What’s key…is that we all need to work together. There’s no way for all of us to know about each other. We’re in that part of this new way of being that there’s too many players. It’s too chaotic. There is no center, there is no hub. But we need to find ways to work together, and to lose the idea that any one of us is the solution. Because if any one of us were the solution, we wouldn’t be where we are now.
Aengus Anderson (Page 6 of 7)
We have been having a discussion amongst ourselves about elitism and to the sort of voices that we’re hearing in a project like this. And one of the tricks of talking to people about the future is that often you get people who have a lot of time to think about the future.
Any time that you lessen levels of disparity you’re going to have more progress. And you can’t look at it as an own individual term. Progress in your own life, progress in technology. But I believe that you have to look at progress through the connection of everything. That’s what sustainability is really about. It’s about the relationship of our economy, of social justice, the quality of life of people, and then the last part is the environment.
I always wonder about people that are very pro-tech on the Left, for example. “Oh, we’ve got to keep all this. Of course. That’d be crazy.” You know, you want to preserve all of the level of technology. The question that occurs to me is, oh so you want to keep how many hundreds of millions of people in the mines, in the smelters, in the foundries, in the assembly lines? I would like to see them be able to do something else. But you’re going to have to keep them there one way or another if you want to have all this stuff.
I think the saddest thing is if you ever stop wanting to learn new things. And it can be about anything. That’s just really heartbreaking. I don’t know. It’s just so much part of like who you are as a human to learn new things constantly. And so to not be curious, not want to learn new things and not create new patterns and connections…you’re pretty much giving up your human self.
In the future, we have to change the way we look at consumption. That’s why I’m such a big proponent of the sharing economy. Because it’s not an issue of if it’s going to happen, it’s when it’s going to happen. And I’d rather people voluntarily adopt it now and start realizing the benefit of it now while we’re still in this kind of relative land of plenty, than be forced into it later when all of a sudden there’s not enough water to cover Phoenix anymore because it’s a huge city in the middle of a desert and they have to go on water rationing.
Obviously there’s human rights that have to do with water and air and safety and shelter, but I think education is right there with it because it really is a public good. I have such a hard time with people who say, for example, who don’t have children and say, “Well why should I pay those taxes. I don’t have anybody in the schools. It’s not benefitting me.” And I think how can you possibly say that? Those are the people that are servicing you, whether they’re servicing your roads or your supermarket or your medical offices.
I don’t think ecological awareness is a sort of “happy happy joy joy, we are all earthlings” thing. I think it’s actually a kind of uncanny realization. On the one hand there’s no away, on the other hand what the hell is this? “This is not my beautiful waste. This is not my beautiful toilet. This is not my beautiful Pacific Ocean.” You know, all of a sudden these things become somehow not exactly what we thought they were.
We want to sort of bring you all up to speed on some of the things that we’ve been thinking about, some of the conversations we’ve been having that I’ve had to edit out of the tail ends of episodes, link a few concepts and also be… Well, first because we think it’s really important to be sort of transparent about where we’re going with the series and the conversations we’re having.
Everything we know about biological sciences, medicine, agriculture, disease, whatever, is based on studying one example of life. Life on Earth. Life as we know it. If we find another example that’s different, a second genesis, and independent origin of life, comparing those two might enable us to answer questions that we would never be able to answer if we only had one example to study. That could provide practical benefits for humans as well as better understanding of how to manage ecosystems, etc.