Today’s post is by regular contributor, Richard Jurin. Before his retirement, Richard led the Environmental Studies programme at the University of Northern Colorado, where he launched a degree in Sustainability Studies. His academic interests are environmental worldviews and understanding barriers to sustainability. As ever, with our blogs, the views expressed are not necessarily shared by NAEE.
I began this series of posts talking about 5 items that I feel are an essential start to creating a sustainable world – the basics needed to transform the world starting from a localized and grassroots framework. I meet so many people that believe that education will transform the failing global systems. Sadly, I conclude that no amount of education will transform the existing global system. Can education work? I believe it already has! We have done a great job getting the word out. Billions worldwide are completely aware of the myriad ecological issues and problems and why they exist. While environmental and ecological knowledge varies from broad awareness to deeper understanding of systems, we can be proud of the work already done to prepare the global population to live sustainably. What stops us cold is persisting in the belief that somehow the powers-that-be, which control the current global systems, will change it all for us. I conclude that they will not, or cannot, adapt to the necessary socio-cultural changes needed to build a world that lives sustainably. The current set of beliefs and values inherent within a worldview of hedonistic-materialism is completely incompatible with a worldview required for a sustainable future.
Nearly everyone knows that the current global market economic system is primarily responsible for all of our socio-economic-ecological problems. What people need is hope in a path that can actually make the changes needed. We have persisted for decades in watching the endless meetings of elite hierarchical groups like the World Economic Forums (Davos), The Club of Rome, The Bilderberg Group, or the United Nations hosted Conference of the Parties (COPs), the results of which clearly show how ineffectual this leadership is in creating lasting change. While there have been some successes over the past half century, the overall ecological state of the world remains unchanged, and if anything, shows that ecological problems are accelerating, not abating as more of the developing countries aspire to live with the same worldview as developed countries caught up in this hedonistic material-consumerist worldview.
American philosopher, futurist, and self-described social engineer, Jacque Fresco. like so many visionaries, saw the future that the global Hierarchies would guide us to if we didn’t make big changes at the local level. He said we are “…wasting energy fighting for rights in broken systems.” His solution? “Stop patching the cracks and rebuild society from the ground up with equality built into the foundation.”
Hence you arrive at my solution of the five basic items for transformation. As a self-proclaimed ‘sustainabilitist,’ I have pondered this for a great many years. We need hope and a path forward that gives us true connection at the community level all the way to the global ecological level. My five items offer a way to deconstruct within the system while transforming it to reconstruct a better world system. People FEAR change, especially when the deeply entrenched path follows a deep RUT, which is one we know, even if it doesn’t work. We keep hoping the hierarchical system will change – why will it? It’s designed to be socio-pathological and exploitative of both people and the natural world.
To briefly recap my five items of change at the local level. It is not a bulleted list that most bureaucrats always want, but a guide to things to aspire towards that promote changes needed. We have done a great job of educating for items 4 and 5, and are readily capable of doing them at the local level whenever we decide that time is ready – which is now. Yet, we are reluctant to tackle the first 3 items on my list that I believe are required to create a sustainable future.
Item number one: Mindfulness. We must start being mindful and conscious of every thought and action. We are conditioned to conflate Standard of Living (material acquisitions) with Quality of Life (what makes life worth living). This is the easiest and yet most difficult hurdle – changing our worldview to reflect compassion and collaboration as we work with each other and the natural world. This is a spiritual transformation in which connectedness is a primary factor – becoming ECO-centric humans instead of ego-centric ones.
Item number two: New Economics. The market economy is but one example of how economics can function, but the global financiers that control this specific market, also control its rules that do not work for a sustainable future – and all markets have rules – there is no reality called a free market. Tweaking the rules cannot change this market model since its goals of endless growth are incompatible with true sustainability. Since the 1980s, the world has been caught up in a whirlwind of economic transformation called ‘Globalization.’ While it has had many benefits, one major consequence has been the erosion of local economic systems, knowledge, and supply chains as transnational corporations have increasingly monopolized everything in our lives (e.g., The Walmart Effect).
Item number three: New Metrics: Redefine what success means for you, your family and your community (or what remains of it). Only by focusing on quality-of-life issues that we embrace can we start creating new models of economics that maintain a good standard of living, but promote a higher and equitable quality of life for all humanity that encompasses a new kind of morality including the natural world that sustains life.
Item number four: Food resiliency. This is important since true resilience means creative thinking about how communities regenerate themselves for self-sufficiency. Food is the number one aspect.
Item number five: Energy resiliency. Our lives revolve around technology that uses energy, and we need to control it at the local level. AI driven technology can assist in controlling the energy. I personally have concerns about AI when it is used as a creative aspect beyond human creativity. I do find that AI has many advantages when it is used as a management tool, such as controlling the power systems within a localized energy generation system.
As educators we are fully aware of the battle for peoples’ attention in a media circus driven by global mega-corporate media systems. Scholars of media, law, economics, and many other disciplines, have documented the results of globalized control of information – fragmented media ecosystems that intensify polarization, separation, and compliance with corporate thinking that continue to wage destruction on the planet to maintain profits over everything else. Disinformation spreads not because people are uninformed, but because emotionally charged narratives travel faster than verified ones. The result is exhaustion rather than persuasion. When citizens stop trusting any source, they stop demanding consistency from the powers-that-be.
We localize and collaborate neighborhood by neighborhood, and spread a new worldview region by region, all the while deconstructing the old as we rebuild the new. This is not a simple pledge-money to a cause, but a commitment to create a sustainable world from the wreck of the old. All of us are the ones we are waiting for. If we do not create the change, do not be surprised at the ‘Brave New World’ that the global Powers-that-be are currently leading us into.
“The planet doesn’t care about your political beliefs. The laws of nature don’t bend to human stubbornness. Either we adapt to a world without endless extraction, pollution, and destruction, or nature will remind us that we are not in control” Powwows.com.
Richard can be contacted at: richardjurin@gmail.com