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| Herman Daly - his sound advice has been ignored by most. |
However, optimism alone is not enough for what we need are
positive thinkers who understand the context of the world within which they
seek their utopia.
Many careful thinkers around the world have declared this to
be the decade in which we, and that is you and me, must make some fundamental
and critical decisions about our behaviour and so how we use and apply earth’s
limited resources.
Being half-way through this vital decade our options are
becoming fewer and so this is the year we must decide.
Yes, we either waste it pondering the past or apply our
intuition, inventiveness and imagination and go somewhere we have never been
before, the future.
And so what will we do?
With a country lead by people with values rooted in 20th
Century and seemingly afraid of addressing tomorrow, it is likely we will
continue to look at life through the prism of what was.
It is misplaced optimism that has brought us to where we are
now; optimism that has diverted our attention elevating the economy to God-like
status, blinding us to other possibilities, other ways of living, of being a
healthy compassionate and considerate community; a community that understands
that infinite growth on a finite planet is not only problematic, but
impossible.
Embarking on the second week of 2015 and surrounded by what
are generally narcissistic New Year resolutions, it seems we need to lift our
gaze and consider the views University of New South Wales lecturer, Dr Ted
Trainer.
Dr Trainer, who writes about sustainability and justice, has
said on The Conversation (a joint
universities website): “It is also now clear that increasing the GDP in a rich
country does not improve the quality of life!”
“This is what the ‘limits to growth’ literature has been
telling us for decades, but most economists, politicians and ordinary people
still fail to grasp the point,” he writes.
Conscious of that we need to consider and act on what a senior
economist in the Environment Department of the World Bank, Herman Daly, said in
the early 70s about the need for a Steady State Economy.
Daly, like many others since, pointed to the weaknesses of
our existing economic system, noting that it favoured only a few, marginalized
most and left the bulk of humanity limping toward extinction.
Yes, we need optimists; people who can see beyond what
exists, understand there is another way and stand up and holler in support of American
linguist and philosopher, Noam Chomsky,
who has repeatedly argued that we should put people before profit.
Arguments that without profit we can do nought are
fallacious – optimism and educative, innovative and ecologically responsible
ideas are unstoppable.
