See No Evil, Speak No Reason

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o We need to look beyond technology. In the late 20th century, high technology is treated as the ultimate human achievement. Yet no technology has ever been anything but a tool, an extension of the biomechanical and communication capabilities we already have: our hands, eyes, ears. What children need now is not more ways to extend their corporeal powers, but more capability to make sense of them.

These ideas are fundamental shifts in how we learn and perceive--and, possibly, in how we make policy. We may make more progress toward stabilizing climate change and biodiversity loss by focusing our efforts on parenting and primary schooling--and on our own enlightenment--than on trying to reform hidebound legislatures and bureaucracies. Once we make these shifts, two things will change quickly. First, we will break loose from our current jaded, dazed condition--in which, paradoxically, nothing surprises us, thus making us dangerously vulnerable to surprise. Second, making policy for a sustainable world--a job that has been bogged down or ambushed at almost every turn--will move forward more easily and speedily, as it must if it is to succeed.

Ed Ayres is editor of World">http://www.worldwatch.org">World Watch. Adapted from World Watch (May/June 1999). Subscriptions: $20/yr. (6 issues) from Box 97108, Washington, DC 20077-7799. The essay was originally excerpted from http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/partner?partner_id=1022

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