musings of an itinerant lover

Yesterday I had the opportunity to sit down with a number of colleagues at the NASA Ames Research Center for an all-day meeting related to understanding a coherent approach to global water sustainability. One of the themes that seemed to run throughout the day was that we have put our efforts (in this particular case for water sustainability efforts) into fragmented silos that often remain isolated. This, of course, reflects a fragmented approach to the generation of knowledge whereby we have put knowledge in these silos and have gone to great lengths to keep them separate. One university professor in the group referred to his own division where he spoke of 3 different chairs of different areas of water management that never interacted with each other. For any of us that have spent any length of time in academic institutions this comes as no surprise.

If we believe that reality is an integrated whole, then a fragmented approach to the generation of knowledge will never approximate an accurate understanding of the underlying structure of reality. No wonder then that our social systems (i.e. governance, economies, etc.), built upon our perception of the structure of reality, often don’t seem in line with the rest of the biosphere.

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I’m thinking I should start every blog post from here on out with a pitiful guilt-laden apologetic opening bemoaning my failure to consistently blog YET AGAIN (notwithstanding yesterday’s post).  It can kind of be a theme of sorts.  I may have actually found my blog title.  The failing blogger…another non-blog…ya…maybe I’ll just raise my head stoically, march on and try to do this first thing in the morning from here on out.

So I’ve been thinking a little about how we are often expected to trace the origin of an idea…especially in academic thinking.  This idea seems umm….ridiculous perhaps?  insane maybe?  Its as if an idea were a pillar of a number of neatly stacked bricks creating a nicely defined, clean cut, very traceable origin where each brick built upon the previous.  That seems totally delusional to me.  What makes up my ideas?  Pieces of conversations, the memory of something I read long ago that shaped my thinking whose origin is now long forgotten, an eavesdropped coffee shop comment by the overly pierced leather wearing dude to my left…and that’s only what I am AWARE of!  We are constantly being informed by sources we’re not even consciously aware of that our mental models sift and order.  Yet despite all we have this notion of property…intellectual property.

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