RS 16 Nexus Thinking Relational Summary 16: And in the end...

 RS 16 Nexus Thinking Relational Summary 16:  And in the end... 

(Culhane, Raj, Dorian, Sophia and Sarah  are seated in a circle. NTHARP is recording them while projecting their learning outcomes as a superimposition on the screen)

Culhane:  By the end of this episode, students will be able to:

Dorian:  Explain the logic (or illogic!) of always searching for “new” ideas and rejecting or replacing the old…

Sarah: Describe how biomimicry can be used to repair and enhance earth-sea systems.

Sophia. Compare and contrast the roles of science and art in moving us toward sustainability.

Raj: Reflect critically on the idea that we should “Think Globally and Act Locally”.  What happens if we flip it around?

Culhane: And we will urge you to Try to defend the entire idea of  “individualism”. Try to defend “holism”.  Try to think of a system that honored “both-and” rather than either/or thinking.

Culhane, Dorian, Sarah, Sophia and Raj (in unison):  “Ga head, I dare you”.

Culhane:  Welcome to the final. 

Dorian: The final week of class that is. 

Sophia: Yeah, we don’t do “finals” – no artificial exams, right?  No tests of arbitrary knowledge or memorization or sycophantic loyalty – we’ll leave that stuff to NTHARP and his ilk.

Sarah:  The real test, folks, is in your real world conversations with each other and the landscape…

Raj: And seascape, and airscape…

Culhane: Yes, the real test is the impact you have, your words, your actions, on your collective present and future. So let’s get to business and see if we can’t wrap these lessons up with a few challenges.  Dorian, do want to tackle the first on you articulated?

Dorian: Not alone, but I’ll get the party started.  First of all, I can’t understate how many times I’ll go to a speech or read a news article and hear this grand call for novelty.  Just as it is on Madison Avenue and in all the adverts, everything has to be “new and improved” doesn’t it?  And back before we took this journey into possible futures with NTHARP I bought into it hook line and sinker.

Culhane: Give us an example?

Dorian:  Well sure – even when the school Principal gave his welcome speech in the fall he kept saying “we face unprecedented challenges here in the later quarter of the 20th century, and  we need you students to come up with NEW IDEAS.”  I was thinking “you never listened to any of our old ideas why would you listen to any of our new ones? The fact is you just don't respect us.” And I remember  listening to Mayor Beame after President Ford told New York to “Drop Dead” when he asked for a Bailout   as the garbage was piling up in our streets  here in New York and turning our city into Ratropolis, or Ratopia because of his service cuts response to our supposed fiscal crisis, which my Dad insists was manufactured anyway.  And he was saying “we need NEW ideas. We need NEW approaches.”

Damned if that wasn't what the whole cultural revolution was supposed to be about. But did they listen? John Lennon moved here and became a US citizen and offered all sorts of solutions to this city that he loves so much. “We need NEW ideas” is the kind of thing you say when you fire someone, not when you hire someone.  It's the  kind of the stock response we new kids on the block always  hear from the old guard when they want to cancel something or don't want to take any real action. It gets easy applause and makes politicians look like they have some vision. But it doesn't fool me.  

Sofia:  To me it's not only kicking the can down the road and leaving the mess in our hands, it is criminally irresponsible, considering how many great old ideas we have that have never been allowed to see the light of day.

Culhane: You’re saying “old ideas didn’t fail — they were disallowed”.  Examples people. These are strong statements. Give us examples!

Dorian: Okay, think of all the people who died here  last winter because of the fuel oil shortages.  Or because they couldn’t afford what was available what with the price hikes.

Sarah: Like us Irish with the famine that drove us to New York a century ago!

