Heritage and Sustainable Development: Transdisciplinary Imaginings of a Wicked Concept

Abstract

Capra noted in The Turning Point (1982) that the stockpile of nuclear weapons was sufficient to destroy the human race several times, and that this global madness revealed a frightening attitude among world leaders, knowingly spending over a billion dollars a day on an arms race, with the so-called ‘first’ world trading arms with the ‘third’ world; developing nations spending more on warfare than health, despite hundreds of millions of people, mostly children, either dying or starving each year; and 40 per cent of the world’s population living in profound poverty without access to safe drinking water or health services. He went on to express concern about numerous social pathologies overwhelming the experts. These included rampant inflation challenging the best economic minds; cancer defeating the leading oncologists; psychiatrists mystified by schizophrenia; police helpless in the face of rising crime. What have we learnt about ourselves and the complex interrelationships that mark the well-being of our world? Have we progressed as a civil society in the 30 years since?

We find ourselves in a state of profound, world-wide crisis. It is a complex, multi-dimensional crisis whose facets touch every aspect of our lives — our health and livelihood, the quality of our environment and our social relationships, our economy, technology, and politics. It is a crisis of intellectual, moral and spiritual dimensions; a crisis of a scale and urgency unprecedented in recorded human history.

(Capra, 1982, p. 1)