Prof.A.W.Date re-presented his keynote talk that he gave in ISME conference last month during yesterday's CTARA seminar. Though the title of the talk was 'Mechanical Engineering and Sustainability', one of the lasting theme to it was this: There are times when we need to accept defeat as an engineer (as a scientist). And if we want to look things from a sustainability perspective, this acceptance is very important to move forward.
Most of the positive mindset people (heck! I don't know how they define it) brand such defeat acceptance as 'negative thinking'. They would quote from many of the 'great thinkers' that we should not think negative or we would never move forward. Once when I mentioned to my friend that we should stop using the plastic cover for every damn thing we buy (we were buying vegetables then). I got the familiar reply, "Don't worry, Science will find a way out".
Is this really negative thinking? It is about the perspective, I feel. For, during his talk a couple of weeks ago, Sir Robert Swan summarized his 'Walk the talk' with a quote which was something like "The last thing we should do to save our planet is to say that someone else will save it". If we look at sustainability from this perspective, not having a sustainable lifestyle is actually negative thinking and accepting defeat need not necessarily be negative.
... to be continued, but do share thoughts....
No comments:
Post a Comment