Changing the way we live in our environment will require changing the way we think about our environment. In nature, sustainability is achieved through diversity. Complex food webs ensure that energy and natural resources crucial for life itself are continuously recycled and redistributed across ecosystems. When biodiversity is lost, food webs become inefficient, and resources are no longer accessible to all species. As part of a larger ecosystem, human civilization is also complex and diverse, and must remain so in order to ensure balanced distribution of food and energy resources in a complex, dynamic natural world.
Globalization of policies, communication, and education aimed at expanding global markets also promotes uniform ideologies and behavior patterns that can become cumulatively destructive to the environment. Food and energy resources become increasingly concentrated in centralized niches accessible to only selected fractions of society.
Multidimensional reasoning, the process of considering issues from diverse perspectives, is a tool designed to gently broaden the uniform thought patterns promoted by standardized curricula and global media networks. Multidimensional reasoning fuels broad consideration of diverse perspectives so that one-size-fits all ideologies and broad scale policies can be replaced with unique, location specific solutions to contemporary problems in education, health, economics, food security, and environment. These diverse solutions are more appropriate than broadly applied technologies, because they can adapt more quickly to small changes in local environments. The environmental impact of these solutions is reduced, because fewer people are engaged in any one action.
Update: 8/9/2022
This post in November, 2012, marked the dawn of my departure from institutional research. I had come to believe that the linear reasoning used in our institutional policy making defied common sense and turned the beauty of discovery in the natural world to a game of resource exploitation. Several weeks later, I began working independently to restore food systems.