Inspirational People

I had an enjoyable evening meeting one of those all-too rare inspirational people. We were meeting about a project that sounded fascinating to me (as if I don’t have enough of them), a mix of IT and sustainable living. The person I met was full of knowledge in the field, and at one stage I was getting quite demoralised, faced with a barrage of depressing facts, many of which I knew, but many which were new to me. Topics ranged from the effects of pesticides on the body, prevalence in groundwater, corporate coverups of negative health impacts uncovered by research, and using funding such research to achieve the results they desire, various plastics, etc, the infestation of the American government by Monsanto corporation, massive bribery budgets corporations have to push their poisons on us (Monsanto again, surprise). I’ll stop with the links now, seeing as its already late and it takes time to find them 🙂

In spite of this barrage of bad news, he remained positive, and is working on an interesting project aimed at changing corporate behaviour. He has a young child, like myself, and I can understand that a motivation for giving up corporate jobs has been his children. People our age (in their 30’s) are critical, as we are old enough to remember the pristine environments of our childhood, young enough to be energised to act, yet experienced enough to do something about it. Younger people, especially those unfortunate enough to have grown up in cities, often don’t have this memory, and take their toxic environment for granted. Older people (a wild generalisation I know, as many older people are doing fantastic work) often lack the energy to tackle the status quo, or they’ve internalised the ‘not be heard’ attitude to questioning and challenging authority.

It was a meeting that almost visibly manifested connections in front of me – as we spoke I saw parallels with other conversations, other people, a whole matrix of small actions connecting to create a fundamental shift. While old-style thinkers may try and solve South Africa’s energy problems with huge government subsidies and centralised planning, a simple act such as developing an energy trading mechanism can motivate large numbers of businesses, or wealthy individuals, to spend capital on purchasing renewable energy sources for their homes, factories and offices, and makes it viable by allowing them to sell excess capacity back into the grid. I get excited at seeing the similarities between these different fields, Open Source software as a new paradigm unleashing the creativity of developers once restricted by proprietary software, open content models such as Wikipedia proving far more useful than closeted groups of ‘experts’ producing their old tomes of wisdom, systems thinkers breaking out from their blinkers seeing connections between once separate fields of study.

Now, just to find that elusive 30 hour day…