Brian,<\/p>\n
Yea, most people think it\u2019s a problem of attitude, but there are great examples of where that\u2019s clearly not the case. The environmental movement, for example, makes the same mistake time after time of treating niche opportunities as unlimited resources. The important part is not to say they have a \u2018bad attitude\u2019. The error is not one of attitude. The important thing to note it that it\u2019s the exact same error they are trying to correct.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s error that the business and finance interests are making in massively misjudging the limits of the earth\u2019s easy resources. The greens like the developers tend to think that every resource we have not yet exhausted is unlimited, like wind and solar and all that. That insight is the useful and helpful lesson of ethanol, that it was a good niche opportunity thought of as an unlimited resource up until it triggered the world food crisis. What we\u2019re dealing with is a major conceptual misunderstanding of the problem.<\/p>\n
If you don\u2019t want to \u201cplan for failure\u201d as you say, then you should pull yourself up short and figure out why nearly everyone with that attitude actually is planning for failure. Almost no one thinks things through. Almost all planning is done to just push the problem a little ways ahead, hoping it will go away. That worked when we had not hit the limits of the earth.<\/p>\n
Now just pushing the problem ahead a bit just pushes it to where it will be worse when we get to it again. In order to think things through we need to understand them from beginning to end, \u00b8\u00b8\u00b8.\u2022\u00b4 \u00af `\u2022.\u00b8\u00b8\u00b8 , and that\u2019ll teach you how nature starts everything with explosions of creativity to see if they will learn how to stabilize, or lets them collapse of their own feeble accord if they don\u2019t.<\/p>\n
The real solutions to our two main uncontrolled growth problems, population and wealth, are both stubbornly in conflict with our self-images of what \u2018good\u2019 means, the stuff we cling to in our minds. Those \u2018functional fixations\u2019 throw us into deep conflict with a changing world. To me the real solution to both is *not<\/strong>* getting the right ideas into our minds.<\/p>\n It\u2019s to learn a way to see *through<\/strong>* our ideas so we can watch the real world, see them in overlay. Otherwise we only look *at<\/strong>* our ideas and let them hide the world from us. If we see both we don\u2019t have to give up the things that are precious to us, including our attitudes, and can successfully navigate a place that we\u2019ve mostly lost contact with too.<\/p>\n Does that make any sense?<\/p>\n Best,<\/p>\n Phil Henshaw<\/p>\n \u2014\u2014\u2014-<\/p>\n Hi Phil,<\/p>\n What differentiates humans from animals is our capacity to conceptualise in abstract terms and to plan for the future, and then to act on those plans with a view to realising them. To me the problem is one of \u201cattitude\u201d. My personal experience is that our plans are self fulfilling. Winners plan to succeed, and losers plan to fail. I am personally not predisposed to plan for failure. To me that is not a constructive use of my time and energy. My personal predisposition is to want to co-operate with my fellow humans with the objective of furthering our mutual interests. To me there is no purpose to be served in contemplating the end of the world. That is not the attitude of a healthy mind.<\/p>\n Kind Regards,<\/p>\n Brian Bloom<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n <\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Brian, Yea, most people think it\u2019s a problem of attitude, but there are great examples of where that\u2019s clearly not the case. The environmental movement, for example, makes the same mistake time after time of treating niche opportunities as unlimited resources. The important part is not to say they have a \u2018bad attitude\u2019. The error … Continue reading Highlighting the challenges of 9 billion people II<\/span>