Facilitating Human Sustainability in the Anthropocene through Transdisciplinarity
Is Contemplation the Key to Our Survival?
By Earon S. Davis, J.D., M.P.H.
Adjunct Lecturer, Indiana University
Presented at The Anthropocene and Transdisciplinary Projects and Learning Session, Dimensions of Political Ecology Conference, Lexington, KY, 3/1/2014
Abstract: Our culture has sought to conquer and subordinate the natural world to meet our social needs and our appetite for what is new and improved. Over time, through the increasing use of specialization and compartmentalization, this has evolved our cultural frame of reference and re-defined our “reality.” Today, with our omnipresent communications systems, we focus on what we know today and what is promised for tomorrow. Downplayed, essentially hidden, is what we don’t know.
The dominance of our consumerist “feeding frenzy” social “reality,” fueled by popular culture and media, functionally hides what we don’t know. More than that, there is an almost “shunned” role for those who challenge the uniqueness and essential omniscience of humanity in general and the U.S.A. in particular. This creates a systemic dissonance that prevents our culture from properly facing our role in the human-caused ecological crises that threaten our world.
Specialization and complexity present opportunities for humans to distinguish ourselves without needing to conquer armies or bring everyone to our way of thinking. Yet, they can undermine the larger wisdom and vision paths that have traditionally kept human societies sufficiently flexible and adaptive in the face of challenges that require adaptive cultural change.
Transdisciplinarity holds promise for re-aggregating our knowledge into a base sufficiently holistic to inform broader vision and to engender wisdom. This paper will explore some of the ways in which our specialized social orders have dampened the human survival instinct and, instead, cultivated over-stressed lifestyles, disconnection from our natural world, and self-destructive impulsivity. It also discusses possible solutions.
I. Introduction.
If a more thoughtful culture emerges from the darkening ages of our greed-based feeding frenzy called “consumerism,” what will it look like? Will it be fully rational and scientific? Will it be ruthlessly feudal or totalitarian? What will be the role of democracy, pluralism and freedom? Will it be morally based and religious? How will it blend these attributes? I suggest that thinking about these questions will play a vital role in generating the conversations necessary to regain some control over our society in the future.
In the end, we may come to understand that reductionism, while scientifically valid/replicable, does not fill the need for vision, belonging and justice in human societies. Throughout human history, vision has made a difference, a whole that is greater than the sum of the parts – a humanity that is larger than the sum total of humans. Human societies have flourished with vision and failed without it. I’m suggesting that we are currently without vision. Social Darwinism is not a vision; it is a rationalization for the exploitation and irresponsibility that arises from lack of vision.
And what will happen to academia? It would appear that our academic institutions have increasingly reflected the corporate values and economic frame of reference that prevail in our society. Will this tendency intensify, with business and management programs continuing to serve as the training ground and playground for our elites? Or are the excesses of our second gilded age already running their course and yielding both wealthy and working class philosophers, writers, actors and artists, with jobs and incomes forming a stronger, more diverse middle class?
I want to present a clear and disquieting point of view on these issues. Let me begin by quoting from “The Heart of Higher Education,” by Parker Palmer and Arthur Zajonc, subtitled, “A Call To Renewal - Transforming the Academy through collegial
Conversations:”1
“Nearly every subject area in the academy has attempted to make itself over into a “science” by adopting its own version of the worldview and methods of the old physics of objectification and disconnection. Along the way, the education of the whole human being in community and the cultivation of his or her humanity seem to be increasingly forgotten for the sake of scientific simplification.”
If it is true that the academy has compromised its mission in order to remain competitive in the commoditized marketplace that is destroying our planet, how might it move to reclaim wholeness and support the inherent worth of each person, each culture, each ethnic group? There is already a shift of perspective that is going on in our campuses and our society at large. There is some recognition of the oversimplification caused by reductionism and specialization. Will it be enough of a shift to replace the worship of personal financial wealth with a culture of humanity and commonwealth?
In the title of this paper, I present three concepts that are beginning to challenge the dominant paradigms of our culture, our economy and our academic institutions; sustainability, anthropocene and transdisciplinarity. Yet, as concepts, they can readily be manipulated to serve other agendas.
