” Find tongues in the trees, books in the running brooks,
sermons in stones, and good in every thing.
I would not change it for anything. “
– William Shakespeare
Nature has ways of telling us what we need to know.
And the writing is literally on the wall, on the trees, in the stones, in the river waters, in the seas, in the air , in the soil, on the glaciers, on the lands and in the hearts of all living things.
Things like you and me all that’s around you…
And if you look you shall read and learn our future borne out of our past, and our present born out of our will and desire. nature will tell you the whole story of where we’ve been and where we are going…
Maybe it’s not exactly what we want to hear, but certainly is what we absolutely need to know. The necessary modicum of knowledge needed to keep our lives running along in the right balance and equilibrium.
And looking back towards this year now expiring, we can really read a whole lot of stories. Because this year has been a series of hard climate change disasters, harsh realities and unnatural catastrophes. Almost a Malthusian world of dystopia for many of us leading short brutish and vengeful existence. And almost always red in tooth and claw – literally and metaphorically…
Take the Fukushima nuclear disaster for example. It opened the year with a blast from the past. The Cold war feared past where nuclear radiation could at any moment poison all of our lives. Yet it does so not from enemy action but from our own nuclear energy domestic production of electricity…
How daft is that?
This year went from bad to worse and it has felt like one of constant upheaval, beginning with the earthquake and nuclear catastrophe and the tsunami in Japan and working up to the resource and food stresses, scarcity and famines, amid unsupportable high staple prices putting food beyond the reach of many Peoples across the world and causing social revolutions and many private privations as well as collective misery. Going hungry is no fun.
Then we had the sovereign debt crisis, the poverty of the middle classes and the financial crisis gripping Europe and beyond. This along with the global solvency crisis doubled the burdens of recession into a W double style depression globally that we can call by any other name but that. That and the Japanese nuclear disaster, the constrained resources resulting in nasty and usually beneficial democratic uprisings and tumultuous changes in the Middle East, Africa and beyond, the successive environmental crises, the nuclear weapons proliferation in North Korea, Iran, and elsewhere, the Horn of Africa famines, the global unseasonable droughts and fires, due to climate change alternating with unprecedented floods, the Greenland glacier constant tipping, the Arctic ice loss, the Monsoon rearrangement — all in all — a constant disaster calendar during the warmest year of record.
This year has been “Annus Horribilis” par excellence and pretty difficult to understand in terms of Earth science. Even the “extreme events experts” have been left struggling to anticipate or explain the course of events. My friend who follows and documents storms for a living told me that his freak of nature, storm calendar is magnified by a factor of ten this last year and expecting to get worse this year…
These are the seeds we’ve sown – trust me – for we know nature to be calling us into account. and we have created this mayhem ourselves…
But our capacity to create is also our only hope for a cure. Imagination, technology and global cooperation can solve this now. But only, if we wake up and act forcefully.
Of course it could go the other way and end up very badly indeed.
Take atomic energy and it’s nuclear applications that have caused so much malaise for all of us. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the penultimate wake up call but we weren’t listening.
Now Fukushima has arrived to tell us that there is no safe nuclear use and we must repower our economies and our lives with renewable energy and not with military weapons grade plutonium. Because the inescapable byproduct of nuclear energy factories is enriched plutonium and that is massively damaging in a bomb or in an earthquake or in a system malfunction or accident caused reactor melt down or in any dystopian scenario you can think of…
Why?
Because we have been seduced by simple explanations based on simplistic models of rather complex systems and we accept the foolish assurances of idiots, as the gospel truth. Not that the gospels have anything to do with this either…
We choose simple beliefs that range from social policy to market economics to the environment because we are lazy. And because long held familiarly destructive ideologies has come to sway over in-vivo evidence, natural observation and scientific reason. And among many of us, blind faith in a deistic system, or faith in dogma, secular or religious, or in an all powerful and omnipotent market, or in destiny and craven deities, has triumphed over reason and spoiled our chances of adaptation and survival.
