writing

GENERAL

For a general audience, I write about a broad range of public policy issues. Many of my articles concern the relationship between society and the natural world. Others deal with the causes of violent conflict, failures of economic systems, and the impacts of technologies and increasing complexity on our lives. I also write about how we can adjust our values and worldviews and how we can innovate better to address our world’s enormous problems.

BOOKS

Environment Scarcity and Violence book

ACADEMIC

In the 1980s and 1990s, my academic writing largely focused on the links between environmental stress (for instance, water, forest and cropland scarcity) and violent conflict in poor countries. I also wrote about argument analysis and economic innovation. More recent academic papers deal with the causal architecture of global crises, new applications of cognitive mapping to conflict resolution, the phenomenon of dehumanization in extreme conflict, modeling of the structure of ideologies, and the use of complexity science to understand the growth and decline of social systems.

TRANSCRIPTS

Some of my speeches, lectures and interviews have been transcribed.