Complexity brings
many bonuses, but benefits we urgently need to simplify.
The wonderful advances arising from that complexity can only
be realized and made a lasting positive if we are able to better understand how
we go about claiming our space.
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| Geo-engineering - Taking a spanner to the world. |
The prevailing idea that humankind is of pre-eminent
importance and therefore justified as it stomps about the planet building an
uncaring military/industrial complex is one that abhors decency.
Physics insist that everything seeks equilibrium and it is
only through the application of energy that humans can escape the hard-edged
boundaries of those scientific limitations.
And it has been with an alarming degree of indecency that
we, you and me, have used fossil fuels to disable those equilibrium-seeking
scientific realities.
Subsequently, while we wallow in the wonders of a lavish life
provided by our unrealistic and unhealthy dependence on hydrocarbons, the thin
envelope surrounding earth and upon which we depend, is quickly, in geological
terms and even human terms, becoming less effective.
It has become an abused commons into which we have dumped
the residue of our fossil fuel-energized lives disrupting the finely-tuned
balance that allowed life on earth, from the microscopic to the massive, to
procreate and prosper.
In more than a decade of listening to, and participating in,
the climate change conversation, discussion has shifted dramatically,
particularly in past year or so, from mitigation to adaptation.
Mitigation, because of our greed, quite bluntly, was never
going to happen and now even those who blatantly deny the human finger-print,
at least on the public stage, are championing geo-engineering to stabilise a
climate they said in the previous sentence was not in need of repair.
Adaptations using even more of the processes that are the
essence of our troubles reflect Einstein’s view that “We cannot solve
our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”
Beyond that geo-engineering is unproven
and brings with it consequences which we don’t yet understand and we may well
not be able to grasp the meaning of the emerging difficulties until it is too
late.
Scientists are sceptical by training and
so rarely, if ever, present their work in terms of blunt ultimatums, but ever
so slowly that is changing and more and more they are telling us that life on
earth, and that includes you and me, is under severe threat.
I weep as I write for it is not evident
that we have the needed courageous intellectual athleticism to step back from
what it is that drives industrial civilization.
For a few years I have advocated a
four-hour work day, no overtime, no double shifts in a neighbourhood, all
powered by renewable energy, where walking and cycling is commonplace and in
which you work and share with your neighbours – that is more urgent now than
ever.
