I'm a professor at UC Berkeley in neuroscience. I study the human visual system.

I teach a seminar titled "Stewardship of the Earth and its Peoples: The Next 60 Years". One goal of this seminar it to develop plans for a quite large course to inform Freshmen of all the opportunities available at UC Berkeley to get training in transforming the earth and its peoples in the directions outlined in Hawken's "Blessed Unrest".  The course would consist of series of lectures academics in the Bay Area who are involved with stewardship, transformation and sustainability issues.

I'll introduce tne item that sets me apart from my academic peers by sharing my favorite quote. It is from Einstein:

          Religion without science is blind.  Science without religion is lame.

I think that one of the dangers to the future is unhealthy religion and the best way to deal with unhealthy religion is through healthy (progressive) religion. A major challenge in that regard is for the secular world to learn to appreciate progressive religion. My particular approach to that challenge is to see God language as powerful metaphor and poetry. There are two problems with metaphoric God language: 1) Religious folks fear that seeing God language as metaphoric weakens it.  But I claim that when examined carefully at the deepest level, a good understanding of quantum mechanics informs us that reality isn't as solid as classical physics thought and its underpinnings are closer to being metaphoric than to being solid (I should note at this point that my PhD is in theoretical particle physics and that I have published in early string theory articles). 2) The secular world gets upset with my statements that God created life forms including humans by purely Darwinian mechanisms (metaphor again). I see one of my future roles is to find an approach to get that last statement to sound sensible non-theists. I see building bridges between science and religion as an important step to achieving Paul Hawken's dream. Further details on this aspect of my thinking can be found on my web site at cornea.berkeley.edu/duality.  Much of the material under the duality page was written in 2005 when I organized a workshop on Science and Spirit that was part of the launching of the Network of Spiritual Progressives. I look foward to meeting others interested in these ideas, in the activities of the Network of Spiritual Progressives and to other like minded folks living in the Bay Area.