In response to Maria Guzman’s:

Admirable efforts, but of dubious efficacy. Nothing is likely to make a real difference until everyone in the industrial societies personally feels the impact of a disaster in the making. How long this will take is hard to predict.

http://tinyurl.com/pobspv   Maria Guzman

Maria,
Yes, that seems more and more likely, if even then.   I think what will make people personally feel the problem is feeling that we have all been entirely misled on the limits of our current path.   We’ve been misled about the real limits of growth.  We can now it’s for all parts of the system to come into conflict with each other.

We’ve been misled about the real limits of economic growth,
all the parts of the system coming into conflict with each other.

Almost anyone who logically thinks about a system of independently growing things in a confined space can see and make sense of that.   It’s more the scientists who can’t (1).   

The economists and ecologists, whose job it should have been to recognize that, miss it because they treat economies and ecologies as behaving by rules.  They generally think of such complex systems full of individually uncontrolled, independently acting and changing parts as equations of controlled variables and mathematical relationships.

The reality is obviously quite different, just can’t be “modeled”, the way science has come to habitually rely on.   The problem is that equations can’t tell you how or when the physical parts of a system will stop following the equations.

That’s what happens as all the parts of the system run out of room and come into conflict, and try to keep growing at each other’s expense.    Call it the whole system “ manageability problem”.

Call it the whole system “manageability problem”.

If people realize what a threat that is increasingly becoming, I think stuff will (well …could) start happening.    What people are not seeming to see is that the traditional “solutions”, as well intended as they may be, aren’t solving the problem, and though all the parts are finding life increasingly unmanageable all at once, their first choice is still to “blame someone”, when that’s not the problem at all.

Phil Henshaw      ¸¸¸¸.·´ ¯ `·.¸¸¸¸

1) I’m scientist too, and don’t criticize the motive and values of science, but point to a deep flaw in the scientific method. Its underlying idea that we can use our information to replace reality and everything will go better is wrong.

There is still a need to acknowledge that our information can never replace the need to pay attention to the physical realities beyond our information that models refer to, and which no kind of information is ever complex enough to replace or represent…

ed 2/13/09

also, on what science is missing
Are the holes in your map helping you read the territory?
Could “reality math” help the AAAS??

also, search site for “blame” and see:
Harvard Business School, searches its soul
Producer side & Consumer side as one circle