This is an imaginary interview with a great grandmother 75 years in the future. She'd be about 12 years old these days and often compared to Doogie Howser since she's on track to complete her medical degree by 10th grade and her phd in art history/cultural anthropology before her high school graduation. Also, she'll be co-captain of her high school basketball team for her junior and senior seasons = from 2013 thru 2015.
I had fun writing this several months ago (late December '07) and I trust you may enjoy reading it,
paul
founder, Young Ecosystem-Scholars Support Services
"Live!!! From New York!!! It's Wikinterviews Presents"
Dr. Cerrita Beane:
(Senior Spokeswoman for GreenPeace and Director Emeritus for The International Committee of the Red Cross announcing "Sustainability Hall of Fame" Inductees for the year 2082!)Traditional category inductees:
* Bill Joy and Janine Benyus for their work on "Designing Waste-Free Energy Information Systems"
* Hazel Henderson and Peter Barnes for their work on "Integrating Ecosystems and Economics"
We're also most proud of our "Peoples Choice" inductees this year, the Fiftieth Anniversary celebrating our "Sustainability Hall of Fame":
* Laurie Anderson's song "Monkey's Paw" = beautiful bongo & bass bounce w/ reflective, life-affirming lyrics
* Severn Suzuki's presentation in Rio -'92 = future generations voice views on sustainability pre-Kyoto
* Rodney King's public plea = one of the all time greatest team-building inquiring-memes
Wikinterviews:
Thank you for making your time available to be with us, Dr. Beane. Would you care to share your impressions of this year's awards?
Cerrita:
I'm honored to be with y'all and kindly call me Cerrita. Actually, I'm thrilled so many folks seem interested in listening to what this old lady has to say. I'm almost 90 years old, you know.
I'm just so glad that Peter and Bill are finally being honored because each of them spoke out loud and clear about the reality of future generations at a time when we were barely a blip on the radar screen of public consciousness. Thank goddess for those guys!
Wikinterviews:
As someone who lived through some rather difficult decades, what kinds of understandings have you gained?
Cerrita:
Never underestimate evolution! Even though I've not yet fully "understood evolution", I know it hasn't let us down yet.
Our species has been able to evolve, in large part, because team-work uniquely enables an individual's best.
Confronting one's mortality tends to focus any life-form's attention = discerning what's necessary and what's sufficient becomes readily evident as actual, immediate crises clarify one's priorities. Difficult decades provide for that.
Keeping one's wits alive and well doesn't happen by accident during times when 'society' seems insane. Difficult decades provide for that, too. So, good humor should never be underestimated either.
Some friends I grew up with have used images like 'extraordinarily slow alarm-clock' and 'auto-accident that goes on for a long time' to describe the global climate/energy crises our generation confronted. One of my favorite images is drawn from the movie "Network" when surprisingly large numbers of individuals simultaneously screamed out their windows 'I'm mad as hell and I'm not gonna take it anymore!'. Although I didn't witness people screaming out through their windows, I did grow up during times when many folks reached what I like to call "our non-sense thresholds" and I did actually witness myself and many others spontaneously choosing to affirm life, make sense and evolve.
It was just basic cybernetics. Once we began realizing we were actually 'cutting the very life-sustaining branches on which we were sitting', we also began changing course toward more life-affirming activities. As a species (or so it still seems to me) we began understanding that evolution favors good team-work and that good team-work requires good will as a focus for excellence in individual achievements contributing to effective eco-crises management.
Prior to that, our species exhibited a trait involving the waste of inordinate amounts of time and mental energy impaled on such self-generated dilemmas as "Individual versus Community" and/or "Evolution versus God" and/or "Economics versus Ecology". That non-sense trait got selected out. As species-survival becomes crucially important so does the need to discern between what's necessary and what's not. If not at least equaled by an approach geared toward cultivating common ground, the "versus" approach simply wastes so much time and energy it's not needed.
I consider myself especially fortunate because, from an early age I've been graced with a passion for learning and reading. (By the way, is there a difference between evolution and learning? I mean a difference that truly makes a difference!) My parents enjoyed reading and shared their love for learning with me. They provided me with plenty of kid-lit and they also often allowed me to read books they'd gotten for themselves.
Two books, published while I was in grade school, Wilson's "The Creation" and Frankfurt's "On Bullshit" brought to light the human condition as well as the need to change course. Once one's species is recognized as a geophysical force, it becomes increasingly difficult to sustain a "non-sense-artist" role;. There's only so much we'll put up with; as individuals from our selves, societally among one another and species-wide as a global, geophysical force.
Wikinterviews:
Kindly describe what it was like for you personally, as a teenager growing up during a time when our species was just beginning to break through its own confusion and ignorance about the meaning and practice of sustainability.