Dorian:  But the sun was always shining…

Sarah: Just as there was plenty of food in Ireland when a million of us perished…

Dorian: Very much the same story in many ways… so we had all that abundant sunshine – and wind… and wave and tidal and Hudson and East River power potential…  and we had an overflow of garbage – we could have used all of it – solar heat and hydro and  biogas – these are ancient ideas, not  new ideas… I mean why aren’t we using District Heating & Combined Heat and Power.  There have long been district heating systems in places like Denmark and parts of New England that capture waste heat from power plants to warm whole neighborhoods — industrial symbiosis. Proven tech. But instead we doubled down on single-family oil boilers we knew would fail.
And it goes on and on. I mean when was the last time NYC got a subway upgrade?  You go to Washington DC and the metro is clean and silent, running on rubber tires for gods sake, in these beautiful colorfully lit atriums. It makes waiting for the train relaxing.  But here you go nuts with the screeching of metal rails and brakes and thundering noise and you feel like you are in some ugly smelly bathroom all the time. You go up top and you can’t breathe because of the buses and trucks belching out smog, and everything is caught in gridlock… but cities across America used to run on electric streetcars and trolleys… clean, reliable, no oil crisis. Then what - we ripped them out to accommodate the growing car culture and oil lobbies. Then suddenly in ’75 people pretend the idea of clean transit is ‘new’? Come on.”

And why should anybody have died or frozen or been without light last winter?  Wasn’t it windy too?

We had Dutch windmills for centuries powering mills, pumping water, doing useful work. And America had thousands of electricity producing windmills on farms across the country, ripped out during the highway act.  Oil crisis hits and everyone acts like windmills are science fiction. They already existed! They already worked!”

Sarah:  Yeah, and what about Passive Solar Architecture? No one had to die even without electricity or biofuels.  Native architecture, from the Pueblo to the Mediterranean courtyard, used passive solar design — thick walls, thermal mass, shading, cross-breezes… and of course in northern climates big south facing windows and Trombe walls. Then in the 20th century we invented… the window that doesn’t open.

Dorian: Oh, you gotta see the “new and improved middle school” they just opened this year in Dobbs Ferry where my cousin goes to school – they replaced a beautiful brick building that’s been around for a century with a brutalist oil heated fortress filled with rows of fluorescent lights with a freezing open room plan like a factory warehouse -  the only windows are these narrow slits in the teachers lounge and principals office. The rest of the building is completely reliant on fossil fuel heating and Air conditioning. It’s the ugliest and most depressing place I’ve ever been. No wonder the students get so aggressive… 

Raj:  Yeah, “new” really only means “what we didn’t do before that we finally decided to allow you now that we are in a crisis.  Look at getting around the city – the bicycle is older than the automobile and uses no fuel. But suggest bike lanes in ’75 and they look at you like you’re Che Guevara on wheels.

NTHARP: If it is any consolation, my prediction algorithm suggests that Manhattan will eventually start to emulate many European cities and Asian cities and implement bike lanes and even bike share programs so you don’t have to own a bike to use them.

Raj: Wow. How… innovative. NOT.  And how dare they say that prices are up because the cost of shipping goods has risen with the oil crisis. Wind-powered cargo crossed the Atlantic for centuries. And there were dirigibles – one used to dock at the Empire State Building.  There are so many ways to move goods around the earth without being vulnerable to sudden scarcity and price volatility.   Oil crisis hits — and we still insist on bunker fuel supertankers because marketing tells us progress means kerosene fueled airplanes or diesel engines running our boats and water pumps…  they’ve put us in such a vulnerable position!

Sophia: Well, what about water? Those droughts we had in the 60s were terrifying to my parents.  All of sudden the city was saying the reservoirs up in Westchester and the aqueduct wouldn’t be enough.  They formed the NYC water board and said it was all going to be fixed. Then, this year capital investment in the water system collapsed during the fiscal crisis.  I’m told that started a lot of the so-called “white flight” to the Westchester suburbs. Meanwhile, here in the inner city we were told we weren’t ALLOWED to collect rainwater or use greywater to flush out toilets or water our gardens! Can you believe it?  Collecting rainwater is ancient. Reusing wash water for gardens is ancient. But suddenly in the 1970s it’s forbidden here on the east coast while being  called ‘innovative’ on the “left coast”? No — it’s just forbidden in some places because it doesn’t profit the utility companies.”

Dorian: What’s the left coast?

Sophia: California. Where my Dad teaches. Up in Oakland at the Free School Did you know last year Berkeley opened its first eco-house" called “the Integral Urban House (IUH), established by the University of California as a model for sustainable urban living with features like composting toilets and solar heaters.  They have serious droughts out there and the winters can get damn cold… but no one could ever freeze to death or go thirsty or run out of food  in a neighborhood like that. They even have urban chickens running around giving fresh eggs to everyone.  But here… ?  It seems they want us to “drop dead”.

