I have heard a lot of talk of pros and cons about the pressing issues of progressive politics and I am paying less and less attention because it is just getting old to my ears. Instead of judging mainstream people for thinking the way they do, it is better to understand them. It is understandable to want to escape through media, consumables and other media, and by obsessing with social status because we are taught to see the struggles associated with the human condition as depressing and dismal.

Another issue is the way we seek to solve the problems of the human condition. Politics is not reflective of serious and geninine desire of those who really control the political process to change things. Within this dynamic what keeps politics interesting, exciting and most stimulating is sensationalism. We cannot blame people for fleeing serious discussions about politics (at least I don’t), when so much of the discussion is so far removed from any obvious relavance in terms of the immediate issues of their lives that they face on an everyday basis. As corporations and institutions have become more centralized, the power of the common people to impact politics and the social dynamic has declined. From the mindset of Joe Six-Pack nothing ever changes and so what is the point in trying to change the system?

The continued irrelevance of the green party is its own arrogance and blindness to the diversity of the progressive movement and to the larger perspectives of mainstream society. There is a proclivity to talk about the problem rather than to see the many ecological designers, socially conscious people and innovative businesspeople that are working towards solutions. The ecological cassandras--the die-off and peak oil people--have their purpose but they are so obsessed about these issues that their ideology becomes unhealthy and ineffective to truly looking at solutions. In the extreme it becomes more the problem than the solution.


If there are fifty million people in America (according to demographer Paul Ray) who are sympathetic to green values, then why are they not voting green? Why is green biz not more influential than it is today? Why hasn't sustainable development taken off?


Newtonian Politics
The term Newtonian Politics refers to the linkage between the overall patriarchal paradigm that drives our society and the political. It also makes the connection between the assumptions of the founding modernists and the dehumanizing and ecologically destructive aspects of modern technology and the systems that have evolved to uphold that system’s values. Sustainability therefore must involve a change in the mindset. I constantly hear of how people hate Bush. I see more and more people consumed by hate and resentment of those who run our society. To me that is simply a rehashing of the same mindset that created that system and its incompetent clique of leaders. More radically I see the dialectical necessity of Bush within the larger context of history (and I feel the same way about Hitler).

Progressives should know better than to see leaders in isolation of historical events. Bush represents the rising extremism (the current system metaphorically has its back to the wall) that is embedded in the American system and its need to dominate people and resources to sustain the greed of a few, keeping a grossly unsustainable system going. This is not to say that I do not see the need to replace him of course, but I understand that any replacement will face a tough time creating real changes unless a significant number of people are mobilized not simply to protest as political activist but in terms of a comprehensive change in how they live their lives. Until progressives develop a proactive strategy to challenge the present discordance that is enveloping our world, events will continue to spiral downward and we will have to content with characters much worse than Bush and with significant public support.


Grassroots Economy
We cannot effectively talk of national or global solutions until we are practicing them at the local level in our backyards and communities. I think there is a simple basic common sense logic to this that resonates with most people, particularly those in the mainstream. Right now I still have to ask: where is my community? It is scattered across the globe and much of it is internet based. This is not necessary bad but we must have global as well as local communities, to complete the whole and manifest that sacred loop that empowers us as change agents for global transformation.



Progressives speak so much but complete so little on a tangible and practical level because the movement still revolves around a leadership that is very much living in the pain of the past and is more about theory than practice. Possibly this is because it is so much based on academic ivory tower intellectualism. Much of the progressive community seems to define itself primarily by what it stands against and does not seems to want to see how ineffective this strategy is in winning over mainstream America.

The real issue is that we are constrained by our built environments. As long as we exist within built environments that are defined and dominated by the dominant paradigm of sprawl, consumerism and commercialism, we can expect little resolution of these problems that so bother us as progressives. This is not to say that we are not capable of doing great things within constraining environments but that suburban sprawl and consumerism that most Americans now live and define themselves by is constraining to the human spirit and to the realization of full human potential. And this is why if you see economic growth not as an ends to itself but as a means to an ends of improving the overall human condition and quality of life then our overall social RIO on economic growth is not only low it is actually in the negative.


