Laurie Santos, on TED reports on a study of capuchin monkeys designed to find out whether the monkeys make the same kind of irrational mistakes that humans make over and over. She winds up with this paean to using design to build a better society, exactly the message of Zero Waste.

Humans are not only smart, we are also inspirationally smart
We are amazingly good at overcoming our biological limitations through technology and other means.
But we have to recognize that we have those limitations.
Here is the rub:
Camus said that man is the only species who refuses to be what he is. The irony is that it might only be in recognizing our limitations that we can really actually overcome them.

The hope is that you all will think about your limitations, not necessarily as unovercomable but to recognize them, accept them and then use the world of design to actually figure them out. That might be the only way that we can reach our human potential and really be the noble species we all hope to be.

… Mr. Forstmann … jumps between thoughts, examples and anecdotes. One such aside is about Warren Buffett and the rule of the three “I”s.”Buffett once told me there are three ‘I’s in every cycle. The ‘innovator,’ that’s the first ‘I.’ After the innovator comes the ‘imitator.’ And after the imitator in the cycle comes the idiot. Which makes way for an innovator again.” So when Mr. Forstmann says we’re at the end of an era, it’s another way of saying that he’s afraid that the idiots have made their entrance.“We’re in the third ‘I’ for sure,” he interjects an hour after first introducing the “rule.” “And that always leads to something. Innovators don’t just show up. Some disaster takes place because of the idiots, and then an innovator says, oh, look at this, I can do this, that or the other thing.” That disaster is now. – from a conversation, reported in the Wall Street Journal, about the current credit crisis. It seems to apply to many different kinds of idiocy. See the original.

Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.

Albert Einstein

Read more quotes by Einstein

Naomi Kline, speaking in Berkeley in September 2014, about her book This Changes Everything, commented about a friend who observed that it was not enough to oppose disaster capitalism in the destruction of New Orleans, we need our own disaster collectivism. Ms. Kline comments that she learned that lesson well, and in appraising the struggle to avoid climate change, it is not enough to oppose the destruction of the climate, we need to work at the source and put forward our own alternative forms of energy usage to replace that which we oppose.