Some Suggestions for Designing a Sustainable Earth Co-operatively.
(This article is very badly written--I decided to make at least
three articles out of it, so that the ideas contained in this
article (in my opinion they are good ideas) are easier to
present.
I finished putting together "The State of the Ideal Earth Design." and the next one
will be "Some
Suggestions for Designing a Sustainable Earth Co-operatively" (renamed to: Ensuring Transparency by "Evolving" the Ideal World
Design. )
that will contain "'Evolving' the Ideal Earth
Design: Ensuring Transparency."
Thank you, Hearthstone.)
Before we
can start living in an ideal world, we have to know what this ideal
world should be like. We have to know what it is that we want to
have, in order to ever be able to obtain it. We, all of us, have to
agree on what kind of a world we want to have, and then, directly,
all of us can strive for it. There is no time for "hit/miss"
methods anymore.
While designing our ideal world collectively, with the exclusion of
none, we can spot and deal with potential problems before those
manifest in real space and time. This function of collectively
designing our world and matching the reality with the ideal
portrayed in the design would supplant, eventually, any form of any
government from the global level down to local communities.
By starting the ideal Earth design from the simplest possible level
of sustainability and then progressively evolve the design from
that simplest level to more complex levels "in modelo", rather then
trying to model into the design complex sustainable situations
straightforwardly, the transparency of the design would be ensured
at any level of complexity.
There is an urgent need for the existence of a model of an ideal
Earth--a unified and a harmonized model accessible and amendable by
anyone--whose existence would greatly expedite any attempts at
making our peaceful co-existence in the world possible; it would
serve the purpose better than any controversial summits and any
such are doing now. It would be there allowing interactions among
all interested in resolving any differences that there might be in
the world now on a continuous basis. It would prevent the
horrendous waste of time, energy, and lives that there occurs now
while using methods for resolving of our differences in use
currently.
It would not matter that only a small group would be maintaining
the model at the start--the usefulness of the model would become
more apparent with time.
Contents:
The Need for Designing the Ideal Earth
Co-operatively
"Evolving" the Ideal Earth Design: Ensuring
Transparency.
The State of the Co-operative Design
Presently
Bibliography
Credit
Links
The Need for Designing the Ideal Earth
Co-operatively.
It has to be
understood very firmly that creating a vision of what one wants (I
paraphrase Robert Fritz in his The Path of Least Resistance
[Fritz 1984] frequently without always acknowledging this) is in no
way forecasting the future!
This "vision" (a "choice" [Fritz 1984]) has to be based on what
there, in the ideal reality, we would really like to have, without
considering whether this would be "realistic", "possible" (Fritz
1984), or any such considerations for the nonce. It has to be
ideal; as ideal as possible--one could not improve on the vision
any further, as if. Only after this, once a vision is formulated
into as minute detail as possible (Fritz 1984), would the effective
finding of ways of how to achieve this vision start. It would not
do to start looking for such ways without the vision not being
fully defined, or at least as well defined that we would recognize
this vision should we encounter it.
This approach is very different from the hit-or-miss, band-aid
superficial approach that we, the humanity, have been using so far
in trying to improve our conditions for life on Earth, with the
results clearly observable--increasing environmental and societal
crises that have no precedents in humankind's existence so far. So
far we have mostly been responding to problems as they
occur, with the result that we have been able to successfully deal
with some of the problems, but, on the whole, although we have
achieved a lot of "progress", we usually manage to create even more
difficulties in this way due to our not dealing with the root
causes of most of our problems.
Most of us know what kind of a world we would like to live in. And
to make sure that we end up living in a world that we all would
like to live in, we have to reconcile any possible differences that
there might be among our individual ideas of what the world that we
would like to live in should be like, before we start striving for
it--just to make sure that we, each of us, are not striving for a
different objective! As much as we share the same place, the same
planet together, that much we have to share our planning for our
common co-existence, our common future together.
We have to collectively create a model of the world that we would
like to live in in order to have a "visible", a referable to
portrayal of the commonly designed ideal, and while we all
co-operate on constructing the model, we all work out all the
differences that there might be among our ideas of what our ideal
world should look like as we progress on construction of the
design. Of course, constructing the model of an ideal world would
never be finished--it would be continually improved upon--but we
would start eventually getting the idea of what it is that we are
all agreeing on, and we would start working towards the ideal world
in real time and space as soon as the design would be clear enough
to permit this.
This forever ongoing co-operation of us all on creating of an ideal
Earth agreeable to all would be far better than the way of
resolving of our differences on occasions, then going our separate
ways, and then getting into difficulties with each other
again--over and over again, as we are accustomed to doing
"normally".
