Summary: The Preface indicates intention, style, and method. It sets the tone and provides an agenda that introduces the reader to the mission of this project.
The goal of this project is to discover and promote paths toward world sustainability. This daunting and elusive challenge, sustainability at a global level, provides a magnetic north by which to guide this project. I will try to identify and explain ways to promote sustainability. We will not make sustainability out of nothing and there is an ongoing vibrant and diverse movement promoting World Sustainability. Since there is no standardized or orthodox method to achieve this, we will need to step out of the conventional to speculate and to improvise, or to hack our way to world sustainability.
A sense of urgency pervades this project. Evidence will be presented candidly and reality faced squarely. Time is not our ally, however. Will irreversible tipping points be crossed, if not already passed? Will the built-in momentum of trends resist a change of course? Will the sheer inertia of sunk capital discourage innovative capital formation, such as in energy? Will heavily endowed ideology not staunchly resist revision? You bet they will.
Meanwhile, the sheer pace of change at the global level has probably never been so dizzying. Little stands still. Communications and information, light in weight and constantly revolving, come to the fore as the technics of the coming age. This effort to promote sustainability provides an act of faith in our ability to network a better future. This is accelerating as a diverse, proactive process all around.
Up front, I acknowledge my concern that powerful, entrenched forces resisting world sustainability will likely prevail --- with potentially cataclysmic consequences. Nonetheless, my intention is to lay out another path, one based on a synthesis of economics, politics, culture, technology, science, and whatever else is needed to promote a way of acting and thinking that allows us to move flexibly and rapidly to the magnetic north of sustainability.
There is no obvious path to traverse, so improvisation based on common understanding and cooperation will have to be discovered as we go. Since world sustainability is unlikely to happen in the normal course of events, the alternative is not to promote a single path but rather to flexibly adapt with a wide variety of approaches all guided by the North Star of world sustainability. You go your way and I go mine. We each "self-organize." We will need to join inclusively and respectfully in an ongoing conversation. The means for that conversation exist and will be incorporated into this project.
Up front, I also acknowledge that the concept of sustainability remains awkward and vague for many, despite its pedigree. The magnetic north looks different to each of us simply because we are each standing in different locations and because magnetic north is not quite due north, but close enough. However, pointing in roughly the same direction sets a general course, not the same route for all travelers. The agreement on the general direction, however, promotes variety and inclusion. Always, an authentic and widely shared approach to sustainability will be diverse, decentralized, and self-organizing from below. This principle must be kept in mind when thinking about sustainability.
Our notions of sustainability may be partial and parochial. We need depth as well as clarity and practice as well as theory. Popular discussion often may remain hazy, may dance around key issues, and may not include the word sustainability at all. If sustainability, however, implies a historic transition at the civilizational level, which it does, we need to call into question our assumptions, clean up our language, and raise critical ethical concerns. This injects philosophy into the discourse on sustainability. (Notice the parenthetical reference to the Aristotelian concept of "substance," above.) Sustainability provides its inherent and intense dynamism.
Inevitable, a sustainability movement needs some broad strategy, or, put another way, strategic thinking: We need a clever and systematic plan of action. There are a lot of good ideas about sustainability, some of them have been field-tested and some are grandiose. Just as we are all in different places, hopefully willing to point to magnetic north, we can organize a general strategy. Strategic thinking, however, is not obvious, especially we build in the assumption that a lot of powerful social forces will attempt to maintain an unsustainable status quo.
So, we need to elevate and organize our thinking about sustainability, yet elevate the discourse and try not to define all this so as to create divisions. Let's start with a sense of where we, as an earth-bound species, are located, discover magnetic north and start the journey. Let's then proceed to find our own paths to the unlikely goal of hacking world sustainability.