"I love that you've brought this to attention. An extensive database of uncommon but resistant and hardy plants/foods could be developed and organized by climate. Ease of growth and processing should also be taken in to account. I will try to…"
A crash course in changing the world.
Secrets of Social Innovation: The World is Not Small
These are all about local context, and they are about humility. They say that the world is a big place filled with many kinds of people and problems, and that solutions designed in one place don't always work in others. One size does not fit all.
Technologies, especially communication technologies like the glowing screens you and I are both staring into, are often said to transcend place, to shrink or erase distance, to make the world one. The internet is everywhere and nowhere all at once, right? We're living in a global village? But our supposedly space-transcending or distance-shrinking ideas and gadgets inevitably get defined and distorted by local cultures, by regional advantages and disadvantages, by territorial governments, and by the earth’s environment itself. A lot of our problems grow out of trying to ignore or deny this fact. The world is not small, it is not flat, and we have not transcended distance.
The rhetoric of place-lessness, of global villages and globalization, of a world made small and manageable by the miracles of technology, is hardly new. It's been with us for a hundred years and then some. And it is almost always put in service to a particular set of political prescriptions. So we ought to be a little skeptical of this language.
I'm not arguing for pessimism. I'm arguing for humility. One step in saving the world might be getting past the ego trip that says we know how to save it--even if we are a global network of idealistic net-savvy superheroes funded by the World Bank. Douglas Rushkoff recently wrote: "The temptation to save the wh*** world--and get the credit--comes at the expense of steps we might better take to make our immediate world a more fruitful, engaging, sustainable, and satisfying place." When Alchemy calls me in 2020 to solve the Tokyo food crisis, I might have to say, "Tokyo needs to save Tokyo, Alchemy. There's work to be done here at home."
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Comment by Brandon Spearman on March 5, 2010 at 8:24pm
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This is a very engaging post Rob. I think your ideas about transcending distance are true. Just because I can talk to someone in South Africa in a split second doesn't mean I understand their plight. To truly uunderstand we must experience and this cannot be done through a computer screen.
I know we have many problems in our own countries but it never hurts to have people solving problems elsewhere in nations that don't have the resources that we are so used to having. If we completely ignore their issues and only work to solve our own they could grow into even larger epidemics that begin to affect greater populations. There is no perfect solution to solving the problems we have in this world but the only way we're going to be able to try is to work together. That's my opinion at least.
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Comment by Rob MacDougall on March 6, 2010 at 8:15pm
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Thanks, Brandon. Certainly I'm not arguing that we should not try to work together or to solve or think about problems on a global scale. Just, as I say, calling for humility and an examination of our own motives.
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