The mysteries of blogging… My first article about my talk at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) suddenly disappeared because this scientist here definitely is a learner as regards blogging 😉
Anyway, I wanted to readdress the issue I was raising: When talking about sustainable lifestyles, the question often revolves around the issue of “what type of people do we need for that?” or “what kind of education is necessary?” In my point of view, this is pointing into the wrong directions. It presupposes that people today are not capable of living a sustainable life and that we need “new ones” or better education. As far as I know human nature — and I don’t really think there is one! — people are capable of almost everything, for the better or the worse. So, the possibility for living sustainable lifes is already “folded” within us — to borrow a term Joseph Beuys used as regards human potential for creativity. The question then can be reformulated into “what conditions do we need, to let this possibility for a sustainable lifestyle unfold?”
The answer to this can be only: experiment! Go for social experiments, create rooms for innovation, protect these islands of creativity and stand the uncertainty of the whole process. Because no one really knows exactly how a sustainable lifestyle will manifest itself. The only boundary condition is that of less than three tons carbon dioxide per capita and per annum. In pleading for experiment, I take an evolutionary standpoint, almost the same as John Stuart Mill took more than a century and a half ago. We don’t know what the future holds and we cannot predetermine what kind of people we need or what kind of knowledge will be important for living a sustainable life. What we know is that there is huge potential for creativity when we allow for experiment and uncertainty.
And maybe, just maybe, the people we are looking for turn out to be the people who have been sitting in front of us all the time…