The Future of Sustainability: Have Your Say!

Week One - “Global Challenges to Sustainability in the Twenty-First Century”
Comment / Comentario / Commentaire

Daniel Henry, CIDA, Canada

Moderating team: Wisdom is the basic ingredient toward environment sustainability and Knowledge could have a unique leverage on it. Daniel agrees, but leaving wisdom to competent colleagues he argues that revisiting basic roots of knowledge could not be avoided to pave the way for an efficient leverage to emerge.

La sabiduría es el ingrediente básico hacia la sostenibilidad ambiental, el conocimiento podría aportarle un importante apalancamiento. Sin embargo, es fundamental volver hacia las raíces básicas del conocimiento para no dejar la sabiduría en manos de los “científicos competentes”.

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Reaching sustainable use of environment depends on a 2-pronge strategy: adjustments in Human being's wisdom and correct Knowlege and use of nature's laws regulating environment.

I agree with Jeffrey in thinking that sciences and technologies could have strong leverage on changing behaviour. I leave to more competent colleagues the review of the "human pronge". I concentrate on the other one and ask: are impressive technological successes acheived by mankind over last centuries enough to assert that all actual and most important laws

are known?

Would it be possible that, on a number of points, we, the so-called moderns, could be just like ancients were when they beleived that sun and stars were turning around the Earth? After all with their "tools" they were able to acheive already a lot, from predicting some events in the sky to

orient themselves in their travels!

One hint, in one particular field of environment can be given to support the value of such a question about knowledge of laws: each individual niche, macro or micro, in the environment ends up with a host, and all niches are linked and influence each other; recent discoveries around complexity of soil biology and its impact on soil fertility tend to demonstrate that we ignore as much as we know both for production and sutainaibility. So, why not to revisit some basics, for example around plant nutrition.

For a number of reasons, human beings, scientists like others, tend to proudly overvalue their visions and explanations but to forget or even hide disturbing questions, instead of looking for them: Epistemology is still and always at stake, still a very hot issue!