It's not poor pathetic nature. It does whatever, whenever, with all the patience in the world. It's poor us, spoiling paradise, burning home.

Excerpt from Four Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle (1987)

 

 

Economic growth is only partly progress.

Another often larger part of it is just turning stuff that's not counting into stuff that's counting... It's gotten strange. Future, communities, nature and health are turned into just another show off car on an even bigger pavement in front of an even kitschier house. Life is submitted to decadence and greed. Life is butchered and packaged. We're in the big sellout age, an age that promises to be shorter than any age before, and we decide if it stops through (social) innovation or through collapse.

Humans are awesome. But not the current regime that tries to raise us as consumption-hungry gluttonous sheepish weak entitled mean individuals. More and more we see the IRREVERSIBLE DESTRUCTION of ONCE ETERNAL THINGS for a few quickly-spent dollars more.

By turning godly mountains into apocalyptic mine pits, forever, for five years a few blokes can display their undriveable amount of Lamborghinis and Bentleys in front of their mansion. Showoff cars are much more common than lasting investments in progress (through science, health and environment protection, sensible production, quality housing,..).

Death is good for economy. And sickness too. But life ain't.

 

 

 

 

And one day nature will collect the debt.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Now to the crisis that is brewing in the heart of international stability and welfare: the biodiversity crisis and CLIMATE DISRUPTION:

 

 

A forecast for the future is shown by figure 1 of the IPCC's AR6 Synthesis Report.

A forecast of the worldwide geographically-varying impact is shown by the Probable Futures maps.

The time of Cleopatra is closer to now than it is to the building of the pyramids of Gizeh, which was more than 2.000 years prior to her. Times are changing fast. Will humanity still last another two thousand years just like that? We can't possibly sustain our careless large-scale impact? We can't just continue this brutal shit show like the world is over anyway next week?

We need to act..

And we can:

 

It's not all so very bad. After scientists rang the alarm on our impact on the Ozone layer, governments came into action with the Montreal Protocol. Years later, thanks to international cooperation and action, the Ozon layer above Antarctica is well on its way to recover.

But something's got to happen here. The climate disruption we're seeing now has been building up since a longer while, and it will affect all aspects of daily life, setting in motion many feedback systems. Mitigation and adaptation are key. The IPCC elaborated this very convincingly over many years. The U.N. and the European Commission made climate action a clear urgent objective.

Yet somewhere it all goes wrong and strands into inaction and misaction, not getting very far beyond greenwashing efforts and narrow-minded fairytales of purely symptom-oriented techno-arrogance that's not backed by science. Why is it so hard, if governments internationally did manage to act so gloriously on the ozon-destroying CFCs?

Governments managed to lock us up during the Covid crisis and spend astronomic amounts of money. These draconic measures are not needed to avert the climate world crisis. Actually we can do a lot as a society.. but the will is not there.

 

Why is it so hard to act on this crisis? ... the most urgent of all!

The self-serving elite strategically manages our beliefs and aspirations. It decides what the majority thinks is important. It's a religion.

To act on CFC's, a big public interest outweighed a limited elite private interest.

To act on Covid, the elite even benefitted greatly.

But to act on CH4, CO2, land use change... It doesn't weigh up. The global public interest yet doesn't outweigh the private interest of a group of elite. So all action is thwarted, principally in our minds even more than in the actual politics. In a democracy you have to possess the minds of people, not just the politicians.

They tell us that we hinder industry with all our care. We're suffocating but a very little voice somehere else in the big body that humanity is, it says we've got to keep binging on caviar and oysters, although the stomach is full and we're out of air.

For their hegemony, the power-craving elite relies on cultivating and nurturing injustice, cruelty, stupidity and irrelevance. The current socio-commercial regime works through media, sport sponsoring, influencers, paid narratives, spatial planning, expensive lawyers, Stockholm-syndrome 'job creation', etc..

It preaches consumerism and single-mindedness. And it teaches us that society's supreme heroes are commercial billionaires. Gambling man. The extremely rich are treated like inventors though they never invented anything. They're treated like prophets though they have no clue about daily life outside of their gold-foiled bubble. One day in real life and they would fizzle away instantly. They won a money game where they could start with 30 dice more. So?

The Western dream is held out in front of us: living in a cube, having a car that says we've got it made, surrounded by concrete. And all this should be as privatized as possible. And there we are: so proud of the coffee machine we bought in olive wood version. And our wildest dream is having more furniture in olive wood.

I am raised in this system too. So I too know exactly who Steve Jobs is, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, but I don't know about Ken Saro-Wiwa, Mbaye Diagne, Wangari Maathai, Binalakshmi Nepram, Sunitha Krishnan, Robert Bilott, Nicholas Winton, Harriet Tubman, Omkar Nath Sharma...

We're taught to be good consumers. We're taught that numbers always come first. We're taught that we have to be better than others, all on a unilinear scale. As Oscar Wilde predicted we know the price of everything and the value of nothing.

We're taught to take things for granted. Knock down the moas around us like they'll be here forever.

Our exploitive society, ran by powercravers, has come to live a life of its own and now breeds loneliness, sourness and small- and narrow-mindedness.

We are often told that we need the workings of greed as they make society move. But we're tricked. Of course it's true that we need the elite's greed, when the elite is given full ownership of all the important means and assets in society,... But the importance of what they own doesn't legitimize that ownership and status, that's circular reasoning..

 

 

This exclusive transport mode is heavily subsidized with taxpayer-money (see this report to the European Parliament).

We need new power balances, less based on old accumulated money.

 

 

Conclusion: Do we want more billionaires? Or more polar bears?:

 

 

Polar bears are endangered by climate disruption. The big northern icy part of the world might become empty, made boring by botox-faced moneyjunks who are in power in a world dominated by a money-religion that revolves around

• consumerism
• laissez-faire politics which have little to do with the free market principles of Adam Smith
• immoral influential rich supported by tax-money, they take a lot and give only diverse kinds of relatively-small bribes (a football club, a newspaper, a local development,...) and avoid real giving-back by offshore constructions (Panama Papers, etc.., etc...).

The goldeaters block change because it doesn't serve them. It doesn't serve their luxury car collection. It only serves our children, the world, polar bears and our future.

Yet we can make a change by contesting the culprit structural power relations... Excessive private wealth can't occupy our minds.