Is This OK? An Exploration of Extremes

Abstract

This paper presents an abridged version of a fictional story titled Is this OK?, a story about a day in the life of an individual in a non-specific future. It was written as a teaching aid to help students critically engage with theory, as experience has taught the authors that students engagement with conventional academic articles is problematic. There are three principal theories that inform the story, notwithstanding that the piece also alludes to other contemporary issues and a reader is likely to identify the influence of a variety of theoretical constructs. The three are natural capital, companies selling solutions rather products or services and a construct of humans as being a temporal negotiation between their genetic material and the environment they find themselves in. The first two concepts are, as the article discusses, encapsulated within but not limited to the concept of natural capitalism. The third draws on a construct of a human as being a phenotype. It should be noted that while the story can be read as polemic, this is not the intent, rather the intent is to invoke questioning and reflection to aid critical development.