The Race For Survival is On!
So here we all are, participating - the majority of us unknowingly - in the most challenging race we’ve ever faced as a civilisation, whether we like it or not.
So tell me, what race is that Mr Doomsday (as my wife so sensitively calls me)?
It’s the race between environmental meltdown and the evolution of human consciousness.
The question is can we raise our consciousness quickly enough to change our behaviour and avoid environmental collapse?
Surely "Environmental Meltdown" Is An Exaggeration?
Well this is one of the paradoxes of the current situation.
If you live in an OECD country, have a reasonable family income and own your own home or part of it at least, basically you’ve never had it so good.
You’re living a lifestyle that has previously only been available to the extremely rich and privileged for more than 99.9% of the time human civilisation has existed.
Everything looks fine. You drive a car, take a plane, catch a train, buy food from the supermarket, watch TV, takes the kids to sport, do the chores, go out and see friends and family . . . .
So what’s the problem?
The problem is our current civilisation is like a house that is infested by termites, or sitting on crumbling foundations. On the surface everything looks fine, but if you look underneath everything is falling apart.
The reality is that the consumption that goes along with the average western lifestyle and the hundreds of millions of aspiring third world citizens who want the same lifestyle, is wholly environmentally unsustainable on a global scale.
And it’s unsustainable right here, right now, not in some vague far off century, or maybe for our grandchildren, or perhaps 2070 when the temperature "might rise between 2 and 4 degrees".
Simply put, 6.5 Billion people living the way we are is killing the planet.
Basically oil is being used as a short term supercharger to raise the output of the planet beyond its natural, normal limits. Oil is used as:
- a short term fertility booster (at the price of long term, soil fertility loss)
- energy source (heating, cooling, lighting, lifting, digging, etc)
- a transportation enabler so our society can run at a faster pace aka "just in time"
- a key raw material.
Unsustainable Civilisation
Specifically, we’re:
- reproducing too much (overpopulation)
- consuming too much,
- destroying too much arable land with poor farming practices, especially losing too much topsoil,
- cutting down too many trees,
- using too much oil and othe rnon-renewable resources, (see peak oil)
- producing too much waste and pollution, pesticides and toxic wastes
- driving too many other species to extinction
- disrupting and destroying too many eco systems in a whole variety of ways with "development"
- taking too many fish
- and so on and so on.
You see when you look under the surface of our technologically quite-advanced civilisation, it really has very simple foundations. We’re biological beings and if enough stuff doesn’t grow to eat or sustain the biological infrastructure (aka the environment), then we die.
In human history, every other civilisation that has faced resource constraints has collapsed in short order.
The Role Of Belief Systems
My view is our civilisation’s challenges revolve around entrenched, dysfunctional (from a sustainability viewpoint) belief systems and a low level of consciousness i.e. stuck mostly at the egocentric level.
- economic growth, consumption and profits are the things that really count and these have priority over a sustainable environment,
- they have to grab as much stuff/ resource/money etc as they can and
- their particular God/society/country is the only one true God/society/country and they’ll kill you if necessary to prove it
The big (or more accurately massive) catch to this is that the necessary change looks very unlikely right now and even if it were made tomorrow, there’s a huge imbalance to correct before we get back to sustainability.
However, some spiritual masters do assert that global consciousness is in fact at a tipping point and is about to move to the next development stage. Hell, I hope so, time is fast running out.
So why don’t "they" do something about it?
Because there are no easy answers and our political and societal systems are set up for one paradigm - growth, consumption and profit. Nobody gets and stays elected for telling peope what they can’t have or do. The illusion of endless growth and limitless consumption being sustainable when it patently isn’t has to be maintained.
Sustainability is still clearly way down the priority list once you look at what the actual actions of most governments and businesses. On the other hand the reality is that the environment’s ability to supply food and resources is finite - there is a limit to what it can provide and still survive longterm and all the signs are we’ve probably already gone past that limit.
We’re eating up the envitronment - our biological capital - just to feed, house and clothe the 6.5B people on the planet. Every year there’s less productive land, more topsoil lost, more species driven to extinction.
Important Note:
This stuff is not in any way easy to deal with. After all, if you children you want them to have a good life too.
This type of material only rarely appears in the mainstream press, because there are no easy answers.
Our political and societal systems are not set up for sustainability and it’s likely many governments and people won’t be willing to face up to reality until is it too late to put ordered plans in place and it will then become a question of raw survival.
So What Can You Do?
1. Do what you can to promote a change in consciousness - part of that is just being the change e.g. being congruent with sustainability, raising your own consciousness (which automatically helps those around you).
2. Take steps towards sustainable living, by limiting or preferably reduce your consumption (which is surprisingly easy once you set your mind to it).
What Do You Mean Domestic Survival?
I think there are several major short term issues looming:
1. Constraints on oil availability due to peak oil (our economy, agriculture and social infrastructure are wholly dependent on oil as a raw material and for cheap, portable energy).
2. The related competition between food and biofuels or food vs mobility (prices have already risen considerably on basic foodstuffs because of this).
3. Environmental degradation e.g. water scarcity combined with loss of topsoil and forest cover which will affect our ability to grow enough food to feed ourselves (and is more dangerous than climate change in the short term).
So make your plans for how you are going to cope with the probable changes in living conditions in the years to come, especially learn how to grow your own food
Site Organisation and Layout:
After each topic there’s a set of suggested actions you can take or research.
Good luck! :-)
And The Point Of This Site Is . . . ?
To cause you to stop and think and ask yourself:
"If this is actually true what can I do to make a difference?"
