Science for the future
Trying to think systematically when it comes to the big problems we face in our world is difficult; but, people like Dr. Khosla from India, (pictured above) are making these topics much easier to grasp. I watched a video that was recorded at UC San Diego where Dr. Khosla spoke about ways we would need to change our infrastructure to be able avoid an inevitable collapse in the future. He started by pointing at our linear way of thinking, that is, that when we think about our economy and how to improve it we often only think of business and technology. In fact, we need to take into account the environment and social issues to truly improve anything in our economy. Each of these factors plays a vital role in each of the others. Next, he talked about the over-consumption that is taking place in America and Japan and mentioned the champagne glass effect (income distribution, where the top 20% have 80-90% of the wealth). Over-consumption is a real problem in American and we are wasting a great deal of energy to move desired products from other parts of the world. Overall, Dr. Khosla was trying to make the point that we need to make major changes if we want to avoid a collapse in the future. We need to change the way we farm, use energy, transportation, and even the way we design our dams and buildings if we want a future in this world. The video had a tremendous amount of information and I would encourage anyone to watch it.
The New Science of Sustainability
To continue my effort of understanding sustainability and using systematic thinking, I read the first chapter of the book The New Science of Sustainability: Building a Foundation for Great Change. The first point that the author makes is that sustainability is not about saving the planet but instead about saving civilization as we know it. For background and easier understanding the author brings up the various changes that society has gone through. These include: Medieval society, where people believed the world worked according to God’s design. Second, the modern society, where we saw a clockwork universe, this is what brought free citizens, presidents, and freedom of religion. Lastly the integral society, which is now pondering the interwoven nature of all things. Specifically, the integral society looks at holistic alternatives in medicine, a renewed concern for community, and the sustainability movement. What I was able to absorb from this reading is that the Darwinian way of thinking (dog-eat-dog) is not necessarily true. That a society who organizes around selfish thoughts, and who turn a blind eye to the corrupt policies that continue to destroy the world we live in, will not be able to continue on for much longer. The new evolution that the author believes we will start accepting is dynamic evolution. “Dynamic evolution encompasses the same facts as Darwinism, but it replaces the old vision of life created by accident and run by selfish genes, with a much more logical and fully physical explanation of how natural dynamics produce the common patterns of emergence, development and adaptive change seen in biological organisms and societal systems.” What the author is trying to portray in this argument is that the world works more like a system where everything is interconnected and the idea of constant competition will eventually be a thing of the past. Fortunately, we now can see the side effects of capitalism, where companies are producing more than what we need and our natural resources are being depleted. I look forward to reading more of this book to see what I can do to help combat the issues we are now faced with.
rs450cemarker 