Cerrita:
I graduated from High School in 2015 and for me and many of my friends (remember how idealistic we can be at that age in life? That's not a bad thing!) there seemed to be an enthusiasm in the air that we, as a species, were actually going to make it. 'Sustainability' was NOT a failed concept! That was a tremendous relief after several years of uncertainty. Yes, in many ways things did get worse before getting better and yet those challenges only seemed to sharpen our resolve, ground our enthusiasm and focus our attention on what actually needed to be learned.
Then, as a high school student and later as an undergrad, I valued current events as a source of learning-fuel. I still love learning and I certainly did during my teens and my twenties. This has been my bias since I was a little kid = learning has been my passion since I can remember and, like I just said, for this I feel grateful. Nonetheless, a bias it is, so you should know that my learning passion totally synchronized with any and all academic subjects related to current events like global climate/energy crises. Being a student in school learning about evolution and sustainability and being encouraged to think critically, was for me like being a kid in a candy store that was also a toy store. I felt enthused by the question what needs to be learned and current events were rich with research opportunities.
Anyhow, this zeitgeist of enthusiasm was infused with gratitude for the individual and collaborative efforts of earlier generations of folks who actually made a difference ensuring the likelihood of sustainable futures. Through my early formative years, our species seemed to be re-learning basic social skills and other fundamental aspects of human survival. Things we were taught in kindergarten took on an entirely new level of importance and 'good will toward others' wasn't just lip-serviced at Christmas-time. It became quite evident quite quickly to many people my age that collaborative innovations are necessary for sustainability. 'Necessity being the mother of invention', we began nurturing 'Black Swans' (some say 'Green Swans') = generating improbable innovations via social technology.
Throughout my teenage years, it was becoming more apparent to more people that team-work works. It's easy to look back and see that now, but at that time team-work was merging with individual achievement to address global energy/climate crises in effective ways that had been virtually inconceivable only several years earlier. Exploring the subject of common ground became most relevant; as did radically new studies in subjects like ethics, entropy, epistemology, ecosystems, etc.; as did the basic re-conceptualization of common ideas like waste, freedom, information, time, energy, security, human nature, quality of life, virtual/actual needs, etc.
Wikinterviews:
Can you recall participating in any particular early tipping-points toward more sustainable futures.
Cerrita:
Please, my memory's not that bad!
My earliest such recollection was in 2007 when I wrote a fan-mail letter to one of my heroes on the basketball team preparing for the 2008 Olympics. I was only 11 years old, hoping to play on my school's team the next season and I asked for advice on how to improve my game with the wild idea of playing on a future Olympic team. We were studying global climate change in school at the time and that subject was sufficiently worrisome to cause me to express my concerns about whether there would even be any future Olympics.
Little did I know that leading up to the summer of 2008, something extraordinary had already begun happening and I'm pretty sure it was sparked by various teen-age athletes (myself included), simultaneously and from all around the globe, sending fan mail to our elder athletic heroes training to compete in the upcoming Olympics.
Quite by chance, at least one athlete from each country participating in the games had not only received and read all their fan-mail and not only improved her/his sports performance from our expressions of appreciation and encouragement ... they'd all observed two themes being voiced by the next generation of potential Olympians.
The first theme is well-described in retrospect as a simple call for help, a genuine, humble and open call-to-reflective-action, expressed from one human being to another, to listen to future generations. Unbeknownst to us various youngsters who voiced our support through fan-mail, it was how we were expressing it that conveyed the most meaning = both confronting and inspiring. We young fans were expecting some sort of guidance which in turn made such guidance all the more possible for the olympians to deliver. That was the sub-text.
On a more explicit level (though still not the main fan-part) much of this fan-mail conveyed another more specific theme focused on underlying concerns related to global climate/energy crises, e. g., doubts about the next olympics in 2012, etc.
A black swan or as some now say, mothers of green swans, began emerging.
So many individual olympians in training, representing so many different countries, began to improve their athletic performances and began to notice that simply considering these two themes expressed via their fan-mail seemed to be making major contributions to their performance improvements. So, quite naturally, they shared this information/insight with their various team-mates. This was happening on each and every team.
Unanimity is rare. When it occurs in a highly competitive environment that's being observed simultaneously by a global television audience, something special is happening.
The 2008 games unfolded pretty much as most folks expected. The singular commitment expressed by every individual Olympic athlete participating in the 2008 games came as a complete and totally pleasant surprise to just about everyone.
All participants swore allegiance to Future Olympians and committed the best of themselves to perform public service and deliver results ensuring a greener Olympics in 2012 specifically, and more sustainable futures in general.
