By David Korten | Great Turning website
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…
© 2008 David Korten. All rights reserved.