Human Scale development and the Alliance for Sustainability

September 28, 2009 at 9:49 pm (Uncategorized)

Reactions to articles from Max-Neef, Terry Gips:
http://www.bigpicture.tv/speakers/9abfcfa56 (All three videos)

http://homepages.mtn.org/iasa/tgmaxneef.html

In both the videos and article concerning Max-Neef, he talks about how we live in a society that is obsessed with maximizing things. Companies are relentless to get the most out of something in the fastest way possible. However, there is more to life than the quantitative things; it’s the qualitative things that count. He continues with how “measurement is important but we cannot be led to believe that only the things that can be measured are important”. Students that are studying economics at universities today are looking at the picture all wrong because they are teaching are presenting the field as a “value free science”. Max-Neef disagrees with this is says how can a study about humans have no values and economics don’t work because it doesn’t factor in values. We need to look at situations in a holistic view of what is going on because we are a part of an inseparable part of a whole. We as a society move at a million times a minute always worried about deadlines and live our lives dictated by a clock. A good example that Max-Neef uses is that  the Cologne’s cathedral took 500 years to build so if we as a society slowed down and just didn’t worry about time and maximizing production that we could like in a more happy world that over time will grow strong and stay strong for some time.

I agree with a lot about what Max-Neef talks about how we let numbers and statistics run our lives and help predict how situations should play out or tell the lower classes that they don’t have it bad. He is right that these economists need to get a sense of reality. They need to see first-hand how people are living and incorporate human values into their calculations. Our society moves extremely fast and in most cases it moves too fast for a lot of people to catch up or keep up with and these people aren’t help but left out on the curb overwhelmed by stress and work.

Reading these articles and listening to Max-Reef makes you think about how trying to get everything in life is not always going to make you happy. That it’s ok to have a non-glamorous life because as long as you’re happy with what you have that’s what counts. We live in a society that makes people think that the more money they have means it will bring happiness but in reality you can be rich with other things such as the land you own, the air you breathe, and the people that you have in your life. The pace of an American lifestyle is so fast that we should slow down and really have clear cut plans on how to solve the plethora of problems that we have made for ourselves.

Like Max-Neef says in Terry Gips article about how people need to be more aware what is going on and perhaps exposing these values at the grassroots will help promote the new generation to live more predominance towards living in a world that has less violence, fear, and pollution if they would just practice a lifestyle that does not take up that many resources and just take things as we need them. When I get out of school and get a job I’m going to do my best to spread the word about how being conservative about what we use can make a difference, the power to inform I think is the most powerful tool to use when it comes to sustainability. Not too many people think about where their trash goes or where their bath water runs off to, all they care about is that its’ gone and that they don’t have to deal with it anymore. But being a part of this holistic society and world we need to worry about issues like this because if we all do our part we can make a difference.

Citations:

Max-Neef, Manfred, <www.bigpicture.tv/videos/watch/e56954b4f>, Credits: Interviewer – Marcus Morrell, Camera and Editor – Marcus Morrell, Copyright © 2006 Big Picture TV.