The State of the Ideal Earth Design.
online: www.modelearth.org/state.html
I am trying to find out what is there in the world that deals with collectively designing how we all should ideally exist together in this world.
Currently there is no clearly defined, referable to, by anyone accessible and by anyone amendable model of an ideal, sustainable Earth yet.
Listed bellow are some of the most prominent, promising, for modeling the ideal state of the Earth potentially important concepts:
*) Donella Meadows concept of "envisioning"/"visioning".
There are currently many groups and communities in the world that purport to be creating "visions" of how a group, or a community should live together; "visions" created by, if not all of the members of those groups and communities, then, at least, by more than one person, using methods that derive from Donella Meadows' "envisioning"/"visioning" (Meadows 1996) concept that ultimately owes its origin to Robert Fritz's TFC (Technologies For Creating) as originally introduced in his The Path of Least Resistance (Fritz 1984).
The Donella Meadows' "envisioning"/"visioning" cannot really be properly understood without understanding the very clear Robert Fritz's TFC concept (Fritz 1984) of creating results that we want.
Please see author's
Donella Meadows' "Visioning": Global Citizens Designing a Sustainable World Together. (Hearthstone 2009)
*) Robert Jungk's "future workshops" ("Zukunftwerkstätte") (Jungk 1987)
Any of the examples of consensual common reality vision creating based on Robert Jungk's "future workshops" that I found so far don't go beyond the scope of a local community, with no results that could really be called "sustainable".
*) ESDA (Future Search)
ESDA's (Envisioning a Sustainable and Desirable America) -
http://www.uvm.edu/giee/ESDA/am2100.html
This "Future Search" ( http://www.futuresearch.com ?, http://www.futuresearch.net/ ?) based consensus building system is really not a careful combined "... vision" of more participants, but rather a forecast 100 years into the future on the way to a not declared ideal, "... agreed [on] a set of 'realistic' assumptions both about people and the rest of the world that embodied the latest scientific research findings....". The impression I got was a depiction of a not quite sustainable future (this future has some hi-tech objects that would be impossible to manufacture by socially and ecologically sustainable methods, in my opinion) that still was evolving to some unspecified ideal--the time in this particular vision of a future in 100 years depicted by three "visitors" was very clearly linear, still evolving to something else; time in any vision of an ideal (even though the ideal itself might be evolving continuously) is cyclical--seasons, moon phases change in an ideal reality.
I would like to learn more about this "... Virtual Visit to a Sustainable and Desirable America, 2100...", but no links at the site work anymore--contacting the participants of this "Virtual Visit" has proven unfruitful, so far.
Bibliography:
Fritz, Robert
1984 The Path of Least Resistance. Salem, MA: DMA Inc., ISBN: 0-930641-00-0.
Hearthstone, Jan
2009 "Donella Meadows' 'Visioning': Global Citizens Designing a Sustainable World Together."
http://www.modelearth.org/donella-vision.html
Jungk, Robert and Norbert Müllert
1987 Future Workshops: How to Create Desirable Futures. London, England: Institute for Social Inventions, ISBN: 0948826398
Meadows, Donella H.
1996 "Envisioning a Sustainable World." written for the Third Biennial Meeting of the International Society for Ecological Economics, October 24-28, 1994, San Jose, Costa Rica
In Getting Down to Earth, 1996 Practical Applications of Ecological Economics, editors Robert Costanza, Olman Segura and Juan Martinez-Alier Washington DC: Island Press
Meadows, Donella H. "Envisioning a Sustainable World." is online:
www.sustainer.org/pubs/Envisioning.DMeadows.pdf (accessed 10/06/2009)
It is a must read document; it explains best what Donella Meadows' "visioning" is.
