In the narrow business sense, co-creation is something done with other businesses or with customers or other stakeholders. This happens in the context of what is now called a business eco-system or business ecology.
Co-Evolution
This is a very important concept, more usually referred to as co-evolution, and more recently, as co-intelligence. A good example of co-evolution is the role of bees in agriculture. Without the bees, pollination becomes a major issue. When we find that electromagnetic pollution is killing off bees, we are in fact interfering with a priceless natural process.
Co-Intelligence
There are also restrospective looks at what indigenous natives knew about co-evolution, and futuristic looks at what we can do to mimic nature, called bio-mimicry. What we are doing with fossil fuels, toxins that we manufactor and disperse, and with (or against) clean water, are the opposite of co-creation.
How are we going to reduce Vermont’s carbon footprint and at the same time protect Vermont’s agricultural heritage and family farms, create local jobs, and stimulate small business formation? Is utility-scale wind part of the solution? I would suggest the answer is no.
For a number of reasons, utility-scale turbines are not the best and most appropriate tool to reduce Vermont’s carbon footprint; while they may be effective in other states, they are a misfit for our landscape. First of all, it’s a tiny drop in a big bucket. Electrical generation in Vermont contributes less than 1 percent of Vermont’s carbon foot print; heating with fuel oil and burning transportation fuels account for the overwhelming percentage. It would be far more effective, for instance, to increase dramatically the number of homes that heat with safe, clean, automatic biomass heat, using pellets of wood or grass grown and pelleted in Vermont.
Second, even if we wanted to focus on reducing our carbon footprint for electricity, we should look to a resource far more abundant in Vermont than wind: sun. Vermont’s wind resources are estimated to be about 1/620 of its solar resources. It would take less than 7,000 acres of Vermont’s agricultural lands to site enough solar electric generation to meet ALL of Vermont’s current power needs. This amounts to just 0.6% of Vermont’s 1.2 million acres of open farmland. And all of this with no bulldozing, no blasting, no noise pollution or health hazards, and no 400 foot towers strung along our mountain ridgelines.
Phi Beta Iota: The following is borrowed from a colleague commenting on the full article above. We agree.
Let the battle begin! Jock's analysis of the problematic nature of siting industrial-scale windmills in VT raises a much larger political/philosophical question about what kind of energy future we should be investing in. The forces of the current centralized power station/gigantic distribution network system will naturally favor very large-scale sourcing for renewables, and the mainstream media are quite comfortable framing the discussion of renewables as if a simple overhaul of the sources of our electricity sources were the only issue on the table.
How many times have you read that some area of the country (usually in the south-western desert or more recently along a north-south axis in the farm belt states) could supply all of the electrical demand of the United States? This vision is very common, and assumes that we will also be building of thousands and thousands of miles of high-voltage distribution lines. And where will those lines be built? Is there any doubt that federal and state governments will eagerly put their powers of eminent domain to work in order to run these lines wherever they want them to go, with “energy security” justifying their work?
Supporters of the gigantic renewables model believe that solving our energy problems involves no changes in business-as-usual beyond changing the source of the energy used to power everything else in today's global economy.
But if we take Jock's arguments about the unsuitability of gigantic renewables for the state of Vermont seriously, we have to ask whether the same arguments do not carry the same weight wherever we might turn. If we believe that this argument can be generalized, then the challenge to the current system goes far beyond the question of what technologies we happen to be using to generate electricity. Gigantic renewables do not threaten the current distribution of political power; the localized model inherent in Jock's approach is a profound threat to that same distribution of political power. Building gigantic windmills is a fairly trivial problem compared with moving to a truly localized system.
“I've been trickled on for thirty years. Tastes like piss.”
— Randall Head, attorney in Louisville, KY
This is the single best explanation of the raging anger in America today I have seen. Reagan voodoo economics sowed a bitter crop that we are reaping with a vengence today. And neither party seems to care or be willing to take corrective action. No wonder we have anger on the streets and in the ballot box. Frank Rich is right, it will not end with the mid-term elections. It will only end when we replace Reagan's magical thinking and its reality distortion field with a reality based economics with fairness as justice for all.
