Thoughts on Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto by Stewart Brand
I have the utmost respect for people like Stewart Brand, who is doing more than his part to help the rest of us better understand our environment and how we can live well within it. I haven’t read his new book – Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto - yet, but it’s very high on my 2010 list. I learned about it via a cool blog called Brain Pickings which gives a review of the book and some background on Brand.
In 2010, I am planning several initiatives which resonate with concepts like Whole Earth Discipline and how we, especially those in the modern urban world, can better attune ourselves to the Laws of Nature. One of those initiatives is called “No Tech 50″ and the other is “CEOs Gone Green”. You’ll hear a lot more about them in the coming weeks!
In the meantime, I hope you can take the time to enjoy this informative TED Talk by Stewart Brand. In case you don’t, here are some interesting tidbits from it [My comments in blue brackets]:
- Rapid Urbanization: By mid-century, about 80% of people will be living in urban cities.
- “The Rise of the West, dramatic as it was, is over.”
- “Squatters, 1 billion of them, are building the (urban) world. They even build (or steal) their own infrastructure.”
- Mumbai is half slums and 1/6th of India’s GDP.
- “So if you want to save a village, you do it with a good road, a good cell phone connection and some good electrical power.”
- World population will level off at 8.1 billion by the 2040s and then drop rapidly.
- Global Warming: Expect to see a great increase in climate refugees over the coming years.
- Baseload Electricity is what it takes to run a city. Building nuclear reactors is the most viable low-pollution method of increasing baseload electricity. Nuclear energy has done more to dismantle nuclear weapons than any other activity [how ironic and potentially very positive if we take an All in One global approach to problem-solving].
- Micropower is on the rise.
- Genetically modified crops are important in Brand’s view and he thinks that some of his “environmentalist friends are being irrational on this matter”. [Well, I agree that it is a highly moral and controversial issue. But I don't feel that GMO food is a sensible or healthy solution to global hunger. As it looks like we're going the GMO route with reckless abandon, I will go on the record to state that I believe it is a stop-gap, patchwork solution to a huge problem that we created and could have solved in healthier ways. Brand, not being a health or nutrition expert, seems to be less concerned with food quality and more about the pure economics of food production. This ignores some of the basic tenets of health. I believe much healthier outlooks and solutions to world hunger are presented in The Food Revolution and Blue Zones.]
- “We are as gods and have to get good at it.” [Well, this may give man too much credit, and that's part of the problem in modern civilization. We THINK we're gods, when we are really not. We are supposed to be stewards of the earth and live in accordance with Nature, not try to reinvent, out-manufacture, abuse or compete with it.]
Guard your emotional investments in anything outside of your life’s best interests. Addiction is an emotional over-investment in things that do not serve your personal growth. A good example is sports fanship. Why do we do it? My hypothesis is that our level of fanship (how much we emotionally invest in “our” team’s outcomes) is connected to our own level of self-esteem. I don’t know if it’s a perfect correlation, and I believe that there are other reasons why we become fans (such as pure enjoyment and entertainment). But there is no question in my mind that there is a major element of escapism at work here. We are putting our faith on the shoulders of men and women – heroes – hoping for them to provide for us an emotional spark or lift; consequently, this reduces our self-reliance on providing and sustaining such a spark. What if our team loses? How much energy did we lose on those bets?
Personally, I have observed how drained I am on Mondays following emotionally intense Football Sundays. Even now, as I sit here and watch the World Series, a sport which I generally don’t even watch and teams which I don’t really care for (Phillies and Yankees), I find myself emotionally swaying, from frustration to excitement, in certain tense situations of the game. Why do I even care? read more…
I have become a big fan of Karen Armstrong over the past several years. Funny thing, is that I bought one of her books – A History of God – over ten years ago, but never cracked it until last year. It was worth the wait! Since then, I’ve read two more books from Armstrong, who is a leading author and scholar on the ever-controversial subject of Religion.
Here is a short clip of her recent TED talk. The theme is Compassion as the underlying essence of all world religions.
If you don’t know about TED yet, I strongly advise you to visit ted.com, create a profile and participate! TED also has strong presence on Facebook, Youtube and Twitter.