While continuously trying to improve the model of all of us
existing together we would spot potential trouble spots long before
those would develop in real life to cause real problems--an
improvement over the cycles of violence we adhere to presently! It
would be dealing with problems before those occur--not after
problems occur!
It is very important that everybody has an access to the process of
building the model, so that anybody's ideas of the ideal that might
differ from the ideas of others would get sorted out in the model,
rather than that those differences would be sorted out in real
life, causing real damage!
With the free access of everybody to the modeling/designing of the
ideal world everybody would be able to and forced to learn what
they need to learn "on the job"--first by taking a part in
designing of the ideal, then by co-operating on actually achieving
the ideal in real life.
The ongoing designing of the world would be a permanent feature in
everybody's life. It would be a feature that would be consciously
encultured into the social/cultural fabric of the society from
generation to generation seamlessly and thus (I hope) would prevent
any future possible reversal to our current way of conducting
politics. After all--resolving problems, differences,
controversies, and complaints before those could engender
real life damage would, at all times, be clearly superior to any
other ways of living.
It would fundamentally differ from the way "politics" is being done
in our world now-a-days in that, that it would not be personalities
fighting for partisan and personal power; it would be ideas
that would "compete" for inclusion into the ideal world design;
only ideas that would best fit in with all other components of the
design, and with all that we know about ourselves and about the
world would be included in the design, to be replaced when better
ideas would be submitted. It would never be necessary to know who
is behind which idea!
This imagining of what the ideal Earth should be like should start
on the global level and from there the design would be directing
what each local community should look like, because were it
otherwise, in the end, during the process of each community's
becoming what the whichever community might consider "ideal" might
interfere with what other communities might consider "ideal"--they
would be wise to check on the global design just to prevent any
future conflicts. In this case the "think globally, act locally"
would have its rightful application. In practice this thinking and
acting would occur simultaneously.
Top
"Evolving" the Ideal Earth Design: Ensuring
Transparency.
It would be possible to accommodate any (provably) sustainable life-style on Earth--those could exist in the world without interfering with each other and without interfering unduly with other life forms that share the Earth with humanity.
It would be possible to model this situation in a very simple way, perhaps not even needing any extensive computer modeling--"gedanken experiments" might even be enough, at least at the start; computer modeling might perhaps be used for proving that the more complex sustainable life-styles would, indeed, be sustainable.
To ensure that any style of a sustainable living of any degree of
complexity would really be, beyond any doubt, sustainable, the
design of any of those should start from the simplest way of
sustainable life possible--a hunter-gatherer community living side
by side with all other forms of life, without there being any need
for any special "wild-life preserves" since it would be in humans'
conscious interest to live in balance with their environment.
From there the model would follow the "evolution" of
hunter-gatherer way of life to more complex sustainable
life-styles, step by step, always plainly displaying that the
design remains sustainable ecologically and socially.
It has to be noted that this "evolution" in model would not
follow the real evolution of human society in which violence has
been the mover and initiator of "progress". On the contrary--the
evolution of sustainable life-styles in model, from the simplest to
more complex, would be driven by considerations for the wellbeing
of all in the system. In this way "sustainability" of the system at
any stage of "evolution" would be assured.
I hypothesize that in this way it would impossible to introduce
into the design any non-sustainable societal and technological
elements.
Evolved in this way, any way of sustainable living--from the
simplest possible to the most conceivable complex ones--would
demonstrably be transparently sustainable, i.e. truly
sustainable, not only "sustainable" in name.
The younger a child to understand any process, the greater the
transparency of that whichever process--in a way of testing
processes for transparency.
A design evolved in this way would allow anyone wishing so to live
at any level of complexity of a sustainable life-style, since many
people have different ideas involving the complexity of a
sustainable life-style. No too complicated computer programs would
be necessary to model a sustainable Earth in this way! All
different sustainable life-styles would fit in as long as the
"sustainability" in each case would be clearly provable on the
basis of all known and pertinent data.
The overall global population size should be determined by what
population of hunter-gatherer the Earth could support, even though
any sustainable style of living would be possible, the global
population should aways remain at the level of hunter-gatherer
society (the simplest and, at the same time, sustainable way of
living on Earth), so that if the more complex forms of sustainable
living (that might even be more "efficient" at using land area for
food production, perhaps) should fail, or become not attractive
anymore, there would never be any overpopulation problem should
everybody have to start living at (ultimately) the hunter-gatherer
level again. The idea of any "expansion", or "growth" (of
population, of economy) would be foreign in a sustainable world. In
a sustainable world there would be no need for growing population;
a growing population would be antithetical to common sense--no one
would introduce such ideas into the design!
Top
The State
of the Co-operative Design Presently
(as known to me, the author; please
inform me of anything that I might have overlooked):
Currently there is no clearly defined, referable to, by anyone
accessible, and by anyone amendable model of a sustainable Earth
yet.