All this 3rd party stuff will not amount to a hill of bean if these 5 heresies are not converted into common wisdom that everyone knows and accepts:
1. We live in a closed system;
2. Corporate profits have trumped democracy for far too long;
3. Global Climate Disruption is a real game changer;
4. Caucasians will no longer run the casino and the country club
5. Knowledge will always be imperfect.
So long as we fail to modify our ‘narrative' to take these facts into account, it is unlikely we, or any third party, will be able to embrace the future with confidence. Any party, economics, or politics that must assert that these truths are heresies is, of course, then based on fiction and lies. That is why, amongst other things, they are intellectually bankrupt. As you may recall, I have been saying this about both parties since about 1993.
#5 is a killer as it is the force that drives the seven deadly sins.
So a third party, technology to the contrary not withstanding, will not matter until these heresies become truths. It is essential that we develop education, politics, and economics that are based on these truths. No third party I have heard of has even begun to tackle this very difficult challenge.
We are in the fix we are in because we deny these 5 truths and, as a consequence, live in a reality distortion field.
Phi Beta Iota: Brother Gill is correct, which is why we started funding this non-profit in 2006. Public intelligence in the public interest is the CRITICAL ingredient in moving beyond kum-ba-ya hand-holding and long sighs of Ommmm. Below the line we RECAP Third Party relevent-entries.
The rapidly emerging/evolving new field medical doctrine is usually termed Tactical Combat Casualty Care. Not sure how fast it will migrate to civilian sector due to litigation risks.
EXTRACT GOOD: Gone from their repertoire are difficult or time-consuming maneuvers, such as routinely hanging bags of intravenous fluids. On the ground, medics no longer carry stethoscopes or blood pressure cuffs. They are trained instead to evaluate a patient's status by observation and pulse, to tolerate abnormal vital signs such as low blood pressure, to let the patient position himself if he's having trouble breathing – and above all to have a heightened awareness that too much medicine can endanger the mission and still not save the patient.
EXTRACT BAD: But something has happened in the usually smooth communication between dispatch center, aircraft and hospital. No ambulance pulls up to the helicopter. Reece and Helfrich wait. They wait. The pilots radio the dispatcher that they've arrived with a critically injured soldier. Reece and Helfrich, helmeted and inaudible, gesture wildly to people outside the emergency room door to come over. Two other patients have also recently arrived. But that's not the problem. There's an available ambulance 100 yards away. But it doesn't move.
Phi Beta Iota: What has been done in TACTICAL combat medicine in the ten years of constant war has been nothing short of sensational and inspiring. NOTE that it is not just technology, but HUMAN enhancement. This has NOT characterized the rest of the US military nor the rest of the US Government which has the added disadvantage of not having the funding nor the education-intelligence-research mindset needed to enter the 21st Century.
The purveyor of the “suicide vest” story should be named and questioned about what he hoped or expected to achieve by his lie.
Linda Norgrove (RIP)
Phi Beta Iota: It is with such sadness that we contemplate the demise of the US Government and US Armed Forces as effective vehicles for prosperity at home and peace abroad. A careful reading of all of the stories make it clear that “the system” failed at every level from the utterly stupid operational helicopter raids hampering elder negotiations down to the man that threw the grenade that killed the hostage. The death of Linda Norgrove and the lie that was immediately concocted are a fitting epitaph to Empire. We pray that 2012 brings us a restored US Congress and an honest President who can pick honest Cabinet officials who can actually act in the public interest. This is not about individual honor or intent–INTEGRITY is much more complex than that. This is about restoring the Constitutional integrity of the United STATES of America, and ending the inherent corruption at every level of the US Government (and Wall Street) in which humans don't matter and profits take precedence over potency.
Phi Beta Iota: The FBI has two walk-ins on 9/11 in advance of the event, one in Newark, NJ and the other in Orlando, FL. In both instances, because the FBI did not recognize any of the names being reported, it blew off the walk-in. Something similar appears to have happened here, BUT there is also yet another instance of a US person being in the employ of the US Government (similar to the botched car bomb attack on the World Trade Center) and their activities being a) sanctioned by one US agency and b) not being reported to other US agencies or to allies. The US secret world is HOSED strategically, operationally, tactically, and technically….. it is cultural “unfit for duty.” We continue to believe that an Open Source Agency and a Multinational Decision-Support Centre with reach-back to at least 90 countries is the way to kick-off 21st Century Intelligence. See the Virtual Cabinet series at the Huffington Post for the larger context within which we believe US intelligence must be reinvented.
