I will exert the fullest practical effort toward the creation of a society in which the maximum role of government is the protection of life, liberty and property.

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Welcome to my web site!

 I was born and grew up in the south of central Quebec, in a region historically referred to as the Eastern Townships, where I developed an inherent curiosity and intrigue with the forces and processes that produce and control all the phenomena in our world of living things.  Fortunately I matured in an area of the world and in a culture free of oppressive dogma and bias - one that encourages imparting knowledge and skills in schools, colleges and universities.  My desire was always to perceive and thoroughly comprehend nature with veracity, which is why I ardently developed my knowledge of natural phenomena with the principles and empirical processes of discovery and demonstration.

As a scientist I am persistent in my worldwide alert for new knowledge, closely observe and sagaciously evaluate current trends and conditions and have developed faculties of discernment for what is true, right and lasting.  Outside the classroom and science laboratory, I encounter a panorama of diversified humanity with all its limitless motives for behavior, conducting their daily routines in a sleepwalk of dangerous complacency, oblivious to the deadliness of global jihad if it is allowed to expand, addicted to the raptures of sanitized infotainment, living under a system of well funded, coercive and technologically sophisticated governments which undertakes hideous activities that would have been unconceivable to past governments.

When I broaden my perspective to include a global view, I see a fragile planetary ecosystem that is showing severe signs of strain from the exponential growth of the human population. The pollution of air, water and soil is dangerously eroding our environmental resources, threatening the life-support system on which we all depend. Two hundred years of burning fossil fuels, with our continued ideal of continuously increasing fossil fuels consumption, is adding to the problem of global warming. We have passed this era of cheap fossil fuels as reserves and supplies dwindle and maintaining current production rates has become increasingly difficult and expensive. Now, unless there is a coordinated agreement for cooperation, geopolitical competition for dwindling oil supplies could trigger international military strife over this and other natural resources.

The human population explosion is also creating difficult social problems and tensions.  With technological advances in transportation, numbers of pluralistic societies are increasing with widespread examples of racial, political, religious, economic, language prejudices with its unreasoned feelings of superiority and discriminatory practices against particular groups.  With technological advances in communication I must daily face all the suffering, resentment, conflict and possible violence that such discrimination engenders locally, nationally and internationally.

As a technologist I advocate the application of modern science to rapidly develop and implement sustainable technologies to enhance the quality of living and solve a host of problems and dilemmas facing humanity today.  As an environmentalist I work toward protecting the natural environment from destruction or pollution, since the environment is the primary influence on intellectual growth and cultural development.  I understand the cause and impacts of global warming and fossil fuel resource depletion, which I describe in my book "Provident Living in a Technological World - A Canadian Wake-up Call".

As a preservationist I advocate the protection of life from injury, peril or harm, the controlled use and systematic protection of natural resources, the maintenance of abstract knowledge and important skills. As a humanitarian I advocate the sole moral obligation of humankind is the improvement of human welfare. I adhere to the tenet that all humans are created equal and have natural and unalienable rights to life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, security of the person and his private property, together with the right to defend them in the best manner they can.

About this Web Site

This web site is dedicated to sustainability, self-sufficiency, reclamation and assertion of the individual's birthright of conscious awareness and free will.  A sustainable future is the only viable option to prevent ecological suicide from becoming our reality.  Sustainability is achieved through the ideals of self-sufficiency and strict application of the consumer conservation ethic to reduce consumption, increase recycling and reuse of material resources and products, and rethink how to restore compostable organic waste back into the soil, how to recover energy from existing flows of energy, or how to capture energy from renewable energy sources.  This is universal truth, accepted and recognized by over 90% of the world's scientists.

Sustainability is an economic, social, and ecological concept.  It is intended to be a means of configuring civilization and human activity so that society and its members are able to meet their needs and express their greatest potential in the present, while preserving biodiversity and natural ecosystems, planning and acting for the ability to maintain these ideals indefinitely.  Put in simpler terms, sustainability is providing for the best for people and the environment both now and in the indefinite future.  Sustainability affects every level of organization, from the local neighborhood to the entire globe.

Self-sufficiency is personal autonomy with little, or no, technological conveniences from outside of what is produced by the self-sufficient individual independent of state subsidies.  This concept is extended to the development of self-sufficient communities - a cooperative and autonomous association of people (men and women) living in the same locality, united voluntarily to meet their common economic, social and cultural needs and aspirations based on the ethical values of honesty, openness, self-help, self-responsibility, social responsibility and caring for others, democracy, equality, equity and solidarity.  A self-sufficient community is a collective of creative, productive minds each with unique talents where innovation is encouraged, property and the individual rights of others, is respected.  Everyone in the self-sufficient community takes responsibility for themselves, their actions, and their decisions, and there are no pretenses or false realities - everything is as it seems.  Everyone in the self-sufficient community understands the importance to play an active role in the identification of the real needs of the collective, and a community that produces its own foods can reduce reliance on far-off food producers and stabilize its food supply.

