How I arrived at the concept of designing
the future collectively.
Since early
on in my life I had been attracted to self-suffiency, feeling that
the "system" I existed in was grossly inadequate to support
intelligent, rational existence. I gravitated in my interests
towards any examples of people providing for their needs "from the
scratch", such as growing their own food, building their own
shelters, making their own clothes etc. This continued well into my
mature years when I already had children--I was imagining us living
somewhere on our own land independently ... .
I am sure that many people entertain such, or similar, fantasies
that eventually subside and become buried under the heap of
quotidian existential concerns, but I had a "lucky break"--I was
made homeless, and I had a few years to reflect on how to get out
of my predicament; eventually it occurred to me that trying to
re-establish myself into the same system that allows homelessness
to exist in the first place did not make any sense--I would be
putting my efforts into allowing the same to happen to me again
potentially; I resolved to solve this conundrum. This is how I went about it:
While still homeless I enrolled in college in order to acquire
knowledge and learn skills that would be good to have for a
self-sufficient, of the society independent living.
I started taking horticulture, weaving, and pottery courses.
I was learning how to grow plants for fiber and dyes used in
weaving--I even started a small garden at the college to grow
those. I was learning to use locally found clay and minerals (for
glaze) for pottery ...
With the time, though, I realized that even if I, with my family, did
achieve self-sufficiency, without the whole of humanity becoming
also self-sufficient, my family's self-sufficiency would be
imperiled by the existing system that abhors anything not under its
control. I decided to study social sciences and I enrolled in
Anthropology classes in order to learn about human society.
In Ecological Anthropology I found out about how humans function
within the whole Earth ecological system and I started being
interested in ecological and social sustainability of humans. I
realized that humans today were living "out of sync" with their
environment, causing themselves and many other species on this
planet great damage, and that humans becoming sustainable was the
solution to this.
The difficulty of how for humans to become truly sustainable is
obvious--there are far too many opinions on what would constitute a
"sustainable humanity", and also on how to achieve that state.
I was thinking about the problem of humans achieving some kind of
consensus on what a sustainable humanity should actually be like,
because I knew that without achieving such a consensus it would be
unlikely for humans to ever become truly sustainable, due to the
many, at times very different and even outright contrary opinions
on the matter, when one day, after reading an article in a social
science periodical (I cannot recall its name now) about using
computer modeling to present complex social situations, I thought
that computer modeling used to reconcile all the various ideas
about what "sustainability" for humans should mean could be
helpful. I first mentioned this, in the Fall of 1998, in a final
exam for an Anthropology course--it is online at www.modelearth.org/Anthro415-1998-ModelEarthConcept.pdf.
Using supercomputers seemed a way of accomplishing the task of
reconciling our differences and arriving at a model of a world that
would be agreeable to live in for all of us at first, but
eventually a simpler way of doing this started emerging:
The importance of sustainable solutions to our problems is
obvious--any superficial "fixes" result in creating further
problems, only "transparently" sustainable solutions that present
situations that clearly show their ability to sustain themselves
perpetually are worthy pursuing. This brings back the problem: we
are not united in the opinion of what "sustainable" ought to be!
There is no commonly held concept of what a truly
sustainable community should be like, let alone what a sustainable
humanity should look like globally. What does exist in this regard is a great
variety of mostly vague ideas that would not withstand a test by
any kind of modeling in which the sustainability of the whichever
idea could be proven.
The "universal platform for developing a sustainable Earth vision
co-operatively" (link) is meant to enable us to see how
any idea about "sustainability"/"sustainable" would work out
in the context of a sustainable world; whether on a community,
regional, or at the global level.
Two things made the concept of designing the future of the Earth
collectively (as presented at ModelEarth.Org) possible: Mahayana philosophy
and the book The Path of Least Resistance by Robert Fritz.
(Fritz 1984), please see Credit and Dedication).
Mahayana philosophy takes a holistic view of any system--all beings
in any system (be it the whole Universe, or just a town locally)
are equally important--roughly put: unless all beings are
optimally happy within a system, no beings in that system can
become truly happy--to present the whole of Mahayana philosophy in
a single sentence. I consider Mahayana philosophy applicable to the
collective situations in our world, as it becomes increasingly
obvious that in any system, even a complex one (e.g. the Earth system) no parts
of it are negligible; quantum theory, the science of ecology, etc.,
are attesting to this by their findings: all phenomena are
intricately connected and influence each other in ways that we yet
have to grasp, if we ever can.
The Path of Least Resistance in essence says that one cannot
get a desired result, unless one knows, into as small detail as possible,
what that result should be; it also says, in a nut-shell, that fighting
problems without knowing how things should ideally be (in relation to those problems) will lead
nowhere--one just would continue fighting "problems" forever,
because there is never any shortage of problems, but rarely people
know what an ideal situation that would make them happy (that they
should strive for, abandoning fighting problems as their primary
preoccupation) should look like.
