Potential Options and Impediments for a Sustainable Future
The Futility of Predicting the Future
Mainstream society has traditionally been unable to accurately or at least thoughtfully peer into its crystal ball and examine possible future trends because it often seeks to deny certain truths that govern both present and past reality. Carl Folke says, “The world is complex and nonlinear…uncertainty and surprise are more the rule than the exception—making the future inherently unpredictable.”
Important relationships and links are missed within the complexity of life, because the reality that the world is complex and nonlinear.
Truth is elusive because the society encourages them to live lifestyles that exist in denial of the larger reality. The truth becomes a troubling and nagging force that they seek to avoid.
Yet we can develop scenarios that give us a sense of the different paths where humanity may be going (Carl Folke A Broad Look at Future Worlds Science www.sciencemag.org vol281 8/28/98 p1293). Folke: “our destinies can change: social attitudes can shift dramatically and many negative trends can be reversed if societies so choose and can summon the will to act.”
Competing Visions of Utopia
Dreams of the utopian society have changed over time:
At first people were faced with a powerful sense of hopeless in the human realm and they responded by creating images of that perfect other world--Eternity.
The Greeks envisioned an ideal city where Liberty would flourish.
Socialists saw that the evolution of the market under the urban model would mean that some would find a find a very delusory form of success, while most others would become alienated and so they sought economic Equality.
Fraternity alone associates individual happiness with the happiness of others. Most important thing is for us to conduct our lives with love and compassion for others. Our societies need to develop a stronger notion of universal responsibility and interdependency. He proposes a standard of positive ethical conduct for individuals and societies.
What makes people happy is neither material progress nor knowledge it is the quality of their experience. We need to address our deep-felt needs for meaning and substance in our lives and figure out more fulfilling ways of living on this planet.
We must find alternative outlets for our creative energies “beyond the culture of perpetual economic growth.”
Which Scenario for the Future?
Donnela Meadows maps out the future using several competing streams of thought as to the way the world should or will proceed. Donella Meadows calls these competing ideologies the Greens, the Blues and the Reds.
Blues—the market driven utopia is a place of boundless optimism about the will of humanity with the power of technology and the invisible hand of the capitalist marketplace, empowering people with the ability to overcome any type of adversity. This new golden age of prosperity and optimism revolves around the "individual initiatives, technological change, economic growth and global integration" converging to form the monolithic global capitalist economic system bringing “prosperity, stability and social progress to a larger and larger share of humanity (Folke)." The reality is that markets rarely account for human social needs or environmental limitations and so are not indicators of long-term prosperity. Many “believers in Adam Smith’s invisible hand remain ignorant of the dependence on the global economy on the environmental resource base, and do not realize that it is the content of the growth that matters.”
Greens—Ecotopia was a book written by Earnest Callenbach about the breakdown of American civilization and the rise of a new environmentally and socially conscious culture in the Northwest. Greens are concerned about the limitations of the Blue's worldview, which is now propelling the dominant social paradigm or the market driven world. One major difference between greens and whites is that the greens operate primarily through the green party, while the whites tend to be more entrepreneurial and willing to work with people in established society.
Reds envision a future that relies heavily on centralized governmental systems.
Whites would reject all these scenarios noting that the ideologue develops an emotional, fetish-like attachment to the one sided view of the world that their ideology represents. More likely, they would seek an alternative to the present system. A synthesis of all the utopian views—a mixed economic system, which is free market, oriented but is also concerned with “changing the human endeavor.” Here fundamental changes in the organization of society begin to give rise to “enlightened policies and voluntary actions that direct and supplement market forces. Examples:
Social conscious investing
Corporative governance
Ecological designed buildings
Kurzwell’s age of spiritual machines seems to Rick Joy like a technological approach to eternity, one that may change the most fundamental aspects of human life and alter us into a state that is unrecognizable with today, as a tradeoff for invincibility and immortality.