While it may be increasingly popular for academics to embrace multidisciplinary approaches, sustainability and even the anthropocene, these changes can be cosmetic, more effective at competing for donations, tenure, publications and grants rather than producing the perspectives, values and leaders that our world needs. We are adept at crafting our elevator speeches, but not so much at changing the underlying assumptions that guide our institutions and our civic affairs. As a result, we are not quickly adapting our academic structures and cultures to incorporate what are truly revolutionary changes in our understanding of the nature of knowledge, humans and our relationship with our natural world.
I will begin by translating three terms in the title of my paper into standard American
English: my title includes two ridiculously complicated terms, “transdisciplinarity” and “anthropocene,” as well as the still-vague term, “sustainability.” My use of these terms is not random, nor is it coincidental that all three appear together. They are inextricably interwoven in our culture, and for a specific purpose; to encourage a deeper cultural acceptance of our responsibility, collectively, to future generations of humans and to other species with whom we share this planet.
On this journey, I invite you into a right-brained world in which the rules of the academy do not apply. I will intentionally not provide huge numbers of citations or references, and for a very important reason. The cultures of academia, I believe, are at risk of being calcified by the very intellectual lineages they develop and promote. Darwin, for example, didn’t really say most of the things that are attributed to him. He most certainly had little to do with “social Darwinism.” In the process of academic posturing and debate, over the decades, over the centuries, we are left with myriad lineages of intellectual thought, most of which have been populated by the ideas of acolytes and supporters, deniers and defamers, just as much as by the original thoughts, themselves.
So, when we come across intricate webs of thought, we can either attempt to dig in and master the often unfathomable political and cultural contexts in which they have evolved, or we can poke around a bit and step back. The risk in burrowing in is that we become so familiar with the various concepts and their twists and turns that these become our reality, quite apart from the reality from which our original inquiry began.
In digging for answers, we presuppose that we are in the right place, and our familiarity most likely convinces us that we are on the right track. In poking around and moving to different areas, we acknowledge that the answer may be hidden in plain sight, or may be somewhere else entirely, rather than being buried beneath generations of writings.
Academic tribalism and turf, as I might call it, may not reliably create wisdom as much as it creates complicated tangles of complexity that attract our attention and invite us to partake, adding to the lineages, creating new lineages, but perhaps solving nothing except our desire for momentary gratification and a sense of being special. Nicholas Maxwell writes about the difference between knowledge and wisdom2, one of the key factors in understanding sustainability, transdisciplinarity and the anthropocene.
When I talk about transdisciplinarity, I speak of the need to transcend the disciplinary approach to knowledge that tells us to choose a hole and dig, rather than envision the world and soar. Both are needed. But the adults who used to be in the room, the university presidents and thought leaders who used our human institutions to modulate the mix of reductionism and holism, are no longer speaking so that we can hear them.
How do we invite them back?
A. Transdisciplinarity
In studying sociology, I learned that academic disciplines were constructed in complex ways in order to make their knowledge specialized and more valuable, more impressive and exclusive, and as a result, making them less understandable to the average educated person. Transdisciplinarity, paradoxically, is just such a term. I hope you are duly impressed!
What I actually mean by “transdisciplinarity” is a form of generalism, a holistic approach transcending the traditional perspective of separate academic disciplines, separate guilds and separate departments. Generalism represents knowledge through the perspective of a generally learned person, not a specialist in a particular field. However, a “generalist” can also have detailed expertise in several or many disciplines. Another term for the objective of generalism would be to cultivate “educated citizens.” The goal is not just the creation of “experts,” which would seem to be a good thing, but also of people who can integrate a great breadth of information systems and perspectives in order to arrive at solutions to our challenges that simultaneously consider accumulated knowledge of technology, human nature and culture.
According to Alfred Mann-Neef, “Transdisciplinarity, more than a new discipline or super-discipline is, actually, a different manner of seeing the world, more systemic and more holistic.”3 It is to be cultivated, a way of thinking in which an individual manages complexity on multiple levels of nuanced inter-relationships. Are we using pedagogies that are up to this task?
