Friday, May 14, 2010

Growth towards Equilibrium

I've been reading "Holistic Management" which is basically about sustainable ranching and holistic decision-making. I came across a sentence in a section about ecological succession that began "Complexity, productivity, and stability..." And I've been chewing on those three words for the past couple of weeks. They seem to sum up, in my mind, the direction that we need to take as a society. The frustrating thing is that there is so much work to be done and yet no "jobs." I am thinking that the idea of a "job" has become obsolete, a relic concept of the old economy. Now there is work that may or may not provide a margin at any given moment. Everyone is going to have to accept that risk and the responsibility of their own means of existence to a far greater degree than just a few years ago. There is still huge potential for us to grow but it will not be in the exponential upward curve of the old economy. Now we have to grow towards equilibrium. There is room for growth in building a stable, complex, and productive economy - but to do that we are all going to have to take on the responsibility as co-entepreneurs and not just employees. And we'll need to support each other to make it possible, and yet we cannot take away the elements of risk and freedom that keeps us honest. There is and needs to be a process of succession going on - where we move away from a simplified global economy towards complex re-localized and scalable economies.

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