This week has been quite a blur, as I spent it in formation (the French word) in sustainable development, whatever that really means. Throw in a few friends narrowly dodging a bullet (literally), and it becomes an interesting week!
I'll leave the bullet stuff aside, but it's been interesting being confronted with different ways of thinking and jargony-type things that is a bit hard for me to comprehend how it functions in real life. I suppose it's because it's all rather social science and 'soft', and, I must admit, in asking questions as to 'how' this stuff actually works in real life, I had a hard time actually getting concrete answers from anyone.
I guess what it comes down to is that it is difficult for me to see the utility in models and various tools being developed to describe various phenomena, and then have them not be robust enough to actually withstand a real life situation. Venn diagrams, loop dioramas, etc aren't particularly helpful when they don't help explain basic situations. Parsing out your semantics in order to split hairs as to what facet of jargon you're talking about is also a little bit difficult to swallow.
Now, I sound really negative and down on the social sciences, and I'm trying hard not to be, and it certainly is not that it was all a waste of time, but, even when taking it to the streets and watching it happen in real life still didn't help close the circle in determining how these models function!
I will think about this some more, but then have to re-approach this whole idea of sustainable development...
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