[Dow Jones Industrial Average Index from 1900 until today on a logarithmic scale; chart courtesy of StockCharts.com, click the image for details.]
Now that there is so much talk about the (financial) crisis I see that the word crisis of course shares its etymology with one of my most favorite words: critique.
Come on folks, let’s have a closer look. Let’s be critical about the “crisis”.
[w]
Many agree that there is inflationary use of the term sustainability. In fact, there is inflationary use of the phrase inflationary use of the term sustainability.
Can a single question make change? Ask yourself!
— dropping knowledge, 2006-09-07
On 2006-09-09, dropping knowledge shall bring together some 100 people from all over the world to “engage in the most pressing questions of our age”. Their answers shall be recorded, and they may become seeds of a new “knowledge portal and dialog platform” starting 2006-09-10.
Here are some of the questions which have been submitted and which are likely to be discussed:
Hugh MacLeod provides us with a first pretty ingenious answer: The untitled pyramid.
Sustainability is everywhere. Like viability it is a static concept of concepts, ever changing views, values, and notions. No living system, that is no autopoietic system, has ever been or is unsustainable unless one calls the living dead.
Why am I adding my skeptical bits? Asking why is the quest for criteria, and vice versa, whenever one is applied we cannot but take sides. For then being asked to justify our appropriation, reason and cause shall even up the actual impudence, or exorbitance. Choose yourself.
What makes me hope are the many paradoxical aspects of Sustainable Development. And some researchers are well aware of them. What are we missing? Might the paradoxes seen in Sustainable Development blind out the paradoxes of life itself? Please, sustain paradoxes.
Speaking of autopoietic systems the code of sustainability, this ultimate criterion, is sustainability itself. In order for sustainability to sustain it needs to incorporate change (contrary to its ongoing externalization). Indicators indicate, criteria of sustainability decide. Each and everything considered unsustainable shall be cut off. The price of precious diversity.
Oh, the pleasures of ethical concepts.
Pregnancy of a fucked up mind.
Bound to sustain.
I am afraid people engaged in sustainable development are seriously endeavored to sustain sustainability; sustainability of themselves.
There are basically two ways to indulge in disfinism — the science of no definition: Don’t provide any definition, or provide a new one for each and every occasion and let everyone come up with their own. Worst of all: Make them differ only slightly. For examples see
At the beginning of the film “United 93” it says
It’s time.
It’s time. This is what the crusaders of ecology and sustainability keep telling us, too.
It’s time that we ask what is time.
Never forget.
[G]
There must be something about sustainability that is pretty scarily dangerous. I have seen quite many projects, institutions, lecture series, websites, forums and more, all about sustainable development, sustainability research, and human ecology, and yet they simply stopped, evaporated, ceased to exist, or got nixed.
