An oldy for storage.

May be doing a redesign of my primary website, so gonna store this, here:

Sustainable Development by Jay Moynihan version 08092012 

Sustainable development is a process of human adaptation to a planetary environment that incorporates the following boundary conditions: 

Biogeophysical

 1. Substances and materials from the planetary crust are not removed at a rate greater than planetary processes replace them, or the rate of substitution of a renewable alternative. 
2. That substances produced by humans are, when no longer used by humans, not accumulating in the environment. That any substances or materials released into the environment can breakdown into non-toxic components. Non-toxic means that a plant or animal cell can metabolize it, without disruption of its nominal functions.
 3. The productive capacity of biotic systems are not degraded by human processes. Harvesting of living materials is at a rate no greater than their rate of regeneration. 
4. Delegation of human production and infrastructure functions that can be performed by other living things, to other living things when possible. 
5. That any material or substance produced by manufacturing that is not part of a product be a feedstock for another human process. 
6. The design of all products and services uses life cycle analysis and full cost accounting. No externalization to society and the environment of any costs. 
7. Birth control.
 
Governance

8. Governance structures designed to:
a. Maximize diversity in thought b. Reduce pseudospeciation* c. Decouple status competition from material objects 
9. That economic processes be equitable for the people involved. 
10. Allenby Principles
a. A system of problem solving with increasing or stable returns, or diminishing returns that can be financed with energy subsidies of assured supply, cost, and quality. 
b. The solution space for design is not bounded by simplification or ideology. c. Evaluation of design solutions considers scale, scaling, and emergent events across foreseeable time-lines. 
d. Technological implementation is evaluated across categories and foreseeable time-lines, prior to roll-out.
e. Design objectives are defined, and metrics created to measure success and early identification of feedback in the system. 
f. Solutions are resilient and incorporate redundancies, and are not irreversible.
 

Notes: * pseudospeciation. The tendency of social phenotypes to behave towards other phenotypes of their specie, that are not of the same variant or otherwise differ in tags (as in contingent altruism) as if those that differ are not the same specie. Examples in Humans include nationality, ethnic identity, ethnic hatred, "race", racism, religious group symbol reactions, etc.
Note re #4 & #8C.
These may not be possible where economics is a socially obligate boundary condition. (A Socially Obligate Boundary Condition is a set of social parameters or conditions that evolved in a specie, that limits its behavior at a given point in space time.)
 
Source Note 
The definition I am using is in some part mine, but primarily from other sources: The Hanover Principles, The Natural Step, Herman Daly's Rules, The Bellagio Principles, Joseph Tainter, Braden Allenby, and basic science. Numbers 1,2,3 & 9 are based primarily on The Natural Step. Number 4 & 7 are from me. The "Allenby Principles" are from the work of Branden Allenby. Number 8 (a ,b &c) are from me, (the Creative Instability section of Air Water Ground )
Boundary Condition "Boundary Condition" is a concept borrowed from mathematics. In this use of the term it is a condition imposed on a solution so as to obtain the desired outcome. It could also be viewed as what bounds a solution space, so as to derive a range of possible solutions to further analyze and choose from.
My Assumption(s)
My desired outcome, is that humans survive as a species (or daughter species) for as long as possible.
That space/time, and all environments are in a state of constant change.

Musings on Being Hoisted on Our Own Petard*

“It is not the most intellectual of the species that survives; it is not the strongest that survives; but the species that survives is the one that is able to adapt to and to adjust best to the changing environment in which it finds itself……so says Charles Darwin in his “Origin of Species"                                                                                           

Leon C. Megginson

This morning, after over-sleeping and not yet having a good cup of coffee…

 I found myself beset with examples of my specie’s apparent inability to deal with large, complex problems and threats, while remaining mired in minutia and monkey games. The examples placed before ranged in scale from immediately around me to the unfortunate content of today’s news.

I stopped for a moment and thought:

I wonder if advanced intelligence can be an overspecialization?

We pride ourselves on our intelligence, and much of the story, the saga of our rise to world dominance is (if not depicted as the result of our being favored by some invisible all powerful ethereal creature(s) )founded on our mental abilities producing a behavioral repertoire unmatched by any other creature on the planet. But the most rapid change we currently need to adapt to, is the product of our advanced intelligence accreted into the usual animal instincts and legacy behaviors.

The apparent inability of a majority of us not being capable of, or not caring about, it being hard to discern which; understanding our impact now and since the last ice age on our biogeophysical surroundings is perhaps, the best example of this.

Most of us seem ill disposed or unable, to act with the knowledge we now have of our impact through time. That temporal element for us; the accelerating, accumulating, multi-linear, interacting blizzard of changes that our intelligence spawns, eludes us. When we do get a glimpse, our obligate and socially obligate boundary conditions tie us in knots, launches waves of combinatorial explosions that drive us back into the trees of the tried and true.

Will our species and our daughter specie in the future be an even brainier version of ourselves?  Or, will the future be left to our daughter specie who is a bit slower in the head, sturdier and simpler?

·     *  “A petard was a small bomb used to blow up gates and walls when breaching fortifications, of French origin and dating back to the sixteenth century. A typical petard was a conical or rectangular metal object containing 2–3 kg (5 or 6 pounds) of gunpowder, with a slow match as a fuse…. The pétard, a rather primitive and exceedingly dangerous explosive device, consisted of a brass or iron bell-shaped device filled with gunpowder fixed to a wooden base called a madrier. This was attached to a wall or gate using hooks and rings, the fuse lit and, if successful, the resulting explosive force, concentrated at the target point, would blow a hole in the obstruction, allowing assault troops to enter.  The word remains in modern usage in the phrase hoist with one's own petard, which means "to be harmed by one's own plan to harm someone else" or "to fall into one's own trap," implying that one could be lifted up (hoist, or blown upward) by one's own bomb.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petard