Changing the way we live in our environment will require
changing the way we think about our
environment. In nature, sustainability
is achieved through diversity. Complex
food webs ensure that energy and natural resources crucial for life itself are
continuously recycled and redistributed across ecosystems. When biodiversity is lost, food webs become inefficient, and resources are no longer accessible to all species. As part of a larger ecosystem, human civilization is also complex and
diverse, and must remain so in order to ensure balanced distribution of food and energy resources in a complex, dynamic natural world.
Globalization of policies,
communication, and education aimed at expanding global markets also promotes
uniform ideologies and behavior patterns that can become cumulatively
destructive to the environment. Food and
energy resources become increasingly concentrated in centralized niches
accessible to only selected fractions of society.
Multidimensional reasoning, the process of
considering issues from diverse perspectives, is a tool designed to gently
broaden the uniform thought patterns promoted by standardized curricula and global
media networks. Multidimensional
reasoning fuels broad consideration of diverse perspectives so that
one-size-fits all ideologies and broad scale policies can be replaced with
unique, location specific solutions to contemporary problems in education,
health, economics, food security, and environment. These diverse solutions are
more appropriate than broadly applied technologies, because they can adapt more
quickly to small changes in local environments. The environmental impact of these solutions is reduced, because fewer people are engaged in any one action.
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