This winter I invited the women who were in legacy facilitator training with me to do a short writing exercise, not for the purpose of discerning values, but to provide a sense of generations, an appreciation of life and our mortality, and to address two of our universal needs: wanting to be known and remembered.
The ability to discern the value of content based on its popularity and the value that it provides in growing Netflix's subscriber count has increased over time, and as a result the company is being more picky about how it spends its licensing dollars.
To discern the value of the Copenhagen deal through the din of spin, look no further than the 9% drop in the European carbon market on Monday, where confidence vanished following President Obama's "historic accord".
Survival of the fittest was a fringe belief that caught on only when a resistant generation died off and younger, more open-minded people discerned its value.
It's comforting to believe that we get what we pay for, but discerning true value is as difficult as spotting a genuine Banksy canvas in a city brimming with imitations.
Moreover, even after one rightly discerns the value of an action per se and the value of undertaking a proposed action, experience shows that value perception does not compel either the will or the heart to provide a fitting response.
Techniques that attempt to discern public values around ecological systems without imposing contrived (e.g. only monetary) or unintentionally biased frameworks can be seen as advancing ecological economics as a post-normal science.
In virtue of their suffering and alienation, these individuals are well situated not only to discern which values and practices in their heritage deserve allegiance but also to identify shortcomings in the traditions of the groups to which they belong.
