“We must not give up hope. With global expertise and goodwill, the world can identify and implement specific pathways to sustainable development. World leading scientists, engineers and development practitioners have identified technologies that can .... These are practical, ethical, and achievable opportunities within our grasp, not fanciful science fiction, but things that we know how to do where the costs are absolutely within reach…... Ideas count. They can have an effect on public policy far beyond anything that can be imagined ….Ideas have been transformative throughout history and have sparked some of the greatest transformational movements of the last two centuries - from slavery to the struggle against colonial rule to the civil rights movement to the human rights movement to the women’s rights movement to sustainable development, the idea of our time.”
Sachs, Jeffrey D. The Age of Sustainable Development. Columbia University Press, 2015.
The natural world has been showing us that nature and people are interconnected and flourish according to the law of reciprocity. Cooperation, mutual aid and reciprocity underlie the operations of and are essential characteristics in the unified body of the world of being, inasmuch as all created things are closely related together and each is influenced by the other or derive benefit therefrom, either directly or indirectly. The spread of covid19 has effectively demonstrated the interconnectedness of the human family where the well-being of one is dependent on the well-being of all. This phenomenon has brought about much interest in the implications of what it truly means to be interdependent, including with future generations, as well as with our natural world. To quote Reeves, Levin, and Ueda, collaboration is the managerial strategy that is scientifically proven to work: In society, complex adaptive systems require cooperation in order to be robust; direct control of system participants is rarely possible. Individual interests often conflict, and when individuals pursue their own selfish interests, the system overall becomes weaker, and everyone suffers.
Would seeing ourselves as a single people, all interconnected and
interdependent as the members of one family and the cells of one body help us
to interact with each other better? Would
we take a cue from our body to learn to live and relate to each other like the
millions of cells, diverse in form and function, play their part in maintaining
a healthy system? Realise that when one part is not well, the rest of the body
feels unwell too? The principle that
governs the functioning of the body is cooperation. Its various parts do not
compete for resources; rather, each cell, from its inception, is linked to a
continuous process of giving and receiving.
This consciousness that humanity
constitutes a single people should induce every individual to realise that each
member of the human race is born into the world as a trust of the whole. It might
lead to the understanding that the complex and varied cultural expressions of
humanity be allowed to develop and flourish.
Notions that a particular racial, ethnic, or national group is in some
way superior to the rest of humanity would be abhorred. Patterns of thought, language, and action would
be cultivated to move beyond tolerance and non-discrimination to collectively
working together for our collective betterment.
Society would reorganise its life to give practical expression to the
principle of equality for all its members regardless of colour, creed, or
gender and with nature. Dichotomies of
perspectives such as rich/poor, north/south, developed/ developing nations might
be reframed to one that an integrated, sustainable, and prosperous world would be
built by all of us working on behalf of everyone and not be built by “us”
working together with “them”.
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Key Presentations:
2023 02 - MAICSA Council - ESG 101
2020 01 - CIMB, Co Sec - SDG 101
2019 12 - CIMB, GCAD - SDG 101
2016 08 - MAICSA Conference
2014 08 - Pemandu