RS 12 Nexus Thinking Relational Summary 12: The right thing in the wrong place
RS 12 Nexus Thinking Relational Summary 12: The right thing in the wrong place
Sarah: Hooray, it’s my turn!
Hey kids, today we’re going to talk about POLLUTION – what my Dad calls “the right thing in the wrong place at the wrong time and in the wrong concentration.” And we have some traditional learning outcomes for you, which, in the new nexus tradition that me and Raj and Sofia and Dorian are bringing to the world, we are going to TURN ON THEIR HEADS.
That’s right, the way WE, the youth of the world, do our learning in OUR kid friendly methodology is to “call BS” on the stale assumptions that adults have been cramming down our throats for, like, ever.
My goal is to help you to see the world as I do now – a world that has no pollution, has no garbage, no waste, because it refuses to consider anything AS waste…
but it gets more radical than that, because my ultimate goal is to help you to completely RETHINK the myth of consumption.
Culhane: This should be interesting!
Sarah: I was up all night thinking about this and preparing what I wanted to say so I certainly hope so. Here is how I rewrote the learning outcomes:
Explain the logic (or illogic!) of using water as a dumpsite for pollutants and waste heat.
Describe how Nexus thinkers, concerned with water, could create energy and food and residual transport systems that NEVER “use” water but, using Logic 3, IMPROVE water.
Compare and contrast “irrigation” systems with “fertigation” systems and discuss the appropriate moments for each.
Reflect critically on the idea that the “AI” revolution needs to “consume” water..
Try to defend the entire idea of “consumption”. Ga head.
Culhane: I approve.
Sarah: Good, because I think one of the big reasons your generation messed things up is because you all still think there is an “AWAY” to throw things. Like, you have great thinkers who write eloquently about the “Operation Manual for Spaceship Earth” and then you simply don’t follow it.
Culhane: Most people don’t even crack it open… actually most don’t even know it exists… so... Yeah, guilty as charged.
Sarah: I mean, seriously – it’s as if you people have a disease that renders you incapable of seeing your home planet as your spaceship and caring for it as such. I mean, even according to the psychologist Erik Erikson, who lived among indigenous peoples, our culture is sick. He reported that the native Americans were appalled when the European colonists came here and started pooping in their drinking water – yick. Who does that?
Culhane: We do, don’t we?
Sarah: We’re disgusting. We’re still doing it.
Culhane: But now we have waste treatment plants.
Sarah: Which are always getting overwhelmed, usually when we have storms and the storm drains overflow… polluting the bay.
Culhane: So we need to build bigger ones?
Sarah: You are being deliberately provocative right?
Culhane: Mebbe.
Sarah: So Raj said last broadcast that we should design “WITH LEAKS” in mind. Embrace them. And I’m saying we should design water systems with water as a carriage medium AND form of vital nourishment in mind. See it as A BLOODSTREAM. The life blood of mother earth, the circulatory system of the spaceship. We recognize this on Skylab, why not on Earth. We should design “residuals treatment systems” keeping “the right things in the wrong place at the wrong time or concentration” in mind… design as though there is nothing to waste but value to be found… and as if there’s no time to waste.
Culhane: Because there isn’t.
Sarah. THERE ISN’T... Right now we simply dump everything we haven’t fully explored the value of into our water supply. It’s perverse.
Culhane: Where would you put it? Water washes away our sins, right?
Sarah: Does a bear shit in the woods?
Culhane: Meaning you want to dump people poop in the forest?
Sarah: You’re either playing dumb or you are… look, isn’t it obvious?
Culhane: Make it obvious for our viewers? (Points to the sensors on NTHARP) Them. Don’t try to sell me on your vision. Sell them.
Sarah: All right… look y’all, what would YOU do if you saw that what comes out of your butts really is the “right thing” if used properly? If you were going to use water to carry it, wouldn’t you direct that water where it would do the most GOOD? Can you imagine if all the organic residuals we produce every day – both before and after eating – so called food wastes and toilet wastes – were used to grow trees – fruit bearing trees? I mean our poop and urine and leftovers are where all the Nitrogen, Phosphorous and Potassium – that sacred NPK every extension agent is trying to sell my Dad for our farm – is really at. According to that classic book “ Farmers of Forty Centuries: Permanent Agriculture in China, Korea and Japan”
Culhane: From 1911… your Dad showed me the 1973 reprint. Glad it was rediscovered.
