Nothing will save our civilized life except a radical change in how we treat one another and the world
Man’s activities are changing climate across the globe. Global warming will mean more water bound in the air, meaning some areas will be afflicted with wetter, more savage storms, while other areas will go from cornland into grassland; the grassland will turn to scrubland, and scrubland will become desert.
We are entering into the Sixth great Die-Off of species worldwide, scientists tell us. This is the first Die-Off that a single species of Earthbound creatures – man – has caused.
These views are widely known. And yet we do nothing to prevent it as a global society. And many of the most powerful entities – legislators and administrators of the public trust, corporate officers and directors, civic and community leaders – seem committed not only to refusing to prevent catastrophe, but they do whatever they can to block efforts to prevent it. In effect, they are doing what they can to accelerate and worsen the downfall of world civilization.
What can we do?
These are my first thoughts on the problem, basic notions, radical changes. Of course there are many things we can do as individuals and as groups, and these efforts are not in vain. But even the best of these endeavors will only save us from the immediate ruin that looms over us all in the remainder of this century; they do not address the basic problem that got us into the fix. For that, we need deeper and more radical change.
Some 50 years ago, for the first time, scientists put forth the notion that the planet’s natural systems all worked together in a harmonious, interlocked whole. These were the first of the modern environmentalists, the ecologists. James Lovelock in the 1960s came up with the Gaia thesis, the idea that the environment of the planet was a self-healing, self-regulating whole, that worked much like an organism. His fellow scientists at the time mocked Lovelock; in the decades since then, his ideas have become mainstream science, accepted as the basis of the discipline.
In order to work with Gaia (or with Nature, as the 18th century scientists called it) we must treat the Earth as a whole. And we must work with her over time – long periods of time – longer than any other civilization has ever planned or worked before.
To this end, this is what I propose:
- We must govern human society on a global basis wherever any enterprise affects the environment, whether that means land or sea or air.
- We must reverse our former priorities: rather than banning substances and practices that have been proven harmful, we must only allow substances and practices that have been proven to be innocuous.
- We must restore the natural systems that we have destroyed, and learn to live with and within them.
- We must limit human population world wide and within each environmental area.
- We must reduce our contribution of greenhouse gases to zero within a generation – 25 years – and further reduce carbon dioxide concentrations to pre-industrial levels.
- We must restore the oceans and the wetlands.
- We must learn what works and what doesn’t – to this end, we must establish weather monitoring systems worldwide, millions of them, and launch and employ a fleet of satellites to monitor weather and climate on a global, regional, and local levels.
- We must re-order the science of economics and strive not for growing production and ‘wealth,’ but for ‘happiness’ and justice.
- And we must plan ahead in much longer time periods than man has every tried to do before: I would say 1,000 years at a time, with a reappraisal of the thousand-year plan every century.
Achieving all this won’t be easy. Not only will we need to organize our human community on a global basis – which we have never yet managed – but we will also need to organize the community forward in time over great periods, and plan for the entire ecosystem (which we don‘t as yet even understand). Achieving it while preserving the necessary levels of human liberty and individual property and dignity and privacy will be even more difficult.
We can do this.
But I fear that we won’t.
In fact, I expect that we won’t. I expect that anything I write or say will be in vain.
But all the same I must say them and write them – just like everybody else who sees where we are and can step beyond their narrow, traditional viewpoints and see the shape of things to come.
(Composed on keyboard Friday 5 September 2008.)
