[19 April 2008] Keynote lecture at the EarthStock event at Stony Brook addresses the challenge of sustainability: At this year's EarthStock event at Stony Brook University, the keynote speaker Hans-Peter Plag illustrated in his lecture "Sustainability: a mosaic of many small steps in the right direction" the scale of the challenge humanity is facing in its quest for a sustainable development of society, economy and the environment. He reflected on the fact that at the one side, humanity is amazingly creative, active and intelligent, but on the other side, by putting its intelligence in the service of madness and inflicting the greatest natural disasters upon itself in wars, genocide, and human-caused environmental disasters, has proven to be dysfunctional and destructive. He demonstrated that humankind has grown in number, activity and impact tremendously over the last millennium and claimed that humanity has become a dominating force in the Earth system: we have entered a new epoch in Earth's geological history that rightly should be denoted as the Anthropocene. He illustrated that on intergovernmental and non-governmental levels a rapidly increasing number of organizations and activities are witnesses of a growing awareness of the urgency of the developing crisis, thus informing the audience that if one is worried about the future, then one certainly is no longer alone. Reviewing the current knowledge with respect to the sustainability of humanity as part of the planet, he concluded that the information, particularly what has become available over the last decade, is overwhelming, and he underlined that none of us in a few decades, when the crisis has further developed, can claim that we did not know. Summarizing the numerous interconnected environmental, societal, and economic challenges that we are facing, he sketched the enormous scale of the changes that are needed in our way of being in the world and producing the things we need in order to meet these challenges. By showing a few pieces of the large mosaic of our life and abilities, he demonstrated the many conceptual and technological solutions that we have at hand in order to make progress towards sustainability, and he provided a list of small steps each of us can make in our private, social, and work lives. Finally, he concluded that there is hope and that humanity has a great potential and all the prerequisites to avoid a large-scale loss of civilization or even extinction of the species, if, but only if, we manage to utilize our potential and our intelligence that currently serves what he termed ecological, societal and economic madness into a creative force propelling us towards sustainability. Visit my page on sustainability and see the full lecture there ...