This means that we take the problems of sustainability of today, seek to solve them and in so doing generate the steps needed to get us toward the sustainable world of tomorrow.
Solving the problems requires local communities to collaborate with larger global institutions.
Collaboration is the key.
Many of the solutions to the problems of sustainability are well known.
The problems of sustainability have both local and global dimensions.
Local dimensions because solutions may work in one setting and may not in another.
Global because combing local and global expertise and resources will optimize the results for everyone.
Our vision at Ecosphere Net is developing communities around the world connected in a network of collaboration in a transition toward global sustainability.
E. J. Wensing
]]>Psychology can serve a critical role in helping to achieve a global transition toward a sustainable future because broad-based changes in human behavior are urgently needed across global societies. However, while the needed changes are for the most part well known by humans in thought, these thoughts have not yet translated into the requisite levels of human behavior.
Furthermore, given the limited efficacy to date of innovation in science and technology, governance through policy, corporate leadership, and public education to change human behaviors toward those deemed most equitable with a sustainable future, the scientific exploration in psychology of human consciousness, cognition, emotion and behavior as it pertains to their origins, causes and modifiers on both an individual level, in terms of personality and identity and the broader social level, as members of the collective community or global citizenship in relation to sustainability and sustainable development, is an urgent imperative.
EJ Wensing
US Virgin Islands
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Or text "Haiti" to 90999 on your cell phone or Blackberry and $10 will be donated to the Red Cross and go toward the life-saving efforts for the people of Haiti.
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These projects span across the world from Arviat, Nunavut to Islamabad, Pakistan.
Here’s what they're about:
1) Global Sustainability Inventory (GSI): This project seeks to seeks to characterize the global citizen from the sustainable future. It has both immediate and short-term applicability. In the short-term the GSI can be used to develop current leadership for sustainability (this includes leadership in corporate social responsibility). In the long term it provides goals for learning, both personal and social development goals.
2) The Water and Sustainable Development for Pakistan Initiative (WSDPI): This project seeks to connect corporate culture in Finland with their supply chain partners in China in a collaborative effort to help develop a water/sustainability Information and Communication Technology (ICT) research project in beta-test sites with collaborators in Lahore, Islamabad and Karachi, Pakistan. We have interest from water knowledge experts in Holland and green chemistry experts from US colleges and industry.
While both of these projects are currently in development, we will strive to put them into action in 2010!
EJ Wensing
Ecosphere Net
GSI Research Project Canada/USA
Pakistan Water and Sustainable Development Initiative
]]>From Nunavut to Nijmegen, Australia to Arizona people around the world like what we are doing and want to help us succeed.
We would like to wish everyone a Happy 2010 New Year!
EJ Wensing
US Virgin Islands
]]>The first is globalization. Many have justifiably wrangled with the idea of globalization because initially it has been about multinational corporations seeking a global monopoly for market control. More recently, however, a new vision of globalization is emerging. This is one of collaborative networks connecting the local to the global and, yes, including corporations, but also many other stakeholders.
The second is socialism. This has been something particularly apparent in the media over the last year in the United States. Many people fear socialism and its "ugly cousin" liberalism. Yet there are many models around the world where versions of these two have a functional role in societies, in particular, with regard to generating a sustainable society. Wholly unregulated markets and ideas of infinite growth do not and cannot work in a transition toward sustainable development.
What do tomorrow’s people look like?
In my view, they balance resilience, leadership and connectedness between themselves, their communities and the natural environment, building human, social and natural capital every day. Like CSR, they have ISR. That is, they recognize and engage their individual social responsibility (ISR) and help move the places where they work further toward corporate social responsibility (CSR) and the places where they live further toward a sustainable future. They have a new connection to their needs, to the needs of their communities and to the those of the world in a way I call “I Am Sustainability/We Are Sustainability”.
How do we get there?
Through connecting current action and thought leaders in a global effort. These are the positive deviants, social entrepreneurs, knowledge managers, leaders for world benefit, boundary managers etc, etc. that are emerging, and connect them into a global network of learning systems research for sustainable development. That is what Ecosphere Net is all about.
EJ Wensing
US Virgin Islands
]]>Here is the link (click here).
Well researched, well written and well presented.
Know the facts.
EJ Wensing
US Virgin Islands
]]>Beyond the obfuscations.
Here is the reality check:
Achieving global sustainability and sustainable development is about more than “going green” and mitigating climate change. A successful transition toward a sustainable global future is a complex multi-variable problem that requires both innovation in science and technology, adaptive governance and broad-based changes in human behavior. It refers to the task of meeting basic human needs worldwide while preserving the life supporting ecosystems of the planet at the same time. There remains little doubt that we are currently failing at both. In general terms, an improvement in coupled social-ecological systems, that is, human–nature interactions and human-human relationships across global societies is necessary.
There will soon be 9 billion people here, far exceeding the capacity of the Earth’s natural resources to sustain everyone and, very likely, pushing ecosystems away from current life supporting configurations.
As Tariq Banuri has suggested, let’s consider our home Earthland. We only have one.
EJ Wensing
USVI
]]>The various attempts to motivate people across global societies into actions more equitable with a sustainable future can be seen as currently occurring along three fronts: 1) Direct public education efforts such as through schools, corporations and the social media, 2) through the implementation of governance and policy for sustainable development, and 3) utilizing initiatives that seek to bridge knowledge and innovation in science and technology for sustainability and sustainable development into local action. Successes and difficulties have been experienced with each type of initiative such that collectively they have resulted in a limited amount of action across global societies toward a sustainable future.
At Ecosphere Net we are currently developing a research based initiative that seeks to link and organize all three approaches into valid and effective collaborative action. Stay tuned to this blog for more details over the next months.
EJ Wensing
US Virgin Islands
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