However sustainability and self-sufficiency cannot be achieved until the modern individual musters courage to reconcile his cognitive dissonances, reclaim his birthright of conscious awareness, assert his free will and assume responsibility to question the assumptions of the operant societal worldview rather than just blindly living life in submissive accordance with dominant, out-dated norms and geriatric assumptions.  Thus the individual will overcome his state of despondence, break out of societal paradigm paralysis and confront the current state of the real world and take control of the tyranny, fanaticism and ignorance that takes true knowledge away from people to keep them in darkness and subdued.  In the words of the Swiss Psychologist Carl Gustav Jung "It is the individual's task to differentiate himself from all the others and stand on his own feet. All collective identities . . . interfere with the fulfillment of this task. Such collective identities are crutches for the lame, shields for the timid, beds for the lazy, nurseries for the irresponsible ".

Our Birthright of Conscious Awareness and Free Will

The modern human species is an interesting mix, though there are underlying basic strivings common to people world over.  We are complex multicellular organisms - the result of a biological heritage that has adapted to, and evolved with, our planetary ecosystems and its physical environments.  The quality that distinguishes us from inanimate matter is manifested in our conscious awareness and free will.  Our highly developed central nervous system gives us capacities of sensation that makes us inwardly attentive to our condition of existence.  Consciousness originates in our brain that provides us with the power of mind - the collective faculties of thinking, reasoning, perception, acquiring and applying knowledge, emotion, imagination, memory and the ability or discretion to choose unconstrained by external circumstances or by volition of agency, fate or divine being.

Conscious awareness is a quality of the human mind to perceive the relationship between oneself and one's environment with subjectivity, self-awareness, sentience and sapience. Perception is the process of acquiring, interpreting, selecting and organizing sensory information. We gather information about the environment through our sensory organs and interact with it through our actions. Accurate perceptual information is critical for appropriate behavior, since our actions are consequential with potentially positive or negative effects on one's self and maybe other people. We are responsible to ourselves and to others for our actions; our minds must explicitly understand that one exists as an individual, separate from other people, with private thoughts and free will to accept or deny the influences of an external world with a particular bias. To make this distinction, to act intelligently and responsibly, a person must have facilities of wisdom, discernment and good judgment.

Much of our behavior is motivated in physiological processes that maintain internal equilibrium because we must have homeostasis to maintain stability and to survive.  To sustain life we must have food, clean water and air (oxygen), rest and sleep, means to maintain constant body temperature and a signal system (pain) that will enable us to avoid tissue damage.  Prolonged failure to maintain homeostasis can result in impaired health and intellectual functioning, increased susceptibility to invading microorganisms and disease, and, ultimately, death.  Our biological equilibrium can never be satisfied permanently and our biological drives resists disintegration or decay.  Consequently we go to remarkable lengths directing much of our energy to maintain the constancy of our normal internal environment and have developed higher forms of activity (elaborate systems of agriculture, food preservation and storage, homes equipped with heating systems that offer security, comfort and happiness) group affiliation and commodity exchange in order to establish a physical and social environment that is as constant as possible.

Homeostasis does not account for all types of human behavior.  We are all motivated toward the actualization and fulfillment of our potentialities.  Actualization strivings toward fulfillment take different forms with different people, depending on their abilities, values, and life situations.  Whatever particular forms actualization strivings take, there appear to be tendencies common to all mankind: 1) Developing one's potentials and creative self-expression - may take the form of building new competencies and improving old ones, developing individual capabilities in various areas and using them in creative and constructive ways.  The development of potentialities also takes the form of learning more about the physical and social world of which one is part.  Where a person does have special talents, it may be highly frustrating to be denied the opportunity for their development and expression.  2) Finding increased satisfactions - to enrich the range and quality of experiences through the exercise of creative and inventive capacities.  3) Building rich linkages with the world - by forming warm and meaningful relations with others and experience a deep sense of fulfillment felt with the improvement of life for others.  4) Finding increased meaning in one's life - is closely allied with the striving to develop one's potentials and "become a person" that the individual feels he should be.

