9/3/06Â
Eric & all,
David’s sense of urgency is becoming more widespread, and I certainly think both quite rational and important, but still missing the required change in target.  We need to avoid multiplying the failure the last 50 years of environmentalism has produced.   It’s not wrong.  It just didn’t work.  To keep what I’m saying both clear and accurate, just say the problem is speed.   Our society is designed to accelerate change, perpetually, and the natural crisis you’d expect are starting to blow up faster than we can name them. Â
People are lousy at coming to clear consensus decisions on big complicated matters, and it’s imperative we do so faster and faster to keep up with the impacts of exponential growth.   The real problem is all the crises coming at once, an entirely predictable consequence of designing a system to have them come explosively faster.  The answer is to unplug it.  Hopelessly dreamy?  Hardly.  Every living thing that survives it’s initial growth spurt does the trick, nearly all with grace and beauty, often becoming something wonderfully new.  I think it’s clearly done from the inside since there’s nothing else in control.   Still, for us, it means learning a little about steering natural systems, and science has not really quite admitted they exist yet.  For some reason we just can’t find the formulas they follow…!  Yea, the whole situation does put us at a little disadvantage, including that it’s too late to head off lots of the disasters on the way.
If you think of humanity as a ship at sea, with a huge wave of environmental consequences about to break over our heads, my proposed fairly drastic financial measure, unplugging the financial accelerator, would have the effect of trimming but maintaining sails and turning the ship into the wave, hoping we don’t capsize as we ride it out.    Humanity is all together in this, but does anyone dare to ask the question?
… Can we communicate that there’s a little contradiction in the phrase ’steady growth’ ?    The fact that the closest straight line approximation to any exponential is a vertical line starting at the present is not a trivial matter for anyone required to walk the path.   Do you know what to do?
to save you wandering my site:
http://www.synapse9.com/prpr1.htm Â
http://www.synapse9.com/prpr2.htmÂ
Much more discussion is certainly warranted…
Phil Henshaw                      ¸¸¸¸.·´ ¯ `·.¸¸¸¸