People: Free Green Meme - Paul Hawken, Long Now Foundation & "The Blessed Unrest" [UPDATED]

Friday, October 15, 2004 - 12:43 AM

[UPDATED MAY 5, 02007] June 8 - Paul Hawken, "The New Great Transformation"

From Stewart Brand: "The environmental movement has moved on. It has become so deep and wide that it adds up to something new entirely, still unnamed. Whatever it is, it is now the largest movement in the world and the least ideological. Driven by science and patience, it is civilization-scale therapy." Paul Hawken, "ur-environmentalist" [biography] will deliver a 'landmark address' on "The Long Green." "The Long Now Foundation was established...

Admission Free. Long Now Audio Archive Available.
Listen: [Vorbis (22MB), Mirror] [Mp3 (19MB), Mirror] [Slideshow]

Paul "co-authored Natural Capitalism with Amory Lovins and also wrote The Ecology of Commerce and Growing a Business. He's co-founded a garden company, and an organic food company and creating several companies for Pax Scientific", "translating nature's efficiencies into industrial applications...creation and commercialization of intellectual property." ??Open Source??

"The Long Now Foundation was established in 01996* to develop the Clock and "Library" projects, as well as to become the seed of a very long term cultural institution. It hopes to provide counterpoint to todays "faster/cheaper" mind set and promote "slower/better" thinking. We hope to creatively foster responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years."

Stewart Brand is president of The Long Now Foundation, co-founding member of The Global Business Network (along with Jay Ogilvy, Peter Schwartz, Lawrence Wilkinson and Napier Collyns), a Monitor Group company; "customized knowledge, analytic ability, and craft structuring interventions...expertise in designing and executing... strategic transactions, along with the capital...".

[Individual GBN members] • [GBN Organizations(?)] • [History]
[Scenario Thinking] • [What If? Non-Profit Scenarios]

Stewart is on the board of the Santa Fe Institute, "a private, not-for-profit, independent research and education center founded in 1984, for multidiciplinary collaborations in the physical, biological, computational, and social sciences. Understanding of complex adaptive systems is critical to addressing key environmental, technological, biological, economic, and political challenges."

From the santefe.edu site:
"Cognitive Neuroscience - Through advances in neuroscience, and particularly developmental neurobiology and developmental cognitive psychology, the means exist now, for the first time ever, to provide those insights and measurement tools that are missing in the study of intellectual development and human capacity for cognition, memory, language, and many other components of human behavior, including emotional and social development.

Computation in Physical and Biological Systems - Extrapolating current technology trends 10 to 20 years ahead suggests perhaps insurmountable limits on computing speed and device density. What new forms of information processing will be available to continue the advance of computing technology? One approach is to rethink what it means to compute and to ask what other systems in nature could be substrates for information processing.

Economic and Social Interactions - Cognition and economics continues to be a major research theme at SFI. Areas of interest include the evolution of social norms, state and market formation, persistent inequalities, and market efficiency. Related to work on social interactions is research on evolutionary game theory and population games. The goal is to understand the evolution of strategic interaction in populations of players with a variety of structures of interaction, including both global random matching and local interaction.

Evolutionary Dynamics - SFI's approach emphasizes the interplay between dynamics and organization in the evolution of natural and social phenomena. How do entities with complex organizational structures and functions arise and develop, and what organizations are attainable given specific kinds of lower-level constituent entities? And what are the dynamical features characteristic of populations of mutating entities capable of replication and subject to selection?

Network Dynamics - The ubiquity of networks in the social, biological and physical sciences and in technology leads naturally to a set of common problems. How do social networks mediate the transmission of a disease or the emergence of a new political order? How do cascading failures propagate throughout a large power transmission grid or a global financial network? What is the most efficient and robust architecture for an organization in an uncertain environment or for a distributed computer?

Robustness - The recovery of ecosystems from natural disasters, the ability of cells to tolerate insult, the ability of a computer to compute reliably in the presence of noise or defective components, the viability of an economic organization¬óin all these processes, it is robustness that plays the central role. This work builds on previous SFI research including the dynamics of networks of adaptive agents; the dynamics of coevolutionary systems; the computational capabilities of systems subject to selective pressures; and the emergence of stable cooperative strategies. "

Stewart also "maintains connections with Electronic Frontier Foundation, Wired magazine and MIT's Media Lab."

He also occasionally consults for Ecotrust, where "economic and ecological systems are mutually interdependent. To this relationship Ecotrust and others have sought to add a third "e" - social equity - to ensure that economic development awards benefits to all the region's citizens. Economy, ecology, equity: the triple bottom line."

"In Cannibals with Forks, best-selling author and green business guru John Elkington convincingly argues that future market success will often depend upon a company's ability to satisfy the three-pronged fork of profitability, environmental quality, and social justice.

...outlines the seven great ¬ěsustainable¬î revolutions that are already unfolding, showing how business leaders should respond and profiles some of the world's best-known companies including Nike, Wal-mart, Levi Strauss, Volkswagen, Texaco, Intel, Volvo, Dow Chemical, Electrolux, Novo Nordisk, and Shell." (?)

John Elkington is co-author of The Green Consumer Guide, Chairman of London-based SustainAbility, a sustainability consultancy firm, contributor to Harvard Business Review, Management Today and Tomorrow Magazine....

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. . . . . . . everything really is connected . . .
. . . . . . . . as each question is answered, a thousand new questions pop up in its place.