{"id":1853,"date":"2014-11-20T14:35:50","date_gmt":"2014-11-20T19:35:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=1853"},"modified":"2014-11-20T14:35:50","modified_gmt":"2014-11-20T19:35:50","slug":"learning-from-icarus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=1853","title":{"rendered":"Learning from Icarus"},"content":{"rendered":"

Learning from Icarus<\/a>.<\/p>\n

A reflection on how making society more resilient may be worse than doing nothing at all.<\/i><\/p>\n

What if\u00a0Icarus<\/a>\u2019 father\u2014knowing his son would fly too close to the sun\u2014had made the wings he designed more resilient? What if he had used bone and string and not just wax to bind them? Would this ancient myth have turned out any differently? Probably not. Icarus would have simply flown closer to the sun before the sun destroyed his wings\u2014perhaps igniting them on fire rather than just melting the wax. And so the boy would have fallen even further and have been crushed even more brutally by the onrushing wall of ocean below.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s apply that question to today. What if we make our globalized consumer society more resilient? That is to say, what if\u2014as more people in the sustainability community are advocating\u2014we make our economic and social systems more able to withstand the inevitable shocks that come with an ever larger human population living within a destabilizing Earth system. What if we build future coastal homes on stilts. And invest billions of dollars and massive amounts of natural capital (in the form of cement and embodied fossil fuel energy) in sea walls around cities like New York and New Orleans. And we even genetically modify crops\u2014even livestock\u2014to withstand drought and heat.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Learning from Icarus. A reflection on how making society more resilient may be worse than doing nothing at all. What if\u00a0Icarus\u2019 father\u2014knowing his son would fly too close to the sun\u2014had made the wings he designed more resilient? What if he had used bone and string and not just wax to bind them? Would this […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[150,161,1305,680],"class_list":["post-1853","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-survival-2","tag-collapse","tag-consumerism","tag-icarus","tag-resilience"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1853","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1853"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1853\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1854,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1853\/revisions\/1854"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1853"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1853"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1853"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}