 - Last login: 10 hours agoLaodan
- laodan is a guy from Milford, Pennsylvania, USA.
- Likes 1,599 pages, 24 videos, 8 photos • 228 fans • Received 65 reviews
- Member since Aug 08, 2005
Visit my website
THE WAY THINGS ARE: The meaning of life is to be found in thinking about what is reality and the beauty of reality is to be found in our DNA's memorization of all forms that have been successfully retained along the four billion years of evolution of the principle of life on Gaia our earth. In the end what I mean to say is that beauty is something objective and what we call ugliness is then simply our unconscientious feel of something evolution did not retain.
Launch my Music Player
Favorites » His Blog
-
•TPC• & Diesel-Driven Bee Slums and Impotent Turkeys: The Case For Resilience
-
Aug 5, 2007 8:36pm
2 reviews
•http://www.bestcyrano.org/THOMASPAINE...
-
The Case For Resilience
in Thomas Paine by Chip Ward
"Resilience thinking" the cutting edge of environmental science, may someday replace "efficiency" as the organizing principle of our economy.
... Most of our knowledge about how natural systems work is focused on how to get what we want out of them as quickly and cheaply as possible u2014 things like timber, minerals, water, grain, fish, and so on. Weu2019re skilled at breaking systems apart and manipulating the pieces for short-term gain.
In the world today, efficiency rules. The history of our industrial civilization has essentially been the story of gaining control over nature. Water-spilling rivers were dammed and levied; timber-wasting forest fires were suppressed; cattle-eating predators were eliminated; and pesticides, herbicides, and antibiotics were liberally applied to deal with those pesky insects, weeds, and microbes that seemed so intent on wasting what we wanted to use efficiently. Today we are even engineering the genetic codes of plants and animals to make them more efficient.
Think of resiliency, on the other hand, as the ability of a system to recover from a disturbance. A resilient perspective acknowledges that change is constant and prediction difficult in a world that is complex and dynamic. It understands that when you manipulate the individual pieces of a system, you change that system in unintended ways. Resilience thinking is a new lens for looking at the natural world we are embedded in and the manmade world we have imposed upon it.
The recent collapse of honeybee colonies across the United States provides a compelling example of how we removed resilience from a fundamental ecological service u2014 pollination u2014 to make it more efficient and the unexpected blowback we are now suffering from that.
Ultimately, the loss of resilience can result in profound and unanticipated changes that happen when thresholds are crossed and ecosystems shift suddenly into new patterns of behavior with no way back.
 The Case For Resilience
Think about efficiency as being the ideology of rationality that has been built as the intellectual framework of modernity.
Reversing toward resilience as Chip Ward advocates is bound to take much time in order for humanity to adapt to the fast changes that are coming our way. I don't think there is any chance to see late modern societies adapting to change of such an intensity that is happening at such a fast speed.
It seems to me that "non action", in the sense of Lao Tze in the Tao Te Ching, constitutes our best individual chance to surf the tsunami of change that is emerging.
|
Add him as a friend >
