Recently Fred Unger shared links to a couple of TED talks with NESEA’s BuildingEnergy13 Planning Committee. Here they are:
Peter Diamandis – Abundance Is Our Future
Paul Gilding – The Earth is Full
While the debate these two talks represents is a critical and fascinating one, I kept wondering “How do we really bring it home to the NESEA community at BE13 to make sure the questions Gilding and Diamandis are asking inform the way we think about our day-to-day work?”
We are certainly more than capable of being the clever and creative community that Peter Diamandis describes. It’s also true, on the other hand, that the Big Problems that Paul Gilding describes seem very real to a lot of us in the NESEA community. But the bottom line is that even the NESEA practitioners who are most pessimistic about resource depletion seem pretty eager to get up and get to work in the morning to solve problems for their clients, as far as I can tell. Maybe that’s because active engagement is a great antidote for despair—I certainly didn’t see any evidence of despair at BE12 this past March, only of active engagement.
Here’s what I think is the best way to have the Gilding-Diamandis debate at BE13: Make sure our content is accurate and reality-based; avoid confirmation bias in our selection of topics and speakers; focus on the areas where theory meets practice so that our theory stays grounded in marketplace realities and our practice is informed by a larger context that keeps it in the category of “solution” rather than “problem”. —Paul