Sarah:  Well don’t get me started on the need for Local Agriculture & Victory Gardens. That’s one thing that definitely isn’t new under the sun.   During WWII, victory gardens fed 40% of the country. In the 70s? We tell people they can’t grow food in their yards because the supermarket is the ‘modern’ solution. Until the supply chain breaks — then what?

Sophia: I heard Rene Dubos, the author of that great book Culhane put in the syllabus, “So Human an Animal”, is involved with a project at St. John the Divine Church, creating rooftop gardens to help feed the poor.

Culhane:  I guess we do need DIVINE intervention, huh?  I heard they are getting around the roof-soil-weight problem by creating a light mixture using algae infused recycled styrofoam – turning waste into an ally. Clever folks over there. I mean, when you think about it we really could meet all of our food and energy needs and clean up the city if we went back to some of the old ways.  It’s a mentality isn’t it?

Culhane: Okay, So when the mayor or the principal or the president says ‘We need NEW ideas!’ what they really mean is, ‘We’d like to hear ideas we ourselves never cared to explore or think of that don’t challenge the old power structure.’

And that’s not innovation — that’s amnesia.
So what’s next on our agenda?

Sarah: Describe how biomimicry can be used to repair and enhance earth-sea systems.
This is like a REAL  final exam, huh?  I mean a LIVE broadcast going out to the future?  Off the top of MY head I have, of course, a LOT to say about this topic, because I LIVE it, my father and I LIFE-TEST it with our crew, and I am delighted that for the first time, this semester, I got a chance to talk about what I’m interested in at school – and I’m not getting dissed!

Culhane: What does that mean?

NTHARP:  “diss” is a clipped variant of “disrespect.” Clipping and back‑formation are common in slang (e.g., “rep” from “reputation”). Early spoken forms used both noun and verb senses (to give someone a diss; to diss someone).

Earliest documented print occurrences: Linguistic and lexicographic records show “diss” appearing in print by the 1960s and 1970s within African American communities and music reporting.

Raj:  All of us nerds get “dissed” for being smart around these parts.  But one day we will get our revenge…

Culhane:  You mean when you introduce tech like NTHARP to the world and become billionaires?

Dorian: See, now you are speaking my language!

Sophia:  You’re a cretin.

Dorian: What does that mean?

Sophia: It means one day you’ll be a frat boy and find out that it’s Greek for “you are a troglodyte”.

Dorian: I don’t even know what that SAT word means…

Raj: She just dissed you. Big time. Caveman.

Culhane:  Guys, we’re being recorded, for posterity.

Dorian: Let me show Sophia and  posterity my posterior… (He turns his butt to the sensor)

Sophia: Don’t be a butthead, Dor. I’m going to tease you for ever every time you slip back to Logic 1.  Sarah, please continue…

Sarah: Biomimicry simply means “follow nature’s example”.  Nature, through what we used to merely call natural selection, but now know to include Natural Inclusion (winks at the sensor), has had hundreds of thousands to millions to billions of years to perfect certain designs and processes through trial and error.  Whether you want to call it an “invisible hand” or a “blind watchmaker” or “stochastic process” or “chance mutation” or “hopeful monster” or chalk it up to teleology – that’s Greek for destiny or fate, future frat boy (winks) – or even if you want to  invoke a divine intelligence, the solutions shown in nature – fusiform bodies for sharks…
“…fusiform bodies for sharks, right — that teardrop streamlined shape that reduces drag? We literally build ships as floating bricks when nature already gave us the blueprint for perfectly efficient hulls. Imagine cargo ships shaped like sharks or dolphins — they would use far less fuel, have quieter engines, do less harm to whales and create less wake erosion near shore.”

(Pauses / glances around)

“Speaking of shorelines…  take mangroves. Mangrove roots filter sediment and pollution before it reaches the reef, and they anchor the shoreline against storm surge. Instead of concrete seawalls that crack, we could build mangrove-mimicking breakwaters — branching structures that slow waves, trap silt, and build land the way trees do. Nature is literally giving us civil engineering lessons. But I have these really clueless snowbird relatives who bought a winter house in Florida on the coast. But because the laws there are so pro-development –

Culhane: Tell me about it. Florida is the worst!  Disney was able to buy up the entire Orlando region to do whatever he wants with it…you know the whole usus, fructus, abusus thing we talked about last session, and that was supposed to be a good thing in his case, because he LOVED wilderness and was definitely a nexus thinker in tune with nexus technologies, but now that he’s gone…

Sophia: Killed by Phillip Morris!

