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Sustainability Now!: Critical thinking - maybe we should listen to our own message
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Critical thinking - maybe we should listen to our own message

By Phil Henshaw ????.?? ? `?.???? dd. may 11th 2007
e-mail: pfh@synapse9.com explorations: www.synapse9.com


You might think that the sustainability community would be a rich center of self-critical thinking, in so far as so many of the great discoveries we're making about better ways to do things come from reinventing conflicting interests. It also appears that the movement had it's start from years and years of serious honest thinking about the real complex effects of our choices, and developing a collective strategy for changing direction, eliminating conflicts by creating new rewards. We need to do it again I think, but I'm just not finding where that thought process is occurring. Sustainability not only needs to be 'cool'. It also needs to work. I think we're confusing the fact that there is lots of work to do with the question of whether what we're doing will work.
Anyone who builds a complicated modern building understands very well that the systems just don't work as intended unless you trace through their intended operation over and over to get the design right and then do that again to get it built right and then again to get it to run right. I don't think we're doing that with the design of our movement at all. I think we're just winging it, and ignoring some of the glaring contradictions that remain and are not being addressed. That's not good, and I can prove I'm not making too big a deal out of just a little 'irrational exuberance' in this year of our greatest public recognition and political success.
I won't go on with a long thing. One of the core problems is really so simple. We're planning on having efficiency gains counterbalance the impacts of economic growth. Repeated efficiency gains not only get smaller and smaller, requiring more and more effort, but they actually just plain run out, like getting more to eat by cleaning your plate better after dinner. Once you learn to do the job well, there's not much left to gain by doing it better.
Growth is the opposite, so just doing the job better can't possibly balance. Even if you do things in the most efficient way physically possible (the thermodynamic limit), when you multiply it, it multiplies the impacts. The arithmetic is so solid and simple, it's clear that there's a special reason we're ignoring it. I see two main parts. One is that we don't tend to think of time as change, oddly enough, and so don't see the connection between growth as multiplying all our 'footsteps' with the multiplying 'footprints' we see all around. The other is that we ourselves are addicted to that funny thing that money does, 'just sit there by itself in the bank' multiplying exponentially. There's a connection....

Conflicts and contractions almost always seem to hide enormous synergies we're prevented from seeing by our limited points of view. They're things to *explore*, not things to hide from. As we ourselves have been telling everybody else it seems.... quite often there are big rewards for the former and real tragic consequences for the latter. Maybe we should listen to our own message...


Sustainability Now!: Critical thinking - maybe we should listen to our own message
< Previous | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 |