Yet now is the time to act to put our lives back on track before we derail the whole system. Natural disasters, food and water shortages and biodiversity loss show that humanity is crossing planetary boundaries, making our world more dangerous. We are not heeding the lessons and are hypnotically following the pied pipers over the cliff edge…
Instead we will need to act forcefully to wake up. No more time for sleepwalking over the edge. The clarion call of nature sounded and the future is written in the trees we fell. In our mines and our harvests. In the forests and the earth’s fossils we burn. It’s written up in the dirty skies and in the vast swaths of lands we are turning to dust. It’s written in the bleak landscapes we are deforesting, in our habit of unsustainable progress and in our incessant development We are acting like a cancer on earth. And now nature has chosen to awaken us and we are painfully aware that we must govern ourselves right. We have to create the global Commons governance system. And we will have to push for a global system of ”environmental governance” if only to channel our resources to adapt and mitigate these sea changes.
We are calling it the Environmental Parliament and we are open for business…
Because planet Earth has been stricken many many times by our insufferable ways. Much like Asperger’s syndrome sufferers we do not know the damage we are inflicting on our relatives, on our kin, on our people and on all of our surroundings. All species suffer because of our own behaviour – none so bad as the humans living on the wrong side of the haves and the have not fence.
And poor earth with nine lives, much like a cat, is approaching it’s wit’s ends. We’ve seen roadkill before and the cats are no exception… With all nine critical life-support systems of this planet – vital to ours and all species survival – under siege and under constant threat and pressure — we are threatening our own existence. As a matter of fact we are threatening all of it. These natural closed loop ecosystems acting like any other complex thermodynamic and electromechanical chemical life systems, do have some resilience to the adverse effects of human activity, but the bad news is that we have been going far beyond the safe boundaries of the systems and it has become all too easy to bring about sudden and total collapse.
You want proof ?
Look around you, because we have already burst through the most important of those system tipping boundaries without even noticing.
Here are some interesting tipping points:
1) We are eliminating species at 10 times the natural rate of extinction. More than fifty percent of all species will be gone in the next fifty years at this present rate of extinction.
2) We have turned up the planet’s thermostat higher than it’s been in a million years and probably unleashed unstoppable natural feedbacks that will worsen global warming and climate change.
3) In our closed loop ecosystem our atmospheric commons is polluted, our water fouled and our agricultural lands rubbished due to the illogical use of fertilizers that have pushed the natural nitrogen cycle into hyperdrive, poisoning the soil and then the seas. Yet we clearly depend upon these three factors for air, for water, and for food, because our ecosystems and all the oceans can only offer us this. And the three general Berkeley lines we’ve crossed compound our problems vastly.
With these three “Berkeley” lines already crossed we have literally exhausted three of our nine “lives.” Yet now that these lines are gone, we should ask ourselves and nature, the question of where else are we approaching Earth’s limits and what boundaries we are crossing like yester-year Mazinot lines. Lines that we previously thought uncrossable are all white marks under our tires, quite a few miles back on the black top… as we are speeding towards oblivion.
By mid-century we will probably be far beyond the capacity of the planet to offer us fresh water as we need and will be threatening the last great ecosystems through clear cutting and ploughing land for crops – with serious implications for the world’s food supply. Likewise, the acidification of the oceans will be literally dissolving marine ecosystems and killing off all life forms robbing all of the carbon sink capacity of the great blue seas in the balance.
For two of the three remaining life-support systems – chemical pollution and loading the atmosphere with smoke, dust and other particles – we have yet to figure out where the tipping point to disaster might lie. And we might be approaching the limit up.
Soon we have to face tough choices. And surely some will call for easy fixes, like some forms of climate and earth engineering or military action and unilateral geoengineering and other nonsense to purportedly fix the planet. Yet we call for something else. We call for democratic reform and good global environmental governance through an elected participatory body of leadership – much like the security council of the United Nations – and that’s why we have the Environmental Parliament. And the EP elders and the council of leaders that meets to address the five most crucial things facing our species and this planet each and every year. And whether you buy into any of that or not, we believe you would agree, that we need to be doing something.
And all the folks at the Environmental Parliament are the proverbial “man in the arena” acting on your behalf. And we are rally swinging for the fences and fighting the good fight against climate change and against our daft addiction to burning things up for our economic edification, fossil fueled comfort and wasteful energy consumption.
