Lately a friend and I have been exchanging ideas about how we want to change the world. There is a certain hubris associated with this among privileged circles of people. But we aren’t trying to “change the world” in any grandiose sense. However, I’m not afraid to say that what we want to achieve must be bold and revolutionary. This is a prerequisite for any meaningful action we wish to take in our brave new globally-interconnected world. We accept that the world is too complex and massive for us to change instantaneously as a whole. We believe instant gratification is a symptom of the mechanism(s) we wish to change. Therefore, patience and humility are of utmost importance since what we want to ultimately achieve will not be achieved in our lifetimes. But we can take steps toward that goal.

The problem: as interconnected as we would like to think our global village is, the fact of the matter is that we are growing ever more disconnected at an alarming pace. There is a dangerous gap fomenting between the center and the periphery of our global village, a gap between those who hold concentrated power and those who live on the margins of our global society. This gap is becoming catastrophic in that power imbalances will continue to grow volatile if we don’t comprehensively address the root issues driving the feedback loops of these mechanisms. As food, water, energy, and other natural resource systems lose their resilience and reliability due to the mismanaging of negative externalities, the environments that support human life will be stressed beyond precedent. This is well known. What else is well known is that the disparity in the access to resources across communities at the center and communities on the periphery hampers development.

The solution: Close the gap. Infinitely easier said than done. But infinitely many solutions in diverse and creative forms will be required. I’ll elaborate in upcoming posts.

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The focus: Third World poverty. I’ll narrow this and dig deeper into the details of what I have in mind in due time. The food supply is definitely at the heart of this (see above).