Religion and Spirit
Modernist have viewed spirituality as an impediment to the evolution of society. Those who practice organize religion often know about spirit, but do not allow Spirit to govern their lives. Spirituality faces the challenge of existing on a viable level and meaningful level in modern secular societies that do not believe in spirit and actively act to secularize belief systems “in ways that must inevitably trivialize it (Bill Stephenson “Where is the Environmental Movement Today” Sustainable Sources).”
Although religion and spirituality refer to similar things, they appear to be divergent in many cases.
· Religion—is the belief-system of a spiritual movement. As it evolves through time, it becomes more organized.
· Spirituality—is simply the expression in everyday practice of the belief that there is a deeper transcendent reality to life than is obvious in the material world.
Mechanism and Modern Thought
Mechanistic thinking—the basis for modern progress—has led us to disregard how life functions organically and holistically. Many in the deep ecology wing of the environmental movement feel that is if you are mechanistically orientated in your view of the world--seeing it merely as reducible to a series of machine-like functions, you are anti-environmental even if you "head up the neighborhood's most active recycling program" or run a international NGO that is constantly talking about sustainability. Many are critical of Bucky Fuller's because they view his Spaceship Earth thinking as merely another manifestation of "our rationalistic death-oriented mindset," that is really the core cause of our environmental despoiling of planetary ecosystems.
Modern society has created a perception of reality that insular to the complexity and interrelatedness of the life processes which relies on for existence. What results is the construction of ideological paradigms that are antithetical to life itself. Paradigms usually having the best of intentions usually devolve into calcified ideological dogmas. They become susceptible to opportunists who polarize and paralyze with their cleverness and their cunning. Our political and social systems evolve more and more to become the vehicles that sustain the egotistical needs of the people who formulate and manage the paradigms. An authentic need or desire to create real change in how our civilization functions becomes irrelevant in this process. Paradigms represent the incremental uptake of information that ends up falling primarily into the hands of the powerful. The construction of paradigms is usually limited to the powerful because they are the only people who have the resources to persuade the public to conform to social conception of normal.
Much of the establishment that sustains or conserves that traditional modern view of life, works under the assumption that present and future trends will reflect past experiences. From this perspective, there is little need for serious change or modification in the social order or the approach by which problems are diagnosed and solved in society.
The primary influence of present socioeconomic behavior is the Newtonian worldview. The complexity that we see within life is not linear. Life cannot be fully or accurately describes using pre-programmed, static calculations for it is constantly evolving and morphing into something. Matter remains stable at the atomic short of an atomic blast or fusion reaction, but it is constantly rearranging itself within those constraints. The weather is never the same, there are six billion unique humans, and each snowflake has a different arrangement of ice crystals. Life flows like a river that is constantly ebbing and flowing, bubbling up from dynamic chemical and physical interactions and taking form in the everyday features that make up our lives.
Each experience is a formative process that leads to the next one. In the process, initial events repeated frequently, enough precipitate a continuous pattern of events eventually evolves into a patterned regularity or a pattern language within a system. Life has memory, and these experiences develop into geology, natural history, evolutionary biology and geography. As we evolve biologically having accumulated an immense amount of memory as complex animate and sentient beings, aspects of simple societies develop, then given time and a stable social environment the sciences and the arts emerge. From these developments, complexity increases to even higher degrees.
The Gaia Hypothesis: A New Post-Cartesian Worldview
Battle between Cartesian or Enlightenment Rationality and deep ecology Consciousness, expresses itself even within the environmental and progressive movements themselves. Spiritual underpinnings are evident in various new age interpretations of the Gaia hypothesis. The assumptions that James Lovelock put forward in his Gaia hypothesis were very appealing to various kinds of pantheists. However, those interested in the scientific implications of Gaia theory—people like Carl Sagan, Edmund Wilson, Stephen Jay Gould, or Stephen Hawkins tend to be more careful in the language that they use. Stephenson says the idea of a view of earth as a living system is controversial indeed, partially because, “it differs so radically from the old-fashioned scientific picture, guided as it was by Cartesian dualistic or mechanistic thinking. This old view saw the Earth simply as a collection of matter, rather meaninglessly but consistently arranged into things and ramping itself up in complexity through a process called evolutionary biology until reaching the platuea called humanity. Yet the assumption has been that all things as both individuals and species, more or less randomly walking, swimming, or flying around this planet that is itself spinning aimlessly around the empty universe.”
