|
|
Driving Forces: Environment
The Earth consists of four realms: the Atmosphere, Hydrosphere, Lithosphere and the Biosphere. The Biosphere is the realm of Earth that contains all of the planet’s living organisms. Plants and algae are the Earth’s two primary energy production components that support and maintain life for all species. Humans are the largest consumer of the Earth’s productivity, and population and consumption are both growing today at faster rates than the planet can support. By consuming more than the Earth produces, humans are using energy resources necessary for life for other living species. Those species that are most adaptable to their evolving environments are the most likely to survive and continue to exist. However, continuing over-consumption is dangerous to all living species and the balance of life. No form of life lives independently of other life forms.
Temperature and precipitation control the Earth’s climate and physical environment. Every climate ranges from Arctic to Tropic and from Wet to Dry. The three most extreme environments are the cold arctic, the hot, wet tropical rain forest and the hot, dry tropical desert. Human comfort is greatest within the moderate realm of each extreme condition. It is within these moderate environments that Earth’s production is greatest. It’s also within moderate regions where competition for resources is the greatest. When resources are over extracted there are a chain of events set in place that begin impacting neighboring environments creating unintended consequences. These situations often begin with invasive species overtaking native production, ultimately destroying habitats through environmental transformations. Competition for resources and over extraction also result in damaged and polluted environments caused by remaining waste. Pollution contaminates air, water, soil and food which in turn cause illness and disease.
While we do not know exactly why the Incas, Aztecs and Anasazi are now extinct civilizations and societies, we do know that it was over consumption and the over extraction of resources that led to their demise. Problems facing civilization today around the world are certainly greater than any other time in history. Modern demands for resources and greater forms of technology are placing all of humankind in danger.
While you may not agree that climate change is caused by human forces, it cannot be denied that chemical fertilizers and pesticides are damaging nature and other species; that coastal development is polluting the oceans’ waters; that air pollution is damaging health; that arctic and Antarctic ice is melting, that coral reefs and fish are dying; that our drinking water is contaminated, and our rainforests, the most productive environments in nature, are being cut down for lumber and farming.
We must awaken to reality and change our ways of life – and thinking! Instead of Driving Forces having negative connotations globally, we can harness these powers for making positive contributions to the world and for sustaining life on this planet.
Please provide us with your thoughts – and we’ll respond. We’ll also connect you with others so you can learn how they think as well!
Thanx!
We all know how important technology has been for progress and human development worldwide. Electronic communications that links everyone living on earth together as part of one global community overtime will bring down all barriers that currently keep us apart and at war. Medical advances as well are helping people worldwide and we now have the ability to effectively and economically eliminate malnutrition, even within the poorest and most remote settings.
However, for every positive effect technology brings to the world, there are those currently who use it for destructive means. Remember, Sir Isaac Newton? His third law of motion indicates when bodies remain at rest they are being influenced by equal and opposite forces. When one force becomes greater than its opposite force the greater force prevails, resulting in movement. When we flip a coin into the air, at some point in time the weight of the coin and the friction of the atmosphere overcomes the force of flight, and the coin begins its return to the ground. The point being, to overcome the destructive capabilities forces can use technology to produce, as societies, we have to find greater sources of opposing force to limit the escalation of danger or eliminate it entirely.
One set of opposing forces results in the use of confrontational action. Another approach is to eliminate any needs for confrontation. Globally, we use religious and political issues for confrontational causes to mask poverty and ignorance. Within this nation, it’s poverty and ignorance that is paramount in keeping us from achieving America’s highest principles.
Today, through making access to information and knowledge through communications open and available to everyone, we are well on our way to diffusing the influence ignorance plays. It’s now time to begin a second front where we focus national attention and interests on poverty – not only here, but, globally for assisting developing nations.
If we’ve learned anything from the most recent wars in Eastern Europe and in the middle-east, it should be that we in fact are our brothers’ keepers; and unless we’re willing to help others as we help ourselves, war and terrorism will continue – as will crime across America.
We can use technology to our advantage by using it as a strategic tool as well as a tool for commerce. Please provide us with your thoughts – and we’ll respond. We’ll also connect you with others so you can learn how they think as well!
