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Imagine a spaceship cruising through the vastness. It has no ports where it may dock for millennia. No ships will re-supply the life giving stores of food, water, and air.
How do you survive, indeed thrive, on such a ship? Pause and think about this.
What strategies would you put in place to assure that your great grand children to the seventh generation thrive.
Decades ago futurist and all around genius, Buckminster Fuller coined the concept of Spaceship Earth.
A spaceship with self-contained resources requires that the crew work together. It requires they be resourceful and resource conscious.
Clearly, you can see your circumstances in this metaphor.
The best of the green movement, the World Wide Web, appreciation of diversity, and the best of globalization find a home in this metaphor of Spaceship Earth.
Fuller wanted and I have adopted the goal of a world that works for everyone. (“Everyone” includes all life, not just people.)
Seventh Generation Thinking
When the wise leaders of the Iroquois nation made decisions, they considered the effects of each decision on the 7th generation that follows. How’s that for long range planning, eh?
This idea seems to give people a best chance at survival and a best chance at a truly wonderful world to live in.
What do you think?
You may not know that the US constitution was largely derived from the Iroquois Confederacy. Sadly, they left out some useful pieces.
Sustainability
What practices can you sustain indefinitely? For example: What is a sustainable level of burning fossil fuels? That is, what level can you continue to use fossil fuels and not run out, ever?
Answer, none. Because Nature ain’t making any new fossil fuels, of course.
That’s where biodiesel comes into the picture. Is there a sustainable level for biodiesel? It depends on whom you ask. Remember global warming and depletion of soils. Think about robbing food crops to move trucks. Hmm.
What is sustainable? Perhaps, an apple orchard. Or maybe a field where the crops are rotated and the field gets to lie fallow and where natural ingredients are added back into the soil.
In my youth we learned that the Nile river, which flooded every year, deposited nutrients on the fertile banks. Was this sustainable? It certainly fed Egypt and much of the Mediterranean world for centuries.
Of course, the government dammed the Nile and now the floods have ceased. Can you guess what’s happened to the productivity of the fields?
Did they get a non-fossil fuel source of electricity?
You can see it’s not an easy question. It is a question we must solve. This area provides many of the really tough questions that the left-brain, sequential, analytical mind alone has failed to handle.
You’ll need to Upgrade Your Right Brain in order to help. Engage your right-brain to think outside the box. (See Upgrading Your Right Brain below.)
The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them. – Albert Einstein
What you can do –
When you make decisions, ask yourself and others these kinds of questions.
“Is this practice sustainable?”
“What is the impact on the 7th generation?”
“How does this move us towards a world that works for everyone?”
A variation –
“Does this move us closer to a world that works for everyone or farther away?”
Engage your right-brain to think outside the box. (See Upgrading Your Right Brain below.)
Resources –
Your best resource is your considered thought before you make decisions. Stop and consider whether your action is sustainable. Can you pay the price? Can we pay the price? Can your grandchildren pay the price?
For example:
On a personal level, I realized if I wanted to be happy and practice into my 70s, my work schedule wasn’t going to be sustainable
That insight led me to radically modify my schedule of work – I now work eight or nine weeks then take a two-week sabbatical.
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