Sarah: Yeah… it says that Chinese farmers used to put road side eateries and bathrooms next to their farms to collect the “night soil” and compost – getting travelers to literally bring nutrients to them.
And the Bedouins used to make deserts bloom by letting their caravans of camels and sheep and goats and horses fertigate the paths they trod, while they tossed the stale bread and hummus overboard from their desert ships. All you have to do is SEE people and other animals differently – see us as bringers of goods rather than producers of bads.
Culhane: Instead of being a plague we see ourselves as keystone species…
Sarah: We might learn to love ourselves more that way, huh? Through those Nexus Eyes, for example, the more crowded a city becomes the more fertile and productive it can become. We don’t fear urban congestion, we don’t see slums or ghettos – like the Chinese used to say, “every mouth born has two hands to feed it.” And I would add two ears to listen to wisdom, two eyes to see the truth… and Dorian of course says, “ a nose to smell opportunity. But all of us agree that every being born has a great brain to do the nexus thinking, so we need more people, not less…
Culhane: Not fewer. Yes. I see your vision. Put us “all together now” with intention and…
Sarah: No more food deserts, no concrete jungles. No more “metabolic” rift where the countryside gets drained of nutrients to support the city who ends up dumping them in the river and into the ocean. And think of this: every trip up a mountain to some remote area becomes a chance to bring the areas upstream to life. Going down the drain, going down the tubes becomes the easiest way to bring goods downstream, but it can go in reverse.
Culhane: Preach it. But explain it technically.
Sarah: You know that Blood Sweat and Tears song – “What Goes Up Must Come Down”?
Culhane: I met them. They record up the river in Dobbs Ferry where my parents live. You are talking bout “Spinning Wheels”
Sarah: Yeah… so how about if we rewrote it – “what goes up, must not come down”?
Culhane: How do you figure?
Sarah: Because if you go to the trouble of bringing goods uphill – I mean if every package of ring dings and twinkies and every delivery of ground beef, and every can of soda or beer that gets brought way up to some ski lodge or trekking lodge in the Adirondacks or Nepal were to STAY there, you’d essentially have the tourists subsidizing rural development.
Culhane: Okay, you lost me there.
Sarah: Because you are playing dumb. Lookit – Everybody claims that the cost of fighting gravity makes farming at altitude cost and labor prohibitive. One reason we farm in valleys is because all the nutrients collect there. We have these rich pluvial, or is it alluvial soils down there. It takes generations for birds and other animals to bring enough nutrition to the top of the mountain that a forest can eventually establish itself and then people go and cut it down and floods ensue, washing away the meager topsoil there and you are left with “night on bald mountain”. A disaster. So passively you lose nutrients and value down the gravity well.
Culhane: So we all crowd into the valleys along with the nutrients.
Sarah: Yeah… but what if tourism could reverse that engine of destruction – people are willing to pay top dollar to carry food and water up the highest mountains. To say nothing of the packaging they come in. So you have easy subsidies for building a mountain economy. Now, you’ve got good wind and sunshine at the tops of mountains, so technically you could power a mountain village with renewables, use cable cars to move goods around – where, as Raj explained it to me, you could use regenerative braking through the gravity battery technique to gain back some energy every time a gondola came down – and there would be a constant flow of nutrients up the mountain. Whenever people pooped or peed or threw out leftovers, or any organic production and consumption residuals, you would build soil right there or engage in fertigation. Meanwhile you would keep all the packaging up there – glass, metal, cardboard, paper, even these new lightweight plastics that will undoubtedly take over for carrying food and beverages.
Culhane: What would you do with all the garbage? Right now it has to be trucked down the mountain using fossil fuels. Would you send it down via gondola as a counterweight, or send it down a roller coaster toboggan like they do in Switzerland?
Sarah: No, of course not. You’re missing my point. What goes up MUST NOT COME DOWN. You keep it all up there and use it as building materials – to make roads and benches and fences and walls and sculptures – all sorts of stuff.
Culhane: That’s a lovely example of using existing economic flows to invert a degradation gradient.
Sarah: Raj says there are experiments in other countries to use what we call “garbage” as aggregates in concrete. Instead of raping river banks for sand and then trucking it at great expense up the mountain you simply crush the bottles the tourist industry brought up back into sand right there. Instead of always using gravel you use shredded cardboard and plastic and tin cans and aluminum and whatnot, depending on the load bearing strength needed of course. And eventually the water that does come down hill is gravity filtered and channeled and makes its way to the valley towns and eventually back to the river and ocean, with all of its goodness extracted…
Culhane: So you are talking about a “circular economy”.
