Johan Rockström speaks during the 2007 Resilience conference in Stockholm Photo: J. Lokrantz
Congratulations to my colleague, Johan Rockström, director of the Stockholm Resilience Centre and SEI, who has been named Swedish Person of the Year by FOKUS magazine
for his engaging and exciting work for sustainable development.
The Stockholm Resilience Centre has a press release about the award in which Johan states:
I am immensely honored to receive this award, above all on behalf of my many colleagues whose work deserves this attention. Both SEI and Stockholm Resilience Centre conduct enormously important work to support sustainable development in both rich and poor countries. This also includes the importance of actively communicating their work to policymakers and society as a whole, Rockström says.
It’s so tragic that the idea of working backward from what is possible with the earth’s resources is promoted along with its antithesis.
Human minds, as full of love for the experience of life at we are, are so vacuous when it comes to understanding the mechanisms of life. What we need to recognize is our mistake in thinking that reality is what our minds knit together into pleasing images. Our most pleasing image is the development paradigm, using profit to multiply profit. It is also at heart a profound misunderstanding of the exponential function and our complete undoing.