In this essay, I will pay tribute to Prof John McMurtry’s ever-lasting memory by reflecting on how his lifework and our correspondences over five years of engagements have changed my views of life and its meaning in ways previously unimaginable.
Category: Health
Introducing “Ten Essays In Honour of John McMurtry – January 6, 2024 by Jeff Noonan (Author), Giorgio Baruchello (Author)”
Ten Essays In Honour of John McMurtry: Noonan, Jeff, Baruchello, Giorgio: 9781999114657: Amazon.com: Books
Min(d)ing ChatGTP for the Social Biases, Blindspots, Fault Lines and Roadblocks to Adoption of Life-Value Onto-Axiology in All of Our Relations
Table of Contents
♦ On Democracy
♦ On the Military-Industrial Complex
♦ On Zeitgeist
♦ On Wider Dissemination
♦ Overview for Data Analysis of “ChatGPT’s Take On Integrating Life-Value Onto-Axiology with other Life-Coherent System Thinkers, Frameworks and Global Institutions”
♦ On how best to integrate true but partial life-coherent perspectives
♦ On Roadblocks and Challenges
♦ On Transmuting Profit and Power Dynamics to Social Profit and Empowerment
♦ Why does the dominant paradigm persist despite systemically driving socially and environmentally life-degenerative consequences?
♦ Is resistance futile, and how can we be hopefully optimistic for meaningful life-coherent changes?
The Regenerative Lens: A conceptual framework for regenerative social-ecological systems | Buckton et al., | One Earth (2023)
SUMMARY
Societies must transform their dynamics to support the flourishing of life. There is increasing interest in regeneration and regenerative practice as a solution, but also limited cohered understanding of what constitutes regenerative systems at social-ecological scales. In this perspective we present a conceptual, cross-disciplinary, and action-oriented regenerative systems framework, the Regenerative Lens, informed by a wide literature review. The framework emphasizes that regenerative systems maintain positive reinforcing cycles of wellbeing within and beyond themselves, especially between humans and wider nature, such that ‘‘life begets life.’’ We identify five key qualities needed in systems to encourage such dynamics: an ecological worldview embodied in human action; mutualism; high diversity; agency for humans and non-humans to act regeneratively; and continuous reflexivity. We apply the Lens to an envisioned future food system to illustrate its utility as a reflexive tool and for stretching ambition. We hope that the conceptual clarity provided here will aid the necessary acceleration of learning and action toward regenerative systems.
SOCIETAL VIOLENCE – A PUBLIC HEALTH ISSUE | H.E. Dr. IzBen C. Williams | 17 April, 2023
SOCIETAL VIOLENCE – A PUBLIC HEALTH ISSUE
ITS PREVENTION – A CARICOM DEVELOPMENTAL IMPERATIVE
(Not a prescription…. mere sensitization and an exhortation)
Keynote Address by H.E. Dr. IzBen C. Williams to National and Regional Leaders and other high-level officials of the Caribbean Community of Nations, attending the Regional Symposium on Violence Prevention as a Public Health Issue, and its related Crime Challenge, at Trinidad’s Hyatt Regency, 17-18 April 2023
Mitochondrial and metabolic features of salugenesis and the healing cycle | Robert K. Naviaux (2023)
Abstract
Pathogenesis and salugenesis are the first and second stages of the two-stage problem of disease production and health recovery. Salugenesis is the automatic, evolutionarily conserved, ontogenetic sequence of molecular, cellular, organ system, and behavioral changes that is used by living systems to heal. It is a whole-body process that begins with mitochondria and the cell. The stages of salugenesis define a circle that is energy- and resource-consuming, genetically programmed, and environmentally responsive. Energy and metabolic resources are provided by mitochondrial and metabolic transformations that drive the cell danger response (CDR) and create the three phases of the healing cycle: Phase 1 — Inflammation, Phase 2 — Proliferation, and Phase 3 — Differentiation. Each phase requires a different mitochondrial phenotype. Without different mitochondria there can be no healing. The rise and fall of extracellular ATP (eATP) signaling is a key driver of the mitochondrial and metabolic reprogramming required to progress through the healing cycle. Sphingolipid and cholesterol-enriched membrane lipid rafts act as rheostats for tuning cellular sensitivity to purinergic signaling. Abnormal persistence of any phase of the CDR inhibits the healing cycle, creates dysfunctional cellular mosaics, causes the symptoms of chronic disease, and accelerates the process of aging. New research reframes the rising tide of chronic disease around the world as a systems problem caused by the combined action of pathogenic triggers and anthropogenic factors that interfere with the mitochondrial functions needed for healing. Once chronic pain, disability, or disease is established, salugenesis-based therapies will start where pathogenesis-based therapies end.
Graphical abstract
Commercial determinants of health | thelancet.com | vichealth.vic.gov.au (2023)
Published: March 23, 2023
Executive Summary
Commercial actors can contribute positively to health and society, and many do, providing essential products and services. However, a substantial group of commercial actors are escalating avoidable levels of ill health, planetary damage, and inequity — the commercial determinants of health. While policy solutions are available, they are not currently being implemented, and the costs of harm caused by some products and practices are coming at a great cost to individuals and society.