Raj: Somebody killed him? I thought he died of lung cancer!

Dorian: She means the cigarette companies. She doesn’t know what brand he smoked…

Culhane: Anyway,  it looks like they are going to take his whole Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow sustainability dream and turn it into just another theme park and hotel complex. Typical…

Sarah: Right? So Logic 1.  So disappointing!  Well, my relatives, you know, we are of Celtic DRUID heritage and we are supposed to WORSHIP trees – you’d think! But they get down to Florida and all they really want to do is golf on some fake savannah – not a good form of biomimicry by the way! – and stare out over an empty stretch of water because, you know, apparently they went to see Sartre’s “No Exit” off Broadway and took it too  seriously. They told me, “when you stare at an uninterrupted view of the ocean you heal from the hoi poloi – remember dear, HELL IS OTHER PEOPLE.”

Culhane:  That’s… sad.

Sarah: I didn’t get to my point – the point is they used that “abusus” device in property law  and CUT DOWN ALL THE MANGROVES ON THEIR PROPERTY! Just to get an “unobstructed view of that emptiness”. They say they “love the nature in Florida” and what they really mean is they just don’t want to see anything alive in front of their face.  Their whole property now is a concrete patio with deck chairs looking out over crab grass, sand and shimmering water that blinds them so badly they wear thick wraparound sunglasses, keep the shades drawn and the AC on max and  rarely go out on the deck. 

Culhane: Well, I’m sure they appreciate the colorful sunsets…

Sarah: They bought a place on the East coast. So… no spectacular sunsets. And they are late sleepers so they never see the sunrise.  They actually  think the sun is dangerous.  But here’s what gets me… How do we get the savannah and coastal culture club people to see views of trees as beautiful and desirable?  

Culhane: Well I certainly get you!  Those of us who are forest culture club people find nothing so beautiful as the view of a treescape, the sea of green dappled with yellows and reds and dashes of other colors, flitting with birds and butterflies and buzzing with life.  We would rather that view than some empty vista of endless water or some golf course like lawn.  To be surrounded by trees and to look out into their majesty is heaven for us.  But everywhere I've lived there is this mad hunger to eliminate treescapes and "clear the view".  In Dobbs Ferry some of my most beloved old growth forest giants were cut down by developers so they could charge higher prices for a "clear view of the Hudson River".  We fought them -- I devoted the Urban Planning law course I took to the case but we lost in the end.  The trees were awarded protection but then the developers hired hooligans to chainsaw them in the middle of the night. When the cops caught them they said they were drunk and just out for some fun.  That was too fishy for anyone to buy, so the investigation proved they'd been hired by the developers.  The developers were found guilty and the result?

They had to pay fines. Like 400 dollars per tree.

Oh, ouch.  That wrist slap must have stung.  They ended up making millions and millions from the "premium" sale prices.

Dorian: So how do we change this so that a view of trees is the premium value?

Culhane:  Since I can't understand people who prefer views of water or lawns over views of trees I'm not the person to answer this question.

Sarah: Don’t look at me.  I prefer trees to open views any day of the week.

Sophia: I’m a city girl. I prefer the neon lights on Broadway!

Culhane: And all this backstory will affect our character arcs and understandings of and contributions to the practice of sustainability. But I want to hear more about biomimicry…

Sarah: Well, the one silver lining I got with my relatives… the one concession, was that they allowed me to spend Spring Break installing “oyster balls” off their beach. They said, “as long as we can’t see them, you do your nature girl thing…” and my uncle even took me in his F150 to the hardware store and bought me all the concrete.

Raj: I don’t know what “oyster balls” are?

NTHARP: "Oyster balls" can refer to two very different things: either artificial concrete structures for habitat restoration (Reef Balls) or, colloquially, bull testicles deep-fried as a dish (Rocky Mountain Oysters). The habitat restoration balls are designed to mimic natural reefs, giving baby oysters a place to attach and grow, while the culinary "oyster balls" are a protein-rich appetizer enjoyed in parts of the American West and other countries

Raj: I don’t know whether you have an advanced sense of humor or are just plain dumb ‘tharpy.

