The State of the Ideal Earth
Design.
I am trying
to find out what is there in the world that deals with collectively
designing how we all should ideally exist together in this
world.
Currently there is no clearly defined, referable to, by anyone
accessible and by anyone amendable model of an ideal, 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 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 not quite sustainable
future (this future has some hi-tech features in it that would be
impossible to manufacture and maintain 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 due to
us as yet unseen causes) is cyclical--only seasons, moon phases,
etc. change in an ideal reality.
Please, do read "Envisioning a Sustainable and Desirable America".
I have been trying to find out from the participants and from the
people who facilitate "future search" how exactly the "forecast"
described above was arrived at, but so far with no success.
Bibliography:
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.
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