News – Mark Lundegren

Third Book In View

September 1, 2022

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As September of 2022 begins, I am in the midst of final proofreading of my third book, and am on track for its publication in early 2023.

Regular followers of my updates will know that the project involves conversion of my HumanaNatura website and natural health programs into book form. Some of this material dates back to 2002 and all of it has undergone multiple iterations over the years. Notably, these changes now include fairly substantial new revisions and refinements to this material, as I have worked to create the book and finalize this extended project exploring modern personal health.

What may be less clear is that the new book also will complete a long-planned three-book series, and in particular will form the first of the three books in the series, even as it is the last of the works to be published as a book. This natural health trilogy of mine is a long-term effort I have been working on for several years, and successively explores nature and health at a personal, social, and philosophical level. The other two books in the series and progression are The Seven Keys of Natural Life and Nature’s One Commandment, each already published but likely to be modestly updated by me during 2023 and 2024.

HN Screenshot

If you are not familiar with the HumanaNatura website, and its health programs and supporting materials, the above graphic is a screenshot of its longstanding home page. For much of the past twenty years, the site has offered personal guidance and assessment tools for exploring and promoting naturally healthy modern eating, exercise, lifestyle, and community. Most of this material will live on in the new book, and the HumanaNatura website will be closed down with the book’s publication (the website’s companion blog will continue on, however). If you want to tour or download materials from the soon-to-be-retired website – http://www.humananatura.org – the next few weeks would be the time.

I will provide another update on the new book, notably including its title, when publication is imminent. In the meantime, expect to find me at work, finalizing this project and moving toward completion of my three-book series, throughout the fall of 2022 and into 2023.

Thank you for your new or ongoing interest in and support of my work.

Health & best wishes,

Mark

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Nature’s One Commandment

November 16, 2020

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I am pleased to announce publication of my new book, Nature’s One Commandment.

More than three years in the making, Nature’s One Commandment is the philosophical companion to my earlier and more practically-minded book, The Seven Keys of Natural Life. This new book seeks to expand both popular and technical appreciation of the natural phenomenon of health, its central place in evolving life and systems, and its core attributes, demands, lessons, and opportunities.

Nature’s One Commandment begins with the ready observation that human experience is marked by recurring ideals, values, norms, or common aims – from happiness and justice to honesty and growth. These valuations may vary in strength and scope by person and culture, but overall prove persistent and indeed inextricable from our humanity and natural place in the world.

More importantly, the book then explores at length how and why one ideal naturally supersedes, underlies, permeates, and informs all other values and goals, human and beyond. This probing work of philosophy extends my earlier ideas to show that all ideals are naturally nested within and subordinate to life’s most essential challenge – the health or advancement of organisms in time.

In the book, I consider twenty-four perennial ideals, examining how each naturally arises and can aid life, but is not a complete end and even may limit health. Emerging across the chapters are several crucial themes: understanding and measuring health, changing natural value and values, the nature of individuality and sociality, and the natural interconnection and frequent synergy of all recurring ideals.

From beginning to end, Nature’s One Commandment explores how and why health is the most essential or ultimately selected natural quality or ideal, among all possible qualities and ideals, and the crucial implications this has for human life, priority, and action, today and always.

Across this broad exploration of modern and natural life, there are historical and scientific discussions of each ideal, offering the curious reader a rich compendium of insights regarding the ideals and aims that guide us all, each day and across our lives.

Whatever ideals, values, or goals principally drive or inspire you, I would encourage you to review Nature’s One Commandment, and consider its many lessons and central premise that health ultimately waits at the core of all we do.

Thank you for your new or ongoing interest in and support of my work.

Health & best wishes,

Mark

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The World’s Healthiest Nation

June 17, 2017

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In an earlier post, I posed the question, which is the world’s most advanced nation?

For that discussion, I considered several ways we might measure national advancement, and how each measure – or each alternative framing of the question – produced very different national rankings.

At the end of the discussion, and as I did in my first book The Seven Keys of Natural Life, I encouraged readers to consider a relatively new measure called the HPI, produced by the New Economics Foundation. In my reading, the HPI can serve as a rough or preliminary measure of national adaptivity, or adaptive health. HPI stands for Happy Planet Index, though for me it would be better named, and in any case thought of, as a Healthy People Index.

Importantly, however adaptive health is best measured, and thus predicted, for me adaptive health is the ultimate performance metric, whether for individuals, groups, species, or whole ecosystems. In nature, health – here defined as the ability to steadily survive over time and amid progressive challenges or uncertainty – is the final test of life, and therefore the ultimate measure of all measures.

Some Nations Are Wealthier or Happier, But Which Ones Are Healthier?

Since my earlier advocacy of the HPI, the metric has undergone an important and I believe positive change, increasing from three to four internal variables. In this post, I’d like to review the change, highlight why I believe the HPI is improved via the added variable, and explain reasons why the HPI remains an important preliminary or suggestive measure of what matters most at a national level today – adaptivity or each nation’s likely potential to survive, and therefore thrive, in time.

Continue reading “The World’s Healthiest Nation”

Ready For Prime Time!

September 15, 2012

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I’ve spent the last couple of weeks re-working and improving the early materials on this site, describing my Natural Strategy method and planned workshops and retreats, and speaking and media work.

It’s a work in progress, one that I first envisioned about a year ago while beginning work on the new sixth edition of HumanaNatura. As such, the new materials you see are not perfect or final, but I think they are ready for prime time. In the least, they are good enough so that I cannot use them as an excuse not to start doing interesting strategy posts, and to begin a larger project spanning this new area of focus for me.

If you are interested in following the development of this blog and the larger body of Natural Strategy ideas and techniques it will introduce, here’s a quick preview of what to expect:

#1 Posts – look for at least weekly posts on personal and organizational strategy here…discussing specific techniques and learnings from my workshops, highlighting good ideas and practices when I find them (or they are sent to me), and translating my growing focus on translating the principle of natural progressivity into modern life and work practices.

#2 Marketing – good or new strategy ideas really don’t make a difference until they get into the world and improve the functioning of people and groups. With this idea in mind, I’ll be creating 2-3 marketing campaigns in the next few weeks to introduce my Natural Strategy programs. If you have a similar to-do in your work, I’ll be favoring creativity and a few compelling propositions over large advertising outlays…so maybe my work can aid yours (and vice versa).

#3 New Book – with the new blog ready, next week I will start outlining a new book spanning my seven workshops. I see this project as important not just as a publicity vehicle, but also because the workshops all revolve around some central ideas and have a natural integration or progression to them…but in ways that are not perfectly clear until it is somewhat carefully described. After eight months of intensive editing work on HumanaNatura, I am not really ready for the demanding work (at least for me) of writing again, but fortunately the outlining portion of the book project will take at least until the end of the year. Most likely, I will not put fingertips to keyboard until January.

Feel free to subscribe and follow along as I develop my new blog and begin this larger body of work to communicate my Natural Strategy techniques. And definitely please comment or send a note with your ideas, if and whenever you want. I’d enjoy hearing from you.

Health & best wishes,

Mark