Since their oath of allegiance was clearly not a protest, no one got offended (at least no one that mattered). This was simply a spontaneous commitment to provide excellent public service in response to young people's expressed concerns about sustainability and global climate change; and it made good sense to anyone who gave it a second thought. After all who can argue against real public service?
Numerous critics complained that athletes should stick with athletics since they obviously weren't qualified to contribute to the tasks such complex problems as global warming required (tasks that many of these same critics had assigned to themselves). Since these critics were not contributing much in the way of well-implemented solutions to the problems they'd signed-up to solve, they shut-up as soon as they noticed this.
The 2008 Olympians had a lot going for them = they understood the basic principles of performance-improvement and team-excellence, they came from various backgrounds and various locations around the globe and most were already employed in different professional fields and/or enrolled students with a wide array of academic interests.
Not a single one was an expert on preventing or managing global energy/climate crises and they all used this 'non-expertise' to tremendous advantage in focusing attention on what needs to be learned regarding such crises. Their 'non-expert' status enabled them to approach challenges as students who weren't afraid to ask obvious questions. They also chose to act in a 'non-official' capacity, and so they bypassed a lot of needless red-tape.
They all openly acknowledged they had more to learn than they already knew. Each in their own way, the 2008 Olympians, drew on their years of rigorous training experience to design their own, new training curricula to study the management of global energy/climate crises. They all knew they had a lot of homework to do and as they got busy with it, they generated completely unpredicted innovations applying teamwork to prevent and manage crises.
Their open acknowledgment that they had much to learn was also a genuine acceptance that they did not know much about managing global energy/climate crises. Since they were determined to excel in learning to meet challenges via the training regimens they were busy designing, they generally viewed 'ignorance' (including their own basic errors, mistakes, etc.) as fuel for learning. And learn they did. They inspired many others to learn, too.
Acknowledging one's ignorance is powerful action.
To an unprecedented extent, their team orientation toward valuing ignorance-reductions as part of performance-measures in their training regimens, excelled. Reducing ignorance is like reversing the effects of accelerated entropy. The flip-side of ignorance-reduction includes learning, knowledge-generation and evolution. Their work contributed immeasurable value, directly and indirectly, to the general body of knowledge on sustainable futures.
The 2008 Olympians expressed a common commitment with various individual voices and that message rang a bell in the consciousness of the human species. Yes, their commitment was general. It had to be since it was intended to be inclusive. They were simply concerned humans willing to voice their views and take advantage of their public exposure for the public good of the present, as well as the future generations of our human species here on earth. It wasn't so much 'what' those folks accomplished as it was 'how' they helped others accomplish so much good, so many actual improvements in implementing more sustainable best-practices. Much of the 'what' already existed; the major systemic breakthroughs those Olympians helped produce were mostly about implementation and that's more of a 'how' kind of thing.
Although the full impact of their commitment wouldn't become evident for a few decades, its timing was crucial. As so many aspects of human activity were going from bad-to-worse during that time, so many others began changing and improving. There were other 'tipping-points toward more sustainable futures' and yet few of them embodied the inclusive, species-wide courage to acknowledge our collective ignorance and focus on what needs to be learned as well as the tipping point reached through the individual and team efforts of the 2008 Olympians. Although their efforts were not sufficient, I'd say they were necessary for sustainable futures to have happened. If they hadn't done what they did three-quarters of a century ago, then others would have had to do something else producing comparable results; otherwise I doubt we'd be alive to have this conversation today, December 30, 2082.
Wikinterviews:
If you could send a message back to the folks in 2008 who were working to help manage global energy/climate crises, what would you emphasize?
Cerrita:
Wow!!! That's a great question! Let me think for a minute ...
For some reason, I'm recalling Muhammad Yunus' response to a question 'What can we do, here and today?' that was posed to him at a public presentation he gave sponsored by Pepperdine's Law School Students (my Dad took me with him cause he couldn't find a babysitter). Professor Yunus encouraged us to take a day-off = a genuine day-off, filled with free time, free from the day-to-day demands we place on ourselves in our various ambitious pursuits. As such a day-off is being enjoyed, reflect on what's most valuable and important to us as individuals and then envision such futures. He also suggested listing the various images and insights we gather during such a day-off and then conversing with one another about what's important, what's valuable and what kind of influence we intend to have on the future.
This was in 2007, a time when many of us youngsters and adults (especially in the USA) were so preoccupied with our daily activities that the decision to take a real day-off was not taken lightly. Even though his focus was on poverty-related crises, his suggestion still makes a lot of sense to me in terms of your question. Being so busy within our own human activity systems that we're convinced we can't afford to take time to step back and think about whether or not such systems are sustainable, is a dangerous state of busy-ness and resembles an ostrich sticking its head in a sand-hole. If more folks engaged in public discourse and other good work on subjects related to global energy/climate crises were to take the kind of day-off recommended by Professor Yunus, such discourse would elevate/evolve, BIG TIME!
