Innovations to Save the World

Dave Pollard is a Canadian systems thinker - his blog is full of boxes and arrow diagrams that reflect his analysis of the world condition and his attempts to derive solutions. Check it out. - Sri

Innovation: We need to develop:

* Simpler, cheaper, more reliable birth control technologies (and ban technologies that increase human fertility)
* More efficient clean energy technologies (and encourage their development by banning technologies that create massive environmental damage like coal-burning plants, dams, nuclear plants and internal combustion engines)
* Technologies that prevent rather than treat diseases (we could learn much from nature in this area, but we had better do so before we destroy her medicine cabinet, the tropical rainforests), because families that live long, healthy lives are smaller
* Technologies that reduce the amount of poisons we release into the air and the water
* Production technologies that produce no waste, and whose products are 100% biodegradable -- If it can't be completely, inexpensively, easily and quickly recycled, it should not be produced
* Technologies that eliminate expensive, polluting, dependence-creating transportation of goods, and allow local self-sufficiency and bioregionalism to work (Local wind and solar energy co-ops, and new greenhouse technologies that expand the range of foods that can be locally produced, for example) -- Nothing should have to be imported unless it cannot be reasonably produced locally
* Technologies that allow us to do more with less, that replace hardware with software and molecules with bits -- and where there is no alternative to durable goods, they should be lightweight, recyclable, and unconditionally guaranteed to work for many lifetimes, so there is no need for landfills
* Nutritious, delicious foods that use no animal products, to render obsolete current technologies that cause massive suffering, like factory farms and pharmaceutical and chemical products using laboratory testing
* Technologies that produce more edible plant mass per acre, without using pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers or genetic engineering
* Networking technologies that allow people working on solutions to global problems to self-organize and collaborate more effectively
* Information technologies that allow citizen and consumer groups to organize and to identify, prosecute and defeat socially and environmentally irresponsible corporations, governments and organizations
* Technologies that allow us to learn better from nature -- the languages of other animals, the mechanisms of self-regulation, self-organization, conflict resolution, and other important lessons
* Technologies that will prevent and treat mental illness, that can be inexpensively and easily provided to all, including those on the streets and in our criminal institutions"