Zoe Weil, co-founder and president of the Institute for Humane Education (IHE), is considered a pioneer in the comprehensive humane education movement. She remains my go-to person for learning about how to make the world a better place for all beings, human and nonhuman, and her new book called Solutionary Way: Transform Your Life, Your Community, and the World for the Better is now my go-to source for explaining how to solve problems in ways that do the most good and least harm for everyone and why solutionary is not synonymous with problem-solver. Here's what she had to say about her landmark work.
Marc Bekoff: What is a solutionary, why did you write The Solutionary Way, and what is MOGO?
Zoe Weil: I wrote The Solutionary Way because the world desperately needs solutionaries: people who identify unsustainable, inhumane, and unjust systems and transform them so they do the most good and least harm for people, animals, and ecosystems. Ensuring that we solve problems in ways that do the most good and least harm for everyone, what I call MOGO (short for MOst GOod), is the ethical foundation underlying solutionary thinking and action and why solutionary is not synonymous with problem-solver. Engineers can solve the problem of blowing up a mountaintop for coal removal, but they are not solutionaries.
Solutionaries are also not the same as humanitarians. Humanitarians work to alleviate suffering, whether of people or nonhuman animals. Humanitarianism is essential, but we also need........