David, The issue of getting people to have a new paradigm about development and the destructive use of natural resources and indeed our planet is central and has concerned me throughout my career. Since economic gain motivates almost everybody, making people understand that mining the earth and its resources is not in their long term interest and that sustainable adaptation to changing conditions is. Jared Diamond believes that this sort of change can come from the bottom up or top down or both (ref Collapse) Unfortunately we have reached planetary thresholds that make finding solutions absolutely critical and imperative. I believe one of the most beneficial uses of applied complexity is to determine what makes societies succeed sustainably and what makes them collapse. This was a problem that perplexed me and my colleagues at the UN. Perhaps "free energy" can assist (I must reread all the string on this issue), but it seems to me that there is no free lunch in this universe. Paul
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