Tom,
I guess the problem is that we’ve been steering the development of the earth as if expanding our vehicle with our windows painted over with out of date explanations, having a party and not watching the earth’s responses as we crashed into things. Our blind procedures, then, have not been doing what we intended them to do.

I could be a lot more specific, but steering requires watching the thing you’re steering through.   Old wives tales won’t satisfy.  

Basically, using science to try to turn nature into a machine, finding its rules so we can make it follow our rules… is a false objective,  That’s not the *intended* purpose of science, but a default purpose from allowing science to be co-opted for making money for  purposes science never examines.

That that’s been going on for the whole period of the development of modern science is a key to understanding the real dimensions of the problem.   What individuals can do is begin to explore why continually increasing control of nature is a false objective, both infeasible and self-destructive.

Making money to make more money, in particular, is a defective model for establishing partnerships with living things.  When you explore around the issue it appears to error is a combination of

• a) using models to represent complex living systems with simple rules, grossly misrepresenting them, and
• b) then ‘innocently’ buying into the dream of using money to continually make more money, using the simple rules to plan on exploiting living systems till they fail.

Neither of those mental errors is easy to cure, but they are both information problems. That makes them potentially curable, except not by waiting to see what happens if we cling to them to the end… 

Does that connect with anything?

ed 2/13/12 see Are the holes in your map helping you read the territory?