Shaping our future

Where are we headed?
Where do we want to go?

Do we have the courage to shape our own future; to create our own salvation?

I have been silent for a long time - consumed by my studies of ethics in any spare time I had and for which I sat my exam this past Monday. So now I feel free again - free to pursue my various (other) trains of thought and action, yet enriched by plunging into the ethical dimensions behind our every day decisions and attitudes. The first thing I took up again was to continue to read the books I had no time for. Here is the first inspiring quote I came across:

 Most of us expect the deterioration of our world to affect our children and future generations but not us. We believe that educational efforts must be focused on young people, because they might somehow solve the problems we created. But [...] who we are today shapes how the future will be. Despite our aspirations or hopes, our children will grow up to be whom they wish to be [...].

It is important that we teach them literacy, responsibility, aesthetics, and morality, and one excellent way to do that is to strive for that knowledge ourselves. We too must change if we want our youth to change. [...]

We concurrently share a moment unprecedented in human history: we have a preview of our own destruction, or our own salvation. The future is shaped only in the present.

This is from the book "The failure of environmental education (and how we can fix it)" by Charles Saylan and Daniel T. Blumstein (2011), London: University of California Press.

The dilemmas of an ethical consumer

The dilemmas are coming out of my ears at the moment. So where to start? Perhaps I will warm up with a little of my story:

Although I have always been aware of what I have bought, and was brought up and grew up with a very environmentally conscious mindset, the last few years have seen my ethics become a whole lot stricter - in a non-anthropocentric sense. As members of our community that is all nature on this planet, I am convinced that each of us human beings has the duty to do our best to appreciate and respect what nature has gifted us with. This gift is the basic building block of everything, which I believe, in moral terms, is life (and I don't mean only human life).

So the latest opportunity to become more ethical, to align my actions more closely with my principles, arose when we sold our car. What an act of liberation! But soon reality hits you: living in middle class suburbia, this so-called 'loss of mobility' immediately presents you with a challenge. Yes, gone are a gazillion car-related worries (in the UK these consist of: road tax, petrol costs, annual MOT testing, unnecessary repairs, cleaning the car - honestly, I have problems enough cleaning my flat! Who wants to have to clean a car in addition?! -, insurance etc etc.) BUT "hello" to a whole host of different challenges, mainly consisting of: how do I do my household shopping ... without breaking my back? It's even more difficult for me, with my ethical conscience looming over me as big as... well, a very big thing. How do I shop ethically without breaking the bank and without having to spend half my spare time on it (by going to one shop to buy my potatoes, and to another in a different part of town to buy my butter)?

What's in a "foodie"?

Having thought a lot about whether I might be called a "foodie", and feeling uncomfortable about being labelled as such, I started thinking about why I feel uncomfortable with the term and what it really means (to me).

I think it is safe to say that when we think of a "foodie", we think of somebody who is almost obsessed with great food, who has the level of interest and takes the time to learn about it, often going to great lengths and expense to get their hands on top quality ingredients, to cook and/or enjoy (and probably be served) a tasty meal. Nothing wrong with that. There are worse things to be obsessed with! However, as implied above, it is inevitable that a foodie is normally comparatively well-off and, let's be honest, a bit of a "food snob" (which is probably a term that requires its own analysis!). There will always be dishes that a foodie will not touch or places that a foodie will not eat at, because it would literally be a sign of "bad taste". And this is precisely what bothers me about the term. The term "foodie" is in itself, firstly, exclusive, and secondly, narrow-minded. My aim here is therefore to make a particular point related to the "democratisation" of food. Bear with me while I explain...

Meta-economics (cont.)

(Vintage book cover 2011 edition)

I owe any readers of this blog a definition of meta-economics...

"Prof E.H. Phelps Brown, in his Presidential Address to the Royal Economic Society on ‘The Underdevelopment of Economics’, talked about ‘the smallness of the contribution that the most conspicuous developments in economics in the last quarter of a century have made to the solution of the most pressing problems of the times’, and among these problems he lists ‘checking the adverse effects on the environment and the quality of life of industrialism, population growth and urbanism’.

Late summer impressions - from the heart and from a city

From the heart...

Back from a "Friends' Working Weekend" at Embercombe last night.

Feeling dreamy and strangely emotional today. It feels like Embercombe and the experiences surrounding it have stoked that fire in me again, and perhaps putting pen to paper (I am now copying this from handwritten notes - the keyboard feels strangely uncomfortable after the pen gliding across the paper) is making me admit it to myself. I feel shy and vulnerable in front of myself. Perhaps that is why I am prone to tears while writing and re-reading this.

Interlude: Navigating people traffic

Have you ever noticed that you don't bump into people or don't do the "dance" to avoid bumping into people coming the opposite way, when you look into their eyes when walking through a crowd?

Try it next time you are walking through a train station at rush hour or a busy shopping street (or anywhere busy with people for that matter)!

Simple is good - or is it?

Nature's perfect
complexity, seemingly
so simple...

Following on from the P.S. in my previous post on 21 March 2012 ("Interlude: Ode to pen and paper"), below is what I came across when googling "simple is good":

"Why do we assume that simple is good? Because with physical products, we have to feel we can dominate them. As you bring order to complexity, you find a way to make the product defer to you. Simplicity isn’t just a visual style. It’s not just minimalism or the absence of clutter. It involves digging through the depth of the complexity. To be truly simple, you have to go really deep. For example, to have no screws on something, you can end up having a product that is so convoluted and so complex. The better way is to go deeper with the simplicity, to understand everything about it and how it’s manufactured. You have to deeply understand the essence of a product in order to be able to get rid of the parts that are not essential."