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2011年3月9日, 星期三, 由 uci 教授 richard matthew 主持的可持续发展研讨会讲座。家庭和健康、企业和教育系统、淡水和清洁空气--在我们的世界上, 有很多东西我们都想坚持下去。它们是自由、尊严、舒适和稳定的物质基础。然而, 在过去几十年里, 我们已经认识到, 我们重视和依赖的一些东西正在沿着不可持续的轨道前进。成本在不断增加, 我们可以想象, 在不远的将来, 当这些东西中的一些东西用光了天然气、动摇, 也许崩溃的时候, 我们可以想象。我们还认识到, 我们所珍视的许多东西是密切相关的。一个领域的失败会波及许多其他领域, 总是使事情复杂化, 有时还会产生复杂的灾难。这些认识植根于科学探索和当地知识, 产生了我们时代的一个决定性问题: 我们如何在不同的规模和不同的背景下设计、促进、管理和衡量不同事物的可持续性？许多令人震惊的趋势的先进状态和改造庞大、相互关联的进程所涉及的复杂性似乎不可避免地导致了一个简单的答案: 我们不能。但这真的是最好的答案吗？我们拥有前所未有的知识和工具, 赋予了前所未有的力量。事实上, 我们经常听到, 我们许多最令人生畏的问题是存在的, 但我们缺乏执行这些问题的政治意愿。这表明, 我们有一些重要的东西需要引入或重新引入政治。因为在民主的政治意愿中, 应对新挑战的意愿是政治关切和参与的结果。这里和全世界的政治可以而且应该是我们从许多角度探讨我们时代具有挑战性的问题、动员对可能的解决办法的支持、试验答案、分享资源和经验教训以及公平和公开评估我们的决定的效果。政治最好的时候就能让我们在充满了公平、尊严和自由的强大理念的背景下做到这一切。可持续性政治不仅是可能的, 在某种意义上也是根本的。因为政治最基本的形式是关于可持续性--定义我们希望共同领导的生活, 以及这种生活能够持久和繁荣的条件。
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| 课程简介: |
Recorded Sustainability Seminar Lecture on Wednesday, March 9, 2011 delivered by UCI Professor Richard Matthew. Families and health, businesses and educational systems, fresh water and clean air- there are a lot of things in our world that we would like to last. They are the material underpinnings of freedom, dignity, comfort and stability. We have come to realize over the last few decades, however, that some of the things we value and depend upon are moving along trajectories that are not sustainable. The costs are mounting and we can imagine a point in the not too distant future when some of these things run out of gas, falter, perhaps collapse. We have also come to realize that many of the things we value are deeply interconnected. Failure in one area can ripple across many other domains, always complicating matters, and, at times, generating complex disasters. These realizations, rooted in scientific enquiry and local knowledge, have generated one of the defining questions of our age: How do we design, promote, manage and measure the sustainability of different things, at different scales and in different contexts? The advanced state of many alarming trends and the complexity involved in transforming vast, interconnected processes can seem inexorably to lead to a simple answer: we can't. But is this really the best answer? We have unprecedented knowledge and tools that confer unprecedented power. Indeed, we often hear that solutions to many of our most daunting problems exist, but that we lack the political will to implement them. Which suggests we have something important that needs to be introduced, or reintroduced, into politics. Because in a democracy political will, the will to tackle new challenges, is the fruit of political concern and engagement. Politics here and across the world could be-and should be-the realm where we explore the challenging questions of our era from many perspectives, mobilize support for possible solutions, experiment with answers, share resources and lessons learned, and fairly and openly assess the effects of our decisions. Politics at its best allows us to do all this in a context imbued with powerful notions of fairness, dignity, and freedom. A politics of sustainability is not only possible, it is in some sense fundamental. Because in its most elemental form politics is about sustainability-about defining the life we want to lead together, and the conditions under which such life can endure and flourish.
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