{"id":1705,"date":"2009-11-20T01:56:06","date_gmt":"2009-11-20T01:56:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ietransfer.wpengine.com\/?p=1705"},"modified":"2009-11-20T01:56:06","modified_gmt":"2009-11-20T01:56:06","slug":"viewing-the-world-as-a-system-will-help-us-establish-sustainability","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/inspiredeconomist.com\/articles\/viewing-the-world-as-a-system-will-help-us-establish-sustainability\/","title":{"rendered":"Viewing the world as a system will help us establish sustainability"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Paul Hawken was the keynote speaker at the Sustainable Industries<\/a> Economic Forum in San Francisco on Thursday. He had some inspiring talking points (the forum’s goal was to ‘reinspire the inspired’), but one of the key takeaways was in how we should be viewing sustainability.\u00a0 He started by saying that sustainability should be viewed as a easily defineable.\u00a0 Sustainability means we survive.\u00a0 Living unsustainably means we don’t.\u00a0 But it was how he suggested we view this that was really interesting.\u00a0 <\/p>\n

He wanted to suggest that sustainability is about seeing the world as a system.\u00a0 Once you see it that way, it’s hard to un-see it.\u00a0 If you see the world that way, there’s no such thing as bad news.\u00a0 You can see the loss, feel the grief\u2026the loss of a child, the loss of a species, the loss of a culture\u2026it’s connected to a whole system.\u00a0 Instead, it turns into just news\u2026information.<\/p>\n

In this way, we can view the whole world as one system of energy.\u00a0 A watershed, for example, builds over millennia using a lot of energy in terms of rainfall, geologic uplift, etc.\u00a0 We are tapping into that energy, unsustainably, and have been since the industrial revolution.\u00a0 We’re using our reserves.\u00a0 Quickly.\u00a0 Seeing this as a system, where the river may look ok today, but when viewed as part of a system, clearly is not, is a path toward an enlightened view of the world that many more people can share.<\/p>\n

All the oil in Canada can run the world for 6 months.\u00a0 China\u20267 months.\u00a0 The U.S.:\u00a0 9 months.\u00a0 Nigeria:\u00a0 12 months.\u00a0 Russia: 28 months.\u00a0 Iraq:\u00a0 4 years.\u00a0 Saudi Arabia has 8 years.\u00a0 Biggest recent discovery offshore of Brazil:\u00a0 15 months\u2026after it takes 20-25 years to extract.\u00a0 When viewed as a system, with all the energy that went into the creation of that oil, it becomes so clear that extraction and burning is not the answer.\u00a0 Drill, Baby, Drill is just plain dumb.<\/p>\n

Scott Cooney is the author of Build a Green Small Business:\u00a0 Profitable Ways to Become an Ecopreneur <\/a>(McGraw-Hill)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Paul Hawken was the keynote speaker at the Sustainable Industries Economic Forum in San Francisco on Thursday. He had some inspiring talking points (the forum’s goal was to ‘reinspire the inspired’), but one of the key takeaways was in how we should be viewing sustainability.\u00a0 He started by saying that sustainability should be viewed as 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He had some inspiring talking points (the forum’s goal was to ‘reinspire the inspired’), but one of the key takeaways was in how we should be viewing sustainability.\u00a0 He started by saying that sustainability should be viewed as…","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inspiredeconomist.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1705"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/inspiredeconomist.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/inspiredeconomist.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inspiredeconomist.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/70"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inspiredeconomist.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1705"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/inspiredeconomist.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1705\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inspiredeconomist.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1706"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inspiredeconomist.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1705"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inspiredeconomist.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1705"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inspiredeconomist.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1705"},{"taxonomy":"adace-sponsor","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inspiredeconomist.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/adace-sponsor?post=1705"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}