I was studying a diagram my husband shared with me that compared the deepest holes humanity has ever created. It showed mines, scientific laboratories, caves, tunnels, and boreholes stretching thousands of meters beneath the Earth’s […]
Author: Jennifer Buergermeister
Educator, Advocate, Author, Friend
The Teenage Observers
The teenagers are watching. Not just listening to what adults say — but measuring what they do. Adults tell them to recycle while entire industries normalize waste. They ask young people to conserve water while […]
Surviving Juno
Juno did not enter our lives. She detonated into them. She was a puppy in size the way a tornado is a breeze: technically true, wildly misleading. All legs and fur and velocity. The first […]
God’s tear awaits a broken heart
It’s only when our hearts break can God’s tear slip inside and fill it with something that wasn’t there before so that we too may someday help someone similarly bereaved. 🥹🫶🏼 From my dream journaled […]
What world do you want?
We have made simple goodness seem somehow unsophisticated. Compassion is mocked as weakness. Kindness is treated as naivete. And yet John Donne knew four centuries ago what we seem determined to forget: “No man is an island.” The world we live in is made from the daily moral choices of ordinary people — and the world most of us long for is still within reach, if only we would have the courage to choose it.
The extinction event is not coming. It is here.
Scientists have been warning for years that Earth is entering a sixth mass extinction. The newest evidence suggests the collapse of biodiversity is not a distant threat but a present-tense crisis — and humanity is […]
Order in Costume
The fatal collision at New York’s LaGuardia Airport on the night of March 22 involved an Air Canada Express CRJ-900 landing from Montreal and a fire truck crossing Runway 4 while responding to a separate […]
Where the Break Becomes Form
A mind, like any living system, cannot remain alive by becoming infinitely rigid. General systems theory, as Ludwig von Bertalanffy argued, distinguishes living open systems from closed mechanical ones. What remains alive does not endure by freezing into certainty. Living systems persist through exchange, adaptation and dynamic order, not through the false safety of static equilibrium. Too much closure may preserve appearance for a time, but it weakens resilience. Life does not flourish through perfect sealing. It flourishes through disciplined openness.
Opinion | The Feeling That the World Is Ending
There is a quiet sentence you hear more often now, spoken not with drama but with weary sincerity: It feels like the end of humanity.
The headlines offer little reassurance. Climate systems are destabilizing. Democracies are straining under polarization. Technology is advancing faster than the institutions meant to guide it. To many observers, the foundations of modern civilization appear to be cracking all at once.
Yet history suggests something surprising. Moments that feel like collapse are often moments of transformation. Civilizations rarely end overnight; more often, they pass through periods of profound instability as outdated systems give way to new ones.
The question facing humanity today may not be whether the world is ending, but what kind of world is struggling to be born.
When Facts Are Not Enough: Trust, Credibility, and the Limits of the Misinformation Narrative
Public trust in the media has been declining for decades, but the current moment feels different. It is not simply that people disagree with journalists or dislike particular outlets. Many no longer believe journalism is […]