As the general population becomes more aware of our environmental challenges and the emerging energy crisis certain words have become popular in the media.  Not too many years ago words like sustainable, green or renewable would bring snickers from people who thought the environmental movement and search for alternative energy sources were just hoaxes perpetuated by those with purely political agendas.  Not anymore.  Just about everywhere you look in media and advertising people are talking green and sustainability.

One unfortunate side effect of having meaningful words become marketing buzzwords is that what these words mean and represent is often lost in a barrage of advertising and shallow quasi-news reporting.

The words sustainable and sustainability are powerful words with meaning that reveals great wisdom for the future of humankind.  It is important that we preserve the power of these words to help us understand what we must do to provide a high quality of life in the years ahead.  It would be tragic to be seduced by the spin doctors that because we put a green or sustainable label on something that we are properly addressing our long-term challenges.

Problem:  Terrorism is usually associated with some form of religious extremism and religion is often used as the justification for terrorism.  Religious extremists tend to avoid contact with those who are from opposing religious belief systems.  This lack of contact with those they wish to hate makes it easier to see these people as sub-human, which makes it easier to justify killing them.  This technique of avoiding contact and defining as sub-human was used extensively by the Nazis to justify killing Jews in WWII.

Solution:  Bring together those with opposing religious points of view to work along side each other on a shared goal.  This “humanizes” the opposition and makes it difficult to maintain hateful attitudes once they get to know each other as fellow human beings.  This technique helps these opposing groups to see that they share more similarities than differences.