I chose to use the word, “transdisciplinarity” – not because it has a clear meaning, but because it challenges today’s dominant paradigm of fields that are disciplinary, interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary. Basically, I’d say that interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary activities combine two or several different perspectives and/or academic lineages. Is this enough? Environmental studies and environmental science have become their own multidisciplinary disciplines. In them, we encounter biology, environmental science, law, chemistry, health, politics, geology, economics, anthropology, literature, history, psychology, communications, architecture, engineering, art and other fields.
This is truly an impressive spectrum of human knowledge. Each field has something to contribute to our understanding of the systems that impact our lives and our ability to live within the range of resilience that we call sustainability. When we can’t even delineate all of the relevant fields that need to be included, I propose that it’s time to cultivate thinkers who go beyond the boundaries of our disciplines. That’s “transdisciplinarity,” otherwise known as the realm in which educated citizens can understand what is going on and people with expertise that is broad and deep can collaborate with other individuals to understand new realities, find new uses for materials, new aspects of problems to be solved. As a society, we can then use that knowledge to make informed decisions affecting our future. Knowledge must be a public good and not to be treated like cattle or grains to be rounded up, harvested or branded as the property of an intellectual lineage.
In our current academic world, mirrored in our professional realm, we are now living in an era of specialists and experts. The fields are carved up as if human society can function as a collection of individual specialties comprising an organic whole. The idea, which is based on assumptions from less complex societies of the past, and simplistic ideologies like Social Darwinism, notes that the body has specialized organs to more effectively handle different specific bodily functions. So, why can’t society function in the same way? Why can’t humanity become equal to the sum of its parts? The problem is that this reductionism represents reality no better than the germ theory represented a model for human health. We simply do not understand enough of the larger system, or the constraints of human nature, to know what pieces are needed and how they must interact to maintain homeostasis.
My concern with this simple, highly organized “organic society” is that people and societies just don’t work that way. Historically, we were taught that our nervous system, our endocrine system and our immune system were all rather separate. Today, we know that they are all thoroughly integrated and interconnected. This is also the case with our fields of knowledge. Interconnected. Interwoven. Just as our universe is seamlessly interconnected, and our habitat on earth is a vast web of life, and our bodies are thoroughly interconnected we cannot rely primarily on reductionist science to make decisions affecting our future.
Understanding one, or many, minuscule subspecialties of science is insufficient. We cannot hope to make sound decisions as citizens unless we have access to reductionist science, but also have the capacity to contextualize vast amounts of information in models that include consideration of that which we do not know for certain. Of course, we don’t know what we don’t know, but we can use our experience and “wisdom” to work with a calculus of risk, when our eyes are wide open, fully considering the potential problems that would exist if our assumptions are found to be wrong. Two examples arise from our massive commitments to energy technologies: nuclear energy (resulting in catastrophic melt-downs in Chernobyl and Fukushima), and fossil fuels (creating global climate disruption).
So, we live in a holistic world in which all educated citizens need to engage in investigation, debate and decision making. There is no subset of academic disciplines that can contain all that is necessary to understand and evaluate issues of environmental sustainability, representative democracy or global peace and cooperation. There is no subset of disciplines that provide an academic context for dealing with our complex issues of environment and meaningful living. We may have training in specific disciplines, but perhaps we should be choosing a dozen fields, rather than one or two. Perhaps we should be cultivating knowledge of the interactions between the various intellectual domains rather than each serving as a standard bearer, wearing the gang colors of but one primary fountain, or brand, of information.
B. Anthropocene
The anthropocene is a fascinating concept to me, but it is silly, also. As a generalist, stepping outside of the academic jargons of the various disciplines, the anthropocene is basically a device for pointing out that our society has completely misinterpreted our connection with the natural world. Before our current times, our culture had an implicit assumption that human activity took place in the context of our natural world, but that it did not basically change the natural world or create a new natural order. That implicit assumption was an attractive fantasy, casting humans as the underdog, battling to survive and prosper against the elements and onslaught of nature.