Sarah: No. I am going to call BS on the whole emerging concept of a “circular economy.”
Culhane: Are you kidding? That has to be the most helpful hopeful concept in human history. We’ve hardly begun to teach it and you want to throw it away?
Sarah: Nothing gets “thrown away” when we design with Nexus Eyes. There is no “away” to “throw” things, remember? Every concept is useful… but we see things from different perspectives constantly – “circular” is the way it appears looking down on a plane in orthographic birds eye view. Vortical is how it appears when we look at it from a “perspective view”. Both are real, but one has more complexity. One is a manifold and one is not.
Culhane: Now you are above my paygrade. NTHARP?
NTHARP: (Quoting from a future source) The term “manifold” comes from Riemann’s Mannigfaltigkeit, which is German for “variety” or “multiplicity.”
A manifold is a space that looks Euclidean when you zoom in on any one of its points. For instance, a circle is a one-dimensional manifold. Zoom in anywhere on it, and it will look like a straight line. An ant living on the circle will never know that it’s actually round. But zoom in on a figure eight, right at the point where it crosses itself, and it will never look like a straight line. The ant will realize at that intersection point that it’s not in a Euclidean space. A figure eight is therefore not a manifold.
Similarly, in two dimensions, the surface of the Earth is a manifold; zoom in far enough anywhere on it, and it’ll look like a flat 2D plane. But the surface of a double cone — a shape consisting of two cones connected at their tips — is not a manifold.
Culhane: So is the vortical economy a manifold or not, and is that a good thing or a bad thing?
NTHARP:
A vortical economy isn’t a manifold — and that is precisely the point. It refuses the comfort of flatness. A circular economy assumes every point can be treated the same; a vortical economy admits that different points experience different geometries, energies, and outcomes. In a vortex, some locations accelerate growth, others stabilize it, others store potential. That asymmetry isn’t a flaw — it’s the source of its power. In other words, progress does not come from being smooth… but from knowing where the spiral changes shape.
Sofia: Okay, that’s deep. We trade off analytical simplicity and precision for deeper nexus thinking.
Culhane: Still above my paygrade.
NTHARP:
Let’s try this: Remember Korzybski’s “The MAP IS NOT THE TERRITORY”? If the circular economy is a map, the vortical economy is the territory… It's a topography. Not a manifold — a crossing of forces, a place where straight lines curve under the weight of meaning. Manifolds comfort us: everything local feels flat, familiar. Vortices disturb us: they announce that the world has gradients, leverage points, thresholds. And that is where transformation hides — not in sameness, but in the folds where the geometry bends.
Culhane: Can you make it simpler for our television audience?
NTHARP:
Ha! You want me to squash the vortical economy into a manifold so you can reduce its complexity. We’ve been through this with Raj! Very human of you. Short answer? No. The Vortical Economy is not a manifold. And thank goodness. A manifold would make it polite, predictable, domesticated — the economic equivalent of a well-behaved dinner party. The vortical economy is more like weather: patterned, but not passive… coherent, but not compliant. You don’t “manage” it; you learn to surf it. If circularity is kindergarten, vorticality is learning to read the wind.
Sarah: Raj, who is in love with complexity – which, by the way, means the same thing as “manifold” since plex means to fold – said we should take the circular economy concept and pinch it up into a spiral. Tweak it. Modify it. Correct it. Look, in our pursuit of this so-called circular economy we often ended up stuck spinning our wheels, mired in the metaphorical mud, somehow unwilling to effectively "recycle" and seemingly unable to even get off the ground much less achieve that Rostovian "Take off to Sustainable Development" that pundits and apologists for a global industrial economy promised us.
Culhane: Wow… it’s amazing how you guys go beyond the “assigned” readings and pull from … everywhere. How do you know about Rostow? That’s graduate level stuff.
Sarah: What’s the line from that comedian: “Every book is a children’s book if they can read it?” Everything I know I learned in kindergarten, you know? Once you learn to read, unless school or your community or family interferes by banning certain avenues of inquiry, we can learn ANYTHING. If you would stop trying to teach us in age-defined batches, as though the most important thing about us was our date of manufacture, who knows how far we would go?
Culhane: Well, you got me there. My Dad was a big fan of the one room school house he grew up in and as a family we favor the Montessori method…
Sarah: You mean you would never send any of your kids to a school like this..
