{"id":1285,"date":"2010-10-26T00:00:42","date_gmt":"2010-10-26T04:00:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.synapse9.com\/signals\/?p=1285"},"modified":"2010-10-26T00:00:42","modified_gmt":"2010-10-26T04:00:42","slug":"the-what-to-do-question-still-there","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/the-what-to-do-question-still-there\/","title":{"rendered":"The \u201cWhat to do\u2026 ?\u201d question, still there!"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cWhat to do\u201d is a question I\u2019ve tried to answer before. A\u00a0Google search for \u201cwhat to do\u201d<\/a>turns up 75 places on my web site where I use the phrase. \u00a0I like my\u00a0May 29 post in response to \u201cWhat\u2019s one thing everyone could do to slow climate change?\u201d<\/a> for example. \u00a0It hits the nail on the head, ranging from advanced systems science to the every day practical necessities.<\/p>\n

The more general message I keep telling people, though, is to become explorers of the real world that will be grading our exams\u2026 That likens our circumstance to not having paid attention in class, and finding a couple hundred years of back homework suddenly coming due.<\/p>\n

\"Leo(1)<\/p>\n

But, people also seem to really need cultural motives and visions to guide them. The guiding vision created by the 60\u2019s generation for how to reinvent civilization is turning out to be full of holes, though, so someone needs to create a deeper new motivation and vision, somehow.<\/p>\n

In my view the evidence of the problem is that for all the holes people plug even more holes appear, pointing to something not working. So a new vision and motivation needs to more or less start from scratch, scavenging things from the old one, but starting from something more complete to start with.<\/p>\n

My own motives and vision seem to come from a scientific\/design approach, involving a lot of direct observation of how the systems of nature operate and change, inventing my own new methods of analysis and reasoning to make sense of it. So\u2026 that\u2019s not something to base a new popular motive and vision on. Large groups of people can\u2019t pass on learning experiences of that kind, that they have not had themselves.<\/p>\n

What I did, though, was to reground my own thinking my own way, studying nature\u2019s old exams in effect, looking for what exemplified successful and failing strategies for inventing new things. Other people using their own starting points might develop more easily shared images of what nature\u2019s requirements are. Lacking good pointers to what does and doesn\u2019t work in nature seems to be one big hole common to many of the generally popular ideas of sustainability.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve tried many times to point to what, for me, are clear signs of great learning opportunity, showing me what works\/fails in nature. It always seems to be from my own scientific\/design approach though, and that has not seemed to work for others.<\/p>\n

The answers my approach finds are not so very hard to explain, or hard to \u201cprove\u201d in a technical sense either. They just leave people with no reaction, it seems, failing to stimulate their curiosity as if the practical solutions don\u2019t also feed some emotional need they find missing.<\/p>\n

Still, what the movement needs is a new motive and vision, that\u2019s not full of holes, somehow. So someone needs to find other kinds of signals for where to look, ones that DO communicate \u2026 Can you think of any?<\/p>\n

pfh<\/p>\n

1) fyi – The cartoon is from\u00a0the story on Leo Cullen<\/a>, the New Yorker cartoonist, whose obit was in the paper today.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cWhat to do\u201d is a question I\u2019ve tried to answer before. A\u00a0Google search for \u201cwhat to do\u201dturns up 75 places on my web site where I use the phrase. \u00a0I like my\u00a0May 29 post in response to \u201cWhat\u2019s one thing everyone could do to slow climate change?\u201d for example. \u00a0It hits the nail on the … Continue reading The \u201cWhat to do\u2026 ?\u201d question, still there!<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crdt_document":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[7,16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1285","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-econn","category-whattodo"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1285","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1285"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1285\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1285"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1285"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1285"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}