However, the assumption was wrong. It has been wrong since the advent of agriculture around 10,000 years ago, and perhaps farther back than that.4 So, I’m happy to acknowledge that we finally have a word that changes the implicit assumption that has helped human society to be oblivious to the damage fellow humans are doing to our planet, to our life support system.
It is no coincidence that you will see the word, “Anthropocene” with increasing regularity for the time being. At some point, it will become redundant. The culture will change.
The point will have been made.
C. Sustainability
Compared to “anthropocene” and “transdisciplinarity,” “sustainability” may seem simple, but it is not. By sustainability, do we mean carrying on exactly as we are forever, with those at the top of the pile holding their positions? Probably not! We may want our species and our cultures to evolve, adapt, grow or shrink. We recognize that there is a range within which humans and our environment can exhibit resilience, where new technologies may enable changes to our status quo. In my investigation, though, I have found two powerful concepts that describe what I mean by sustainability. These are reflected in the following definition developed by Earlham College5 in Indiana.
"Sustainability is the continuous effort to meet the needs of the present generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs by working toward a healthy environment, social justice, and a strong economy."
This definition expands upon the 1987 definition of sustainability adopted by the Brundtland Commission.6 However, it may fall into a trap, which will be addressed below, in creating the impression that environment, society and economy are co-equal considerations.
First, most views of sustainability seem to include some element of homeostasis, a place within the range of human resilience where the natural world, and our survival, are not constantly hanging by a thread. When we are outside of the limits of resilience, we may find drastic climactic changes that threaten our infrastructure and our ability to survive and adapt to environmental changes and the social and political ramifications of changed environments.
Second, sustainability requires consideration for future generations. Should we require of ourselves that we act in manners that allow future generations to choose how they want their future to unfold? If we make certain choices, we prevent future generations from living in certain ways, regardless of their wishes. So, to me, it is vital that we preserve the rights of future generations to a wide range of possible lifestyles for their future.
Sustainability will mean different things to different people. Its meaning will also change over time and will vary with the context in which it is considered. Generally, when sustainability is talked about, it is paired with concepts like “resilience” and “flourishing” to make it clear that our quest is not to give up on humanity, but to nurture it.
On a personal note, I want to mention that I had the privilege of working on a project with the late Dr. Barry Commoner at Washington University while I was in law school in 1974.7 Dr. Commoner was an environmental pioneer engaged as a citizen and not just as a specialist. One of his major concerns in opposing the construction of a nuclear power plant went well beyond the engineering. He testified that the proliferation of nuclear power plants would help give rise to concerns about terrorism and to a police state in response to those fears. Indeed, if our goal is human flourishing and resilience, we might want to stay away from technologies we can’t safely handle.
Returning to the role of environment, society and economy, I recommend the discussion of the traditional “Sustainability Triangle” or “Three Pillars of Sustainability” in a paper by Kathleen Smythe8, who is critical of the representation of sustainability as the interface between three separate circles – Environment, Society and Economy. There are alternatives, and Smythe presents one. However, in my quest for simplicity, I prefer to use a representation of Sustainability as three nested circles9 (Figure 1), with the large circle representing our environment and a smaller circle inside the environment representing human society. As a yet smaller circle inside of society, we find “economy.” In this representation, below, we get to experience a context for our economy in which it is clearly something that must yield to both larger considerations for our planetary environment as well as our human society. Economy serves humanity, presumably, and not the other way around.
Figure 1.
Source: Sustainability Advantage9
II. Contemplative Learning.
An alternative approach to human “knowing” allows for reformatting our knowledge to include that which is holistic as well as reductionist in a blend that is more usable and socially relevant than currently. Following is the challenge issued by Parker Palmer in his forward to the powerful book, “Contemplative Practices in Higher Education” by Daniel Barbezat and Miribai Bush.10
Palmer writes, “When I think about the reforms needed if higher education is to serve our students and our world faithfully and well, I think there should be a litmus test for every project that claims to strengthen the mission of our colleges and universities. Does this proposal deepen our capacity to educate students in a way that supports the inseparable causes of truth, love and justice? If the answer is no, we should take a pass and redouble our efforts to find a proposal that does.”