Sarah:  Obviously I’m doing the former.  Oyster reefs filter water like living kidneys. One oyster can filter something like 30 to 50 gallons of water a day. Imagine artificial reefs modeled on oyster geometry — curved, cup-shaped, layered structures that multiply flow contact and scrub the water clean. It’s wastewater treatment as cuisine… and coastline defense at the same time.

NTHARP: Don’t forget coral, Sarah. Efforts are underway in the Florida Keys to restore America’s only continental reef, and this is also important in the fight to mitigate the damage from the coming hurricanes. Coral doesn’t ‘fight’ the ocean, it dances with it — branching to break waves gently, honeycombing to dissipate energy, and partnering with algae to turn sunlight into food. If we designed harbors and docks like coral instead of like fortress walls, ports could heal themselves instead of collapsing under the next storm.

Raj: I’m feeling bullish about that one. But what I like best in the biomimicry movement are designs based on whale fins — this one blows my mind. Humpback whales have these lumpy bumps, tubercles, on the leading edge of their flippers you know. They look ugly, but they change the way water flows — delaying stall, increasing lift, reducing drag. You could retrofit that cool giant  wind turbine they installed up on Block Island, you could improve ship propellers, even airplane wings with tubercle edges … suddenly they would  use less fuel and make less noise.

Sarah: Yeah, biomimicry is like nature saying, ‘Here’s a free upgrade; why didn’t you ask sooner?’”

Sophia: Oh, and you should have seen the Kelp forests my mom and I visited in San Diego when we went to Cali to visit my Dad and did that long drive South.  I got to go scuba diving right off the beach and swayed with them as the surfers drifted by above me. It was magical… It’s a forest down there, but  it is flexible, not brittle. The giant kelp stalks bend with storms. They absorb wave energy. They sequester carbon. Picture kelp-mimicking sea farms — vertical gardens offshore capturing CO₂, feeding cities, restoring fish nurseries. That would be a cool form of  biomimicry: food, fuel, and carbon drawdown just by copying seaweed.”

Sarah: Ooh I’m so jealous – I would love to dive in someplace other than Rye Beach and the Jersey quarries. I tried snorkeling at my relatives place.

Sophia: Next summer, girl – we are going on a ROAD TRIP! (They hi-five).

Sarah: So, in conclusion, biomimicry isn’t just flower patterns for decoration — it’s design for sustainability.

It’s not a metaphor , it’s a real world  cost saving  method.

And these aren’t ‘new ideas’ by any means... they are among the OLDEST… they are an  old wisdom that long predates humanity. 
Maybe the problem is we don’t teach biology right in this country because we don’t really have the guts to teach evolution right. We are still showing that old movie “Inherit the Wind” with Spencer Tracey and Frederick March in classrooms and acting like “Evolution vs. Creation” is a valid debate.  And without understanding how evolution REALLY works, we just create the same old problems.

Nature already solved our problems long ago.

We just stopped listening.  Thank you for listening! Next outcome!

Culhane: Hold on one second. What I hear Sarah saying is that nature doesn’t deal in facts the way textbooks do.
It deals in what works.
If a form, a pattern, or a behavior survives — it’s not because it was ‘right’…
it’s because it was viable at the time.

This reminds me of an important lecture I attended on a professional development trip to the University of Georgia. It was by the Austrian born professor Ernst von Glasersfeld, the guy who developed  “Yerkish” a few years ago,  a machine-aided language to communicate with chimpanzees like Lana– and he also built a plywood computer. He would love talking with NTHARP.  He’s the kind of guy who would help us bring chimpanzee voices into the mix to help us figure out what WORKS for other hominoids besides just us.  Maybe help us stop the deforestation and the unethical use of primates in research. What he’s starting to become known for now is a way of thinking that sounds a lot like Nexus thinking — radical constructivism. The “truth” emerges through dialog. It ISN’T “taught”. 

Sophia: So… you’re saying knowledge isn’t about discovering reality per se — it’s about making something that doesn’t fall apart?

Culhane: Exactly. We all co-create and co-evolve that reality. We don’t find meaning like archaeologists digging up old bones.   We construct it — together — and then reality stress-tests it.”

