We’ve got a long time to go until the Sun dies and with it our planet. In the meantime the Earth is perfectly capable of looking after itself. It did for a long time before we arrived and if we are foolish enough to go as we are, it will for a long time after we’ve gone. So saving the Planet is no problem.
What is a bit trickier is finding a way of living, working and playing so that our interactions with one another and our world continue to remake conditions where future generations can exercise their creativity and flourish. This too may be less difficult than the vested interests of rich, old men proclaim.
As Simon Caulkin wrote back in 2002:
“After Kyoto and Johannesburg, only an idiot would say it was easy to save the planet. But the dizzying irony is that it is. All the posturing at political level ignores a prosaic truth. Every company in the world would directly benefit – in lower costs and higher profits – by doing its bit for the earth. And it would cost nothing except the energy to shift office furniture or a few machines around the factory floor.
All it takes is for managers to start tackling the waste in which their companies wallow. Companies are almost inconceivably wasteful. Most obviously, they directly waste raw materials and energy. But less obviously, all companies actively generate waste – masses of it. One form of self-generated waste is rework – correcting errors that should not have been made in the first place. Another is making things that people don’t want to buy. Half of all the books printed in the United States are pulped unread.
But even less obviously and worse still, all of these conspire to create a nightmare spiral of yet more waste, endlessly feeding on itself – more space, heat, light, people, conveyors, paperwork and computers to track it, all to deal with stuff that would be better off not being done at all.
It’s uneconomic growth – activity that adds no value and profits no one except perhaps the economists who add it up. And the more that is wasted, the more effort has to go into managing its byproducts and pushing harder against the friction on the flywheel.
Waste on this scale is the treacherous legacy of mass-production techniques and thinking that have long outlived their usefulness.”
And then there is climate change. The way some of the discussion is framed, it is as if this is some thing new, an aberration. The fact is climate changes. That we contribute to this change seems unarguable. In reality, we have probably been having some impact on the climate for thousands of years as we modify our environment to suit our immediate needs. But it is also true that even if we hadn’t been around the climate would change, just as it did before we were here.
As Jonathan Raunch has said:
“Climate change, then, is a reason to do more of what makes sense anyway: reduce coastal vulnerability and strengthen homes to minimize hurricane damage, improve public health and develop drugs to fight malaria, and so on. There is nothing radical about any of this. No rethinking of capitalism is required.
Given how neatly adaptation dovetails with the sustainability agenda, and given its immense potential to relieve whatever human suffering that global warming causes, one might think environmentalists would tout it to the skies. Some do, but many seem to believe that reducing harm distracts from the real job, which is to reduce emissions. In a blog post last year (at gristmill.org), an environmentalist named David Roberts made the point with startling candor. “In an ideal, abstract policy debate, sure, I’d say we should boost our attention to adaptation,” he wrote. “But in the current political situation, I don’t want to provide any ammunition for the moral cretins who are squirming frantically to avoid policies that might impact their corporate donors.”
This is like denigrating HIV treatment and blocking condom distribution in order to discourage promiscuity. And it is every bit as callous and irresponsible. Where climate change is concerned, the truth — and this truth really is inconvenient, or at least sad — is that too many activists and politicians mistake panic for virtue.”
What seems to be our biggest obstacle to muddling our way to a sustainable future is the power and influence of the hard headed realists, who can’t imagine a future different from our present. Of course, their “realism” is a kind of grumpy fantasy that celebrates their ignorance and lack of imagination and it could well be that it is the idealists, who have a better grasps of the realities of our world. Trying to do things better may be the most realistic thing of all. So, on that note I leave you with the words of Greg Steltenpohl, quoted in a recent article in the New Statesman:
“”In the past, organic and natural foods were about personal health,” says Steltenpohl, “which is why they have become mainstream today. And that’s very important. But it’s impossible to separate the organic movement from environmental and social-justice issues. The idea now is to make the whole process of what you do the thing that does good in the world.””