There are ways of viewing life that cultivate a reductionist point of view, wherein what is understood on a technical, scientific level is valued beyond what is not understood in that way. In a system like this, our attention is directed towards carefully expanding our knowledge base, but through detailed analysis using technology rather than a broader look that embraces more diverse ways of “knowing” and which may be more open to paradigmatic changes. Knowledge becomes deeper before it becomes broader. As profit motive has increasingly dominated all human endeavors, including higher education, the incentive is to develop trendy and novel objects and ideas that are appealing and habit forming, allowing profit maximization. Human understanding and meaning are less quantifiable and it has been too tempting to educate young people about the predictable sphere of technology, leaving the less well-defined areas of meaning and peace to our increasingly materialistic mass culture.
Big changes do come in our society, but are more evolutionary than revolutionary since we drill down into the details in reductionist ways, valuing what is quantifiable over that which is not. Corporations grow large and successful and gain influence in government (through government contracts and regulations) to favor them against their competition, often stifling innovation. Efficiency becomes an end in itself, despite the fact that it tends to consolidate power and industries rather than promoting the public’s interests in diversity and competition. Efficiency has become the modus operandi of business, elevating reductionist perspectives instead of balancing in the values and needs of our culture, our health and wellness and our nation.
Growing up in Chicago, with its huge stockyards in the 1950’s, I heard it boasted that everything about the pig was used in one way or another – except the squeal. Commodification of livestock, crops, forests, fossil fuels sparked increased efficiency as economic goods, but the social and cultural value was largely ignored. Factory farming is a natural step in the business efficiency competition, but not necessarily in an ethical framework that values small, local businesses and individual choices. Efficiency and greed are natural allies, it seems, while humanity, individualism and choice are often their antagonist.
The creative processes that exist in our economy bring up inspirations and new ideas, but generally in the quest for greater efficiency or trendiness and not more humane and healthful ways to live. Often, inspired innovation is discarded for years, or decades, until or unless it is recognized as providing someone with sufficient opportunity to generate profits. Only then is it worth the effort or investment to break through the existing paradigm. The goal, there, is organizational or individual success. The advancement of knowledge, or the enhancement of our collective future, is secondary. And we wonder why our culture has become so opportunistic and fails to consider human values and ethics. There are no adults watching over things.
There are other ways to live. It is possible to value creativity and innovation that cuts across the dominant paradigm. There are ways to value re-novation, the use of existing ideas and technologies, to address issues for which they had not been used in the past – or for which such use was abandoned years ago under different circumstances. Systems thinking is one category of potential approaches to broad areas of policy concerns. Complex, adaptive systems approaches can provide the potential for a more holistic way to view an issue, or the larger framework of issues and systems that interact. Of course, systems thinking is only as good as it is truly systemic. It is only as good as the breadth of its understanding of the system and of human nature, including the human tendencies towards bias and distortion. Like science, it is a process and not a product.
At the bottom of systems thinking and other approaches is contemplation, reflection, a mindfulness of larger pictures and diverse perspectives and stakeholders. Rather than acclimating to existing disciplines and existing technologies and paradigms, contemplation is a skill set that utilizes breadth as well as depth, inquiry as well as calculation. What stands in the way of these broader approaches is specialization and its inherent over-valuation of economic/measurable outcomes over human values and diverse lifestyles. Universities, in their partnerships with industry and wealthy donors, have not fared well in their attempts to maintain a healthy balance between business efficiency and social values. As the old Russian proverb states, “When money talks, truth is silent.”
Contemplation, it seems, is a path to innovation and inspiration, but a path less traveled in our fast-paced, competitive, multi-tasking society. We want one-stop shopping. We want academic papers and TED talks that direct us to all of the necessary sources and provide all of the answers. We want access to the expert who will answer our questions. We want to find the specialist with in-depth knowledge in the particular issue with which we are grappling.