NTHARP This aligns with a growing view in cognitive science:  knowledge is not a mirror of the world, but a tool for organizing experience.  Ideas persist not because they are objectively ‘true,’
but because they remain operationally successful within a system.

Sophia: And THAT would mean that both science and art are necessary for the co-creation of truth.  We’re told that science is the method we use to discover truth, but if radical constructivism is any guide, we need art to help make truth, right. Because we’re ALL involved in it. 

Sarah: Even the other animals?

Culhane: That was my understanding. Whatever beings were dialoging with.  We’d have to ask the chimpanzees what their idea of “truth” is if we want to get a clearer picture… 

Sophia:  Well, that seques nicely into my learning outcome:  Compare and contrast the roles of science and art in moving us toward sustainability.

(Takes a breath) Now… this one requires a total rethink.  A Nexus think. Because the pablum we are fed by those who are involved in good educational reform is that we need both.  Very post modern right?  

Sure, in this politically polarized world scientists don’t talk to artists and artists don’t talk to scientists – they’re considered  like two different species, right?  But I may be just a teenager, but I can tell you already that I’m BOTH and always have been. And I will stay both because the separation between these… these “aptitudes” is an illusion. This whole “artists are right brained” and “scientists are left brained” is Caesar’s divide and conquer strategy used to hoodwink an entire civilization. And where did we learn this indefensible way of seeing the world?  IN SCHOOL of course.  School tells us we have to choose our lane and they give us aptitude tests and…

Culhane: My Harvard advisor Freshman year told me I got chimpanzee scores on my science placement exams and told me very sternly that I should stick to the arts…

Dorian: So we’re back to chimpanzees again, huh?

Sophia: (Ignoring Dorian ) Oh my god… your ADVISOR told you you got  chimpanzee scores!  How rude. How discouraging? What did you do?

Culhane: I decided it was a sign and so I  majored in Biological Anthropology – you know,  studying chimpanzees. And other primates.  I spent a year following orangutans in the jungles of Borneo on a Harvard research expedition and later I even got to meet Jane Goodall several times – she introduced me to our indigenous allies.  So maybe that seemingly nasty comment was a good thing…

Sophia: Well, you turned lemons into lemonade. Every good scientist/artist does.  Because that is my point – we are all both and always have been and always will be – nexus thinking isn’t left or right brain, it’s WHOLE BRAIN thinking.  And that’s all I think we really need to say about the matter, because the question is stupid.  You don’t “compare and contrast” art and science as strategies to sustainability. It would be like saying, “compare and contrast your right leg and your right leg as vehicles to get you across the street.”  Duh.  You teachers should really study and apply metacognition and the growth mindset. That’s what my Dad does out at the free school in Oakland. The phrasing of your very “learning outcomes” are often what impede the learning.  Next outcome.

Culhane: You are actually reminding me of an Ivy League club discussion I had about education recently with this brilliant guy named Alfie Kohn who graduated from Brown last year. He suggested that the mere act of grading was degrading and he insisted that even dedicated educational reformers like me don’t really understand teaching at all. That took me aback of course, but I listened politely as he said something like, “you are all focused on delivering knowledge efficiently, not on how students actually learn. Even gifted edutainers like you still treat the  classroom like a performance instead of a conversation. Students are interchangeable receptacles to most of you —wide-open bird beaks waiting for worms. Stop performing FOR them. Stop giving them the worms!

Sophia: Blackbird singing in the dead of the night...  Take these broken wings and learn to fly… all your life. You were only waiting for this moment to arrive. Well thank god you listened!

Raj: And you had better KEEP listening. Just as Dor here is like a moth to a flame when it comes to Logic 1, you can’t resist Logic 2’s incrementalism and the desire to try and please everyone and perform for whatever audience is in the room. In that sense you and ‘tharpy are a pair. Anyway, my turn:  Reflect critically on the idea that we should “Think Globally and Act Locally”.  What happens if we flip it around?

