Overview

Recall a page presented early in our course: Mission: World Sustainability. Point #1: Civilization cannot be sustained

Civilization cannot be sustained and will collapse within two generations or so -- nobody quite knows when -- with catastrophic consequences. While this calamity could be prevented and while many will strive to rescue civilization, the very forces, ideologies, interests, and institutions that create this global crisis will obfuscate critical remedial discourse and will thwart the diverse efforts toward restoration of vital social, economic, political, and ecological systems. The ongoing effort to forestall civilizational collapse will thus fail. The resulting trauma will be appalling and irreversible.

Point #2: World Sustainability is possible.

An alternative path presents itself, based on a holistic notion of sustainability applied worldwide. World Sustainability requires that mutualism and interdependence replace hierarchy, conflict, and avarice, the hallmarks of established globalization. The vision of World Sustainability amplifies a generative conception of world citizenship formed within an expanded civil society. While such a vision has discovered its roots, those in power will strive to extinguish its flourishing.

Point #3: World Sustainability is no walk in the park. There will be opposition and dangers.

The detritus of civilizational decay will provide nourishment to sustainability but the poisons of distortion, militarism, and plunder will intensify. The outcome of this dialectic remains fluid but uncertain. The despoilers have the upper hand.

Friedrich Hölderlin:
But where danger is, grows
The saving power also
Patmos

"The significant problems we have cannot be solved at the same level of thinking with which we created them." - Albert Einstein

Martin Heidegger says that "all saving power must be of a higher essence than what is endangered, though at the same time kindred to it." He also said regarding technology on a global scale: "Only a God can save us." We will certainly see.

If the problem is at the level of civilization, foundational thinking is needed.

Our thinking must be at a foundational, at the level of first philosophy, or Metaphysics. Otherwise, we tacitly assume that which must be re-thought. Our premises, paradigms, ideologies, hidden assumptions that are rooted as inherited social constructions within civilization must be critically examined. Such iconoclasm will disturb many and invoke a hostile response.

But the very act of this conversation speaks to the will for a brighter future.

The global discourse on sustainability has begun two decades ago, with the Brundtland Report. The discourse deepens and broadens. Stay tuned!