Stephen's topic

Sorry to still be emailing this to you - at this late stage and all - but I failed in my weekend's campaign to post my topic to the blog. The blogger blog is a shitty thing that has been designed by sadists, but hopefully my topic is not - so Martin will post it up there for now. Here it is - would be great if people were able to muse overnight and bring some thoughts to the session: Almost daily now there is another headline about a flood or other extreme weather event in a different part of the world. If these extreme weather events continue to increase, we may eventually reach a point where acceptance that we are sliding into an environmental disaster reaches critical mass. By critical mass I mean the point at which the majority of people no longer view radical change in our daily behaviour as an annoying idea imposed on them by others, but rather as a personal imperative driven by their own sense of necessity. Or, to put it more basically, where fear overtakes denial as the stronger instinct. At this point, one would presume that the level of global human energy that comes online to actualise change should bloom to thousands of times its current level. While, from our current decrepit vantage point, that might seem like a victory in itself, the subsequent challenge, of "what to do now?" will be just as important to our salvation, and no doubt be subject to all the same squabbling, power-plays and screw-ups that plague the majority of mass decision making. Up to now, it seems amazing how little public energy the growing challenge to come up with a 'new way' appears to occupy. Where are the models, the proposals, the scenarios? Isn't solution or scenario modeling the standard approach to managing an imminent serioius threat? Instead, all humanity seems to have come up with is a hotchpotch of good samaritan ideas, such as having four minute showers, and tokenistic, commercial and political piss-fartings such as carbon trading. If the developed world is living in a manner that cannot be supported by the planet then surely that manner itself has to change. And yet, humans, like all beasts, are hard wired to acquire and horde both material and power - and certainly not to relinquish it. The challenge therefore, is this: What does a world look like that is both sustainable and palatable? As the first of our new, more applied, COSC series, I can think of few more worthwhile challenges than to make an initial attempt to devise a practicable, high-level, new model for a sustainable modern society, suitable as a target for transition over the next few decades. To provide a little structure for the discussion, I propose the following primary criteria for the solution - we can discuss and adjust these if necessary at the beginning of the session. The solution should: 1. Discuss change across the various primary struts of society - political, legal, commercial, technological, social, cultural, communal etc.. 2. Address the major known environmental impact areas: food and nutrition / transport / manufacturing and consumerism / waste / 3. Be fully cognizant of human nature i.e. as palatable as possible to existing generations and culture. 4. Be practicable within the confines of current technologies or those reasonably foreseeable in the coming decades. Now, I am fully aware that this is not a likely brief for a 90 minute discussion but I think that although we can't hope to weave anything like a complete fabric for a solution in one session, it would nevertheless be very worthwhile if we can simply make a general start by tossing around some thoughts and creating a few good threads.