Currently I am studying at the University of Amsterdam. I study interdisciplinary social sciences. Since I am studying a relatively new programme, I have the possiblity to create whatever progamme I like to study. I now have two weeks to decide what direction I am going to work towards and I use TED to find out what idea I find worth studying most.
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A comment on Talk: Janine Benyus: The promise of biomimicry
Not only in the biological world there are experts on using and enhancing our planet's resources to thrive in. I would like to know what lessons we can learn by studying other cultures which are experts in self-sustaining systems.
If adapt our 'western' way of living to the cultures which are enhancing their environment AND their own quality of living and to "those organisms that have not been able to figure out how to enhance or sweeten their places, are not around to tell us about it" -Janine Benyus, wouldn't that be a potential solution to many big challenges we are given for the upcoming decades?
However culture doesn't exist because it 'survived like organisms and enhanced the environment it lives in' (our western polluting consumerist society is an example of that) I hope to find not only ways of doing, but mainly psychological systems of reasoning to enhance and live.
"All of these peoples teach us that there are other ways of being, other ways of thinking, other ways of orienting yourself in the Earth." Says Anthropologist Wade Davis in his TED talk: http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/wade_davis_on_endangered_cultures.html
So my question is: Is studying cultures to find more sustainable ways of living and thinking than the western consumerist way an idea worth doing? In short: is Culture-mimicry possible?