Hope, more growing pains, more emphasis (part three)

Some Reasons for Hope


   At the superficial level of corporate ego there seems to be evidence of positive directions. Naming rights has only been around for about a generation. So far it seems restricted to arenas and stadiums, but I imagine there is no real reason for this not to spread (Washington State becomes Microsoft State).
   Genetic engineering, breaking the genome and all the rest of the biotech industry holds all the promise and anticipation that we saw just a generation ago with technology. If we have forgiven the deaths of whole countries, who will underwrite free medication to once and for all and malaria and AIDS (Sachs, 2005). We are living in a time of face transplants, genetically engineered foods and the possibilities of banking one's own physical copy or backup. Certain ethical gauntlets have already been established; no human cloning, for example. Still, when you stop and think about it, the possibilities for good seem on the almost endless.
   The computational prowess of a common PC is supposed to equal that of a human brain within just a few years (Fisch, McLeod, & Brenman, 2008). What technology has already given us, just in the last 20 years, has been extraordinary. Begun in 2005, the nonprofit One Laptop Per Child Association, Inc. (OLPC) has given away hundreds of these little, portable educational and opportunity objects. For those who tend to use their computers for little more than e-mail and social media the PC revolution may seem passé. But conventional wisdom has not weighed in for good reason; the implications for what's to come are still staggering.
   When one asks about the environment, we tend to think of the environment out there. Yet it is here in our homes, this environment, where, in many ways, the waste starts. We have been tinkering around the edges, some might say for too long. However, it took the time that it took. For example, LEED certification has only been around since 1998 (a mere dozen years at this writing), but has already taken the related fields of architecture and interior design, etc., by storm. I imagine inclined solar panels rimming the lip of a bright white cistern, sharing space with skylights as the roof of a home for which recycling is so easy it is second nature (Anonymous, 2004). An aspect of my prediction of hope, and its new expressions, includes this very kind of thing. Prices continue to come down and the housing industry is in crisis, what better way to add value and differentiate (Head & Atchison, 2009)? We could have the same conversation about automobiles. High-speed magnetic trains and other green infrastructure are back on the drawing boards. The building of wind farms is happening as fast as possible. IKEA is drilling hundreds of feet under Denver to leverage thermal energy (CNN [CNN], 2010). The response never seems to be adequate for the need in this self-gratification, microwavable, just add water, and drive through times. However, if you look closely, it actually is. The first Earth Day was April 22, 1970. There was an excitement for a while, and then the world slowly forgot. We have learned from those lessons. Now we monetize green, assign meanings of sophistication... we now hope green; and we now incorporate the behavior to back up (Fresco, 2009).
   Among the thought leaders of the 1960s and 70s was Bucky Fuller. Buckminster Fuller was also caught up in the original green movement. He gave us the geodesic dome, and much more. Among his legacy, he left us a thought posture that was worth noting then, as well as forward; and has in the intervening time since been rediscovered and re-celebrated. Fuller used to refer to a breaching of a threshold that makes a difference as the trim tab. Actually a trim tab is the small rudder within the rudder of a large ship of state, an aircraft carrier, an ocean liner, etc., that is wired all the way to where the captain sits. For all the men and all the machinery under his command, nothing else quite has the ability to rotate in the middle of an ocean such a small city as the trim tab. In subsequent writings such as Ken Keyes’ the Hundredth Monkey , or even more recently in Malcolm Gladwell’s the Tipping Point, such thresholds for difference making change continue to be celebrated and pointed to for lessons learned for such paradigms (Keyes Jr., 1984), (Gladwell, 2001).