Here's the last part of Tormod V. Burkey's essay Can We Save The World? (Stanford's Millennium Alliance for Humanity and Biosphere, December 13, 2016).
“Can we save the world?” should be an important enough question to justify submitting it to our best thinking and a thorough review of everything we know that has bearing upon it. Perhaps it is one that we have shied away from, for fear that a negative answer would breed despair and passivity and become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Yet it is hard to see that compiling everything we know in an accessible manner could be a bad thing, and realistically assessing the mechanisms that hamstring us when we want to save the world may help us find ways to get around them.
I suggest we organize a seminar series with experts that have worked on mechanisms that hamper our efforts, and people with experiences with existing efforts, to ask the question: “Can We Save the World?”
The results from such a seminar series should be contained in an edited book of the same title. Anyone willing and able to help make Can We Save The World? happen—whether it be planning, fundraising, organizing, participating, facilitating, brainstorming, providing a venue, publishing, whatever—please get in touch.
Bonus Video
Interesting that Burkey is actually permitted to ask such a question in a relatively mainstream forum. Equally interesting is his statement that he's not necessarily interested in saving Homo sapiens, but rather preserving as much of present-day biodiversity as possible.
But he's asking the wrong question as a starting point. "Can we get people to be different than they are?" assumes that the collapse of the Earth system can be stopped. If Burkey spent more time with the science and less with theories of human behavior he'd be in a better position to answer his larger question.
@ Dave, yes, by all means get in touch with this guy, if you feel like it. Personally I doubt you'll be able to have much of an impact on the conversation, though it'd be nice to see you prove me wrong.
Posted by: Phil Stevens | 12/14/2016 at 11:26 AM