Climate Change is a Conspiracy!

Had a chat yesterday afternoon with yet another business person who believes that global warming is an elaborate hoax, perpetrated by an unknown many, with purely commercial intentions, on unsuspecting world citizens.

The jury's still out on this one, admittedly. If you've installed a solar panel and you recycle, you've covered your bases to some degree anyway. Lest the oil runs out, ya'know.

FACTS

Fact is. Globalisation has enabled accurate tracking of biodiversity depletion. Arguably caused by global warming. And human interference in sensitive ecosystems (to live, mine or grow food in). Technology-driven social media is the glue that holds this open information exchange together.

Fact is. We need to produce the past 8000 years' worth of food within the next 40 years - just to feed ourselves and the animals we keep/eat (WWF stats). Global population growth is not the sole tenure of the poor - we have all lost a sense of community

Fact remains. One fifth of us eat/drink/use (in excess of) three-quarters of what's available to all humans materially, while an unlucky fifth gets a mere 1-2%, and the middle lot share the other fifth among themselves (2008 World Bank stats). There would actually be enough to keep everyone sustained and entertained, if people were less selfish.

Side-effect: enormous waste dumps. Gadgets & gizmo's, packaging, chemicals and bio-waste spilling over city borders and into the oceans. Out of sight, out of mind, right?

NUSTHELLS

 

• While Earth in only arguably warming, certainty is that counted plants/creatures are stressed to the point of extinction, and our behaviour plays a big role.This is speeding up.
• While 20% of people are flourishing and 60% are just getting by, the remaining 20% is hungry, ill and living an inhuman life on Earth. This is getting worse.
• The material habits of four-fifths of humans are causing unmanageable waste streams. This is escalating.

So. It doesn't matter which of the three broad economic groupings you find yourself in, or whether or not you feel comfortable there. What does matter, is that you wake up and smell the unhappiness, which may be external to you, but is invasive - angry voices, not to be stilled.

Unless we as a society start building a shared value construct that includes a liveable social and economic infrasctructure for our fellow living beings, the things we enslave will either die or kill us - whether these slaves be ecosystems or people.

Grow up. Life's unfair

I detest the rebuke "grow up; life's unfair" as it is scientifically anomalous. Nothing unfair lasts. Only the nourished survive. And you certainly don't find the disenfranchised believing this. Self-serving philosophies...

"Grown-ups" often shadow the nugget with "nothing lasts". Pretty fatalist from our captains of advanced humanity, neh? Dark horses chasing the material dragon for an Apocalypse that might beat the boredom of hardly contested subordination.

On being human

Every human is born with a tricky ego and selfish nature with innate manipulative skills. Every human is also born with a conscience and a capacity to love that transforms everything around them. This Yin-Yang I have witnessed first-hand since the early months of my four-year old daughter's existence.

I am middle class. Thanks to my rearing, rights to riches or insatiable material hunger do not constitute my make-up. Relatives impressed on me "soft skills" (neighbourly love, humility, a sense of community) before letting me loose in the early '90s business world, where I've spent twenty years adjusting my personal, social and economic footing to get beyond basic survival mode. Sadly, middle class citizens are often driven by a fear of being poor, or a desire to be rich, or not driven at all. My advice to the youth among us echoes the basic life skills advocated by Mahatma Ghandi, which he formulated as the "seven deadly sins":

Wealth without work, 

Pleasure without conscience

Science without humanity

Knowledge without character

Politics without principle

Commerce without morality, and 

Worship without sacrifice.

Playground antics

So if we had to apply the above to the World Bank Class of 2008 Report, where one-fifth of kids eat, drink, play with and use up just over three-quarters of all the toys on our playground, an unlucky fifth has to share 1-2% of class resources (and our our used-up stuff if they want), and the rest of the kids (60%) share the remaining 20% of resources among themselves... how would we change things?

In Sociology (the discipline heralding the age of advocated human rights and NGO aid), humans looked at each other through the trifocal lenses of habit/heritage, brain and manipulative power. Does it follow, then, that cleverer, more sexually astute people (at least in terms of reproduction) are just harder working and better able to navigate nature's ravages? Hardly. Art, history, psychology and literature tell a very different story.

Spread the word

It doesn't matter which kid you are, or what you believe is right or wrong. What matters, is that you see things as they are - not as they should or could be - and share this knowledge freely.

We are taught from a young age that the tree be known by its fruit. If the current state of inequality and competition between people and natural systems is causing decay instead of improvement, my question remains: what is the price of comfort for a few?