Viðar Hreinsson, chair-man of the Reykjavík Academy writes on the necessary of building the future of the Icelandic society on living integration of culture, nature, eco-friendly technology, around the country.

One of the main characteristic of the changes with the expansion of the creative class, is the tendency to open up all boundaries of what has been preconceived. Main value of the class being individualism, ambition or productive targeting, diversity and open mind, it can not be denied that these changes increase wage differential.

Richard Florida is an american professor of urban studies, and a Ph.D. from the University of Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburg, where he taught for awhile but teaches now at the George Mason University in Fairfax. He has new ideas of the role of the creative class in economical uprising. His main work on this being The Rise of the Creative Class, published in 2002 – a bestseller. (more…)

Series of work-shops on alternative ways to utilize natural and human resources in a self-sustainable ways

For some years, various attempts have been made all around the country to find ways to utilize natural and human resources other than those employed by large scale industry. These innovatory attempts have increased our capacity for a greater variety of options and helped to increase Icelanders’ personal accountability for their own landscape. Yet, for various reasons little heed has been paid to these attempts and there has rarely been sufficient follow-up to many of the ideas that have been forwarded. There has been a sharp division between promising plans and their entrepreneurial implementation on the one hand and between investments and the networks that serve to generate them on the other. In
these difficult times, when people are desperately trying to find alternatives to the excesses of large-scale industry, then we must a way erect bridges between unlike areas of interest.

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Sustainability, in a general sense, is the capacity to maintain a certain process or state indefinitely. Similarly, the absence of certainty in terms of climate change, global warming has raised the profile of sustainability.^[1] In recent years the concept has been applied more specifically to living organisms and systems. As applied to the human community, sustainability has been expressed as meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.^[2]

The term has its roots in ecology as the ability of an ecosystem to maintain ecological processes, functions, biodiversity and productivity into the future.^[3] To be sustainable, nature’s resources must only be used at a rate at which they can be replenished naturally. There is now clear scientific evidence, (environmental science), that humanity is living in an unsustainable way, by consuming the Earth’s limited natural resources more rapidly than they are being replaced by nature.^[4][5] Consequently, a collective human effort to keep human use of natural resources within the sustainable development aspect of the Earth’s finite resource limits is now an issue of utmost importance to the present and future of humanity.

Sustainability has become a controversial and complex term that is applied in many different ways: to different levels of biological organization (e.g. wetlands, prairies, forests), human organization (e.g. ecovillages, eco-municipalities, sustainable cities) and human activities and disciplines (e.g. sustainable agriculture, sustainable architecture).

Sustainability is many things to many people. It can simultaneously be an idea, a property of living systems, a manufacturing method, or a way of life. For some people it is little more than a hollow buzz word. Although the definition of sustainable development given by the Brundtland Commission (used above), is the most frequently quoted, it is not universally accepted and has undergone various interpretations. Difficulty in defining sustainability stems in part from the fact that it may be seen to encompass all human activity. It is a very general concept like “liberty” or “justice”, which is accepted as important, but a “dialogue of values”^[6] that defies consensual definition.^[7] It is also a call to action and therefore open to political interpretation concerning the nature of the current situation and the most appropriate way forward. A further practical difficulty with a universal definition is that the strategies needed to address “sustainability” will vary according to the particular circumstances under consideration

Sjá nánar á:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sustainability