If you want, let's schedule another one of these interviews after I've had a little more time to consider this question.
Until we re-connect, how's this for a quick and dirty response? Believe it or not, coincidentally, I recently read some blog entries posted in 2007 and realized that folks were expressing interest in subjects like crisis management and philosophy in the context of learning how to best address global warming. Then I pulled together some links to the work of various individuals whom I believe had already done (and/or still were doing) some extraordinary work in those subject areas = contributions that were both relevant and available to the folks expressing such interest via their blog posts. I also found a few good quotes that were circulating 75 years ago. I filed the stuff I pulled together and stored it on my phone. Here, let's transfer the file to your system and display it on the Wikinterviews screen, okay?
Wikinterviews:
Okay. This ought to work and be up in a few seconds. We'll include it at the end.
Cerrita:
Talking of the end, I've gotta boogie on down the hall before I'm too late. Some friends and colleagues from RMI and TBI (still celebrating their anniversaries this year; one hundredth and seventy-fifth, respectively) have invited me to a year-end, brain-storming conference focused on appreciating our species interests seven generations from now. Although the conference doesn't officially start until tomorrow, we're using the excuse of a cocktail party that began a few minutes ago to do some unofficial preparation. After all, old fogeys like me need all the help we can get just to keep up with young folks like you. Why don't you come along with me? I'm sure there'll be several folks worth interviewing.
Wikinterviews:
Thanks for the invitation and we will tag along.
More importantly, thanks for your time and attention during this interview. Your links and quotes are ready to display after you sign-off.
Cerrita:
Ooh, ooh ... one more comment for the good folks in 2008, if I may. Find a teacher or a parent of a young student (somewhere between fifth and twelfth grades) and collaborate on the design of reward-systems for such students to voice their views on the challenges they're inheriting. A little cash combined with a little academic prestige can go a long way toward helping generate useful insights. Your challenge, as such a reward-system designer, is to produce designs that are much more fun and appealing than dire and frightening. Keep sight of the whole, attend to the details as well as to the quality of the relationships, and the bigger results will tend to take care of themselves. Thanks for having me. It's been my pleasure. Keep up the good work!
Ciao, for now ...
What do the fields of 'crisis management', 'philosophy of science' and 'global climate changes' have in common?
These links (to the contributions of various intellectual heroes of mine) may be of general help with such an inquiry: Don Michael: http://www.gbn.com/Russ Ackoff: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell_Ackoff
Bela H. Banathy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bela_Banathy
Sir Geoffrey Vickers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_Vickers
West Churchman: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C._West_Churchman
Arnie Schultz: http://www.cnr.berkeley.edu/~schultz/!raisinb.htm
Ken Boulding: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_E._Boulding
Jim Miller: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Grier_Miller
And these links (to currently active 'systems' scientists/practitioners) may offer more specifics:
Peter Checkland: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Checkland
Ian Mitroff: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Mitroff
Sim Van der Ryn: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sim_Van_der_Ryn
Amory Lovins: http://www.rmi.org
Stuart Cowan: http://www.aboutus.org/Stuart_Cowan
Karl Henrik-Robert: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl-Henrik_Robèrt
David Cooperrider: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Cooperrider
Charles Hampden-Turner: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Hampden-Turner
And these quotes may be worthy of reading and some reflective thinking:
"Today the network of relationships linking the human race to itself and to the rest of the biosphere is so complex that all aspects affect all others to an extraordinary degree. Someone should be studying the whole system, however crudely that has to be done, because no gluing together of partial studies of a complex nonlinear system can give a good idea of the behavoir of the whole." Murray Gell-Mann
"Matter at each level of complexity appears to consist of two interdependent, nonidentical elements in dynamic interaction and in integral relation to each other. It appears that an interacting, dynamic, asymmetrical binary relationship is the fundamental module of order in the cosmos. I have the impression that the interactions in these dynmamic asymmetrical binary systems underlie all phenomena in nature ... The most fundamental phenomena in the universe is relationship. It then becomes possible to recognize the underlying unity in all the diversity of the phenomena of life." Jonas Salk
"A human being is part of the Whole ... He (She) experiences himself (herself), his (her) thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest ... a kind of optical delusion of his (her) consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving for such achievement is, in itself, a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security." Albert Einstein
(With special thanks to the folks at: www.newciv.org/ISSS_Primer/seminar.html for these quotes. Also, please note editorial liberty taken to include 'she, herself and her' in Einstein's quote to ensure a greater feeling of inclusion for female ecosystem scholars.)