Sustainability Principles Online Dialogue

Dear dialogue participants,

It is hard to believe that six weeks are over but time is up and tomorrow, August 18, the on-line dialogue on the sustainability principles will be coming to a close.

I wanted to thank all who participated for a very lively discussion and for the thoughtful contributions made to the discussion. The entries, in all the forums, provide a very valuable store of material that is sure to be helpful in a process of further refining the original text. The experience, as a whole, also provided a wonderful opportunity for all of us to learn from each other.

Special thanks to Joshua Arnow, BFI Board member, who concieved of the idea of conducting the dialogue, and for BFI staff, who worked so hard and well to make it happen.

I was wondering whether participants in the dialogue could offer suggestions of how could the principles (perhaps in an aproved version, following the dialogue) be best made use off?

The essence of the challenge, I think, is “creation of the fundamentally new.” This is the definition of “transformation” within “archetypal epistemology,” as explained by Manfred Halpern (now deceased, former Professor of Near East Studies, Princeton University).

The difficulty is creation of a vessel of “truth” that serves more as “emanation” and thus falsifies the claims by the error of reification. This produces incoherence when that vessel breaks.

Establishing “sustainability” as some verity, as if there were a set of laws to discover, hence a path of purity to follow once those laws are discovered – a new dispensation, as it were – is to construct a theology of sustainability, instead of the visionary goal that it should be. As a visionary goal, sustainability merely postulates the human desire to continue species, communal, and cultural existence within the universe – and employs the distinctly human attributes of creative intelligence and anticipatory design science in its pursuit and, thereby, ongoing attainment. Sustainability, in other words, is an invention.

Michael,

Eric's comments take issue with the spiritual principle functioning as the central core of the Sustainablity Principles System. He asserts that the domain of life is the core driver.

You have asserted that without the spiritual principle the system of principles could not function or exist as a coherent whole. He states:

"By anchoring the essence of human motivation and intention, the spiritual principle acts as the causal root which sets the tone for the whole. It drives the integration of the other four principles, those related to the material, economic, life, and social domains."

Recieved by Email on July 17th 2006 and posted here with permission

"I have had a chance to look at the Five Core Principles by Michael Ben-Eli and admire his efforts to establish core elements of sustainability--not an easy task. There is clearly much that is useful here."

"At points, I wish it had been written in less wordy, more straightforward language, and there are things I don't understand--like why the Laws of Thermodynamics (which I studied in college as a biochemistry major) are included--and there are things I don't agree with--like the Spiritual Domain being the central core."

Feedback from Hazel Henderson (received by e-mail on August 10th 2006 and posted here upon request):

"My congratulations to Dr. Michael Ben-Eli for a comprehensive document. My overall comment is that of course, the document is "Western" and could use some of the multi-cultural approaches of the 16 Principles of the Earth Charter (www.earthcharter.org )".

"Regarding the Intro and Definition of Sustainability, I would substitute "stewarding" for the sexist term "husbanding" which might turn off half your audience. Also, the term "wealth" needs defining up front, because so many people are brainwashed to equate wealth with money (worthless pieces of paper or blips on computer screens)".

The following provides an overview of a program on which we have been working--this program is "designed" for implementation in Vietnam. However, over the course of time we have received substantial inquiries and expressions of interest about this program from people in many parts of the world.

We have worked to approach the complex issues associated with rural development from a systems solutions perspective---the following is our concept, our plans, and our goals---for your information, all of the technology described already exists and has been used either in seperate installations or, in some cases, combined--so we know that the parts work and we believe that the system will be a high-performance sustainable program.

A few questions have emerged during the dialogue (so far) that participants may wish to address. These include:

1. Strategies for action: suggest initiatives which could accelerate realization of a worlld around transition to sustainability practices. What key areas of emphasis (technology, public policy, education, open citizens' dialogue, etc.) would be key elements

2.What should the role of education be in relation to the challeng of such a transition and how should it best be organized?

3.The first principle highlights the concept of entropy as a basis for the range of possibilities in dealing with physical systems. The term (entropy) seems to be problematic since it is not universally understood. How could this be clarified and the intention of the principle be made easier to understand?

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?

“It is implicit that the fact of imminent feasibility of high standard sustainability of all human life now recognized by less than 1% of humanity must gain a 99 fold amplification which involves a 99-fold educational reorientation to synchronize human capabilities with the inexorable and irreversible frontiering of evolution. This Educational regeneration is now the highest priority function of intellect in Universe”

R.B. Fuller

(from; It Came to Pass Not to Stay, 1976)

So if RBF is on target with the above statement and I think its safer to assume that he is, then it seems that in one or more of the domains, the policy and operational implications should address priority educational objectives.