This community site and the CreativeCoffee Club itself came out of the desire to kick around our ideas on creativity for a "work in progress" book on capturing commercial creativity. We wanted to get the worlds of business, the creative arts and academia together to talk about it, because the topic is so vital to our future. This latest government initiative by the Culture Secretary Andy Burnham suggesting the government wants all school children in England to have access to five hours of culture per week is a misguided attempt to address the problem. How is the UK going to compete with the challenge from India and China or the massive changes we are living through?
I'm just reading James Martin's The Meaning of the 21st Century. I'm only a short way in, but I can see it's an important book you should read. This early paragraph sets the scene:
"Water is vital for our survival and for producing food. It takes almost a thousand tons of water to produce one ton of grain that, fed to cows, produces only 18 pounds of meat. Today mankind is using about 160 billion tons more water each year than is being replenished by rain and fed back into water storages. If this water were carried in water trucks, it would require a 300,000-mile-long convoy of trucks every day - a convoy length 37 times the diameter of the Earth. This is how we are using and not replenishing"
A minor thing I take from that paragraph is that if we used grain to feed the World rather than meat, we'd all be a lot better off, but one of the dynamics the book talks about is that the more affluent that societies get in China, or India, they shift their habits and eat more meat. The major thing I take from that paragraph is "when are we going to start fighting over water as a resource, rather than oil?"
These staggering facts are saying shift happens.This is Jeff Brenman's stylization of a presentation you might already have seen from Karl Fisch – the Director of Technology at Arapahoe High School. Shift Happens again:
Without making creativity a part of the day to day processes within our businesses and organizations, I can't see how we are going to survive any of these changes very well.