Sustainability means forever

There is much talk of "sustainability" these days, but I don't think very many people have considered what that truly means. "Sustainable" has become synonymous with "green", which in our hyper-consumerist American society has transformed into "buy something". Understandable, perhaps, but it's deadly wrong. The World English dictionary defines "sustainable" as "2. (of economic development, energy sources, etc) capable of being maintained at a steady level without exhausting natural resources or causing severe ecological damage", which seems to me to be a pretty good definition of what the word really means, as opposed to what people think it means.

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Free market family

Have you ever heard of a family that ran well without any bureaucracy and without any formal regulations? Of course you have, and that because the social group is small and all members are well-acquainted with each other. The group is kept in check as a result of a top-down power structure under the control of the parents. The family is also guided by well-understood customs and habits, by kin selection and by reciprocal altruism. No surprise here, that families don’t need formal rules and regulations. How about a corporation, though? Have you ever heard of a successful large corporation that had no need for formal rules and regulations? I haven’t. These organizations are much bigger than families, of course. There is little biological relatedness and they lack most of the other “natural” regulation that families have. They are held in check thanks to numerous rules and regulations, many of them published in the corporation’s manuals filled with policies and procedures. Now think about an entire country. How is it that so many conservatives insist that a country can run well without rules and regulations? How can they insist that the fewer rules, the better a country will run? On what do they base this? On countries without rules and regulations, such as Somalia or Haiti? We have test cases called corporations that absolutely need formal regulations, yet free market fundamentalists insist that entire countries, which are much larger, much more complex, and rife with conflicting interest groups, will simply run by themselves, without planning or structure. I don’t get it. Just because many rules and regulations don’t make sense, you don’t through out rules all together. Large organizations need smart rules. They need rules that work. There is no example otherwise. How can this possibly be controversial?

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What are gamers getting good at?

Game designer Jane McGonigal points out the immense numbers of hours gamers are spending getting good at what they do. World of Warcraft players typically spent 22 hours per week playing that game. What are they getting good at, based upon all of that investment? At what are they becoming virtuosos? McGonigal offers four answers. a. Urgent optimism; b. Weaving a tight social fabric; c. Blissful Productivity d. Epic meaning. Gamers, per McGonigal, are "Super-Empowered Hopeful Individuals." They are convinced that they are excellent at changing the world, and they are good at getting things done, but it is only in their cyber-worlds. They are gaming to escape the dysfunctional real world. What's McGonigal's solution? To make the real world more like a game-world--she argues that gamers are a valuable resource that we need to tap into. We are ready to start an "epic game" where we remake the future. Her games include the following invitations to change one's world: A) World without oil - learning to live in a world of Peak Oil. B) Superstruct - Learning to survive global extinction. C) Evoke - Learning to teach social innovation skills to aid stressed societies.

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Because Sometimes Things Are Forgotten That Shouldn’t Be

This is a completely personal anecdote, so take it for what it's worth. This is about a defining moment for me in my education as an egalitarian. Equality is something we talk about, we assume to be the case for everyone, and never really question. Here, it's the air we breathe. It's not true. We are not all equal. And in spite of our all our lip service to the idea of equality under the law or the equality of opportunity, we all know, if we're honest, that we're still trying to get to that level. Probably it's a function of how well we think our lives are at any given moment. "If I'm doing all right, there's no problem. What are those people over there complaining about? I don't see anything wrong with my life." Well. This is about gender equality. It's one of the most under-considered things in our present world. I saw a PBS special last week about early television and on it Angie Dickinson was talking about her series Police Woman. Breakthrough television. It had been the first dramatic tv show since the mid-60s to be headed by a female in prime time. It was shortly before Charlie's Angels and a decade after both Honey West and The Girl From U.N.C.L.E. During the interview, Dickinson commented that the feminists had been angry with her because she hadn't used the show as a statement for the cause. She defended herself by declaring that she was feminine not a feminist---as if being a feminist were somehow a bad thing, a dirty word, a slur. [More . . . ]

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