However, this orientation in our culture results in a kind of bias that is pervasive and systemic; we tend to focus on problems we can readily solve, or on activity that is likely to generate quick profits. We tend to neglect the more complex problems that may be far more important. When cast in the sense of our personal security and insecurity, the “problem” is often defined as our need for more prestige, money, publications, etc. When that is the “problem” we are unconsciously seeking to solve, needless to say, the greatest good for society is not always paramount.
In our scientific method, we first look at what tools we have to identify and solve a problem. We develop a research design that is relevant, but to produce a good research design, we often need to research something other than what we really want to address. From another perspective, we can say that our financial and technical resources determine what we investigate, rather than the importance of a given problem.
For example, we might like to prevent cancer, but it is easier to create studies to test chemotherapy agents than it is to find out what is causing the cancer and prevent our exposure, or to find ways to enhance the body’s natural healing mechanisms in order to prevent the cancer. Economic interests, of course, help set us on this indirect course for research, because research into prevention could well expose as causes of cancer some of the very same industries and companies that are involved with curing it. Individuals representing these industries also sit on the advisory panels that set our nation’s research agenda, since they are the “expert” specialists.
As a result, specialization and reliance on reductionist science have created a system in which the paradigm is set and innovation is only sought within a limited, proscribed, area. Over the course of decades, the impact of these systemic biases can be sufficient to subvert the ethical and political desires of our entire society. Nowhere is this true r than in the fields of cancer and food safety, or environmental sustainability.
We might like to live more sustainably, but innovation would be required for us to move away from fossil fuels. Vested economic interests, and the stock market in general, are wedded to supply chains, financial systems and production systems that resist change. The “movers and shakers” could be the leaders of new technologies, but retooling is very expensive and disruptive. Change creates risks that those in power often have no inclination to take, even if it would be for their long-term benefit, as well as everyone else’s.
Change is rarely efficient, at first, even if it is necessary. The automobile industry fought against fuel efficiency standards and safety standards vigorously for decade after decade, and was dragged kicking and screaming into a better future. The worlds of engineering and production are reductionist, with efficiency substituting for vision. If your vision is greater efficiency, and larger profits, our attention can be drawn away
from the common good. One can be fully occupied with making money and solving production problems, without having to address the thorny, uncomfortable issues of human sustainability and flourishing. However, businesses are also capable of responding to larger societal visions, adapting to new policies and technology-forcing regulations that promote the needs of our society.
Energy companies have been forced to reduce pollution, again kicking and screaming, and brought into a position where they can better contribute to a quality of living that is more sustainable. There is a long, long way to go, and they are still kicking and screaming. We need to have a government, an informed electorate, powerful enough to force them to let go of their greedy and short-sighted inclinations and to be open to the changes that will make life better for everyone in the future.
Stress Reduction. In the history of contemplative traditions, we find the goal of “letting go” of our obsessions, our grasping for perfection, our fears and aversions. In the field of sustainability, there is a lot of talk about feedback loops, both positive and negative. How about stress? It is possible that the more worried we are about our environment, the less flexible and creative our thinking may become. So, how do we let go of some of the stress that seems to be fueling our “locked and loaded” reliance on systems and perspectives that are clearly not working?
Is contemplation just another consideration that should be factored in at the level of society, culture and personal choice? Cognitive science is beginning to answer this question with a resounding “No!” At the core of the human ability to make rational choices, including the living of healthy lifestyles, is the proper management of stress. Poverty, violence and hunger undermine the functioning of our society. So does ecological danger and the potential for war. Income inequality and legal inequality have taken a heavy toll on the energy and resilience that help sustain and inspire the human capital that makes a nation successful. We already know that societies without dramatic social class differences are probably healthier and simply work better.11
One of the most revealing educational tools of Stanford researcher and McArthur
Foundation Fellow Robert Sapolsky is a video he made with National Geographic in 2008, called “Stress: Portrait of a Killer.”12 In this video, Sapolsky talks about a natural “experiment” that demonstrated an alternative to high-stress, hypercompetitive lifestyles among a troop of baboons, which is followed up with an equally eye-opening segment identifying the same lifestyle stress patterns and very serious risk factors among a troop of British civil servants. What is becoming clear is that humans don’t make good collective decisions when in high-stress, highly stratified and domination-based systems.
