a Care Giving Purpose – a neglected constituency

A three minute message originally for the UN,

Caregiving Purposes

(YouTube video)

As a way of life no one would make a practice of consuming ever more of their neighbor’s resources.  If we just pay someone else to do it for us though, and the profits are used to grow the process, people get so distracted they lose track of where the profits are coming from, … making the temporary fountain of wealth seem like a good enough idea to organize a whole civilization around.

The science I study clearly points to our society rapidly causing the greatest tragedy of the commons the earth has ever known.    We don’t recognize our roles in it, simply for not looking at how our money does what it does for us, passing on our requests for services and generating profits to grow our ever increasing requests.

By looking at money only in relation to our own needs we are “laundering” the information about what our incomes, spending and savings really do, to the earth and for us. It’s visible enough we could easily get the idea of if we wanted; that it’s using money to make money that grows wealth and overshoots, spoiling the wealth created.   So it’s our every-day practices of using money that overwhelm any way of creating reliable profits, passing on messages to add to demands beyond their limits rather than to care for the productive partnership people build with nature.

Spending the time and effort to see how our money system uses the earth has other returns. Gaining that ability to recognize how systems behave beyond our intent lifts a veil on new perceptions of nature and nature’s systems, with real benefits. Whether your first concern is cultural values, or economic ones, or religious ones, professional or artistic, it’s much the same.   To learn how nature can work for you, you need to first find how to recognize nature’s systems and how they work.

It lets you watch and become familiar with the many more kinds of individually behaving living things around you. You begin to notice the communities, cultures, economies, industries, professions, networks, governments, environments, ecologies, and people’s lives, etc, around you, in a new way. You notice we’ve been ignoring them as living things, and how they behave by themselves, as a quite important neglected constituency on earth.

Each living system has its own internal organization and lively behaviors, that developed as it grew, as our own did, and as those of every other living thing.   You may study them your own way, (no one actually has any other way…), but your approach needs to be a quite open minded and objective, like a scientist or a business person takes, or a parent takes, toward their care giving purpose, and use it to care for the earth.

 

Whole Culture Led not Technology Driven – getting SDG’s to really work

The UN’s idea of Sustainable Development Goals (SDG’s), as a “unified policy framework”, and seemingly everyone else’s too, turn out to be “missing something”,

Missing the glue that fits and holds the many parts together, high aspirations lacking a real method for connecting the parts

In the UN’s “Vision of a Future Worth Choosing

“The High-level Panel on Global Sustainability argues that by making transparent both the cost of action and the cost of inaction, political processes can summon both the arguments and the political will necessary to act for a sustainable future.”

Human cultures have NEVER changed according to plan, is the problem.  That’s now how societal change works.   How people are discussing the implementation of the SDG’s, called a “unified policy framework”, is almost entirely as just a list of ideals, almost like “complaints” about how economic development didn’t fulfill our best intentions over the past century…  No, it certainly didn’t.

What isn’t mentioned, though, is how to change that.  How would the economy’s normal steering mechanism might be changed, if it didn’t go where we’d want in the first place?   How would a new steering mechanism be created that would be more responsive to rational concerns about fairness and our role on earth?   Just a list of desires for what didn’t happen is really just wishful thinking, a delaying tactic perhaps, rather than addressing the problem.

The simple framing of this problem below, what steers the economy, is followed by my brief reports to CAUN on how the “connecting the parts” problem came up in the DESA workshops on implementing SDG’s.  The Workshop Agendas offered a fairly comprehensive view of the “technology push” transfer techniques being contemplated… which helps illustrate the basic problem that human cultures don’t learn that way.

the servant became master, the served the slave
A choice between Whole Culture Led and Technology Driven change...

A. Technology Driven Change, the “tech solution” – leaves cultures shaped to serve technology values, perhaps with ignorance of culture

B. Culture Motivated Change, “the cultural solution” – leaves technology shaped to serve cultural values, perhaps with ignorance of how things work

What thrives in nature is the cultural solution, when… cultures are able to understand what technologies are physically profitable, linked together to produce more than they consume, and… their choices show long foresight in being responsive to where profit ends… Continue reading Whole Culture Led not Technology Driven – getting SDG’s to really work