The cassandras are right for each unit of economic value created, we are degrading the ecological and socially commons not at an incremental but an exponential rate. So things will come to a head very soon. We could talk about this until we were blue in the face and specify and quantify every little nook and cranny of the dysfunctional system we live in but it would not get us inch further to what we want in life.


Let us imagine the incredible potential of humanity if there was a shift in how we humans spend our energy and that more resources was spent creating a sustainable economy that was a positive and life affirming force for humanity and that less energy was put into talking about all that is wrong with the world. This is the tipping point that we are striving for when we talk about reaching critical mass in a global movement for social transformation and sustainable development. We need to be well informed about the problem but not allow ourselves to be defined by it.

The opportunity of ICT to dramatically shift the fortunes of underserved communities is a major theme of the oneVillage Foundation. However, it is not something that should be considered in isolation of the many other factors that need to be considered in any authentic approach to sustainable development. We are not simply talking about virtual/ICT tools but the integration of those tools into a sustainable and socially just built environment centered around communities rather than large mega scale urban projects—holistic ICT. The development of the tools themselves will require a great networking effort an effort that will involve many groups. To make ICT technology work we have to improve the quality of the user experience as well as their effectiveness but we ourselves need a more effective set of tools to create this Holistic ICT platform.

We are developing this Holistic ICT platform to promote and integrate the kind of tools being developed by technologists with all the other components creating sustainable communities and maximizing the replication of these systems throughout the world. The reason for this is probably clear to most of you: the ecological as well as the socioeconomic window for change is short and growing shorter. There is an understandable sense of urgency among us, but we must however remain patient and not be overcome with anxiety despite the great challenges we face collectively as a species. We need to ask ourselves honestly…what are the blockages…what is holding us back and keeping us from our full potential as innovators and designers of a new sustainable and socially just global system of doing things?

One thing I envision is a TECHNOLOGY portal to enable one stop shopping and help towards developing the right ICT solutions for each particular group user. Possibly there are already sites like this in existence. Yet obviously there is still much work to be done in this area. We need to condense our knowledge and focus on open source solutions that are not limited to those who know how to program. Open source is on the verge of dominating the server market but is still lagging in the retail markets. It is hardly a mystery as to why this is.

One of the things we talked about when Joy and I were meeting with some people who are involved with the Global Women’s Leadership Center, project here in San Jose is some of the problems with existing ICT and the Grand Canyon like divide between designers and users. We see this in every aspect of modern design and the overall dismal level of interactivity between professional and laypeople. To sum up the conventional thinking technologists are too much in love with their designs and their jargon to really create easily accessible user-friendly interfaces that empower the user instead of imprisoning him/her. Computers as they are designed today are a source of much grief and they only add to our sense of being overwhelmed by too much data. If ICT is to be a real solution not just for developing countries, but for the world, this must change. Are we up to this challenge?

One of the most important movements towards sustainability involves the redesign of the ICT sector. Sustainability is not just about solar panels and sustainable agriculture it is about how we design the systems that we rely on. Are they efficient in the use of our resources, time and energy? An efficient and highly integrated set of computer programs can make a great contribution to sustainable development by themselves by reducing the amount of time wasted on the computer and the amount energy used by the computer to do tasks.

Most modern systems in our world today are highly productive in stand-alone form, but as integrated systems, they are abysmal failures. The conventional economist/wall street driven notion of productivity because it focuses on individual technologies and not integrated systems is an inaccurate measure of the technologies themselves and their effectiveness as tools that we can use towards achieving progress in the quality of our lives. In fact conventional economic measures, in fact mask the fact that much the technology and the consumer products being developed are actually moving us in reverse in terms of both personal and collective issues relating to human development, quality of life and a sense of personal empowerment.