According to a recent article in the Financial Times, "global leaders" are a relatively new set of professionals who work in multicultural and international environments. They are not necessarily leaders in the sense that they run nations or large transnational corporations. Instead, they are leaders in the sense that they are at the vanguard of building a fair, just, and sustainable global society. They recognize that personal gain and societal success are interlinked, and they strive to make their organizations responsive to the communities with which they work.

Global leaders work all over the world and engage in many kinds of work. For example, someone working with refugee resettlement in Denver, Colorado is a global leader. An Indian professor such as Subhasis Bhadra, who develops mental health interventions in the context of natural disaster recovery, is a global leader. People working to end human trafficking in Peru are global leaders.

Globalization has lead to complex problems that are larger than national boundaries, and these problems require novel solutions that no one has ever seen before. Global leaders are the people who are trying to find solutions to these problems. They approach a problem, imagine a solution, and then try to make that solution work. They are creative and independent people who thrive in multicultural settings. A global leader needs an education that helps them understand global issues, helps them build their analytical and critical thinking, prepares them for multicultural environments, and gives them the confidence to pursue their dreams. More than just obtaining new knowledge, a global leader needs an education that teaches them how to develop their own knowledge. Thus, many high schools are creating global studies programs that focus on these skills.

It has been a long time since I posted anything, but thought with all the new beginnings, now would be a great time. I am just starting to dig into my new job at Asahijuku Secondary School. It is a small program now, with only about 100 students. Over the next few years we plan to build on its strengths in science and languages to build a Global Studies program that will prepare our students to be global leaders. We currently have students from Japan, China, Thailand, and South Korea, and hope to create a truly global program by recruiting students from The Americas, Europe, Africa, Australasia, and the Middle East.

My wife and I moved back to Sendai after a 12 year hiatus. We are really excited to be back!  I am in the process of looking for teaching and research opportunities, as well as starting up a psychotherapy practice.

One of my goals is to provide mental health services to the English speaking community in Northern Japan, something that is sadly lacking.  Check out our website for Tohoku English Counseling Services here!

If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to let me know.  I look forward ot hearing from you!

Well, the website is finally coming together, as is my microryza crowdfunding project.  So, time to make a first blog post!

So, social scientist and musician?  That might seem like an unlikely pair, but in my mind, the go together perfectly.  How?  Because I enjoy things that are complicated.  I am happiest when I am at the edge and not quite sure what it is coming next.  And what is more complex than social systems and music?

Some time I may write more about my music, but today it is about my research.  As you may have guessed, I am interested in how social systems and ecosystems are intertwined.  Being trained in psychology and social work, I am firmly rooted in the social sciences, especially from a practical approach.  My basic assumption is that social systems are complex adaptive systems that react to their environment and attempt to continue on, much like a person, an animal, or a plant.  However, these human systems are dependent upon ecosystems.  I propose that this dependence is core to how social systems self-organize, and that therefore social and ecological systems must be studied in tandem.

I originally started picking up on this when reading Marx and Lenin.  I think it was in Lenin's "What's to Be Done?" that I really started to grasp this link when he discusses how politics and economy cannot be treated as separate spheres.  If economy is about the exchange of goods and services, that means material resources have a direct effect on political and economic systems.  Thus, there is a link between ecosystems and social systems.  I eventually moved on from the Marxist conception of political economy, but that is where I got started.  And why did I move on?  Because they had something wrong.  The incessant claims of collapse and revolution did not occur.  Of course, the issues they point to and underline so emphatically still exist, but their solution has so far failed to materialize.

After more reading, thinking, studying, and starting my doctoral studies, I began to feel that treating society as a complex adaptive system had good possibilities.  Working from there, I eventually discovered the Resilience Alliance and the Stockholm Resilience Centre.  My dissertation is thus based on looking at how a the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake caused a forced transformation in an agricultural community on the coast of Japan.  I am examining how that community is adapting to displacement and resettlement, looking specifically at how that is related to changes in their ecosystem.  I am using one of the major tools for examining changes in complex systems -- social network analysis (SNA).  SNA is one of three methodologies (the other two being agent-based modeling and systems modeling) that are particularly useful for exploring changes in systems.  The knowledge from this study will help us approach disaster risk reduction in new ways.  This is especially important in the context of climate change, which many believe will increase the number of environmental migrants (also know as climate refugees or ecomigrants).

So that is a little bit to get you started.  If you would like to learn more about resilience and social ecological systems  take a look at  http://www.resalliance.org and http://www.stockholmresilience.org.