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I am not prone to tirades or radical behavior. I have never participated in a public protest and refuse to sign most petitions. In the classroom I offer both sides of an issue. I have a stable job and hope to someday spend the money collecting in my retirement account. In British America in 1775 I would have been a loyalist.
But as an applied philosopher -- I know that sounds like an oxymoron -- poking around modern civilization's foundation and plumbing for two decades, I see cracks and leaks growing, and ever faster. I see that the past half-century's wonderful ride, an amazing and blazing run on the carbon bank of coal, oil and natural gas, is sputtering out. But not before we clog our carbon sinks, particularly the atmosphere, triggering global climatic disruption that is already under way.
We want to see our current problems as part of the usual ups and downs of the business and climate cycles. But in the past three years oil production has remained steady while the price has doubled. Oil supplies will soon fail to keep up with ballooning world demand. Then the other fossil fuels will flare out too. But not before adding to atmospheric carbon dioxide already a third higher than pre-industrial levels and strongly tied to a long, abnormal rise in global temperatures.
I have come to this perspective reluctantly, but am now convinced: We are living in revolutionary times! We must change to a way of life as inconceivable to us as the invention of the modern factory or heart transplant would have seemed to a peasant or professor in medieval Europe.
The good news, if I can call it that, is that only by accepting this challenge in revolutionary terms will our odds of succeeding in this change go from "fuggedaboutit!" to "long shot."
"Well, change, yes," you might say, "but revolution? What about technological progress and efficiency? The environmental and sustainability movements? Isn't all that enough?"
In "Common Sense" Thomas Paine recognized this reluctance: "Until independence is declared, the continent will feel itself like a man who continues putting off some unpleasant business from day to day, yet knows it must be done ... and is continually haunted with the thoughts of its necessity."
Efficiency tweaks won't save us. Ever since England in the 1800s grew efficient with coal, only to use ever more of it, efficiency has led to higher consumption and more atmospheric carbon. Even if every car in the world were a hybrid, and every light bulb a compact fluorescent, growing demand would dwarf savings.
And though Toyota, General Electric and Wal-Mart tout their green efforts, their need to profit by increased consumption of their products is not questioned. This system can't fix the problems it has created or fit our emerging realization that Earth has limits, any more than King George could have encouraged independence-minded Colonials, or medieval scriptural authority could have embraced 17th century scientific discoveries.
Our challenge is to make a new Enlightenment, rejecting belief that we can master Earth and treat it as our unlimited supermarket, playground, laboratory and dumpster. Every human enterprise and standard needs reorientation to recognize the boundaries of our sun-powered planet.
We don't have to be violent about it. But we must be as single-minded and insistent as someone yelling "Fire!" when there is, in fact, a fire. That's not radical, that's prudent and morally required.
It's so much easier to hope for a miracle. But our best hope lies in embracing revolution -- to, in John Adams' words, "start some new thinking that will surprise the world."
Here's a short "to-do" list:
- Reduce the industrialized world's carbon footprint 80 percent by 2050.
- Prevent the projected 3 billion increase in human population over the next 30 years and actually reduce population by 2110 without famine, disease or war while preserving human dignity.
- Revise the scientific method so that it better balances the goal of discovery with moral considerations and precaution.
- Switch our economy to sustainable energy: solar, wind, hydro.
- Make that economy one in which happiness and success do not require increased consumption.
It's time to accept the creative limits and boundaries that gave us sun-powered Earth in the first place. It's time to change our minds and our lives.
Bill Vitek teaches philosophy at Clarkson University in Potsdam, N.Y., and edited "The Virtues of Ignorance: Complexity, Sustainability and the Limits of Knowledge." He wrote this comment for the Land Institute's Prairie Writers Circle, Salina, Kan. His address is vitek@clarkson.edu.
7 Comments so far
Show AllThe author astutely observed that "This system can't fix the problems it has created or fit our emerging realization that Earth has limits, any more than King George could have encouraged independence ..."
He then went on to describe a list of "to do's" that failed to recognize the political and institutional changes that must be achieved BEFORE his laundry list of planet-saving changes can be implemented.
Today's greedy King Georges have absolute control of the people's government. They have absolute control of the people's media. They are blinded by profits and have no interest in revolutionary changes that threaten their income streams and the status quo.
