Just the way we are: reinventing our own body’s existence, this time

Much we take for granted as “just-the-way-it-is” in modern civilization are artifacts which have been invented by predecessors who imagined them. Are some of us beginning to invent beyond mere imagining how to make our own bodies artifacts which can surpass the natural end of lifetimes? How much science fiction is what’s already being accomplished by scientists and bioengineers in labs around the world? Whole new sets of ethical questions arise as we re-invent who we are existentially as life forms.

The Necessary Revolution

Just got to a book last night which has been on my “anti-library” shelf for several months–Peter Senge’s The Necessary Revolution (2008)–which I highly recommend. Here’s an article from Business Week‘s “Innovation” section which reviewed the book last summer and spurred me to acquire a copy of it.

The following paragraphs from the book’s first chapter, “A Future Awaiting Our Choices,” provide a good introduction to the nature and scope of Senge’s recent work.

The Industrial Age has often been called the “machine age” because the rise of machines and the way they operated transformed the way people thought and worked. It wasn’t long before people were expected to work like machines and the assembly line became the icon of efficiency and standardization for all organizations. Gradually, machine thinking shaped much more than manufacturing: Economic progress became synonymous with increases in efficiency and productivity; cultural advance became equated with dazzling new technologies; and nature, including the other creatures with whom we share the earth, was reduced to ‘natural resources,’ inputs to the economic machine.

A sustainable world, too, will only be possible by thinking differently. With nature and not machines as their inspiration, today’s innovators are showing how to create a different future by learning how to see the larger systems of which they are a part and to foster collaboration across every imaginable boundary. These core capabilities–seeing systems, collaborating across boundaries, and creating versus problem solving–form the underpinnings, and ultimately the tools and methods, for this shift in thinking.

For over a quarter of a century our work, first at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and then through the Society for Organizational Learning (SoL) global network, has involved helping organizations of all sorts to “learn how to learn”–which naturally leads to the question, “Learning for what?” For many years, precedent provided the answer: learning so that companies could be more innovative and profitable, so that schools could help students learn, so that governmental organizations could better serve their constituencies. For the past decade, however, we have begun to also see a larger answer: shaping a sustainable, flourishing world for life beyond the Industrial Age. This represents perhaps the greatest learning challenge humans have ever faced, and it will require extraordinary leadership from institutions of all sorts.

This is not pie-in-the-sky rhetoric or intellectual idealism, but in fact is reflected in ways organizations and individuals are already working together. The organizations and people you will meet in the pages that follow are starting to enact new ways of managing, leading, and ultimately creating value, not just for today’s real needs but for tomorrow’s, and their practices are spreading to hundreds of businesses and non-business organizations of all sizes around the world. There is no silver-bullet formula for putting these ideas into practice widely, but there are principles, practices, and ways of getting started.

I once was guided professionally by Senge’s idea of the “learning organization” in my own organizational development / knowledge management work. I’m guided again by him, this time by his idea that the environmental and social challenges we face create an unprecedented opportunity for us to bring about real, sustainable (and “revolutionary”) change in the ways we work and live.

GlobalPost.com

GlobalPost.com is a start-up organization attempting to fill the lack of first-hand, first-class, international reporting in American news media in the digital age. Here are two paragraphs excerpted from GlobalPost’s mission statement:

We, the Founders of GlobalPost, are also acutely aware of the fact that quality journalism in America is threatened more profoundly today than at any time in our history from an unprecedented combination of forces: the transformational power of technology and the internet, the dramatic erosion in the economic underpinnings of the traditional media, and a steady migration of the most devoted consumers of news as well as younger people to new content platforms, most importantly the web.

GlobalPost is a direct response to these forces. Our mission is to provide Americans, and all English-language readers around the world, with a depth, breadth and quality of original international reporting that has been steadily diminished in too many American newspapers and television networks. GlobalPost is at the leading edge of what we hope and believe will become a new flowering of journalism in the digital age, built around new models of financial support.

Perhaps students can model their digital journalism projects on what GlobalPost.com attempts to do. The re-emphasis on original reporting is propitious for actually getting the news.

Best Green Blogs

This link to Best Green Blogs came to me in a tweet from humanvillage on Twitter this morning. Few who declare themselves to be “green” these days, especially many of the money-rich, large corporate advertisers, are ready to communicate how difficult it is (will be) for most folks to change their habitual economic behaviors to collectively create more environmentally sustainable local communities embedded in “green” societies globally. Here are some blogs communicating the challenges and opportunities.

