Esmeralda Guevara Prescott College Ph.D. Dissertation Proposal May 2010

How to Maximize Fulfillment and Wise Power Use in the Start of a New Human Life

SKY VIEW--Scaling trade-offs between economic and spiritual components of sustainability

VISTA DEL CIELO--Intercambios de escala entre los componentes económicos y espirituales de la sustentabilidad. 

DEFINITIONS OF CONCEPTS RELATED TO SUSTAINABILITY

• Scale:  relationship between the size of something and some other factor
• Energy:  transformation of matter that can be used to power work.  All every-day uses of the word energy—personal, societal, cultural, spiritual—are based on this physical concept. 
• Power:  rate of energy use or ability to do work.  All every-day uses of the word power—political, social, cultural and spiritual—are based on this physical concept.
• Natural history and ecology:  an ecology cannot be static and so is best described, dynamically, as the natural history of a region.
• Cultural history and sociology:  a society also cannot be static and so is best described, dynamically, as the cultural history of a region or people.
• Natural Resources:  Sauer said it best—“natural resources are cultural appraisals.”
• Environment:  Only exists as we humans define it.
• Sustainability:  Movement for improvement of human welfare or well-being and diminishment of suffering
• Well-being:  Must include both monetary and non-economic (spiritual?) factors.
• Spiritual:  Emergent and transcendent qualities of living economies that cannot be easily reduced into simple measures of physical energy
• Domestication:  A co-evolutionary relationship that has no subject (domesticator) or object (domesticated).

         SIMPLE TRUTHS ABOUT TRADEOFFS BETWEEN ECONOMIC AND SPIRITUAL FACTORS IN SUSTAINABILTY

I.              As living entities, we cycle energy, a process that we can call “power use.”

II.           Variation in power use across living systems is huge.

III.         The scale of power use greatly affects how organisms use resources and how they interact with the environment… or how economies, and ecologies, behave.

IV.         (Natural) Selection operates when different approaches to power use result in better performance.

V.           Economic (and ecological)  well-being is based on better performance in cycling of energy or money.

VI.         Physical and political power currently depends on economic well-being, or faster cycling of energy and money leading to great financial profit.

VII.      Non-economic well-being is based on better spiritual performance