Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
We make decisions, not on known outcomes but on imagined projections standing on theories of how things work. These projections have an ethical range called the ‘planning horizon.’ The better we understand the world the broader the reach of our anticipations. Conscience serves to measure how well we encompass social effects.
Slowing growth in population and in consumption of materials and energy will not eliminate the problem. But it would reduce the pressure to increase efficiency and leave more possibility for increasing resilience.
COVID-19 and climate breakdown are interconnected crises. They are the unintended consequences of a 500-year history of territorial expansion, conquest, resource extraction and industrial growth as a by-word for progress that has seen carbon pumped into the earth’s atmosphere at a rate that carbon sinks, compromised by industrial-scale deforestation, can’t contain.
It’s in the interests of the 1 percent that we not use the Nordic model as a way to talk about vision. They’ve watched with alarm the growing public appeal of Medicare for All and the Green New Deal, which are partial versions of the Nordic model. Especially now, they don’t want us to expand, to talk in an appealing way about system-change.
A longstanding anti-human, anti-science, anti-democratic, individualistic, racist and xenophobic narrative is clashing with the reality of a pandemic that can only be overcome by humanity, science, equity, collective effort, and trust in the democratic institutions that are coordinating and delivering health services and economic relief.
Navigating the end of growth will require courage, new thinking, flexibility, and a willingness to make mistakes. It’s understandable why, during “normal” times, people want to stick with what’s familiar. But we’re no longer in normal times.
Some people say that now is not the time to be talking about the climate emergency because people are feeling anxious, afraid and overwhelmed, and that you and I should desist from dating until the COVID-19 crisis is over. I suspect that those saying this never took the climate and biodiversity emergencies seriously in the first place, and they don’t understand that just as the causes of our troubles are linked, our solutions must also be linked.
The coronavirus pandemic is like a chunk of ice falling off of a melting glacier. You can see the ice falling, but you can’t see the melting of the whole glacier. Similarly, climate change will keep dropping chunks of ice at humanity well after the COVID-19 pandemic subsides.
If ever there were a time to reassess the genuine threats to our security and separate them from the self-interested aims of the weapons industry, this is it.
Yet our governments’ primary effort is to enhance their power at the expense of other countries. In failing to address our real and common threats, we are our own adversaries.
This crisis must be an opportunity to challenge what we have allowed corporations around the world to do with the natural environment (conveniently referred to as resources) and people (labour) in the name of economic growth. Thatcher was wrong: there are alternatives.
Surely it is within our collective imagination to socially construct a system of globally networked but self-reliant national economies that better serve the needs of a smaller human family.
The ultimate goal of economic planning everywhere must now turn to ensuring that humanity can thrive indefinitely and more equitably within the biophysical means of nature.
This national crisis calls for a new model for economic disaster recovery. We propose a new strategy ‘resettlement in place’ – it is based on best practices in refugee resettlement and social intelligence, a model to harness local data and lessons learned from previous disasters, including Chicago’s response to Hurricane Katrina.
