Tuesday 12 March 2013

And so it begins....

Hello everyone,

I am new to the blogging world; in fact, this is my first blog ever, so please bear with me as I learn how to do this better.  My reason for setting up this blog are two-fold: first, I am writing a book on sustainability and I'd like to pop ideas on here (along with other ideas) and get feedback from those who are interested, and, second, I was challenged to do this by some good friends so here it is.

I've been writing this book of mine for a little over a year now and I realized that I needed to get parts of it out here in a blog to keep the writing juices flowing and to make sure that I am not out to lunch with my ideas.  To start things out, here is the basic introduction to what this book is about:

"Today, modern industrialized societies find themselves locked into a shifting maze of choices and perils.  The past twenty years have shown the fragility of the military state, with the fall of the U.S.S.R., the difficulty of harmonizing economies, with the European Union, and the real paradox of wealth and happiness not being consistently correlated. 

My interest in these issues stems from a growing sense that something is going wrong with our approaches to control, sustainability, and social policy.  At the risk of sounding like a cranky scholar peering down from the ivory tower, I would say that we need to get our acts together, and really think about what we see as a sustainable future for us all.  Is that sustainability merely enough energy, food and water?  No, there is also the need to protect the sustainability of the mind and spirit of ourselves and our society.

It is intriguing that we live in a self-made time of simultaneity, such that we face, in North America, as well as many industrialized parts of the world, the material wealth of industry, and yet the poverty of a lack of time to use it well.  One constantly hears in advertisements and talk shows about ‘today’s busy lifestyles’ or how ‘people just don’t have time to do x, y or z’.  What is the solution?  I have read many works that urge us to “get back to the land” or to “let stuff go” but I think these admonishments, while well meaning, are both unrealistic for most people and, moreover, might be counter-productive.

Instead of removing ourselves from the material world, I would argue that we need to get more ‘materially-oriented’, but we need to really think about it as a process not of doing more material but really better material.  What shape will better take?  We’ll see in the pages ahead, but let me say that this is not a book that sings the praises of consumerism; the cult of more, as you will see, is, quite rightly,  a major problem for our world.  This is neither a book that calls for a return to the “all-natural earth” idea – humans, as I will show, haven’t lived in the real world for thousands of years and we can’t go back to what we never really did in the first place.

This is, however, a book that tries to show how we got here, first of all, and then shows why our current “eco-movement”, while well-intentioned, is over-optimistic and, more importantly, forgets to mention an even greater sustainability issue…US!  Of course, I would not assert that protecting the earth and non-human life-forms is not important, for it is, but we must also think of the insidious erosion that plays havoc on our society and its “social-mental capital”, and why this resource is the most precious of all."

<end book part>
Okay, so that is the first step for tonight.  For now I am going to commit to once per week blogging, with a bit of talking about what is going on with the book and then a section of it.  I hope this will be helpful to you, and I hope to hear from any of you that have comments about the work (or the issues you might see in the other comments I make).

Thank you all for the opportunity to share,

Paul aka The Wandering Scholar