Surrender of Conscious Awareness and Free Will: Freedom's Paradox

Because of our great capacity for learning, remembering, reasoning, planning, and delaying gratification, through our use of language, perceptual, cognitive, and motor skills, through our concept of an integrated self with a past and a future, with organization of a social structure, mankind has become the master of this planet.  A persistent theme is man's quest for freedom from dependence, restraints, and external control.  Along the way man has confronted the forces that can diminish his potential.  Our conquest over the creatures and physical matter of the earth was developed and refined because it helped us survive the demands of a hostile environment through better prediction and control.  Paradoxically the very attributes that make possible mankind's greatest achievements for such beautiful dreams also, if misused, can cause the greatest misery for such horrible nightmares.

We respond to stimuli sympathetically.  People behave as they do not because of unseen supernatural forces or equally unseen internal forces of the mind, but because of empirically established patterns of environmental stimulation.  Family, culture and society profoundly influence our behavior.  In the normal process of forming a consistent, organized personality, a particular combination of early life experiences and prevailing societal conditions can set the stage for a perversion of personality.  The best criterion for determining the normality of individual, or group, behavior can be evaluated in terms of adaptation with the environment.  Highly adaptive behavior strives for the survival and well-being of mankind, adheres to the probity of principles and practices that fosters the dignity, equality and growth potential of the individual.  At the opposite end of abnormal, maladaptive behavior are the enlivening and exhilarating effects of logical reasoning from the illusive mouths of ideological sectarian philosophers or partisan politicians and their groups, where new prejudices are taught and learned.  Maladaptive behavior breeds ethnocentrism with all the racial, political, religious, economic, linguistic and other discriminatory practices against particular groups and all the suffering, resentment, conflict and possible violence that such discrimination engenders.

Along a continuum that extends from highly maladaptive behavior at one extreme to highly adaptive behavior at the other, the individual with conscious awareness pragmatically perceives his present relationship with his environment and asserts his free will for potential to choose an alternative reaction to diminish and eliminate negative stimulus conditions, enhance physiological and self-actualization needs.  However, man in an environment of maladaptive behavior such as in a regimented culture, who lives under despotic rule or exists in conditions of economic subsistence, is overwhelmed with extreme deprivation, unpredictable noxious stimulation, or aversive confinement from which there is no escape, this person must struggle for mere physical survival and has little concern, time or energy for personal growth.  Behavior motivated primarily by maintenance needs is unhealthy, since it leaves the individual little opportunity for mediation by evaluation, the development of potentials and self-actualization.  People in such situations usually experience a sense of frustration and dissatisfaction, loss of personal dignity and worth.  Life seems meaningless and incomplete, feelings of helplessness and hopelessness can lead to death even in previously healthy humans for they are missing the fulfillment of themselves as human beings.

Under less pressing environmental conditions, with the gratification for food and safety, the individual is free to devote his energies and meet his needs for self-actualization.  The proper goal of every man is to become "self-actualized" which represents the healthiest and most truly human orientation.  The individual with conscious awareness, bound to growth toward independence and self-direction, develops a clear sense of personal identity, his competencies and values.  The price of forming a strong identification with an external power or a rigid ideology is an inadequate identity of one's own.  The perpetuation of value assumptions and social norms that diminish man, present and future, that were blindly accepted, which operate as inner guides and controls of behavior (which we refer to as conscience), may now need reappraisal for a clear distinction between fantasy and reality for a moral value orientation that bears one's own stamp.  Thus the individual may need to include sufficient emancipation from family and social groups to be a person in one's own right, so he will not merely view himself as a product of past conditioning and his life experiences, but as a potentially active agent who can develop and use his capacities for building the kind of life he chooses for himself, his children, and the kind of world he chooses for mankind.  As result, the individual will mature with a new face on reality, learn to control impulse, emotion and desire to use them for the enrichment of living and to establish satisfying interpersonal relationships, delay immediate gratification in the interest of long-range goals, replace wishful thinking with hard work, thoughts with action, and faith with coherent contingencies.

The stronger the sense of individual personal identity a person develops, the more likely he will be to show autonomy, independent judgment, and creativity to enable values, gained at great risk and pain, to be enjoyed by later generations.  For some individuals the process of self-identification is a very hazardous one psychologically, with the danger that they may develop a feeling of alienation rather than of belonging, especially if the society does not value or actively punishes independence.  Freedom, by placing responsibility for choice and action on the individual instead of on external authorities, can be frightening to an insecure person.  Some individuals learn to fear freedom and to gain a feeling of strength and safety by identifying with a strong authority, gaining self-confidence by unquestioning acceptance of clear standards or a rigid ideology and rejecting any deviation or innovation.

Proud to live under two flags

This page was last updated on January 31, 2012