Tuesday, April 26, 2005
On a good day, you go to bed having been forced to give up a critical chunk of conventional wisdom...
And on a great day, you have to give up on multiple chunks of "what everyone KNOWS is right..."
This isn't about wikis, or blogs, or - really - any one technology. It's about remembering that we are often so quick to take a straight edge to what's come before and plot out the most likely future. It's about the often unspoken assumption that "yes, in the past others were - sadly - mistaken but THIS TIME, well, we're pretty confident we've *got it right.*"
Stewart Brand is one of the best thinkers around. He's written a piece in the May issue of Technology Review. It's an argument that makes us question conventional wisdom about population trajectories, about cities and hinterlands, about GMOs and about nuclear reactors.
I'd argue there's a tie-in to the subject of my wikisquared-dot-com site.
Knowledge-Managment, Expertise management, Social Networking, Blogging (and that awful neologism, the blogosphere), Collabortion Studies ... are all 'stuck' in some kind of organisational neutral gear. Maybe what's needed is a whole new way to think about how people work together.
If great big clusters of Received Widsom can be questioned, surely we can apply original thinking to the issues of our own work places.
Environmental Heresies
By Stewart Brand
TECHNOLOGY REVIEW: May 2005
http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/05/05/issue/feature_earth.asp?p=1
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Over the next ten years, I predict, the mainstream of the environmental movement will reverse its opinion and activism in four major areas: population growth, urbanization, genetically engineered organisms, and nuclear power.
Reversals of this sort have occurred before. Wildfire went from universal menace in mid-20th century to honored natural force and forestry tool now, from “Only you can prevent forest fires!” to let-burn policies and prescribed fires for understory management. The structure of such reversals reveals a hidden strength in the environmental movement and explains why it is likely to keep on growing in influence from decade to decade and perhaps century to century.
The success of the environmental movement is driven by two powerful forces—romanticism and science—that are often in opposition. The romantics identify with natural systems; the scientists study natural systems. The romantics are moralistic, rebellious against the perceived dominant power, and combative against any who appear to stray from the true path. They hate to admit mistakes or change direction. The scientists are ethicalistic, rebellious against any perceived dominant paradigm, and combative against each other. For them, admitting mistakes is what science is.
There are a great many more environmental romantics than there are scientists. That’s fortunate, since their inspiration means that most people in developed societies see themselves as environmentalists. But it also means that scientific perceptions are always a minority view, easily ignored, suppressed, or demonized if they don’t fit the consensus story line.
Take population growth. ...
...see article...
posted by Tom |
12:39 AM
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