Bryan Welch is a writer who Rancho Cappuccino blog appears as a regular column in the Mother Earth News. Over the course of the last couple of months, he has turned his attention away from negative touchstones of how to combat global warming or the impending doom promised to us by the scientific community, and instead turned in a more positive direction. He asks the question: what does a sustainable world look like? To further break down that question, he focuses on four sub-questions for a sustainable society (each question below links to Welch's relevant post).
- Is it fair?
- Is it repeatable?
- Is it beautiful?
- Does it create abundance?
The last question piqued my interest, because I believe that every human advance in culture, science, technology, or the arts has come from a society that enjoys abundance. After all, if your main concern is how to make your last $2 buy enough to feed your family of four today, you are much less likely to care about the Eigenvalues inherent to a rational canonical form in linear algebra!
Give him a read. I'd love to hear your thoughts on the matter.
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I'm glad you found the topic interesting, David! I look forward to seeing reactions from your audience. - Bryan
ReplyDeleteGood post, David.
ReplyDeleteYou are EXACTLY right on the last point. Josef Pieper's LEISURE AS THE BASIS OF CULTURE makes the point that for culture to develop, it is necessary for at least some people to have enough leisure to do philosophy, theology, music, literature, drama, etc. This necessary leisure is a result of economic development. More broadly, the more prosperous society generally is, the more sustainable it can become. Key word there is "can."
Fairness and beauty seem more like requirements for social acceptability. I would hope that people interested in sustainability (whatever they mean by that) will include beauty. I'm afraid that conventional conceptions of "fairness" are tainted too much by egalitarianism these days.