Well, I can be as glib as Sophia.  Let’s not overthink this.  Flip it around and don’t compromise. We have to think LOCALLY and have faith that what we do locally… that local throw of a stone in our OWN pond,  will ripple out through this Planet Water until the effects are felt globally. 
Because – I mean, what HUBRIS is it for anyone to think they can “think globally”?  You can’t even get your mind around all of Manhattan, with all its diversity, and it's just a tiny island that you can bike across in an hour or so. What arrogant, imperialist, colonialist Peace Corps jocky came up with advice as absurd and privileged as “think globally”?

NTHARP:  The concept behind "think globally, act locally" was pioneered by Scottish urban planner Patrick Geddes in the early 20th century, but the specific phrase gained prominence through environmentalist René Dubos in the early part of this decade. Dubos used it as a guiding principle for addressing global environmental issues through local action.  I thought he’s a hero of yours – you said you loved his book in the syllabus…

Raj: Oh. Oops. This is an SNL  Emily Latella moment. “Never mind…”   But… well, I mean, HE isn’t an arrogant colonialist type… and I’m sure he had a different intent… he was emphasizing the local action part, which is in alignment with what I am saying and I bet he said “think globally” because of the famous “Earth Rise” photograph and other images of the earth from space which were the first time in human history that  people could even consider what a “global perspective” might be like.  So I don’t blame him. But you can see how easily it has been twisted by megalomaniacs right?  It’s like Lex Luthor thinking his mega brain can think for the rest of us. And the thing about Superman is, even though he is the only one who actually  gets to fly into space and look down on the whole globe on a daily basis, he shows us that the most important work he does is reporting on local news as Clark Kent. I mean that’s the whole charm of the comic – Superman was raised by humble farmers in Kansas.  He understands the importance of each grain we plant.

Sarah: It’s a Jesus allegory too – the Messiah who comes to walk in our sandals and experience our individual pain. He doesn’t think for us. He dies for our sins and then gives us free will to keep messing up as long as we try to do good in our own neighborhood. He didn’t fly around the globe solving peoples problems.  I think it is lovely.

Raj: So that’s my point.  For all you would be sustainability superheroes out there – do as Ivan Illich demanded in “To Hell with Good Intentions” and think through solving your own problems in your own back yard among your own neighbors before you go jetting off to some other place around the globe. Point!

Culhane: Counterpoint:  You can hold both perspectives at the same time, using the necker-cube approach to constantly shift between them and using the macro-micro-telescoping method to constantly change your granularity and your perspective.  We all fall into the trap of returning to the debilitating binaries and dualism that were used to divide us. Learning outcome:  Try to think of a system that honors “both-and” rather than either/or thinking. 
Try to defend the entire idea of  “individualism”, then try to defend “holism” and then try to hold both ideas in your head at the same time.

 Natural Inclusion’s “hole-point” is that they are both inadequate alone. Both perspectives exist. All perspectives that CAN exist exist. Everything that IS co-evolved with everything else that is, and for what seemed at the time very good reasons - they all FIT in their time and place.  NTHARP predicts that in 50 years people will be circling back on all these ideas and the time may be right then to truly think both locally and globally and act both locally and globally because the conditions will finally make all these ideas fit. The trend lines suggest to him that there will be NTHARP like intelligence everywhere and human thinkers, like the pracademic Dr. Victoria Hurth he predicts and the dancing economist Christian Felber he intuits, will be leading charges beyond profit and toward a well-being economy for all beings guiding us from Logic 1 through Logic 2 to Logic 3, which will circle back to indigenous wisdom known and practiced for tens of thousands of years.  People will be able to Envision Sustainability like never before even as they face existential challenges like never before – climate change, species extinction, habitat loss, planetary pollution, a resurgence of fascisms and racisms and sexisms and militarisms we here in 1975 thought we had finally climbed out of.  But as the Bible teaches, and the folk song Turn Turn Turn reminds us “For everything there is a season and a time under heaven.”  Let’s just all remember that this course is a river meandering through time and space gathering ideas from every locale and bringing them to the ocean of global experience.  We are on a journey my friends… and the learning, and the wisdom, come from our mutually respectful and ever edifying CONVERSATIONS. As the Beatles sang, “And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make”.  We make that love real through respectful dialog.  That’s how we’ll get through the rest of this century and the next. We’ll keep adding different voices, different intelligences, to the mix and…

NTHARP: (Mimicking the computer voice of Stephen Hawking) : All we have to do… is KEEP ON TALKING.

(Fade to snow).