Excerpt #7 from my book, Interconnected, Interrelated & Interdependent, Like It or Not:
A WORLD OUT OF BALANCE
Business as Usual
Many will argue that throughout history humanity has always faced problems similar to those which we encounter today, and that our current ones are simply more of the same.
They conclude that we will find solutions and that life will continue as usual.
It is a position that is not easily refuted, for we humans, despite our shortcomings, have always exhibited a natural instinct for survival and certainly an untiring penchant for growth.
To the universal wonders with which we have been endowed, we have, through our creativity, added those of our own human proportions.
Our accomplishments have ranged from the most functionally mundane to the most aesthetically ethereal.
To serve ourselves, we have created an endless variety of tools from axes to lasers.
In food and agriculture, our advances include the likes of refrigeration, pasteurization, cloud-seeding, and so much more.
In clothing, we have gone from natural textiles to sewing machines and to human-made fabrics.
We have produced sound and communicated and recorded with everything from drums through communication satellites.
We have transported ourselves in the air, on the ground, in space, and underwater in, on, and hanging from an endless variety of vehicles.
We have shaped Earth’s resources and materials into pottery, glass, steel, plastics, aluminum ad infinitum.
We have built with materials ranging from brick to plywood and have created structures as simple as tents to as complicated as rocket launching stations.
Our homes contain a potpourri of conveniences such as washing and drying machines, carpets and sweepers, lighting, central air and heat, microwave ovens, and countless others.
For our protection, we have everything from umbrellas and fire extinguishers to napalm and nuclear bombs.
Innumerable instruments from clocks to electron microscopes, sources of energy from steam engines to nuclear reactors, organization from postage stamps to supermarkets, and health advances from spectacles to surgical implants, represent more of endless examples.
Further, in each day of our time, our pace of learning accelerates as stores of knowledge are assembled in data bases and made more easily and rapidly accessible in the Informationand Communication Age in which we exist today.
We continue to forge ahead within every area of human endeavor.
In an explosion of creativity and inventiveness of seemingly unlimited scope and diversity, we continue to fashion for ourselves everything and anything we can imagine, and more.
Our potential, it seems, is without limits.
It is no wonder that some say,
“Do not bother searching for solutions, for there are no problems.”
This, of course, is a backhand way of stating that dilemmas are simply another aspect of life, and that once addressed they will be resolved.
While there is some validity to this notion, the scope and complexity of problems we face today has thrust us into a realm of challenge demanding more than a “business as usual” approach.