Sustainability Principles Online Dialogue

Gary,

Hazel Henderson recently offered an insightful comment ( via email) in which she suggested adding the concept of "human responsibility" into the text of the Social Domain. See all caps below for clarity.

The Fourth Principle:

Maximize degrees of freedom and potential self-realization of all humans without any individual or group, adversely affecting others.

Policy and Operational Implications:

• Enshrine Universal Rights within a framework of HUMAN RESPONSIBILITY AND planetary citizenship

Very much welcome this suggestion, as articulated by Joshua following Hazel's comments. Addition of the term "human responsibility" offers the much needed balance to the concept of "human rights," in a planetary or any other scope.

Well you just made me think of something and i might as well put
it into print.You may be familiar with the work of Stafford Beer and
his book Beyond Dispute were groups of thirty persons achieve ninety eight percent concensus in rigorous three day syntegration meetings presided over by facilitators who track and keep communications linguistically goal driven.Perhaps a fully automated version shall be possible if it doesn't allready exist in aid a Planetary Geometry Of Democracy.Jay Baldwin's 'Bucky Works'contains an interesting diagram and discussion toward the end of his book.A picture worth a quadrillion words.

Andrew,

I agree wwith you that the ultimate chllenge is that of actually transitioning to a more desirable state of affairs and that, therefore, principles of transition and the dynamics of change processes is of paramount importance.

I do feel however that these belong to a different logic level. The five sustainability principles attempt to describe the minimum conditions of a state (of sustainability). The transition domain moves to the level of how to ensre that these are followed and pertain directly to the question of what strategies for change should be addopted by human kind.

Perhaps you could start a topic, as part of this dialogue, on strategies for change...

I agree 100 percent! We need a "strategies for change" topic as part of this dialogue...as visible as all the initial topics were. I'm in the middle of something now...don't know if it's up to BFI to start new primary topics or if anyone can. I'll check back later.

- Steve

to start a new topic just click on 'create content' and then pick 'forum topic' or use the link at the top of the forum page.

for more info:

http://bfi-internal.org/sustainability/creating_content

Thanks for the good links, trimtab!

My observation is: this basic approach & 5 principles were created with a purpose; they were done with 'intent' - but the 5 principles don't mention this. I think there is a gap - a flaw of presumption at the root of this effort...

Ben, I believe, wrote: "The five sustainability principles attempt to describe the minimum conditions of a state (of sustainability). The transition domain moves to the level of how to ensre that these are followed and pertain directly to the question of what strategies for change should be addopted by human kind."

The preceding statement requires that there is an intent to sustainability, and to speak about it to other humans. But it is my sense of societal, familial, and personal action over history that humans *must* be able to set goals of various kinds, and then must strive to reach them. This is mostly done consciously, I think (the subconscious actions are things like survival skills, procreation, self-protection...). But humans set goals. We act with intent.

Where, in the above "minimum conditions" does intent lie?

(I also do not feel that Spiritual is adequately broad - I read it as very narrowly focused on physical things as we define them at this current era of 'knowledge'. But I feel if it is to be a more useful definition then it must express a more 'ethereal' atmosphere than simple one of 'mystery'.) more another time. Now I gotta see if I can subscribe to changes or if I must visit the website each time I want to know if something new has been posted, so farewell.

I would suggest that collaboration is perhaps not so much a principle as a way of behaving. It represents an option for organizing action (a strategy, in game theory sense) which may or may not be superior in relation to attaining a particular outcome. The later (the outcome) in itself, is constrained by primary principles of some sort: "laws of gravity, electromagnetic forces, and the like.

Did Bucky ever write or do anything that wasn't guided by principles of sustainability?

You said principles guide behavior. Bucky, aka. guinea pig B, had a set of principles he adopted based on experience and which he lived by. One of them was never ask people to listen to you. Instead, wait for them to ask a question and then give the best answer you can.

This forum is about to come to a close and I have this final thought.

We can look to Bucky and probably discover five or six principles he already concluded were necessary for human global sustainability. I don't know if these principles exist in a collection somewhere or not but I bet they do.

Let's use and amplify the knowledge we already have available. I think Bucky's work is barely used. Michael, I applaud your efforts to futher his work. This has been a valuable experience for me. Thanks very, very much.

Thanks Steve,

I agree whole heartedly with collaboration being a 1st principle for BFI. Many thounsands of people, say approx 8k were directly invited to participate in this dialogue. I'm sure it has spread beyond that.

The scale is small to start since its an experiment. The goal is to have a manageable high quality discussion that is also highly relevant too the subject matter. Such a dialogue will hopefully enable a well thought out piece of work to evolve through collaboration to the next level.

The open question posed by someone like Stephen Hawking is of meaningful and the volume of response is quite impressive but upon brief inspection I do not think the quality of the repsonse is nearly as as impressive. Hawking will have a difficult time finding the insightful kernals buried in the mountain of chaf.

It would be interesting to think about how to scale something like this up to enable a much higher level of participation while still maintaining high quality and relevant dialogue that can produce a useful result.

--> This might be were a more thought out system could be really useful. Something that has kind systematic 'agree', 'disagree', etc. type of responses... I would be exited to work on something like that in the future.

Here is the link to the Stephen Hawking thing:

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/?qid=20060704195516AAnrdOD