[iltos]

i s'pose my subtitle...my "hook" here, if you will, is this....."can you forge a new cultural meme?"

my gift to bill is short posts...so i'll keep this brief (king's x )

my train of thought (and the thread title) took its cue from this nytimes article

The political landscape of academia, combined with the fight for grant money, has always fostered competition far more than collaboration.

But the threat of global warming may just change all that.

lol.....ok....so before some of you pull those heavy, keep-out-the-light-and-noise draperies over the window of your brain....i didn't say the thing about global warming, and it's not the point of this thread.....

the new york times said the thing about global warming.....i included it in the quote because it's THERE....but, more importantly, just to emphasize that it is only a tee on the political golfcourse of globalization, so don't get your brand new red and green reindeer boxers in a bunch about it.....

i'm talking about the golfball here

Take what’s happening at the Rochester Institute of Technology. In September the school established the Golisano Institute for Sustainability, aimed at getting students and professors from different disciplines to collaborate in studying the environmental ramifications of production and consumption.

production and consumption.....it makes the world go 'round.....well, the human world, anyway.....

i've probably got a lot more to say about this (i just never know sometimes), but in the spirit of my christmas gift to bill, here it is without the fancy bows and wrappings.

redefine the terms to fit your science, your ethics, your politics...i'm a generalist....whatever the heck that is....

the development (i.e. evolution) of culture has resulted in an economic system that, regardless of your political or personal opinions about it, dictates our world view...it is the 3d glasses through which we appreciate the "natural world" (we take them off to see "beauty", perhaps), the yardstick by which we oftentimes judge our fellow man or fellow nations, and, in the last 40 years or so, it has become the pinball game in our heads that raises questions of "tilt"......

i submit that somehow or other, embedded in that economic system, is a powerful cultural meme....and would further acknowledge that, except for the last 40 years or so, it has been a kind of blind offshoot of our genetics....a product of alphaism, of standing tall on the savannah and seeing far with that big processor of ours, of our "point of reference"-less intelligence creating solutions to overcome what it has analyzed to be the fundamental danger to the human animal in its enviornment (used here in its very broadest, most inclusive, sense)....the lack of control.

so the question this thread poses is this
does the idea of "sustainability" (aka a "green economy") demand a new cultural meme?
what might that be, and is it evolutionary (specifically, might it be the result of conciousness that HAD a frame of reference....a self?)

here's a bunch of links to things that caught my eye and seem at least tangentially relevant, and reasonably "interdisciplinary"....i haven't looked closely at any of them.
http://www.eoearth.org/article/Energ...or_wind_energy
http://www.plantservices.com/articles/2006/131.html
http://homeenergy.org/archive/hem.di...95/950109.html
http://energypathfinder.blogspot.com...challenge.html
http://cascadiascorecard.typepad.com..._whiplash.html
http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/004425.html

i did mine this quote, however

We can build a bright green civilization. We don't have all of the tools and models we'll need ready yet, but with a green revolution we can invent them. We even know how to sell it, and how to enrich our economies in the process.

it's unfortunate that revolution has become such an overused yawn-of-a-word...because if memes are for real, humans changing their's would be, by all accounts.....revolutionary.

[wacor]

Well ya mentioned me a couple of times so I feel obligated to reply in some manner.

Ya could have shortened it to just this.

so the question this thread poses is this
does the idea of "sustainability" (aka a "green economy") demand a new cultural meme?

As to the question I guess I will have to get back to you on that one. Too busy driving all over and heating my house.

Damn those pollutants

Guess that means i need a meme change eh?

[iltos]

Originally Posted by wacor

Well ya mentioned me a couple of times so I feel obligated to reply in some manner.

Ya could have shortened it to just this.

you missed a career as an editor, bill


it's the curse of the early riser, 'specially on christmas morning....gone are the days when my daughter's up BEFORE me, dragging me down to the christmas tree.....

this morning, i do indeed have WAY to much time on my hands.....so i synthesized a bunch of stuff i've been reading here and tried to make it coherent....or at least push it a new direction

[wacor]

I understand your points completely Bob.