Sadly, the American people themselves seem to accept the premise that these corporate tyrants should be granted good old American freedoms to pursue profits, unencumbered, even while the well-being of the country and the planet hang in the balance. The American people don't seem to understand that even the advertising of gas-powered autos is a political activity that they should have a right to control and restrict. Why should we allow the advertising and promotion of products that threaten life on the planet? We arrest those who steal food to feed their families but allow those who market and sell products that damage our atmosphere and drain global resources to operate in plain view on our TV screens. Does this make sense to you?
Those who see the technological and lifestyle changes we so urgently need to survive must understand that, without radical changes in our political institutions, the "to do's" they envision will never occur. The revolution the author speaks about can only result AFTER a political revolution.
Bill,
Freedom, the motivation for the founding of our country, is the key. You can experience this new world view by getting a Prius or something with eveng greater transportation economy. While a Prius only provides an average mpg of 45 to 55 mpg, compared to 15 mpg people typically get driving around town, driving a Prius is quite liberating.
Clean power, efficiently applied will provide us with the freedom to move around that has proven so valuable. Increased transportation efficiency is what the revolution needs. It is the key to Freedom.
40mpg, 60mpg, 80mpg, 100mpg, 200mgp, Freedom
Regards,
The most important issue to be resolved is the scientific resolution of economics in compliance with the laws of thermodynamics. Practically all ecological costs are externalized to the ecosystem or to the public. I would submit that single transactions should be rendered as a calculation of the exchange price and the throughput thermodynamic efficiency in the form:
True cost = Exchange cost + (Exchange cost/Throughput efficiency)
An electric generator on the municipal grid is 40% efficient. For each dollar of electricity it produces, the true cost to economy is $3.50, of which only the $1 is recuperated to the producer; the remaining $2.50 is charged to the environment and/or the public.
If one is linked to the grid providing a service at a similar, machine-like 40% efficiency, the for each dollar of service provided, the true cost is $7.25; with $1 provided to the service and $6.25 charged to externalities.
A calculation such as this can be grasped by all and provides a firm and meaningful foundation to talk about economy and its effect on the environment.
Add this to your to-do list:
- Eliminate the animal protein production industry
- Subsidize small farms to encourage local production and distribution. Discourage large corporate farms through tax disincentives.
- Re-educate people away from consumerism. Reduce. Reuse. Recycle.
- Grow the green industry through tax incentives.
Once in a great while someone pops up and spews out Common Sense and we are so used to Nonsense that we barely recognize its implications. It is comforting to know that somewhere out there someone is actually looking into the future and attempting to assume that there might be a chance for this planet to survive by utilizing Common Sense. How delightful. Thanks to Common Dreams for sharing Mr. Vitek's visions.
And here's my additional "to do" list:
--Counter the "short term" effects of global warming over the next few decades with cirrus clouds, artificial polar ice creation, and other tools, at least until we--
--Actively take methane and carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere to restore the earth's climate.
--Remove the carcinogens from our food, water and environment, ending our plagues of cancer, autism and many other diseases.
--Put invention in the hands of fairly small groups of citizens, so that the right things can finally be invented.
--Invent (or adapt) an election system that consistently produces a wiser government. Continually reinvent a government that gradually becomes government by the people and for the people.
--In a technologically rich world where machines make things, balance our lopsided production engine, money, with our needs for health, for a moral and fulfilling life, for individual and social happiness.
--Refuse as a world to invent an artificial intelligence prologue to the potential end of humanity.
Poet
This guy's suggestions are a little like a geometry teacher walking into his first class and saying "3.1412--which is the value of pi to 4 decimal places--now get to work". Unless the class understands the problems this answer is predicated on solving the utternace is meaningless even if well intended.
Questions needing to be addressed by the author include:
How do we change the minds of those trained to consume to an ethic of conservation?
How do we persuade the uber rich whose controlling power and wealth are built on exploitation of people, the planet and its environment to be less piggy in their worldview?
How do we persuade people to stop violently exploiting the earth and each other when it has given them everything they value and hold dear?
There are answers to our problems laying all around us but no will to exploit them. The thing that has always made any revoilution possible is some better vision of a new reality compared to what now exists. Until Professor Vitek can enunciate such a vision he is just reciting irrelevent factiods.