Many of us have been anticipating the day of reckoning for our reckless human ways for decades. That day has arrived. Peak oil, climate chaos, financial collapse, and spreading social disintegration are all consequences of deep cultural and institutional dysfunction. The imperative to address them presents us with an epic test of our human intelligence and creativity.

When I was a student in business school my professors always told us "Go for the Big Picture. If you find a problem, don’t just treat the symptoms. Look up stream to find and deal with the cause." The big picture of the human confrontation with the limits of our Mother Earth becomes crystal clear once we step back and take a look upstream. This big picture has three critical elements.

The first element is environmental collapse driven by our relentless growth in consumption and population. From the perspective of our Earth Mother our human excesses have for millenia been little more than the normal nuisance one expects from young children. Somewhere around 1970 we passed a threshold. Our human consumption became more than a nuisance, it began to exceed what our Mother could bear and began to threaten her very life. We see the results in climate chaos, depletion of fresh water and fertile soils, the collapse of fisheries, the erosion of denuded forest lands and melting ice caps. We are building up toxics in the water, soil and air. We are killing our Mother and, thereby, ourselves. As a species, we must grow up fast and accept our adult responsibilities. The implications are pretty straightforward.

Remember those scenes in Star Trek in which Scotty calls to Captain Kirk, "Life support is failing. Kirk to Scotty. Shut down all nonessential systems and redirect all available resources to life support." There it is—the order for our time. No resources for war or extravagance. Focus all attention on the health of the crew and the life support system. No more throwaway stuff. No more economic growth for the rich. Our priority must be to grow our wellbeing rather than our consumption. Invest in peace, education, and health care rather than war. Invest in compact communities rather than suburban sprawl. Invest in local economies and environmental rejuvenation rather than in shipping toys around the world and speculating in the global financial casino. Invest in sidewalks, bicycles, bicycle paths, and public transportation rather than cars and highways. Invest in education for living rather than advertising to get us to consume more.

Here is the kicker. We must eliminate exactly those forms of non-essential production and consumption that our economic and political systems are designed to promote.

I'd recommend viewing Annie Leonard’s 20-minute video “The Story of Stuff”. I must have watched it a dozen times. It’s a brilliant exposition of the consequences of an economic system designed to make money for rich capitalists without regard for human or natural consequences.

More next week...

Written by eldering at The Great Turning

Tagged with: consumption environmental_collapse growth production