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| As a result of expanding populations, growth paradigms, advanced technologies, and educational systems that taught students to maximize R-type growth, cultures grew beyond limits and the ability of systems to regenerate. Excessive R-type growth produced the major challenges we face today including global warming, global water shortages, dying oceans, collapsing economic systems, and a myriad of other crises occurring across diverse systems (environmental, social, and economic).
In the past two decades, the Internet-enabled rapid rise of the middle class has accelerated the assault on system ability to regenerate and the world is getting Hot, Flat and Crowded. And today, global warming, the explosion of people in the consumptive middle class, and rapid population growth “have converged in a way that could make our planet dangerously unstable. In particular, the convergence of hot, flat and crowded is tightening energy supplies, intensifying the extinction of plants and animals, deepening energy poverty, strengthening petrodictatorship, and accelerating climate change. How we address these interwoven global trends will determine a lot about the quality of life on earth in the twenty-first century” (Friedman 2008).
To make matters worse, the real crisis, the meta-crisis, is not the symptomatic crises that are bombarding us including climate change, terrorism, income divergence, and so on. Symptomatic crises across diverse spheres indicate the presence of a deeper meta-crisis (Capra 1973). We see this meta-crisis of humankind’s perceived disconnect from systems and dynamics (natural system limits, laws of nature, and so on).