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To
push a science agenda, we would have to promote the underlying premise
of science: that none of the systems we use to understand this reality
are pre-existing or true. They were simply the most useful at a particular
moment—very often to a particular group. When they stop being
useful, we must be prepared to discard them.
Douglas
Rushkoff
A modest
super-fund to explore alternative, non-resource-based energy sources
could solve a great majority of the world's problems. But it would need
to be accompanied by an equally serious look at our commodities-based
economic model. Our chief obstacle to sustainable energy technology
might not be scientific at all, but economic. What would happen to the
oil industry if we no longer needed oil?
The same
could be asked about our chemically and genetically addicted agriculture.
It's not that high-yield, top-soil enriching farming practices are out
of reach; it's simply that our agribusiness industry doesn't know how
to profit off a paradigm that doesn't rely on synthetic fertilizers
and gene modification.
America's
great problems lie in our inability to change the models we are using
to understand the challenges before us. And this is where a genuine
science education—both in schools and through good use of media—would
prove extraordinarily useful.
The scientific
model acknowledges that it is just a model of our reality. It is not
the way things are, but rather a way of explaining the way the way things
are. Those of us who use the scientific model have great practice in
reminding ourselves that our understandings must constantly be revised,
evolved, even improvised.
To push
a science agenda, we would have to promote the underlying premise of
science: that none of the systems we use to understand this reality
are pre-existing or true. They were simply the most useful at a particular
moment—very often to a particular group. When they stop being
useful, we must be prepared to discard them.
Douglas
Rushkoff
Author, Lecturer, and Social Theorist
Professor of Media Culture at New York University's Interactive Telecommunications
Program
Author of Media Virus!; Coercion; and Nothing
Sacred: The Truth About Judaism.
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