I find the ideas contained in the book very helpful in times when I
am unsure about the direction I should take--they help me to keep
clear about what I want in my life.
For an individual to eventually arrive at an ideal worthy striving
for is easy when compared to the difficulty of arriving at an ideal
that would be acceptable to the whole of humanity. That there is a
real need to arrive at ideals that would be acceptable by the whole
humanity is obvious once one realizes that humanity, at any given
time, always shares the same planet!, and that most of the problems
we experience come from humans not having a common idea of how we
all, collectively, should share the same place at the same time
successfully!
The challenge is how to harmonize and unify all the various ideas
that exist in this world about how this world should be
ordered--ideas that often are contrary to other people's ideas,
more often than not.
Donella Meadows in Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update
(Meadows 2004), pondered a similar question: ... "How do we proceed
in such a way as to test our models and learn where they are right
and wrong? How do we speak to each other as fellow modelers " ...
(Meadows 2004); I wrote about it in an article: "Donella Meadows'
"Visioning": Global Citizens Designing a Sustainable World
Together."
The notion of using modeling for the purpose of harmonizing and
unifying of all the various ideas about how our world should be
ordered by humanity came to my attention once as I was perusing a
social science magazine that was describing modeling of various
social situations. I thought that modeling would be the best way of
harmonizing and unifying of all people's ideas about what our
common existence should be--the harmonization and unification would
be done "in modelo" on the basis of all that we know about Earth
processes and what we know about human behavior, with the
participation of all who would be interested in shaping of their
future together.
Using modeling as a way of resolving differences among people would
bypass the hierarchy based systems in existence now that rarely
succeed in resolving of such differences successfully for long. It
would not matter at the start that creating a model of an ideal
situation with the participation of virtually all among whom those
differences exist would have no executive powers. By having a
portrayal of an ideal situation that would be acceptable (ideally)
to all individuals among whom the differences exist would soon
positively and profoundly affect all attempts, even those
undertaken by existing official mechanisms, at resolving of those
differences.
It is difficult to know what people are thinking about what kind of
future they might like to have, so that we never quite know whether
our ideas about what the commonly shared reality are quite "in
sync" with ideas that others might have on the same subject.
Ordinarily we try to find out what others feel about important
issues by the means of public discourse, but this way has its
drawbacks--the meek ones and the disenfranchised are not encouraged
and enabled to participate in such a discourse, and whatever
reservations and objections those might have usually remain
unheeded, and their discontent is carried into the future to cause
problems there anew. The "silent majority/minority" that rarely
takes a part in the civic discourse might be enticed to participate
in the modeling, because now they would have a chance to influence
their own future by a process that is freely accessible by anyone,
and by having the opportunity to input the modeling process
everyone would also learn about all the issues pertinent to what
ever aspect of creating the common ideal.
It has to be born on mind that it would never be individuals
somehow competing in the model, but that it would be ideas forming
the desired ideal common existence! By presenting all of these
ideas in a model it would be easier to "see" what of these ideas
are more realistic than others, whereas a "normal" political is not
always this transparent.
Modeling our common reality by all who are supposed to share
it would reveal what all those ideas are, and how they
correspond to each other.
Initially the process of such modeling might, perhaps, be
considered difficult to conduct, but it is worth starting doing,
because the alternative would be to be sorting out the differences
that there are among people in real life in same ways we
have been using since time immemorial without much success so far,
incurring real damage, more often than not.
Furthermore--I am convinced that with this kind modeling it would
be possible to eventually start getting results that would be
depicting more and more a sustainable ways of life, because a
sustainable situation in order to be sustainable has to be
transparent--it would be impossible to introduce any opacity into
the model (why bother?)--it is much easier and much more defensible
to have the modeled situation as simple as possible, as transparent
as possible. Imagine any social situation on Earth that would be
transparent--as soon as any nonsensical element would start taking
a hold it would be possible to deal with it before it would give a
cause to any complications.
How I arrived at the concept of designing the future of the Earth
co-operatively is an example of the development of enlightened
selfishness.
Update 2010-2011:
From the inception of this concept of designing the future of the
Earth co-operatively (Hearthstone
1998) the concept evolved to the "Universal Platform for Developing Sustainable Earth Vision
Co-operatively: Global Citizens Envisioning the Future
Together..
Bibliography:
Fritz, Robert
1984 The Path of
Least Resistance. Salem, MA: DMA Inc., ISBN:
0-930641-00-0.
Hearthstone, Jan
1998 Final Exam
Anthro 415, University of Hawai'i at Manoa (The concept of
co-peratively designing
the future of the
Earth Introduced)
Meadows, Donella H., Jorgen Randers and Dennis Meadows
2004 Limits to
Growth: The 30-Year Update.
White River
Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing Company
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