I too got up before all the kids. Well 3 to be exact.

Been this way for a while now. Kind of takes the fun out of it.

[BlackSpike]

Didn't the native Americans use a "sustainable", "green" system?
Several peoples have worked with a "take no more than you need, use all you take, and return what you can" ethos.
Not so much a "new meme" as an old set of values needing to be re-applied?

[iltos]

Originally Posted by BlackSpike

Didn't the native Americans use a "sustainable", "green" system?
Several peoples have worked with a "take no more than you need, use all you take, and return what you can" ethos.
Not so much a "new meme" as an old set of values needing to be re-applied?

hmmm....some truth in that.....there is a "theory of history" that explains our exploits as a kind of coiled path of increasing complexity (picture a spring).....you circle 'round to the same point ("sustainability", maybe) on the spring, and you have much the same issues as the "level" below you, in the past....just made more complex by our advancement.

but that assumes all us homosapiens look at "controlling the environment" the same.....and that's were i'd take issue with the "old set of values" arguement.....there is a pretty good article that was posted in these threads http://home.flash.net/~falline/ocrPrimeval.htm about how the native american, too, "controlled" the enviroment (evidence of semi-controlled burns to control the migration of buffalo comes to mind)

it is written tho, imo, in defense of our cultural meme....by attempting to dispel the notion that native americans where somehow different in their value system than we are....just less "advanced"

i don't agree with the article completely, yet the evidence does seem to be there that native americans were also concerned about control of the environment to insure survival.....still, that kind of control (with or without "advancement") is different to me than what i'm calling the cultural meme embedded in our current, pervasive economic system.....in part, because it's values ARE different.

and you're right to call them "values"....but don't values contribute to the creation of a meme?.....our values are significantly different from those of the native americans, or the even "closer still to nature" stone age tribes still living in those isolated valleys of new guinea

imo, to define what we mean by "sustainability" we have to redefine our values....and we won't be going back to the stone age to achieve it.

[wacor]

I don't think the native americans had any special insights.

I think it was just common sense. They lived off the land. As did many until the industrial age.

You destroy what you need to live it is a bit self defeating.

Now we are industrialized and institutionalized and brainwashed and greedy. So we do what is easiest and don't worry about the future.

[iltos]

Originally Posted by wacor

I don't think the native americans had any special insights.

I think it was just common sense. They lived off the land. As did many until the industrial age.

You destroy what you need to live it is a bit self defeating.

Now we are industrialized and institutionalized and brainwashed and greedy. So we do what is easiest and don't worry about the future.

a part of our culture meme, then?

[wacor]

Originally Posted by iltos

a part of our culture meme, then?

Damned if I know.

It is Christmas night.

Time to relax and not think.

[TooBad]

Originally Posted by BlackSpike

Didn't the native Americans use a "sustainable", "green" system?
Several peoples have worked with a "take no more than you need, use all you take, and return what you can" ethos.
Not so much a "new meme" as an old set of values needing to be re-applied?

That was much easier for them to live by as there was much space and few people, but in the end, they fought each other over what resources were available and weren't all that different in the end.

Iltos, at first read of your post, I thought that you had too much egg nog.

To me, the earth is eminantly sustainable and yet destined to destruction in the end with or without human aid. I find the height of human arrogance to be that we first can know what to do or not do, and second to think that we can actually fix what we perceive as broken. To my knowledge, every time we have tried to "fix" nature, either with a ban on killing this species or that, or the "fix" we attempted in the Everglades, we make things worse because for all our scientific efforts, we don't really know squat when it comes to how our world actually works. The variables to how nature interacts is so complex that I think it will take another millenium or two before we have the faintest idea.

This does not mean that I think that scientific examination is useless. Simply that it is way too arrogant to think that we have discovered any answers at all. Let us keep searching, but with a bit more humility, please.

