Courses › Forums › Service Learning and Sustainability › Module 4: The Compass of Sustainability › Sustainability Compass › Reply To: Sustainability Compass
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I really like your point about larger impacts. In truth all our decisions have larger impacts and, as people are exposed to sustainability and systems thinking more, they naturally expand their thinking so that, even if they don’t know the exact impact, they recognize that there is one and look to see what that might be. Identifying “unintended consequences” is an important piece to this as often the world’s problems are just impact that was not recognized or deemed to have been small enough to move forward with anyway. In science they have the precautionary principle which is intended to be used even at the intergovernmental level. That is the refelctoin of these unintended consequences but is often overlooked. I remember, for example, when the second 737MAX went down due to that glitch which, at the time, was unidentified. I remember how quickly European countries grounded the planes and yet the US continued to fly for another week or so citing that there was insufficient data at the time to ground the planes. I remember thinking about the precautionary principle at the time and wondering what would have happened if another plane had gone down in that week. Thankfully it didn’t happen but often there is that decision to prioritize things and decisions to ground or not really do tell a story about the priorities of those making the decisions. I guess the response to COVID-19 is a similar such conversation. Sorry for the rambling. 🙂