Visionary Profiling (part 2)– Dr. Phyl Speser of ECO:nomics, “Education and the Energy Crisis”
Inside ECO:nomics (part 2)- Dr. Phyl Speser talks education and the energy crisis
I was able to find another spirited video from Phyl’s T2+2TM series.
It’s Supply Chain economics… Speser style.
Anyway.
Here’s the second half of Dr. Speser’s discussion of ECO:nomics and the education gap.
He covers everything from Wendell Berry to consumption to our Declaration of Independence. And he connects (rather thoughtfully) our budding green revolution to the counter culture 60’s…
Educationally, I think what is needed is what we used to call a liberal education. You need a healthy dose of humanities to learn how to empathize with people and the earth. You need a healthy dollop of science to appreciate how physical (in a five senses way) the world actually is and thus we can interact with it in ways that are more or less effectual.
If I was to design a curriculum, I would begin with course in literature - in which I would include some nature poets like Gary Snyder and Wendell Berry, that great depicter of the human condition Shakespeare, and some authors of Western landscape like Ivan Doig or Willa Cather, and a bit of essayist like Rachael Carlson or Theroux. What I would look for is some sense of what it is to be human in a landscape.
Empathy is critical and literature allows us to learn that.
I want something to think about that each young person can use to juxtapose with their lives.
Then with the spirit open and I want the mind sharpened, I’d have a course in philosophy with sections of ethics, logic and higher order logics, political philosophy, and philosophy of science. Philosophy teaches us to listen and ask questions.
Now we need some brass tacks. I would toss in a course in math and statistics and some mix of physics, chemistry, biology, and geology.
Then I would bring it home toward the integration of thought with action through a course in economics and one in political science (focused on public policy in general and environmental politics in specific). I would then go to a course in industrial engineering followed followed by a management of innovation course.
I’d close with a course in environmental wisdom. Let’s call it environmental philosophy if that is more comfortable. And I’d have each student due some project focused on actually helping to solve an environmental problem and while doing it write about why do it, how you do it, and how you think about what you should be doing and whether you are doing it right.
The third part is skills. No one person is going to solve this whole thing. You want to matchup your personality and what you like to do with a specific challenge or set of challenges. Say you like research and science and are introverted. Be a researcher. Say you are well organized and methodological, maybe government, maybe business.
It is late after a long day a work so these are not the best examples. The point is we all have different mixes of things that make us happy. So figure out what it is for you and start volunteering for internships and part-time or summer jobs in the kinds of organizations that do the things you like to do. Go out, work in the world, and gain some hands on skills. Then go back to grad school and hone ones in the fields you like working in because if you think about it, why not be happy in your work.
The precise skills you need are tied to the work you will do. If we think of the classic German distinction between the kind of rationality that thinks about the goals of life (social or political) and the kind of rationality that focuses on how you get things done (instrumental or economic), the former comes from wisdom while the latter comes from knowledge. In the second part we laid the groundwork in both kinds in this part, we build scaffolding for instrumental rationality.
Now if you have studied classical Greek thought you may recognize a bit of spirit, mind, body distinction in these first three parts. That is intentional. Stimulate the spirit, focus the mind, and build the body’s ability to act.
But there is a fourth part. For lack of a better term, I call this stillness. It is about slowing life down so we can be happier and have the social/economic/emotional space and time to actually solve these problems.
The morning and afternoon of the first day, Chevron sponsored a golf tournament. I played with a foursome. I am an OK golf player. Not great, but good enough to not be an embarrassment to my partners I suppose. If you have walked around Sandpiper, it’s beautiful. A bunch of the holes run along the cliffs and overlook the ocean out to the islands. I wanted to stop and look. We could have. They brought out lunch and some booze. Sit with a drink and eat and chat. But my group was in a hurry to catch-up with those ahead - even though we had the last foursome so there was no-one behind to worry about. So we never were still. We never stopped, as another old adage goes, to smell the roses.
The environmental ethos makes no sense if the goal is consumption. Consume and run, why care. It is the worst of Wall Street abuse. Consume, consume, consume. If you are always running, then you grab and consume.
This is a long discussion and I plan to right a book on it in the not too distant future. For our purposes, it suffices to say an economy based on consumption cannot be steady state since the goal is to consumer more and more and more, so you need more and more and more energy and more and more and more resources.
Notice the American Republic was founded on a difference premise. Read your Declaration of Independence. “We hold these truths to be self-evident. All people are endowed with certain rights: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
That is why we institute governments, to secure those rights. Nothing about consumption. Happiness. Where is the time to be happy today? Where was the time in the agenda to sit on the beach and discuss what was being discussed at the meeting. If there is no leisure, no stillness, there is no perspective. In the 60s we used to joke “if the revolution does not allow laughter, do we want it?”
This is the final part, learning to build a life with stillness so we can “center” or “reflex” and have some sense of what this is all about. Otherwise you burn out because this is hard work and it is easy to lose your way and lose sight of the path in the midst of all the opportunities to get rich or get famous or get power or whatever.
Nothing wrong with money, fame, or power.
But you want “clean” money, fame, and power and that means, to use the slang of America, getting our priorities right.
The metaphor here is the Platonic Myth of the Cave. The reality is: healthy living cuts health care costs and makes you want a healthy planet.
Anyway, to summarize:
How do you equip young people to help solve environmental problems and save the planet? Put young people in positions where they can start making a difference and know from first-hand experience they can make a difference; given them a solid grounding in the knowledge and mental capabilities needed to grasp the complexity of the problem and see solutions and solution paths; let them develop and hone a specific set of skills so they can earn a living at solving environmental problems and saving the planet; and encourage them to develop their own wisdom by learning how to allow themselves the time and space to live well.
That’s my two cents.
Phyl Speser, J.D., Ph.D.
Foresight Science & Technology Incorporated
We want to thank Dr. Speser for his time and for sharing his comprehensive view on the topic.
AND if you (the reader) have made it this far, thank you. I hope you learned something.
I certainly have.