Listed bellow are some of the most prominent, promising, for
modeling the ideal state of the Earth potentially important
concepts:
*) Donella Meadows concept of "envisioning"/"visioning".
There are currently many groups and communities in the world that
purport to be creating "visions" of how a group, or a community
should live together; "visions" created by, if not all of the
members of those groups and communities, then, at least, by more
than one person, using methods that derive from Donella Meadows'
"envisioning"/"visioning" (Meadows 1996) concept that ultimately
owes its origin to Robert Fritz's TFC (Technologies For Creating)
as originally introduced in his The Path of Least Resistance
(Fritz 1984).
The Donella Meadows' "envisioning"/"visioning" cannot really be
properly understood without understanding the very clear Robert
Fritz's TFC concept (Fritz 1984) of creating results that we
want.
Please see author's
Donella Meadows' "Visioning": Global Citizens Designing a
Sustainable World Together. (Hearthstone 2009)
*) Robert Jungk's "future workshops" ("Zukunftwerkstätte") (Jungk
1987)
Any of the examples of consensual common reality vision creating
based on Robert Jungk's "future workshops" that I found so far
don't go beyond the scope of a local community, with no results
that could really be called "sustainable".
*) ESDA (Future Search)
ESDA's (Envisioning a Sustainable and Desirable America) -
http://www.uvm.edu/giee/ESDA/am2100.html
This "Future Search" ( http://www.futuresearch.com ?,
http://www.futuresearch.net/ ?) based consensus building system is
really not a careful combined "... vision" of more participants,
but rather a forecast 100 years into the future on the way to a not
declared ideal, "... agreed [on] a set of 'realistic' assumptions
both about people and the rest of the world that embodied the
latest scientific research findings....". The impression I got was
a depiction of a definitely non-sustainable future (this future is
"stuffed" with hi-tech objects that would be impossible to
manufacture by socially and ecologically sustainable methods, in my
opinion) that still was evolving to some unspecified ideal--the
time in this particular vision of a future in 100 years depicted by
three "visitors" was very clearly linear, still evolving to
something else; time in any vision of an ideal (even though the
ideal itself might be evolving continuously) is cyclical--seasons,
moon phases change in an ideal reality.
I would like to learn more about this "... Virtual Visit to a
Sustainable and Desirable America, 2100...", but no links at the
site work anymore--contacting the participants of this "Virtual
Visit" has proven unfruitful, so far.
Top
Bibliography:
Bodian, Stephan
1982 Simple in
Means, Rich in Ends: an Interview with Arne Naess originally
published by The Ten Directions, Los Angeles: Los Angeles
Zen Center
included in 1995 Deep Ecology for the 21st
Century, edited by George Session
Boston & London: Shambala
Pertinent to designing an ideal Earth
Fritz, Robert
1984 The Path of
Least Resistance. Salem, MA: DMA Inc., ISBN:
0-930641-00-0.
Hearthstone, Jan
2009 "Donella Meadows' 'Visioning': Global Citizens Designing a
Sustainable World Together."
http://www.modelearth.org/donella-vision.html
Jungk, Robert and Norbert Müllert
1987 Future
Workshops: How to Create Desirable Futures. London, England:
Institute for Social Inventions, ISBN: 0948826398
Meadows, Donella H.
1996 "Envisioning a
Sustainable World." written for the Third Biennial Meeting of the
International Society for Ecological Economics, October 24-28,
1994, San Jose, Costa Rica
In Getting Down to Earth, 1996 Practical Applications of
Ecological Economics, editors Robert Costanza, Olman Segura and
Juan Martinez-Alier Washington DC: Island Press
Meadows, Donella H. "Envisioning a Sustainable World." is
online:
www.sustainer.org/pubs/Envisioning.DMeadows.pdf
(accessed 10/06/2009)
It is a must read document; it explains best what Donella Meadows'
"visioning" is.
Top
Credit
This writing is based on and influenced by the numerous teachings
that I had the fortune to receive from Tibetan Buddhist teachers
for over the last more than thirty years, on what I had studied
about Mahayana on my own, on my personal realizations, on my
reading about and practicing ideas (for over the last twenty years)
of Robert Fritz' as he wrote about them in The Path of Least
Resistance (Fritz 1984), and what I learned at the University
of Hawai'i where I graduated (May 2002, Anthropology).
Top
Links
The need for designing a sustainable world co-operatively is
explained at
The Need for Designing the Future
Collaboratively
( http://www.modelearth.org/intro.html ).
Mahayana: Philosophy for
Sustainability.
( http://www.modelearth.org/mahaecosoc.html )
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