Rising to Our Challenges

It’s easy right now to look around and see negatives. Issues of economy and ecology that may touch every aspect of our lives. I could list the challenges we’re facing, but I’ll spare you. Turn on the television, open a newspaper, read a magazine, talk to your friends: you know what the issues are. Doom and gloom is everywhere. You don’t have to look very far to find it. Push a little further, though -- beyond the surface stuff -- and the positives become apparent.

In an era of ease, we tend to get fat. Intellectually and emotionally, if not physically. But in an era filled with challenges we amaze ourselves: we rise. Sometimes it takes my breath away.

I find myself tremendously excited by the innovation that’s emerging from this era of greening and global concern. It seems to me that, as a culture, we are rising to our challenges. We’re looking out new windows to see answers to questions we hadn’t even considered half a decade ago.

For instance, I’ve been deeply impressed at the emergence of the rocket stove. This is a very new approach to one of mankind’s oldest challenges: how to heat a home and cook food with the least amount of fuss and -- our more recent concern -- with the lowest impact on the environment. It seems to me that the rocket stove is perfect. It’s easy and inexpensive to build; it is efficient and it was born of a human desire to do something in an entirely new way. A better way.

I’m not going to go into the details of building one here -- this Web page at Humboldt State does a terrific job of that -- but I just wanted to share with you one example of the type of technology I’m finding exciting right now: the type that illustrates how well, as a culture, we’re stepping up to our new challenges. There’s something beautiful in that.