Solutions
"When a decision is made to cope with the symptoms of a problem, it is generally assumed that the corrective measures will solve the problem itself. They seldom do. Engineers cannot seem to get this through their heads. These countermeasures are all based on too narrow a definition of what is wrong. Human measures and countermeasures proceed from limited scientific truth and judgment. A true solution can never come about in this way." --- Masanobu Fukuoka
Climate change, peak oil, colony collapse disorder -- a lack of understanding, or we don’t want to give anything up?
Are the solutions really so complex?
2 comments:
the recent experience of western man has indeed been just that: solutions are found in the more intense application of earlier solutions, or in variations thereof.
it seemingly has worked well in the industrial age, but now we are verging on the post-industrial.
we are challenged to turn our waste streams into resources: thus made valuable, and somehow made available.
the terrible example of plastic, ubiquitous plastic, is the case in point.
Our ocean is full of plastic in various stages of breakdown.
these entered the food supply chain, with unknown results.
the mass of waste in the ocean, where it is highly visible, is dwarfed by the land based waste.
so how does it become a resource?
other than that, the planet will not support the growing population of humans: how will this play out in the end?
I guess I don't have the imagination to see beyond our monumental problems in order to arrive at any real solutions.
Plastic. You can't even find milk in cartons any more. And why worry about our drinking water source when we can buy plenty of bottled at Costco? Insanity rules.
Simplify, conserve, downsize. Pretty hard to do when your lifestyle and society values complexity, bigger, more.
If we could just quit adding to the problem, maybe we could focus on the cleaning up the mess we've already created.
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