energy use, economic growth, climate change, biodiversity loss, landform transitions, and so on. A1 is all about large scale changes over time.
A2 is for “places and cases” to do with land and water use. Humans now occupy, control, or impact the vast extent of planetary surface on land and sea. Agriculture, forests, parks & reserves, urban and suburban spaces, oceans, waterways — as places where humans extract or harvest resources, where we build and live in developed communities, and where wild non-human creatures still roam inhabit their own spaces that desperately require protection and conservation — these are the spatially oriented topics of A2.
A3 is for the human economy, broadly understood, ideally to become circular. What are the day-to-day processes humans use for resource extraction, manufacturing, distribution, consumption, and waste? How can they be better? Is technology the answer? Most of what we actually do as a species, that impacts the environment, revolves around our “economy,” literally the “laws of management of the household” (oikos, nomos). Improving human welfare sustainably amidst increasingly vast and complex interactions with the planet is the set of topics for A3.
A4 is the less material side of human activity, the other side of the coin of A3. What philosophical, cultural, ethical, political, artistic resources are there, including from human history, to draw upon as we try, as a species, to understand and re-orient in an overwhelming new human-driven era? One inquiry concerns whether or not, and how, ancient wisdom traditions — philosophical or religious — might provide insight and guidance (wisdom). Another concern is uniquely modern, on PPE topics: philosophy, political thought, economic thought. How can we better “think what we are doing” (Arendt) to be good humans in the Anthropocene?
Week Two will focus on A1-A2-A3. Week Three in the rotation will attempt a “study” to delve deeper into an A4 line of thought based on reading and research, posing and pondering.
It’ll take some time, probably several months and several cycles through the publishing cadence, to work out the kinks in producing content according to this intention. It’ll be a slow ramp up.
Your feedback and encouragement are greatly appreciated. Whenever something strikes you 😃, please do:
One final note. The next few weeks’ schedule is going to be slightly truncated to 2 weeks on, 1 week off. I am adjusting my calendar to sync with another emerging cadence in my life. After that, Pose Ponder will be back to the normal 3 weeks on, 1 week off.
As always, thank you for being a subscriber and reader!