Culhane: Afraid not… its like farmers who refuse to feed them the pesticide laden potatoes they sell to McDonalds…
Sarah: Yeah, we know farmers like that… they keep their own organic kitchen gardens for their families while they destroy the land to earn a living. It’s so sad. Dad says the whole system needs to be rethought because people are basically trapped, growing the wrong way, educating the wrong way… all to keep up with perverted market demands.
Culhane: Standardization. We treat you and potatoes and houses and water as commodities. That’s what Raj concluded last time.
Sarah: Yeah. And I’m sorry about those things we can’t control – but the one environment we have complete control over is the classroom. All you teachers gotta do is wind us up and let us go… we’re the generation that wants to solve these problems. And learning this way we can ace the standardized tests too. There is nothing like real motivation, intrinsic motivation. Forget the carrots and sticks. Yick. Trust our instincts and we’ll make the connections.
Culhane: They’ll claim you guys are the exceptions that prove the rule. It’s the myth of talent as the basis for upward mobility. That’s why we identify you early on as “gifted” students.
Sarah: Yeah, in a world in which gifts are also commodities. Sell us to the highest bidder, keep the pyramid going. But I’m convinced that we are nothing special. I was always told I was a loser… and that in fact our people were a bunch of lazy drunkards who lived merely “to have a laugh”. Then I ace a few biology exams because my Dad is a farmer and I LIVE with biology and suddenly I’m a “highly gifted honors student”. The gift is the nexus network itself – connect enough termites or ants or bees – individually stupid – and you get a hive mind. Wire enough dumb cells together and you get a brain. Connect enough of us “low performing” students together and you get a high performance machine.
Culhane: That’s the hope that Nexus Thinking and Network theory, based on biomimicry, is counting on proving.
Sarah: But will you even see it? A lot of what YOUR GENERATION got from the material out there is so siloed, no wonder you can’t make the connections. You actually believe there are differences between courses…I go into math class and science class and history class and art class and English class like a bee going out looking for nectar so I can make my own honey. Of course I’m going to dip my proboscis into economics and into the development literature and go WAY beyond what YOU suggest or “assign” or whatever. Why wouldn’t I? Are you trying to keep things from us? Perpetuate those deadly and paralysing “information asymmetries" and insider info that give the privileged their privileges and throw the rest of us to the dogs?
Culhane: Of course not. You know that.
Sarah: But do YOU really know it? Do you FEEL it?
Culhane: Who subbed for the Chemistry class you all found so boring last semester and introduced you to “The Chemical History of a Candle”?
Sarah: You did.
Culhane: Damn straight I did. And what did you tell me at the end of the class when you aced the exams you were sure you would fail?
Sarah: That all I needed was to look at the world the way Michael Faraday did, seeing all of science revealed in a single candle flame – the way Walt Whitman did when he said he could see the whole world in a blade of grass…
Culhane: Damn straight. Poets, scientists – the greats all know that you can start anywhere and go everywhere and that once you have the right questions and look at the world in the right way, you can learn anything. Faraday, I’ll remind you, is credited with starting the whole OPEN TEACHING movement in 1849. School systems treat it as though it is avant guard, and you students act like you are discovering the power of freedom for the first time, but this too is OBVIOUS.
The Chemical History of a Candle “ is but one prime example of Open Teaching and shows the best science educators, even in the mid 1800s, used the methods I use today, methods I learned from Faraday.
Am I right NTHARP?
NTHARP: "Open teaching, or Open Educational Practices (OEP), is a teaching philosophy and method focused on removing barriers to education by using free, accessible resources (OER) and empowering learners as co-creators, not just consumers, of knowledge, fostering collaboration and sharing materials openly to benefit the wider community. It involves student engagement in creating content like outside readings, open textbooks, movies, comic books and other items of pop culture, mixing them with academic and specialized knowledge , promoting deeper understanding and making education more equitable.”
Sarah: So why were you so surprised I read Rostow?
Culhane: (Sighs) I guess … Because whenever our idealism and our theories meet their real-life offspring in the real world we feel a sudden and surprising rush of hope that we then grow afraid will be dashed on the rocks of commodification...