Why the Message isn’t getting through
Although the details and specifics of recent social and ecological realizations about the unsustainable path that humanity is presently on may have not fully filtered down to the people, it is clear that many people intuitively sense something is wrong. Yet people when polled still appear to be swayed by the prevailing mentality of the system--that a growing economy always means that things are getting better and better. While many people at certain times in the process of their living thoughts contemplate the state of things those who are the opinion leaders of the society—the mechanistic modernists—seek to ridicule and denigrate such thoughts, by drumming into people's heads that all that really matters is the state of the economy.
Empirically based systems can lead to the creation of socially environments that make it more difficult for people to find their intuitive sense of what is right and true. Indeed the basis of modern society seeks to refute the notion that we have inner awareness and understanding that goes beyond current empirical measurements. Modernism seeks to deny a logical understanding: that a rapidly growing economy sometimes relies on very negative trends that can more than compensate for short-term economic growth that sustains the "gotta have it now," feel good economic growth that affirms the political status quo. Even through many people in the back of their minds suspect that "the system" is inherently deceptive and disruptive, they tolerate the status quo because the economy is good, and see price of progress as justified. There is hope that if the economy remains good long enough then all the problems we now face will become less significant through the working of the invisible hand of the marketplace.
Consumerism has replaced citizenship as the person's main role in the society. People feel that they need to order their lives around higher levels of consumption and production in order to find fulfillment in the modern world. In this process of encouraging material consumption, many people are developing addictive behaviors that often are unhealthy not only to themselves but to the larger social order.
The superficial notion that we can save the environment by some minor alternations in the way things are done in the society represents a false, reformist, liberal path. Rather the individual must reject his or her primary status as a consumer in the society, and begin to reexamine life as series of natural, intellectual, spiritual, creative and interpersonal experiences. This merits nothing less than a radical change in the way we think as individuals in the society. Such a change though necessary in the immediate term is put off as long as possible because of the sense that "it costs too much." There is a sense that because so many people in affluent societies are addicted to the allure of consumer culture, it will be difficult and unrealistic to see a widespread change at the present time and so therefore things will have to get worse before they get better.
The Rise of the Ecological Sciences and the Emergence of Sustainable Technologies
Ecopsychology tells us that here is a connection between emotional and spiritual pollution. Stephenson says, "Our ecological crisis is symptomatic of a deep crisis in human values and beliefs... We may need to examine our notions of time, knowledge, freedom, competition, progress, success, change, and even community. We definitely need to examine our priorities." Wrong belief invariably produces wrong action...even if our relativistic ethic prevents us from calling wrong, wrong, or right, right.
In order to truly resolve our problems "a different mindset is needed—the new organic one." Academia compartmentalizes its knowledge and allows people to overlook systemic flaws in the whole modern world view. Such things as goodness or "the good life," which the Greeks for instance took as their primary subject matter, are discussed only in a rare ethics course.
The economics of nature emanating from the sun builds up in the systems that are most effective in tapping into that current. In a sense, this flow of energy is a sort of money or credit. The credit gradually builds up as the planet evolves and becomes more hospitable to life’s endless desire to grow and expand.
Biomimicry and permaculture are emergent examples of where we “co-invent with nature within and around our biosphere a built environment that is harmonious with the natural environment.
· The powerful and irrefutable realization that we have to respect the organic life processes on the planet is part of the development towards an ecological consciousness.