On a ClimateConcernGroup thread, “Can 350.org save the world?
In response to Maria Guzman’s:
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Admirable efforts, but of dubious efficacy. Nothing is likely to make a real difference until everyone in the industrial societies personally feels the impact of a disaster in the making. How long this will take is hard to predict.
http://tinyurl.com/pobspv
Maria Guzman
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Maria,
I think what will make people personally feel the problem is realizing that we have all been entirely misled on the limits of our current path.
The real limit of economic growth is for all the parts of the system to come into conflict with each other all at once. Anyone logically thinking about a growing system of independently growing parts an see and make sense of that, but not our scientists(1). The economists and ecologists, whose job it should have been, miss that rather salient bit because they both treat complex systems full of uncontrolled and independently learning and changing parts as equations with controlled variables. The problem is that equations can’t tell you how or when the physical system will stop following the equations. That’s what happens as all the parts of the system run out of room and come into conflict by trying to grow at each other’s expense. Call it the “combined manageabilty problem”.
If people realize that, I think stuff will start happening. Lots of people seem to be starting to see that as well intended as they may be, the present solutions don’t solve the problem.
Phil Henshaw ¸¸¸¸.·´ ¯ `·.¸¸¸¸
1) I’m scientist too, and don’t criticize the motive and values of science, but point to a deep flaw in the scientific method. Its underlying idea that we can use our information to replace reality and everything will go better is wrong. There is still a need to acknowledge that our information can never replace the need to pay attention to the physical realities beyond our information that models refer to, and which no kind of information is ever complex enough to replace or represent…