[iltos]

Originally Posted by TooBad

Iltos, at first read of your post, I thought that you had too much egg nog.

....yeah, i know....just playfulness, tho
'cause it was christmas, and i figgered that to be the worst time to post something that felt so complex and "heavy"....but all the musings were rattling around like marbles in a bucket, and i had to dump 'em somewhere.....

To me, the earth is eminantly sustainable and yet destined to destruction in the end with or without human aid. I find the height of human arrogance to be that we first can know what to do or not do, and second to think that we can actually fix what we perceive as broken. To my knowledge, every time we have tried to "fix" nature, either with a ban on killing this species or that, or the "fix" we attempted in the Everglades, we make things worse because for all our scientific efforts, we don't really know squat when it comes to how our world actually works. The variables to how nature interacts is so complex that I think it will take another millenium or two before we have the faintest idea.

This does not mean that I think that scientific examination is useless. Simply that it is way too arrogant to think that we have discovered any answers at all. Let us keep searching, but with a bit more humility, please.

arrogance is a word that comes to mind to me, as well....but in the context of a cultural meme -of cultural "evolution"- it can only be looked as a "fit" quality for survival....one that has served us well for the last umpteen thousand years.

shamou presented alphaism as an extremely arrogant quality (if you remember the gordon gecko arguments), and many of us took issue with it because it's bottom line was crassly self-serving and blatantly materialistic.

which pretty much describes the "tilt" questions that have come up in the last 40 years or so, as the notion of a "green" economy has developed out of the warning written about in "silent spring"

but you take arrogance to a different place....one that points, i guess, to that quality as operating still in any attempt to adjust our worldview towards a 'sustainable' relationship to the planet.

precisely why the word arrogant needs to be reconsidered, imo....my contention is that the WAY we use that quality (our arrogance....the result of that big processor sitting atop that body walking upright and seeing far in the physical (and temporal) distance) gives us more than the ability to seek control of our environment....it gives us the ability to seek control of our "self" as well, and our movements through the physical and temporal distance.

our current cultural meme is not a whole lot different that living in a cave...while we've developed tons of tools (technology) to enhance our survival, and bunches of rituals (religion and politics) to deal with the programming loops our processors ponder (like death and love), our goal is still pretty self-serving and immediate......the whole pleasure/pain thing.....

so i'm suggesting that our "civilization" still operates out of our genetic evolution, and the thing identified as a "meme" by dawson is currently just our genetic template pressed into the stuff of our social interaction....and the resulting pattern left in the social stuff when he pulls that template out is called "culture"

which makes me wonder if the whole "green economy" and "sustainabilty" discussion is....not different, in terms of the significance of "alphaism" or arrogance....but different in that it "sees" culture as an environment

and, maybe for the first time in our evolutionary history, we are standing on THAT savannah, with our big processors atop a body that walks upright, looking into its physical and temporal distance.

[WarC]

Hmmm I gotta ponder this one for awhile.

Off hand I think that the environmental demands we face are just a larger vision of similar demands placed on societies at other levels today and throughout our past. As our cultural awareness of fossil fuels and climate change rises and forces us to adapt, so too does a coming water shortage or a poor harvest force a village to adapt. With that adaptation comes hardship, and temporary loss. As far as that goes, I think little will change.

But the whole question of climate change, of fossil fuels, of finitie earthbound resources...I think it hints at the greater challenge facing us as a species, the challenge of one day moving from the Earth and looking to other celestial bodies for the resources and living spaces our species requires inorder to keep advancing. Thinking of it in that light, it does seem like a demand for transformation culturally. Perhaps the ideology of individual gratification really -is- a symptom of our post industrial age.

[WarC]

I like BlackSpike's example of Native Americans as a group of people who were forced, because of their level of technology and the environment in which they lived, to lead a lifestyle which we would call "sustainable" today. Wacor pointed out that it was "common sense" due to those conditions. I think atleast culturally we can make a parallel there to today. Where we are that lost tribes of natives finally learning that our big prairie can actually run out of bison.