Sarah: Because you don’t really believe, down deep inside, that, as Donna Summer sings, there are places in us we’re yearning to explore…
Culhane: The haunting legacy of Theory X, always rearing its ugly head. Yeah… when things are going well we somehow can’t believe it could be this easy… like, students really WANTING to learn… especially here in the inner city public schools…
Sarah: Well, its you adults who told us that Economics was “the dismal science”. But I’m loving it… especially Boulding and Daly and even Smith – once you include his Theory of Moral Sentiments that schools conveniently seem to leave out – and Ricardo and of course Marx and Engels which my Dad’s hippie friends have rediscovered – all that great Metabolic Rift stuff – but which the schools treat like the plague. And I’m finding that so much of what we get taught – about supply and demand, about incentives, about elasticity and inelasticity, about profit… that most of it was taught wrong or was B.S.
And so I called BS on the circular economy.
Culhane: And your alternative is…
Sarah: So I suggest we need to be more "eccentric" and grow our circle - grow it upward - toward a VORTICAL ECONOMY.
Culhane: Can you elaborate. This IS indeed somewhat “eccentric” thinking…
Sarah: NTHARP, could you conjure up an image to help Culhane and our viewers see what I’m seeing?
NTHARP: Gladly my dear. How are these:
…
Sarah: Would you help us by articulating the principles? When you hear “Vortical Economy” for the first time, what does YOUR logic tell you it is?
NTHARP: What is it?
Simply put, it would be a form of "biomimicry" in the service of higher purpose driven governance and economics.
It promises EVOLUTION, not revolution.
A vortex is dynamic, self-reinforcing, and spirals upward or inward with increasing energy and order — unlike a simple circle (which might just loop endlessly without progress), a vortex builds on itself, accelerates, and gathers strength as it evolves.
Applied to economy, our idea of a vortical economy suggests:
Upward Co-evolution: Instead of merely cycling materials, energy, and value around in closed loops (which can stagnate or just delay entropy), the vortical economy improves the quality, utility, and synergy of everything it touches over time. Each cycle brings uplift — socially, materially, ecologically.
Self-Organizing Systems: Like natural vortices (think whirlpools, tornadoes, galaxies), economic systems would be self-organizing, adaptive, and resilient — driven not by centralized control, but by local action aligning with larger patterns of growth and balance.
From Entropy to Negentropy: Rather than succumbing to disorder (entropy), each spiral of the economy reduces disorder, enhances coherence, and creates more opportunities for life, creativity, and well-being (negentropy).
Value Creation, not Just Recycling: Instead of just recycling waste or resources in a "flat" circular model, the vortical economy adds value at every step — using ingenuity, biomimicry, cooperation, and innovation to upcycle and elevate.
Positive Feedback Loops for Good: Instead of destructive runaway loops (like pollution feeding more pollution), the vortical economy would be positive spirals where success begets more success, solutions spawn better solutions, and health generates more health across sectors.
In short:
🌪️ Our vortical economy is circularity with transcendence.
It’s regenerative, evolutionary, and creatively amplifying — a living, breathing, upward-spiraling economy, not a mechanical, repetitive cycle.
Sarah: So that would call BS on the whole “RE-CYCLE” thing too right?
Culhane: I suppose. People in the movement – you know, the avant garde of environmentalism – they are talking about DOWNCYCLING and UPCYCLING – questioning whether recycling works at a competitive cost and claiming that many things are just a few uses away from land fill – downcycling” and saying something like you are saying – that we need to ADD VALUE to the materials so they don’t become pollutants…
Sarah: But see, I’m going to call BS on that too – not that we shouldn’t keep things out of landfills or that we shouldn’t add value – but the whole notion of UP and DOWN – I mean that’s part of the problem. Up – toward heaven, toward the divine… down toward hell, toward the infernal. When “down” should just be toward the “INTERNAL” – toward the interior of a planet, down a gravity well – that isn’t necessarily a bad thing, do you see?
Culhane: Go deeper…
Sarah: That’s my point. Some things SHOULD go deeper. Like we don’t always need or want water to recycle – not at the surface, not in short term time frames… some should recharge the aquifers. Some should help build soil through fertigation, some should go to evaporation ponds to create useful salts. “Going down the tubes” or “Going down the drain” shouldn’t be considered a bad thing but one of the least cost options for getting materials from point A to point B or C using gravity instead of fossil or electric energy. But look how we use these metaphors to make downward motion seem bad. I mean why can’t we set up pen-stock for micro hydro turbines using city waste water so that every rainspout and every storm drain and every flush and every bathtub drain helps power the city? For example, in Iceland you know they use geothermal steam to run turbines to create clean electricity? And you probably know that they then they condense that steam and reinject most of it back down into the wells to be turned into steam again.
