Week 1 The roots of ecological thought

Week 1 the roots of ecological thought

Opportunity Cost

The objective of this Blog is to share ideas and insights related to the course:  The Biosphere and Ecological Sustainability: The Idea of Ecosystems.  In this first week we have explored a variety of readings and lectures aimed at examining the roots of ecological thought.  Where did these ideas come from and where are they leading us to?

Perhaps a more poignant question would be: where are we headed without these ideas?  Our current societal trajectory has us landing in some pretty scary places, but it remains important, in fact vital, not to get sucked into all the doom and gloom, because our trajectory is not fixed, and we have never had more tools available to us that facilitate the spread of information and new ideas.

Let us now reflect on a week that began with the discovery of Uranus and ended with a discussion on conspicuous consumption.  A couple of things jump out at me:

·         The Kuhn (1962) reading made me want to explore simultaneous innovations that have occurred in isolation.  I was always intrigued by the fact that numerous civilizations that existed without contact past or present from the outside world, were able to develop similar technologies.  More intriguing even, is the fact that so many aboriginal cultures existing in different corners of the planet developed belief systems that mirrored each other.

·         Discoveries are a cool form of a positive feedback loop.

·         I think it’s important to remind ourselves that cash economies are not inherently evil.  Just like a subsistence economy (which we often romanticize) it is a system that evolved as a means of managing resources, a system that has become more complex, as more variables were introduced, and larger populations came to rely on it.

·         The discussion on conspicuous consumption was very stimulating and it brought me back to an economics term (as I know we have many “economists” in our class): Opportunity cost.  This describes the connection between scarcity and choice, as measured by the loss in value by the choice not made.  Our opportunity cost is growing exponentially (in both monetary and non-monetary terms) each day we as a collective choose to continue to consume our resources at a destructive rate, each day we continue to believe in a system that promotes unlimited growth, and each day we continue to value the attainment of wealth above all else.  What is the total opportunity cost of the new Federal budget?  Choice after choice made for the perceived benefit of an unsustainable system.

                                                    http://thesystemmd.com/?p=1028