Hope
I believe that happiness, among other things, relies on fulfilling our personal needs along with those of our environment. Our world is constantly changing and with it our needs. Our environment no longer has any boarders and it is undeniable that all nations on this planet have irreversibly become interdependent of each other. Knowledge that our environment has become one must be spread, happiness can’t be taught.
Economic Innovation
Why do we still do bad things. Use dangerous chemicals, pollute and deplete resources? Because we choose to!
Environmental concerns are as old as man made industrial pollution. This is why I don’t believe that engineering a more fuel efficient car is enough to address the worlds environmental concerns. As a society, we choose to do bad things based on our interests. If prosperity and happiness is our main goal and we choose to follow these goals the traditional way, I don’t think we will get very far. This is what we are doing right now, only with the added pressure of environmental concerns, the reason behind so many products being sold as green products. But this is achieved by pressure, and pressure has serious limits as to how much change it can invoke. For this reason I would like to see the coming years to be years economic innovation, succeeding the years of technical innovation.
I believe that this much needed change requires some breathing room and that this is where we can find it.
Today’s free market capitalism was designed by people with money and power. People who understandably have no real intention to start doing business differently anytime soon. I too believe that it is important to have a good balance between the Darwinism of free markets and the security of socialism. Only with the difference of my belief that we need to rearrange and rebalance these mechanisms in order to start strong change with enduring benefits.
A change of freedom not of sacrifice.