I'm not sure I'm ready for any kind of philosophical thoughts yet. I've finished my year; that's it: completely done with cambridge (except for the graduating in latin bit). i'm starting to take pics when I go into town on a nice day (a rarety unfortunately) to start snapping some memories for when we go - which is scheduled for end of July. But we'll be travelling in and out until then: poland for a conference, france for some climbing, the US for a wedding, maybe a sunny Portugal/Spain even. a voir.
so all I can muster today is a list of quotes and some reading recommendations. i'm also a bit tired from all the rowing we're doing to get ready for 5 consecutive days of racing next week (http://www.firstandthird.org/tables/rowing/bumpsintro.shtml for details and pics).
But I'd love to hear from everyone now I finally have time to reply :D
Laughter is the shortest distance between two people. Victor Borge
The rest is from a book called "Beyond the Limits: global collapse or sustainable development" by Donella Meadows and a few others. Interesting MIT academics analysis of the planet, food, resources, pollution, standard of living, etc. from a systems' dynamics standpoint. They'd done a first book in the 70s called Limits to Growth and this is the follow-up. Worth borrowing at the library and doing a quick read-through even if you're familiar with systems dynamics and sustainability issues (and if you're not, they do a great job of making it accessible). My only criticism of the book would be that they put most of the blame on population growth, which, if we all only consumed as much as the median country in the world, we'd be fine. Anyway, some inspiring stuff I hope you'll agree from the quotes below.
All the evidence suggests that we have consistently exaggerated the contributions of technological genius and underestimated the contributions of natural resources. We need something we lost in our haste to remake the world: a sense of limits, an awareness of the importance of earth's resources. Stewart Udall , US Secretary of the Interior
Unmet material needs: People don't need enormous cars; they need respect. They don't need closetsful of clothes; they need to feel attractive and they need excitement and variety and beauty. People don't need electronic entertainment; they need something worthwhile to do with their lives. And so forth. People need identity, community, challenge, acknowledgement, love, joy. To try and fill these needs with material needs is to set up an unquenchable appetite for false solutions to real and never-satisfied problems. The resulting psychological emptiness is one of the major forces behind the desire for material growth. A society that can admit and articulate its nonmaterial needs and find nonmaterial ways to satisfy them would required much lower material and energy throughputs and would provide much higher levels of human fulfillment.
The capitalists promised that, through the technological domination of the earth, they could deliver a more fair, rational, efficient and productive life for everyone. Their method was simply to free individual entreprise from the bonds of traditional hierarchy and community, whether the bondage derived from other humans of the earth. That meant teaching everyone to treat the earth, as well as each other, with a frank, energetic, self-assertiveness. People must think constantly in terms of making money. They must regard everything around them - the land, its natural resources, their own labour - as potential commodities that might fetch a profit in the market. They must demand the right to produce, buy, and sell those commodities without outside regulation or interference. As wants multiplied, as markets grew more and more far-flung, the bond between humans and the rest of nature was reduced to the barest instrumentalism. historian Donald Worster
How good a human nature does society permit? psychologist Abraham Maslow
The day is not far when the Economic Problem wil take the back seat where it belongs, and the arena of the heart and head will be occupied by our real problems - the problems of life and of human relations, of creation and behaviour and religion. economist John Maynard Keynes
