Braden Allenby gave a keynote at last week’s GeoDesign Summit, and I had the pleasure of sitting down with him for an interview. I’ve been an Allenby fan for some time, having read and re-read Reconstructing Earth and just recently having read The Techno-Human Condition. Allenby is a big-picture thinker, an engineer that trains students to think critically about the challenges ahead, and someone on a mission to wake us up about the complexity in our world today and the need to take new approaches to manage our impacts.
We covered a lot of ground in our conversation, including what’s wrong with ideologies, what the maker movement may mean to the global economy, the fragile social constructs around the world, and even some reasons why democracy may be doomed.
Nearly everything Allenby said made me think more deeply about the issue, including this statement on climate change:
“The statement that climate change is a problem is a hypothesis, because maybe it’s a condition. If it’s a problem then we can solve it, with things like geoengineering. But if it’s a condition then what you have to do is learn much more complex ways of mitigation and adaptation, and you’re into a far different ball game. By positioning it as a problem, like we have done with the UN initiative, the Kyoto Protocol, and with geoengineering, what you’ve done is that you’ve dramatically oversimplified the problem, and have prevented yourself from being able to understand it and address it. That’s why we need to begin working into the complexity implied by our systems engineering.”
Read the full interview here.