While we talk a lot about freedom and dignity, our increasing descent into consumerism and what has been called “hyper-capitalism,” paints quite another picture. Human lives are generally found to be lacking in meaning, purpose and a sense of agency. Depression and suicide rates are high and if I referenced studies to support each of these conclusions, we’d be debating and analyzing the various details and permutations of each reference and study rather than sitting quietly, smiling and taking three very deep breaths.
Contemplation, then, is part of what all of us do, or need to do. It is an important aspect of the path towards stress reduction and improved health – and perhaps better priorities, resilience and sustainability. Having time in one’s day to reflect upon the world, the family and the neighborhood is a critical element of what is necessary for a productive society. There is ample documentation on the role of stress in a myriad of chronic and acute health problems, including heart disease. The data is there, but it is thoroughly ignored because our economy insists on a framework of social Darwinism in which competition if seen as our justification for survival. The myth of multi-tasking remains pervasive, even after it has been demonstrated that the vast majority of people perform poorly when multi-tasking.
Although Darwin gave little support for the idea of “survival of the fittest,” in the sense of human competition and violence, this approach was so consistent with a rationalized, visionless ideology that holds the wealthy to be superior to the non-wealthy that it has gained immense traction in our society. Can we fight this erroneous and selfdestructive myth with more and better research, funded by academia, industry and government? Or, do we fight this by taking 20 minutes twice a day sitting in quiet contemplation?
References
1. Parker J. Palmer and Arthur Zajonc, with Megan Scribner, “The Heart of Higher Education – A Call to Renewal” – Transforming the Academy through Collegial Conversations. Jossey-Bass, a Wiley Imprint, 2010, p. 81.
2. Nicholas Maxwell, “From Knowledge to Wisdom – A Revolution for Science and the Humanities,” Lightning Source, 2007, 2nd Edition.
3. Manfred A. Max-Neef, Foundations of Transdisciplinarity, Ecological Economics 53 (2005), p. 15.
4. Bruce D. Smith and Melinda A. Zeder, “The Onset of the Anthropocene.” Anthropocene
2013. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ancene.2013.05.001
5. Earlham College, Definition of Sustainability, retrieved 2/8/14 from https://www.earlham.edu/sustainability/in-the-classroom/
6. Definition of Sustainability, from the report of the Brundtland Commission, World Commission on Environment and Development, United Nations, 1987
7. Personal recollection from legal clinic work as a law student related to an intervention of the Utility Consumers Council of Missouri in a proceeding of the Public Services Commission of Missouri regarding the construction of a nuclear power plant by Union Electric Company.
8. Kathleen Smythe, “An Historian’s Critique of Sustainability,” to be published this year in a Special Issue of the Online Journal, Culture Unbound.
9. The ownership of this concept and image are unclear. This may date back to at least 2002, but the graphic in Figure 1 appears on the website of Sustainability Advantage http://sustainabilityadvantage.com/2010/07/20/3-sustainability-models/ with attribution to two other separate sources, Bob Doppelt and Peter Senge. However, “Strong Sustainability Model” with this configuration is referenced by Pamela Margaret Williams,
University Leadership for Sustainability, in a Ph.D. thesis submitted to the Victoria
University of Wellington, New Zealand, 2008 – as derived from the document, “Creating Our Future: Sustainable Development for New Zealand,” Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment, Wellington, New Zealand, 2002.
10. Daniel Barbezat, and Mirabai Bush, “Contemplative Practices in Higher Education Powerful Methods to Transform Teaching And Learning,” Jossey-Bass, a Wiley Imprint, 2014, p. vii.
11. Richard G. Wilkinson and Kate E. Pickett, “Income Inequality and Population Health: A Review and Explanation of the Evidence,” Social Science and Medicine, Volume 62, Issue 7, April 2006, pp. 1768-1784.
12. Co-Production of National Geographic Television and Stanford University, with Robert Sapolsky, “Stress: Portrait of a Killer [DVD],” color, 52 minutes, 2008.
