Initial Comment on Designing and Constructing a TRUE Net Zero City

The promise of the ideas of The Venus Project and Resource Based Economics are laid out in the YouTube video Designing and Constructing a TRUE Net Zero City. (https://youtu.be/ap3NCou1rSc ).

Terms to Understand

Many of the terms in the video will be new to viewers.

Terms that may be new

J. Roy Hopkins has written about the enduring influence of Jean Piaget, very much discussed in the BEd. program in the 90’s, among people involved with cognitive neuroscience.

 Piaget’s interview ended with a question about how he saw the future of psychology.“With optimism,” he replied. “We see new problems every day.” More than 40 years later, I think it is fair to say that Piaget’s influence remains strong and that his optimism was justified. Much of the revolution in cognitive neuroscience was anticipated by Piaget’s approach. The “contemporary biological revolution” that he believed had bypassed the behaviorists has continued unabated since Piaget’s death in 1980. I think if he could be interviewed today, he would express delight in the direction of the field.1

If Piaget’s approach is applied to Designing and Constructing a TRUE Net Zero City use of familiar terms that can be applied in a practical way now may facilitate assimilation of this “new situation” based on concepts of changing one parameter at a time, environmental kinship as expressed in documents since 2015, understanding how “greed” has become entrenched in our economic system in the past decades,

Topic	Ponder Patterns Article
Changing one parameter at a time	Kinship in a “Parallel Polis”
Environmental kinship as expressed in documents since 2015	Truth, Beauty, and Goodness in Climate Change
Understanding how “greed” has become entrenched in our economic system in the past decades	Ayn Rand and threats in our economic and political lives

and the advantage of sharing resources in real communities now,

Resources in an area of Nova Scotia

as the Covid-19 crisis is demonstrating to us.

Reference

 1(2011, December 1). The Enduring Influence of Jean Piaget – Association for .... Retrieved April 6, 2020, from https://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/jean-piaget

Ayn Rand and threats in our economic and political lives

Bill McKibben, author of “Falter: has the human game begun to play itself out?” writes two somewhat contradictory comments about Ayn Rand.

Sea level rising

On one hand he suggests that the novelist may have been one the most influential influences on the “Money Men” like Alan Greenspan, avatar of neoliberalism and the chief architect of the world’s economy in the years after the collapse of the Soviet Union and on the other hand that Rand might well have written with a crayon.

 Her ideas about the world are simple minded, one dimensional, and poisonous.Rand called her theory “objectivism”. It’s emotional core, channeled by Rand, is simple. Government is bad. Selfishness is good. Watch out for yourself. Solidarity is a trap. Taxes are theft. You are not the boss of me.1

Even without knowing how her influence was spread by people like Greenspan through the Thatcher-Reagan years, and became part of the formation of Paul Ryan, Rex Tillerson, and Mike Pompeo we can see this “philosophy” has permeated much of our political and social attitudes. McKibben comments that Donald Trump told USA Today that Rand’s first novel, “The Fountainhead”, was his favourite book.

Some kinship directions

The need for an attitude to existence not based on selfishness is becoming clearer to us in this time of COVID-19. Our understanding of kinship needs to be expanded to include as “kin” all humanity and indeed all of nature as we address the real threats to species survival where coronavirus stands with devastation of water resources, forced global migration, and climate change as existential threats.

Reference

1McKibben, B. (2020). Falter: has the human game begun to play itself out? New York: Henry Holt and Company.