Submitted by carl on Wed, 2006-07-26 20:48.
General Discussion on the Approach as a Whole
I posted this on my blog, but since it came at the end of a pretty long post, I'm not sure how many people saw it. Since it involves opining rather than reporting, I thought I'd offer it in the form of a "dialogical post." I feel inspired to offer this because there's been a lot of ideological back-and-forth in this dialogue, and I'm not sure how much progress this particular form of exchange offers.
A bloggerial aside here: wouldn't it be nice if we could find a way to dialogue about sustainability without getting bogged down in debates that ultimately fall back to philosophical (or maybe the word is ideological) first principles? I'm not suggesting any given ideologies are right or wrong. I'm stating the obvious, that their invocation produces impasses. Is there a process or processes that enable people to bypass these traps? And a follow-up question: might it be possible to script a set of sustainability principles that is genuinely ideology-neutral, i.e. that is valid whether or not, for instance, "mega-corps" are good, bad, or indifferent? A nice thought, no?
And here, maybe, is an even nicer one: maybe Michael's Principles do precisely that?