Thanx!
Driving Forces: Food and Agriculture
Early in the history of humankind we left the security of our caves to forage for food. Foraging took us farther and farther away from our permanent habitats as food nearby became over-picked and over-hunted well beyond the seasonal ability to naturally replenish. Once away from the caves a significant distance, humans transformed becoming nomadic tribes of hunter-gatherers. As tribes increased in population they traveled greater distances to fish, hunt and gather food. Once tribes became so large that it was logistically impossible to hunt and gather enough food to adequately feed its members, the tribes settled in regions where moderate climates and ample rainfall allowed them to farm, using hunting parties to bring fresh meat back to camp.
It’s within this cultural framework that hamlets, villages, small towns and cities later evolved. Early farmers survived relying entirely upon the productive capacity of the tribe, favorable climates and rich soils. According to Jared Diamond, author of Collapse, numerous communities and societies were born; most communities and societies from time-to-time were forced to move elsewhere when they too overdeveloped their capacity to adequately feed themselves. When tribes became too large to move any longer, these communities and societies disappeared and became extinct. Is the developing world beginning to reach this point again?
Like everything else within modern society, farm products, including food are now major components of international trade within the global economy. Major corporations are consolidating more of America’s farmlands and transforming them to produce new and different crops other than food for economic interests. Consequently, more and more of America’s food supplies are fow imported.
Like petroleum, food is a strategic necessity for protecting and defending America’s homeland. Yet we do not reserve food nationally in the way we strategically store petroleum. Imported food provides greater security risks. Terrorists have easier access to taint, poison or destroy foods awaiting shipment abroad than exist within the United States.
By decentralizing farming and locating food production across the nation strategically, we can dramatically improve food security; we can reduce transportation costs and cut our carbon footprints. We can also offer fresher foods to Americans and create new jobs. Urban agriculture is being successfully practiced all across Europe. We should be studying their model to determine how it can best work here.
Please provide us with your thoughts – and we’ll respond. We’ll also connect you with others so you can learn how they think as well!
Thanx!
Driving Forces: Values and Political Structures
For the world to advance, humankind must learn that survival is more than a primal instinct. With few exceptions humans form and establish tribal collections bonded together through common geography, common culture, common needs and common aspirations. True, there may be aspects of community interests that not all members of the population accept or support, but to prosper a community recognizes that structure, order, authority and common pursuits are necessary societal achievements.
Common culture and common interests are products of community values. As populations develop internally values expand and increase. Broader values engage larger numbers of the overall population while increased values raises expectations for the population’s behavior - and achievement.
Communities are also shaped by environment, experience and genetic variances. Nomadic communities living within the constraints of the desert are certainly different from those inhabiting the coastal ranges abundant with fresh water and food sources. The political structure within communities varies as well, although leadership has common characteristics forged towards maintaining order, authority, control and the population’s survival. The stronger members of the population lead. At one end of the spectrum, oligarchies are headed by either a small group of individuals acting as council or by a family whose responsibility it is to lead the remainder. At the opposite end of the spectrum, democracy depends upon the wisdom of the community at large to elect its leadership.
The quality of leadership and the contributions individuals make to the advancement of a community lies solely within those who serve. We’ve learned all too well within our own democracy, too many elected representatives have greater interests in protecting their positions and being reelected than they have in accepting the difficult obligations and responsibilities leadership requires.
To strengthen Nevada’s communities, we must continuously work to broaden and increase our values so that everyone within the population benefits – not just a few. Our values should focus on improving our quality-of-life and living in concert with the natural constraints the Mojave Desert and the Great Basin regions contain. We should work for building a more diverse economy demanding highly educated community populations, and we should uncover and identify leadership capable of shepherding this state through all of the necessary changes that will make Nevada’s future sustainable in every regard.
Please provide us with your thoughts – and we’ll respond. We’ll also connect you with others so you can learn how they think as well!
Thanx!
We are experiencing an extreme recession described by many as the Great World Recession. While US government officials opine that its now over and with the help of the congressional stimulus package we’re beginning to claw and climb our way back towards prosperity, others believe we’re still falling and that by the time it’s really over this worldwide downturn will be every bit as bad as the 1929 to 1941 era of The Great Depression.
