A big part of knowledge is understanding where to find the answers. In today’s world, global organisations are constantly challenged with disparate pockets of information created within different functional silos and business units. They find it increasingly difficult to locate specific subject matter experts quickly and efficiently. Social networking tools with powerful search capabilities provide a platform to expedite these connections. If organisations cannot effectively connect people and resources across regions, functions and networks, they cannot increase service capabilities.

All of the world’s knowledge is in the air to be plucked down by our telephone. Of course it’s also all the world’s disinformation, misinformation, spam, porn, Nigerian frauds, urban legends, hoaxes. So how do you find what you want and how do you know that it’s true? Those seem like to me both extremely important questions today . . . .

The answer, says Judy Breck, is nothing less than to change both where we look and the way we ascertain truthfulness.

Those stage theories reflected a time when most people marched through life predictably: marrying at an early age; then having children when young; then work, work, work; then maybe a midlife crisis; then retirement; then death. Those ‘passages’ theories evaporated with changing social and economic conditions that blew the predictability of our lives to hell.

And so person permanence may be the final cognitive hurdle that gets in the way of our effectively realizing the dead as they truly are—infinitely in situ, inanimate carbon residue. Instead it’s much more “natural” to imagine them as existing in some vague, unobservable locale, very much living their dead lives.

Earth’s oceans, we are reminded, form a single interconnected body of water. Its species and currents are not constrained by labels such as Atlantic and Pacific, so why should their interpretation? Sections meld seamlessly into one another, but information in each is presented in a constrained manner so that if you do, say, jump from a stuffed penguin in Poles to a preserved Coelacanth (the giant fish considered extinct until a fisherman found one off the coast of South African in 1938), a visitor can still learn or experience at each. With the exception of the Journey Through Time exhibit — which explores the slow march of evolution that began underwater — there is never a progression to follow, no order by which a visitor must read or look. In this way, touring the hall feels a lot like surfing the Web.

After a day or two, I found myself reading this anthology as if it were a series of reports from a distant planet in a distant time—as an appendix, perhaps, to Doris Lessing’s Canopus in Argos novels. Reading American Earth in that light helped make several things clear. First, each document in the volume is a minority report—sometimes a minority of one. The assumptions, the hopes, the arguments in nearly every one of these pieces, no matter when they were written, are contradicted by the way the vast majority of Americans live and by the political and economic structures that determine that lifestyle. Second, the fundamental environmentalist arguments—the fundamental perceptions—are unchanging over time; only the details vary. We are still catching up to Thoreau, still coming to terms with the outrage George Perkins Marsh expressed in 1864, his worries about “climatic excess” and our “restless love of change.” Third, writers in every generation take a crack at finding the crystalline argument that will induce an epiphany in skeptical readers—for nothing less than an epiphany will do to persuade them to change the way they go about living. Yet every generation fails, in part because skeptical readers so seldom pick up this kind of writing or submit to its evidence.

Her conclusion is also worth noting. She reaches for Kafka (There is infinite hope, but not for us.) and writes regretfully: I would say something different if I could. I have every faith in nature’s recuperative powers….What I doubt is our ability, as a species, to see and, having seen, to continue to pay attention.

People are not assets. Caring isn’t just about admiring the charismatic leaders, the people that everybody likes, or the in crowd. This is the big caring we do that shows we “care, like we really mean it.” It’s about words and actions that everybody sees and recognizes. There’s an old adage that says, “People don’t care how much you know, they want to know how much you care.”