So what happens next? Now that the word is officially out there regarding the certainty of disruptive climate change in our future, a great many more people are weighing in on this topic every day and they're talking about solutions involving everything from aggressive geo-engineering to blockchain technology to more aggressive deployment of green energy.
And some are even talking about the need to overhaul our global economy that currently depends on perpetual growth in a world of finite resources.
What's missing? Two things.
- There is zero talk about the urgency of curbing our exploding population as we're still adding almost a million people every four days.
- There is also no talk about a global vision for what a sustainable economy and overall living arrangement for eight or ten billion people might look like.
Where are the futuristic "architects" who must catch the vision and convert all of this vision into a set of blueprints with a realistic budget? And how many of them are even aware that actually living in harmony with nature is not possible without abolishing our
grossly unsustainable habit of
eating animals?
Can we get this done?
Although the IPCC says we've only got eleven years; in reality, we may have even less than that.
At times like these, I always harken back to the brilliant words of Dr. E.O. Wilson:
"We have enough intelligence, goodwill, generosity and enterprise to turn Earth into a paradise both for ourselves and for the biosphere that gave us birth
...
the problem is that we are an innately dysfunctional species."
So all we have to do is solve our dysfunctionality issue. No easy task for sure, but I believe the first part of Dr. Wilson's quote in that we have all the qualities we need to quickly learn to live in harmony with nature. But will we?
And do we have enough time? We're running out of the time needed to create the vast global human habitat that will not only be acceptable to Mother Nature, but as Lovelock says, may actually improve the our ecosystem.
That said, I believe that we must develop a "vision" of a global economy and lifestyle that most humans would find attractive enough to enthusiastically support.
Once we have that vision, I will borrow a few words from Dr. Stephen Emmott, who stated that, if were faced with a widely recognized civilization threatening emergency, we could easily enlist the active involvement of every scientist, engineer, university and business in the world to make that sustainable lifestyle vision a reality.
The Bottom Line. Our underlying problem is that our "civilization threatening emergency" is not recognized by enough people in power and it will very likely require
a HUGE natural disaster of epic proportion to attract the support of enough world leaders to get started in earnest.
So, as I said in last week's BSB, my moral compass says that I can only do what feels right to me, and that means continuing to share a "vision" that just might trigger more robust thinking and profound action of enough informed experts who are capable of making something like this (or much better) happen.
This envisioned AGRA solution below was described first in the 9-21-18 BSB just beneath this image.
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American Green Region Authority |
followed by this one a month later
Since then, I have posted a related BSB on this topic every single week and here are links to six of them.