El deseo de año nuevo que funciona

Cada año se nos olvida que si seguimos siendo como somos, obtendremos los mismos resultados que hemos obtenido hasta ahora. Eso pasa con nuestros "deseos de año nuevo" - sin crecer, sin desarrollarnos más, pretendemos que ¡ahora si! logremos lo que deseamos. Y no importa qué tantas personas nos deseen "que se cumplan todos tus deseos" como si eso bastara para que se cumplieran...

Así pues, este año te deseo "crecer para hacer crecer", pues únicos entre los seres vivos, nuestro desarrollo y el que logremos apoyar en los demás no tiene límites. En este año que comienza puedes decidir crecer...

The predicament -and hope- of Mankind

Welcome back my faithful readers =) Bienvenidos de regreso mis cuatro lectores =).

Over the summer I happened to read a series of books that nicely complement each other into an either tragic or hopeful sequence.

In 1972, it was published the famous report: “The limits to growth: a report to the Club of Rome project on The Predicament of Mankind”. It described World3, the name of a [Systems Dynamics] model of the planet and humanity. The authors used the model to analyze several possible future scenarios for the Earth and its inhabitants up to 2100. Some of these scenarios ended in a planetary collapse due to pretended infinite growth in a finite planet;  some were hopeful but required difficult changes to world politics and institutions. I borrow part of the sub-title of that book for a series of essays that partly deal with this topic: the predicament of Mankind, including some dashes of hope...

Why global problems don't get solved

Poverty, hunger, inequality, injustice... these are ooold international, very complex problems and there are myriad governments, institutions and organizations interested in their solution... and others interested in keeping the status-quo. And these are only the problems so well known that they have a short label attached to them. There are at least other 50,000 global problems, according to the Union of International Associations, although naturally the count depends on what you define as a problem and how you classify problems.

The Belgian-based UIA has produced over the years a monumental database of "world problems and human potential" (see also the Wikipedia entry) that includes a problems database, international associations dealing with problems, strategies for solution and several other sections.