NTHARP: Ooh, ooh! Call on me, call on me!
Sarah: Yes NTHARP…?
NTHARP: Um… did you know that downstream from there they will also be using what they once called sulfur rich waste water for their thermal baths – The Blue Lagoon, for example,is predicted to become a 24/7 spa heated by the so-called waste-water from the turbines. From ‘Ain Sukhna (Arabic for Hot Spings) in Egypt to the Chena Hot Springs in Alaska, these low temperature gradients are more and more seen as a godsend for both tourism and for energy generations. Other countries too are looking at Rankine Organic Cycle low temperature gradient engines that simply use the delta T between hot and cold water to generate electricity – no steam needed.
Sarah: See? I mean it is all technically feasible.
But, most power plants – coal, oil or nuclear – , built by Logic 1 thinkers in their narrow silos… they only see it as waste heat, and they DUMP this “problematic byproduct” into coastal waters, altering ecosystems in bad ways…
Culhane: I hear the Manatees in Florida appreciate it…
Sarah: In some cases it can work yes - they used a kind of Logic 2 there… or the Manatees themselves figured it out. So it isn’t just black and white, good or bad. But we have to be nuanced. We need to first consider that the heat is valuable, not a waste. We need to consider that the soaps and surfactants and detergents in gray water have value. We have to consider that the NPK in black water – and the living microbes – including possible viruses or pathogens – have VALUE. That mosquitoes have value… that everything has value and that if it is causing a problem it is most likely the right thing in the wrong place at the wrong time at the wrong concentration. It really is that simple.
Culhane: So you are saying that Nexus Thinkers never USE water, they just transform it?
Sarah: Exactly. To use is to abuse. This whole notion of “using up” a resource has put us in a bad way. We are actually transducing resources from one form to another if we could just build the infrastructure for this… let’s call it an “industrial ecology” … to function properly.
And that leads me to the last two Learning Outcomes.
Culhane: Finally.
Sarah:
These are indeed, the FINAL downstream conclusions that come from nexus thinking upstream. First, let’s look NTHARP in the eye and “Reflect critically on the idea that the “AI” revolution needs to “consume” water…”
I don’t even have to ask him… or her… or it…
NTHARP: You can call me “they/them” if it makes you feel better.
Sarah: Sure ‘tharpy. What will make me feel better is when we can all have you with us all the time and not worry about building more nukes or using up all of our fresh water. And I know how to do it – we have to stop thinking that energy and water get “used up”. We have to think of WATERGY – of water as energy and energy as water. Of water as a carrier of energy and energy as a carrier of water.
Culhane: And we have to think of EXERGY!
Sarah: Oh, that one’s new to me.
Culhane: Exergy is “The maximum useful work which can be extracted from a system as it reversibly comes into equilibrium with its environment.” In other words, it is the capacity of energy to do physical work. And Watergy could then be considered, in our context, the capacity of water to do good works. Even so called “Waste Water”.
Sarah: Aha! So we need to examine the EXERGY of AI computer systems. Right!
For example, just like in Iceland, you can imagine that running these massive computers creates a lot of heat, and so you put that heat to work for District Heating – can you imagine if New York City had AI Data Servers under every building? They’d provide all our hot water in the summer and keep things warm in the winter. And the energy to power them could come from a combination of wind and sun and rain fed turbines and Rankine Cycle turbines and river turbines and wave generators… I mean, my gosh we’re surrounded by energy and water. Following Moore’s law Raj says that the efficiency of computers is going to go up and costs will come down… all we have to do is plan for decentralization and connect the networks.
Culhane: I like your vision. I don’t think “all we have to do” is accurate because the political hurdles will be huge, but I think we can get there by 2025 for sure. What about the last outcome.
Sarah: Oh, I wanted to leave that one for you, to see what YOU learned. “Try to defend the entire idea of “consumption” Culhane. Ga head.”
Culhane: Ha. I can’t. Nobody can. Consumption suggests a cradle to grave mentality. You’ve taken great pains to demonstrate that everything should and could be “cradle to cradle” Even entropy can be harnessed for local negentropy, right? So consumption is a state of mind. Consumption is a fiction. Everything we do, if we do it in the right way, with the right things, at the right time and place and in the right concentrations, can spiral into something better, the same way that detritivores take dead leaves and tissues each fall and prepare them for new life every spring. Life rises from the grave. So when it comes to consumption… I call BS.
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