Still the inescapable message is that because we now dominate so many of the planet’s life-support systems we are responsible for acting like leaders. Thoughtful and self governing in a democratic fashion. And we are painfully aware that isolationism simply will not work. Same as backing off and reducing our carbon and resource footprint is no longer a viable option, stepping off the hot seat will not work either.
We have to help lead this planet as a sustainable ecosystem fit for humans, because it will no longer steer itself in our direction and for our benefit. We must assume responsibility and we need to do just that soonest. We must be doing this being fully aware that, with us or without us, the planet will do just fine. And it shall survive well enough regardless.
But the point is that because we are responsible for our own survival along with maintaining the Goldilocks balance that makes human habitation possible on this earth along with all forms of Life we get to be the driver.
Get it?
It’s up to us.
But then you knew this all along. Right?
We are no longer allowed to sleepwalk into disasters of our own making. We are no longer mindless. We have been officially awakened and nature on this year 2011, served just that message to us.
Social inequality has become a massive concern everywhere from the Arab street to Wall Street and the Main Street… and it is not unrelated to climate change and all the stresses that bears upon us all.
Yet our understanding of whether or how all of this change ought to be addressed has only recently advanced beyond trickle-down theoretical dogma. We view social innovation only as the games on the net and playing friends with gazillion others on FB and such social networks. General nonsense that we have reduced social innovation to a virtual video game and not meaningful change. But that too shall pass and real change will arrive soon. We need real social innovation the old fashion way through entrepreneurial trials of uncertainty, failure and the occasional success. Because in general, trials of social innovation are poorly designed, and politically inexpedient outcomes are always rejected in advance. Genuinely evidence-based policy-making remains the great exception, rather than the rule.
Yet we sorely need great positive policy innovation and public policy change at the local, national, regional and global level, if we are to succeed in our quest for our own survival. Still we need to learn new economics too. Science based economic theory is based solidly upon behavioural psychology and agent-based modelling which have long undermined the foundations of neoclassical economics. But who is listening? It is classical economic theory, in which investors are deemed all-knowing and speculative bubbles no more than occasional blips, that we all stumble and fall and our economies lay in ruins with many trillions of dollars of value evaporating in the process unwarranted.
Until now.
And maybe we ought to ask the hard questions: Are financial markets too free, or not free enough? Are they being manipulated in a systemic way? Who has the power of acting in seemingly zero sum games in the marketplace?
Yet no one knows how to answer these questions. Only recently have we started to look for clues in network analysis and ecosystems and the complex environments are giving us a way to look at the markets clearly and predict behaviours long term.
And then we have the limits to growth. The problems of perpetual growth have long been discussed, too. Cancer cells grow exponentially thus killing off the host. Are humans the cancers of the earth?
Because we are clearly consuming resources at an unsustainable rate and polluting all the systems we depend upon for our own survival. Much like cancer does.
Yet we have alternatives to this models of growth and development. But all the alternatives are dismissed as woolly environmentalism, and all attempts at change are fiercely resisted…
Just witness the furore over climate change in the American presidential debates. It’s simply not there. never mentioned, never addressed. it simply does not exist. Where are the questions? and most importantly where are the answers?
But nature has given us the answers…
Albeit we don’t listen.
Yours,
Pano
PS:
The truth can be found in our fast disappearing forests and rainforests.
The living skin of our planet is burned off and the soil tilled and fouled with pollutants.
How can we not be listening to the voice of Nature calling us to account?
Let’s stay silent for a moment and look inwards and then just maybe we’ll listen.
Anyways at least some of us will and share the message with the rest in the primeval dance that John Locke spoke of the seeers of the species taking responsibility for the whole lot of us.
And some of us are doing it in governance taking disproportional personal risks. People acting like modern day Thomas Moore and sacrificing life’s pursuits and existence for it all.
Learn from this.
And take care and heed their wise counsel, because the elders have seen it all unfold.
Happy Holidays and all the best for the New Year — but please remain vigilant for our own good…
