We have missed our chance.
Well, not really for we never, in fact, had a chance.
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| Rachel Carson wrote 'Silent Spring' warning us that our capricious wants were damaging the earth. |
Humanity is headed in precisely the wrong direction for
rather than improving the values under which humans flourish, they are
worsening.
Inequality is greater now than ever; fewer people than ever
control the world’s wealth, be that economic or material; class distinctions
are greater than ever; and peace is more distant than ever.
What exists and the choices offered on Saturday, is and were
contrary to what is needed if society is to thrive and arrive at a point from
which we can build resilience.
A friend argues that “what” is without substance or reason
until we understand the “how”; demonstrable realities, both big and small,
refute that view, illustrating that until we understand “what” we want, “how”
is hollow and irrational.
What we need is to escape from the environmentally
destructive rigours of the corporatocracy that has routed
democracy and in which the economy is sacrosanct, while the wellbeing of people
is seemingly irrelevant.
We live in a world in which authoritarian or totalitarian
governments are eschewed, but that is exactly the guise under which most of the
world’s corporations and other successful businesses operate.
Solidarity and success for them comes through a command and
control system, which, beyond a few rare instances and the constructed guise of
democracy, are effectively despotic with an allegiance only to profit and
growth.
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| Donella Meadows told us about the realities of the 'Limits to Growth'. |
Rachel Carson, warned us in her 1962 book “Silent Spring” of
how our industrial way of life was destroying nature at an alarming rate and a
decade later, a team led by Donella Meadows, wrote and published “The Limits to
Growth.
Carson and Meadows were castigated by the business as usual
brigade, but the authors told truths, which today are being realised with the
added complication that the ceaseless and careless burning of fossil fuels has
damaged our climate to the extent that civilization itself is under threat.
Professor David Karoly from the School of Earth Sciences at
the University of Melbourne recently warned at Swanpool that immediate
cessation of our carbon dioxide emissions was our only hope of avoiding
catastrophic climate change.
No option on Saturday offered anything remotely like that, in
fact quite the reverse, and so now it falls upon us to gather under the
umbrella of intergenerational responsibility and bond with those who want to
preserve people rather than profit.
What do we do? We acknowledge that not all is not as is should
be and that the promises that influenced our vote on Saturday will do naught to
ease the situation; and stand and work with those mostly volunteer groups that
aim to build resilient communities able to endure an unfolding age of scarcity.
