Week of December 8 - 10, 2003   The Last Week

Readings: (Obviously there is much left unsaid and unread, so select from among the  following as you are interested.  All are important of course, but time is limited )

• From your course texts
  • Tenner, E. 1996. Another Look Back, and a Look Ahead. Chapter 12 In: Why Things Bite Back.
  • Monsma: Responsible Technology, Chapers 9 - 12
  • Ratzsch, D.  2000.  Science and its limits. pp. 140 -170
  • Preble, D. and C. Safina 2002. A Rising Tide for Ethics. Chapter 12 IN: Kellert, S. R. and T. J. Farnham, The Good in Nature and Humanity.
• Online
  • Prugh, T. and E. Assadourian 2003. What is Sustainability Anyway. World Watch 16(5): 10 - 21.
  • Rabbi Arthur Waskow 2000. Radical Shabbat: Free Time, Free People. Sojourners 29(3):40-42.
  • Whatever Happened to the Eight Hour Day, Sojourners 29(3):43.
    
    

  Sun City Chronicles - Audio Files from EarPlay
  Part1 Listen to this Audio on campus or over a DSL or cable modem only. To Play the Movie, click on the Quicktime Icon. (31 minutes)	Part2 Listen to this Audio on campus or over a DSL or cable modem only. To Play the Movie, click on the Quicktime Icon. (28 minutes)

• What is the ultimate relationship of science, technology, and truth in the real world?  Will "business as usual" lead "inexorably to a sad future of inequity, strife, natural and economic impoverishment, suffering, and cultural decline...."? Need arguments in science or about technology devolve into "objective" truth, because we really don't want to address the data that exist no matter how convincing?  Can we have "responsible" technology, without it "biting back"?

? 1. What is sustainability?

? 2. Human Survival: Are we endangering our own survival by our own "choices"

* the typical level of material well-being;
* the distribution of material well-being;
* available technology;
* political institutions;
* economic arrangements;
* demographic arrangements;
* physical, chemical, and biological environments;
* how much variability in total population is acceptable;
* peoples' willingness to risk local ecological disaster;
* the time horizon; and
* fashions, tastes, and moral values.

? 3. Does other life play a role in our survival?

?4. Must we as humans abide by a principle (objective truth?) of equity?

• (one casually discarded aluminum Pepsi can = 1 destroyed tropical river?)

• (Cost of  "homeland security" = $839 billion: cost of eliminating illiteracy $5 billion, starvation $19 billion)

?5. Is quality of life in a S & T world a "fountain of youth" myth

• 2002 advertising bill = $451 billion
• symptoms of "illness" in our society?
• ethic of  "sufficiency"

?6 What is "holiness" in a S & T world? (Or is heaven the "noosphere"?

"building receptivity into the still unlovely human mind" - Aldo Leopold

"Belief in the safety of the ship became the greatest single hazard to the survival of its passengers...." - Tenner

? 7. Do we have a "pathology of intensity: the single-minded overextension of a good thing"

? 8. Can we have a "shabbat" - a pause and count it as good?

 ?9 Are we Waking up or still asleep?