Waiting for governments, corporations, and monied elites to solve our Climate Disruption is akin to asking a fox for the best way to rebuild the chicken coop. I read an article this week about how investment company Vanguard sees a lot of financial benefits that can be realized in pursuing climate mitigation strategies. If you don’t recall, Vanguard is one of the major asset management companies that are invested in everything (see post, Saving the world through Meetings? – A Rant, WEF, COP26, etc. – Part 2 {November 2021}). In my post, A New Beginning – Part 1: Wake up Time {January 2021}, I talk about the need to wake up to the system that wants to use catastrophobia as a way to control us to keep their profit high regardless of how the world is going. In that post I mentioned a cartoon where a corporate CEO is talking to his board saying, “The projections are that the future is rife with horror and catastrophe, but the good news is that the last quarter’s profits will be the best ever.” I think this captures their thinking nicely. If anyone is actually going to save the planet from all the ecological problems that we have all created, it is going to have to be us! We bought into the system and it must be us who are going to transform the system. The powers that be have long been invested in this system of destructive business enterprise. They exist to perpetuate that system and cannot possibly be relied upon to change it, no matter what promises they give us. There are several small to middle sized businesses that are doing things that are more sustainable, but they are not transnational corporations and monied elites.
The planet has reached a point where action is needed and now. I don’t buy into catastrophobia, but pretending – or even denying – that planetary problems are not severe won’t resolve them or help us in our efforts to truly adapt to necessary social changes with fortitude and resilience. But as we figure out ways to adapt, we have to come to terms with the fact that life as we know it will have to change. The economic system we have in place, that dominates how humans currently live in the world, is predicated on extreme utilitarianism and social inequity. Consumerism and social injustice go hand-in-hand. All hierarchical attempts to rectify the many ecological problems that are consequences of the root causes will be just failed attempts to maintain the hierarchical status quo (see early posts, The hierarchy 1 – 2 {February 2018}). It’s why I don’t dwell on all the COP meetings and Global summits that governments and hierarchical elites run every year to supposedly tackle Global Warming, Global Climate Change – call it what you want – to get us to buy into their paths of action. Geoengineering and other highly technical solutions are poorly thought out schemes with little true awareness of the global side-effect consequences of what happens if they are implemented. Most governments, corporations, elite think tanks, and the United Nations are trying to scare us in compliance so that they can save us from the climate Change horrors that may occur because of their actions in the first place. If ‘Hunger Games’ is your vision of a better future, go with it, but for myself I want a better world that improves ecologically and where social justice is important, not one where more profits for the hierarchy is promoted.
I keep hearing that Global Climate Change is a global problem requiring global solutions run by global elites. But we all live locally. I believe that solving this global problem is best done at the local level by billions of us recognizing the sustainability needs of local ecosystems and how humans can adapt within local systems. As I said in the Hierarchy-2 post, “We are the ones we have been waiting for.” To adapt to Climate disruption and help bring the planet back into balance will require a much more personal connection to the solution than draconian measures and mandates by hierarchical powers, which would only be short term and ineffective in the long run. Unless the hierarchy gets us to the Hunger Games lifestyle where we all suffer and the few elites party at our expense, I prefer personal sovereignty to solve the problems.
In my root causes model, we reduce our overconsumption of resources by becoming more localized and developing more cohesive and resilient community. With true community, all the social safety nets promised by government are unnecessary. We begin by localizing our food to be organic and energy generation with greener sources. Population would naturally decline over time without the need for draconian measures. As we decrease our need to use fossil fuels in such large amounts (e.g., industrial agriculture, shipping, large scale electrical generation) environmental quality would improve exponentially. Once we move past the need to generate obscene profits, we will focus on more ecologically efficient technology that centers around cyclic systems thinking instead of linear and reductionist thinking. This in turn would move us to manufacturing and resource use that thinks cyclically like a natural system instead of believing that we can just go elsewhere to find more. That makes us locally independent and self-reliant for our basic needs living with abundance instead of scarcity. In my model we have control over our own lives and communities and do not have to rely on the hierarchy. Governments at all levels are meant to serve us, not control us.
We have to think of the Earth as a living organism with Love and reverence if we are to adapt – the Gaia concept as proposed by James Lovelock in 1972 (see earlier posts, Biophilia and Biodiversity 4: Nature – other pragmatic reasons to care for it! {July 2018}and Manifesting a New Global Society while keeping our diverse global cultures 4 – Earth our only Home {February 2019}). Now here is the Catch-22. If we cannot trust the hierarchy to solve the problem, we have to do it. But literally, hundreds of millions of people in the developed world are addicted to the consumer lifestyle and asleep about how the hierarchies control their lives. A great many are waking up now, and will do when the economic hardships arrive, but we who are awake can still make the changes in our lives as a model for them to follow once full recognition of our reality smacks them in the face.
To do this we need to paint a different and better picture for how to live sustainably, and how a sustainable lifestyle can be far better for quality of life than a consumer lifestyle – pretty much what this whole blog is about! And the key point about my focus is to lose the fear and scarcity mentality and demonstrate a path that is full of hope, abundance, and a life with real quality that is better than what exists now.
A quote I used in my Hierarchy 2 post, “Very typically, when people question me about the future, they ask if I really believe people will be willing to give up the wonderful things we have for the mere privilege of avoiding extinction. When I speak… of another story to be in, they seem to imagine I’m touting a sort of miserable half-life of voluntary poverty, donning sackcloth and rags to do penance for our environmental sins. They’re sure that living in a sustainable way must be about giving up things. It doesn’t occur to them that living in an UNsustainable way is also about giving up things, very precious things like security, hope, light-heartedness, and freedom from anxiety, fear, and guilt” Daniel Quinn. No need for a revolution to put in place a new hierarchy, just a transformation of society from the bottom up.
“Change never comes from the powerful and proud [the hierarchy] – they have too much to lose and too little to gain. Change always comes from the common and humble – we have little to lose and much to gain” John Ikerd
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