We missed a chance we never really had

We have missed our chance.

Well, not really for we never, in fact, had a chance.

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.

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.

Blind adherence is leading us toward the abyss

Our blind adherence to what exists stands between us and mitigating the effects of climate change.

It is not too difficult to see and
understand how our global
temperatures continue to rise.

A never-ending retinue of recipes aimed at resolving climate change or global warming, call it what you please, are paraded before us, but in nearly every instance those ideas are about maintaining life as it is, or at least as it is for the rich minority, and so ensuring the sustenance of ways of living that brought upon humanity the very troubles these schemes purport to resolve.

Emerging dilemmas have the potential to decimate humanity with climatologists illustrating, unquestionably, that the human-induced changes to earth’s atmosphere, and so the earth’s weather patterns, are so expansive and dramatic, that the near “goldilocks” conditions of the past 10,000 years of “not too hot, not too cold, but just right” are quickly ending.

Earth’s surface temperatures are nearly one degree above pre-industrial levels and carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere have risen from about 280 parts per million (ppm) prior to the 18^th century to nearly 400 ppm today, breaking the nexus we have enjoyed for millennia between rather pleasant, predictable and understandable weather and something that is quite different and largely untenable for many species on earth, among them humans.

Circumstances arising from lifestyles rooted in a paradigm that depend upon endless growth and the continued combustion of fossil fuels, primarily coal and oil, threaten us all and will only get worse before they get better for carbon dioxide, a natural by-product of that process is a long-lived chemical compound and so what is produced today will be with us for centuries to come. The maxim, “This too shall pass” doesn’t apply.

At a less than one degree increase in global temperatures we are witnessing some unexpected changes to the world’s weather, changes to which humans and associated infrastructure are not adapted, and yet a two degree increase is not simply predicted, rather unavoidable; changes that will bring with them what we, humans and many other species, will find not only challenging, but rather difficult to survive.

The science of climate change is quite complex, but even a layperson can understand it to see that what lies ahead will be, by brute insistence, quite different from what has been.

Proposals to avert the difficulty (we can no longer avoid it for we are 30 years too late) include high-risk and unproven geo-engineering ideas, including carbon dioxide sequestration, and significant alternative energy intervention (unlikely as the fossil fuel industry has massive political and social clout), but never have we truly explored dramatic changes to our way of living, substantially reducing energy use, changing our egoistic consumptive wants and switching our near obsessive interest from building bank balances to building resourceful and resilient neighbourhoods.