What have we learned from this – if anything? Historians tell us it appears the causes of this recession are almost identical to the 1929 collapse. So if we didn’t learn from that catastrophe what can we expect to know now?
For one thing I hope we’ve learned that everything can’t be left to the will and way of the free market economy; regulations that protect us from ourselves are necessary. Second, I hope we’ve learned that the quality in life is far more important and has more value than quantity has in life. Third, I hope we’ve learned that bigger in America is not necessarily better. In today’s post crash economic setting, it’s the small mom and pop businesses of this nation that are keeping us afloat – not big business.
This recession has also proven that we’ve created a tax basis that hasn’t worked either; especially at local and state levels where critically important programs are necessary for health, education and public welfare. Consequently, as a nation of states each of the 55 jurisdictions is caught-up having to actually pull itself out of an even deeper hole.
There are ways to insure this never happens again. To protect our futures we must build a new economy based upon producing what is needed to serve ourselves and others rather than creating an economy based solely on the value of money; where money is made making money available to others. In addition to creating something of value we have to be innovative, making something new that is of value to ourselves and to others. Anyone can make something we already have cheaper, but only the innovative can find new ways to make things better.
Lastly, in rebuilding the economy let’s build it green and make it sustainable. If we don’t improve life on this planet, we’ll lose it entirely.
Please provide us with your thoughts – and we’ll respond. We’ll also connect you with others so you can learn how they think also!
The earth’s population today is growing faster than planet earth can support its current increases. Demographers believe that the population worldwide will grow by 2.4 billion people by mid-century when the rate of increase will then begin to wane – raising the overall population to somewhere around 9 billion. The world’s rising population creates ever increasing demands for drinking water and water for raising crops and live food sources for protean. More than a billion people live today without adequate water supplies. These same people also live without proper sanitation sewerage treatment or sanitary landfills for discarding waste.
Most of the world’s future growth will continue occurring within the world’s poorest developing nations. Increasing world population is already influencing each of the other Driving Forces: Economics, Energy, Food and Agriculture, Technology, the Environment, and, Values and Political Structures. When we examine events taking place around the world today most civil unrest is directly linked to at least one of these forces. Programs directed at reducing population in underdeveloped nations require the remainder of the world to work together, improving education, resource conservation, economic development and employment security so that people within the developing nations have successful models to draw upon for transforming their lives into sustainable societies and governments.
Beyond addressing the issues of the current recession I believe America needs to be promoting a stronger international conversation around this planet’s health and its capacity to sustain humankind in the future. Is it possible that as global partners we could work together to manage and control population based upon the natural renewable resource capacity of each political jurisdiction? For the United States that would mean our capacity to balance population and productivity would be limited as to how well we can feed, cloth, shelter, employ and provide health care to the people of this nation within the develop-able limits of our own renewable, sustainable resources.
Do we have any idea today what the productive capacity of this nation is in terms of the population we can adequately sustain? If we can answer this question, perhaps we can help other nations and the world prosper.
Please provide us with your thoughts – and we’ll respond. We’ll also connect you with others so you can learn how they think as well!
There is an emerging area of specialized study in Social Science and Business Administration called: Study of the Futures. Students and professionals interested in this area of forecasting conduct research in current events continuously seeking information that may lead to identifying disruptive changes in five realms of worldly issues: Economics, Environment, Politics, Society and Technology.
Significant influences that disrupt present patterns or balances in any of the five fields causing change are defined as Driving Forces. In terms of the planet Earth, its current health concerns and the continuance of future life as we recognize it today are directly related to the future influence all five driving forces impart.
Currently, many environmentalists view this perspective negatively. On the other-hand, we all have the opportunity to turn these coins over to view driving forces in a positive light – regarding tomorrow and our futures.
So the question out there today for all of us is: How do we convert and use any one of these five driving forces to benefit the planet and its health, to restore balance to our natural environment and benefit humankind – through our efforts here as a community in southern Nevada?
Please provide us with your thoughts – and we’ll provide you with ours! Thanx
|
|
