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The World Right Now

It is very easy to get depressed with the state of the world today and to feel that we are going downhill rapidly. It is true that many things are very challenging: Climate Change, decreasing biodiversity, pollution, a plastic nightmare, ill-health from eating industrially farmed food, starvation, obesity, loneliness and so on. A seemingly endless list of ways we are choosing to destroy our world and our civilisation.

BUT for me there is a better way of looking at our future!

Yes, at the moment it looks pretty bleak and yes, we must change our lifestyles urgently. However, I think we are missing something vital by looking at the future as if it must inevitably be bad. We hear from all sides that things are grim, that to have any hope of making the future bearable we must make huge sacrifices.

I don’t believe that is true. We must change. That is certain. We must do it now. That is also certain. To understand the urgency of this, have a look at the Guardian’s comments on the most recent IPCC report.

Nevertheless, we are changing, not fast enough yet, but increasingly people are waking up to the urgency of the situation. The rich and powerful are hanging on like grim death to their old life of dominance but the world is not the same as it was before. We are realising, not only what we might lose, but what we don’t have that we need in order to have a better life.

We are in transition.

Transition

Our world is altering. We are en route to somewhere else. The paradigm is changing and humanity with it. We are in the process of writing a new story and with that, writing our futures and the futures of all the Earth’s young people.

There are new methods of low-emission energy production and use, new types of non-polluting transport and better ways of growing food. People are becoming vegetarian in their thousands, often even vegan. Slowly we are talking about regenerating our soils, restoring nature and farming in better ways. We are thinking more about plastic, about our oceans and making our cities more sustainable and human friendly.

Financial and other organisations are changing how they do business to become much more environmentally friendly. Coal is on the way out (although the war in Ukraine may change that for a while). Huge amounts of research are underway to make our lives more nature friendly. Communities are feeling their way to a better approach to life. We are more aware of, if not yet able to change, inequality, injustice, the effects of capitalism, our sick financial systems and so much more.

Somehow though, it feels to me that there is no goal, no fixed endpoint that we can all visualize and aim for. Something that would make sense to millions of people. We are setting off to fix things, but we don’t really know where we are going. It is as if we have no picture of what this will look like.

There is talk of keeping the global temperature rise to less than 1.5 degrees C, and that this will require a 50% cut in carbon emissions by 2030. We must reach Net Zero by 2050. We must stop the decline in biodiversity and much more. All this is true, but for many individuals it is hard to imagine what this will mean.

It looks like a world of sacrifice. A world where we will give up a life we have always known.

I believe that we are making a mistake by looking at the situation this way. What we need instead is a consistent story. A new way of looking forward to the future in a positive way. A way we choose. A Pole Star to navigate by. But we cannot change from an old, discredited story unless we have a new one to replace it.

Who Will Write this New Story?

What worries me is who is writing that story?

Is it the Fossil Fuel Companies? Is it the billionaires who are desperate to try out their wonderful new technologies (umbrellas in space to reduce solar radiation, anybody?). Is it our governments who seem to have one foot in our camp and one in the “powerful people who don’t really care about us” camp? Is it the people who need lots of foreign flights a year for their holidays? Or perhaps those who drive SUVs or change their cars and electronic equipment every time something new comes out?

It needs to be us. Ordinary people who just want to get on and build a better world where we don’t need lots of stuff to make us happy and in which our children and grandchildren can have a reasonable future and we can live at peace. One in which there is more possibility of being healthy and contented. One in which we deal with the massive challenges we are facing.

Is Community the Answer?

Is it possible?

The carbon emissions will remain in the atmosphere. We have changed our climate, and we must suffer the consequences of that. However, it is still possible to create a better and more equal world if we believe in it.

George Monbiot talks of a Restoration Story, a “Politics of Belonging”, in an article on “How do we get out of this mess?”

I believe that he is right when he says that “what humans do best is to find common ground in confronting our predicaments and to unite to overcome them”.

So, what can we do?

My goal in writing this blog is to encourage people to be more active in the fight against Climate Change and all the other challenges we face. This Politics of Belonging shows a way of developing our new story that we can all be part of.

We can develop our communities: grow vegetables together, raise money for children’s playgrounds or a new football field. We can talk about local issues and how our community can fix them, build a local wind turbine, walk the children to school together instead of taking our cars, and develop a local democracy. The list is endless and the goal is to build relationships with our neighbours and through talking to strengthen our communities and to clarify how we want our new life to be.

Then tell our politicians what we want.

That is something we can all do. So yes, Another World is Possible.