A new Lancet Series on the commercial determinants of health provides recommendations and frameworks to foster a better understanding of the diversity of the commercial world, potential pathways to health harms or benefits, and the need for regulatory action and investment in enterprises that advance health, wellbeing, equity, and society.
Follow Energy Patterns to Build Healthy Systems | Sally J. Goerner | Circular Conversations
Sally J. Goerner is the Director of the Research Alliance for Regenerative Economics (RARE), former Science Advisor to the Capital Institute, and Managing Director of the North Carolina Sustainable Community Fund. With advanced degrees in engineering, systems science, and psychology, Dr. Goerner has lectured worldwide on how the Energy Network Sciences (ENS) create a common-sense narrative on how to achieve socioeconomic vitality by revitalising human networks. Dr. Goerner has authored over 50 articles and 5 books, including ‘After the Clockwork Universe: The Emerging Science and Culture of integral Society’ (1999) and ‘Sustainability as the Cutting Edge of Great Change’ (2007). Over her prolific career, Sally has been on a mission to contribute to a rigorous and unifying framework providing practitioners in different fields the systemic vision required to co-create the reforms we need for a healthy future.
What causes such a society to undergo a comprehensive change of life? The answer is that oligarchy is a cultural system that creates systemic problems by coloring all things. It’s not just economic – it’s political, environmental, agricultural, education. When multiple, interlocking, systemic problems happen at the same time, it creates huge pressure inside the society. In the beginning, nobody knows what to do – they are just casting about focusing on individual problems. Then, some of these people become reformers – heretics from the old system. They will figure out better ways in their area of concern: religion, science, education. Great change happens when the pressures get so large that there is a kind of tipping point. You can see this happening right now. Regular people are so fed up with the old way, that they’re willing to go with something new. That’s the point we’re at right now. You can’t predict whether we’re going to pick up effective reforms or not—after all, demagogues are rising and America elected Trump! Martin Luther had a great line: ‘the mad mob cares not that it be better, only that it be different. And, hence they get bees for flies and then hornets for bees’. My mission in life is to try to build well-informed self-organisation, because if the framework gets in place so that people that are in all different fields can see how their reforms fit together, then we can use its clarity and power to move this society in the right direction.
Economies of Life: Patterns of Health and Wealth | Bill Sharpe (2010)
Economies of Life argues cogently that there is a ‘default assumption that there is only one economy in our lives – the economy which is the one based on money. Our position is that there are many economies, of which the one based on money is just one, and that they all contribute to the health and sustainability of our shared lives’. To extend this thinking, money is the currency of trade, and art is the currency of experience.
In his collection of five essays, Bill Sharpe uses the principles of ecological thinking to redefine our hitherto narrow understanding of terms like economy and value. The essays consider – with poetic sensitivity and intellectual clarity – what keeps each economy healthy, what sort of wealth each one accumulates and what sort of policies are most supportive of innovation and sustainability in a changing world.
Bill Sharpe and a small group of other IFF members, working with the Watershed Media Centre in Bristol, took as the starting point for their inquiry the question ‘Can we help people who fund the arts develop better policies if we use ecological thinking to understand how the arts work in society and in the economy?’
The insights resulting from Economies of Life offer an ecologically informed and dynamic framework for understanding creativity, the arts and how the arts should be funded into the future.
The Five Essays
- Homo ecologicus, Homo economicus, Homo poeticus
- Patterns of Shared Life
- Art is the Currency of Experience
- Economies of Life
- Producing the Future
Social Philosophy and Oncology | G. Baruchello and E. Hjörleifsdóttir (2014)
McMurtry’s work offers a contribution to the understanding, as well as to development of standards for the measurement, of human well-being, so that progress and regress may be interpreted in ways that mainstream economic criteria neglect or fail to ascertain, both in theory and in practice. The importance of determining novel standards and indicators is considerable, and widely acknowledged by many academics and politicians (for example, the 2008–2009 Stiglitz-Sen-Fitoussi Commission created by the French Government), but above all it is important to reconceptualise economic phenomena so as to re-orient them in line with life-based criteria.
First, it has already been highlighted that the type of ‘growth’ conceptualised and pursued in today’s global market has had systemic negative effects upon life at many levels, to the point of making possible the explanation of said implications by means of a cancer-based explanatory model. ‘Real capital’ as ‘life capital’ is both unseen and harmed by standard economic thought (CSC2013, p. 12).
Second, in the wake of the current economic crisis, the same global market has been proven equally unable to attain ‘growth’ on its own life-blind terms, that is, in terms of pecuniary aggrandisement for money investors and/or managers (cf. Crotty, 2000). ‘Real capital’ as sheer ‘money’ is not there either, especially if one considers that the vast meltdowns of the last few decades have been caused by speculative bubbles in exponentially ‘leveraged’ masses of currency without any ‘grounding’ in ‘a medium of exchange and capital’ such as ‘gold, labour, or livestock’ (CSC2013, p. 12).
The system’s inherent rationality, which economics textbooks presuppose, is to be seriously questioned, and that is what McMurtry’s work does, consistent with Castoriadis’ (2005a, p. 129) poignant characterisation of the Socratic role that philosophers are expected to play in genuinely democratic societies: the possibility and the ability to call established institutions and significations into question. Whether he will be listened to, we do not know. However, responding to a cancer diagnosis by avoiding what alone can work is fatal.