Ecopolis: City of the Future

I’m watching a re-broadcast of Dr. Daniel Kammen’s six-part series on cable’s Science Channel titled Ecopolis. Here’s how it’s described: “A blueprint for city life in the year 2050, Ecopolis can benefit from new ‘green’ technologies being explored today that will lead to a more sustainable urban experience tomorrow.” Wow, I’m thankful for a Nobel Prize winning geek with a bent for communication and activism and a group of science video programmers who produce for cable TV broadcasting such positive visions of real possibilities for sustaining ourselves in cities of the future.

What will change everything?

The Edge Annual Question – 2009 is this: “What will change everything?” Or more explicitly: “What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see?”

If you’re not yet familiar with Edge.org, then you should be. Here’s a little history of Edge provided at their website:

Edge Foundation, Inc., was established in 1988 as an outgrowth of a group known as The Reality Club. Its informal membership includes of some of the most interesting minds in the world.

The mandate of Edge Foundation is to promote inquiry into and discussion of intellectual, philosophical, artistic, and literary issues, as well as to work for the intellectual and social achievement of society. Edge Foundation, Inc. is a nonprofit private operating foundation under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code.

Contributors to Edge own the copyright to their original writing posted on this site and their posting is in effect a license permitting Edge Foundation, Inc. the electronic use of this work. In the event Edge Foundation, Inc. wishes to use the work in a print medium it will not do so before asking and securing the written permission of the author. Edge Foundation, Inc. owns the cumulative copyright to the site.

looking for the missing vernacular

I woke up this morning with “making things” (which led to “making sense” and “making lives”) on my mind. Is it just me that wonders why fewer of us create the world actively which we inhabit, but instead comply with training to follow directions and expectations–passively and unpoetically and logistically–which command servitude of us that at bottom is our now accustomed view of how the world works? Even the sentences we speak like the things in our lives that as time passes go unnoticed and are used inattentively, are increasingly hand-me-downs already coined and supposedly beyond our ken to make our own. The original designs of our sentences which were born so abundantly when we were kids learning to speak reality from scratch we learned in time to stop allowing to emerge as we lessened our attentiveness and had enough “reality” already packed away in storage.

Combining with these morning wonderings was a leftover curiosity I’ve had about how humans have constructed their buildings of homes and public places and sea-going ships for millennia from the timber they cut from forests available to them. The technology of wood construction and the human civilizations it has sustained remind me that “manufacture” of the structures of ones’ lives was the way minds and cultures were also made–for example, the Romans would have had no empire without instrumental wood constructions of all kinds from battle-winning siege machinery to inventions for the production of domestic goods.

Now a third thread began to weave through this cloth of amused thinking: the fact that we the people don’t really know how to sustain our lives without all the experts working to profit from engineering a world in which we know and do less creatively on our own and can’t prevent our collapse as civilized communities when we’re cut off from our dependencies on their top-down schemes and on our own consumptive addictions. A whole socioeconomic and civilizing system is not there for us to lay for ourselves a foundation to commonly achieve the cultural dream of developing light-gaining meadows of community in which our better natures flower and seed a next generation of hope and fulfillment.

I found an interesting article at Wikipedia which feeds the fire of my thinking on these matters. It’s titled vernacular architecture, and it’s section on what “vernacular” means to the development of culture in a localized human/environmental ecology is closely allied to what else I’ve been thinking about this morning and to my sense that we need to find our own voices as “we the people” to reclaim our birthright to be truly ourselves.

Main Street Recovery Program

OurFuture.org describes the Main Street Recovery Program document it produced (see below) in these terms:

The Obama administration has promised to boldly tackle today’s economic crisis. To help make that promise a reality, we present this Main Street Recovery Program, and call for independent support from economists, public officials and citizens everywhere who fight on behalf of the every day Americans suffering the worst of this crisis.

Progressive economists and organization leaders drafted this Main Street Recovery Program to meet urgent needs unaddressed by efforts to shore up Wall Street financial institutions. This program calls for a substantial, strategic, and sustained effort to not only address the impact the of current recession on the real economy but to reshape the economy for the 21st century.

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