IMAGINE THAT YOUR EVERY ACTION IMPACTS PEOPLE + THE PLANET. EACH TINY STEP TOWARD SUSTAINABILITY HELPS. THE MORE WE KNOW THE LESS WE NEED.

We all both love and fear change.

We need new experiences, crave new things and search out new information. But we fear changes that force us to alter our habits or our habitual thinking. And we ignore, deny or fail to notice changes that threaten our mindsets, world views and self-images.

But we have readily adapted ...

to a universe of changes, more in a week than our grandparents saw in a year, more than their grandparents saw in a generation. The young among us see the pace of change as normal. We who are older see the speed of change as revolutionary and scary. We feel powerless to affect or keep up with the changes. Or we pretend not to notice or care. And if we had had the foresight to anticipate the side effects, we would have questioned many of those changes, adapted to them more slowly or rejected them outright.

We arranged our living space around the TV screen.

We redesigned the city, the landscape and our daily schedules for the automobile, and we now rely on our vehicles to help define who we are. We adapted to the idea that nuclear war is or was a distinct possibility. We are slow to adapt to the idea that we are seriously damaging the planet. Now, as McLuhan would say, we've adapted our nervous systems to an electronic web that links us into some kind of global consciousness. Yet we are clueless about what that adaptation will mean in the long run.

So now, both because of and in spite of all that change, we wake to see we're way behind the curve.

Fifty years late and fifty trillion dollars short.

The industrial, monetized world we have built has developed its own momentum. It speeds headlong toward its own goals. We see the devastation in its wake all around us, but we've come to accept it as the normal cost of progress. And simultaneously we seem to have accepted the idea that we have no control over it.

But our control, like our reality, happens here and now.

Every decision, creative action, sudden shock and insight happens in "real time." We can't go back and undo the damage done yesterday, but we can begin to correct it today. We can't jump ahead to peaceful resolution, but we can imagine it and take small steps toward it right now. Today.

Radicals on the right and left ...

have said that every decision is political, or moral, reflecting or ignoring some kind of responsibility or personal commitment. Political power is also expressed in the understanding that every decision is also economic and ecological.

With every purchase and the "disposal" of every item of waste, we participate in or reject an economy that is built on war, waste and deception. With every menu and fashion choice we consider or ignore the impact on the planet.

When we say we have to be prepared to re-think everything, it means we have to pause and take a step back every time we invest our time and energy in work, every time we choose to spend dollars on anything in the market. This is no small task. But it is no small, localized or temporary catastrophe that we are trying to forestall, one small decision at a time.

We can be intimidated, even overwhelmed by the idea that we have to re-think an entire set of assumptions about how the world works. We can have a knee-jerk response and refuse to give up a level of comfort and consumption that we somehow think we deserve. Even when we haven't seriously looked at the hidden costs of that lifestyle, or imagined what the other options are.

Or we can feel the exhilaration, the real revolutionary spirit in participating in, contributing to, and eventually enjoying the benefits of a growing movement for a sustainable economy and a planet in recovery.

THE RECKONING ...

... will be the realization that small changes are easy, invigorating and satisfying, and that they add up.

We'll never know unless we try...

that change is easier and more creative than whatever we are worrying about, whatever preconceptions we cling to. We won't know unless we try, what it's like to live with a different sense of our relationship with the rest of humanity and with the living planet. We won't understand until we experience it, what it's like to trade in this lemon economy, based only on money, possessions and consumption, for a green model based on human rights and a natural balance.

A few small changes, in each individual's practices, every week or month, in a decade will add up to a society living by different rules. It will mean an economy with less waste, more free time, better work and working conditions, better education and less fear. Better health care and a higher quality of life. We can't imagine getting there in small steps, cooperatively. But when we get there we will be amazed how easy it was, and how much better our lives are in a world that has been made so much safer and more sustainable.

The satisfaction, knowing we are leaving the next generation with a world better tuned to their survival than the one we inherited, will be overwhelming.

So think local and act local and know that tiny decisions will build and combine with the acts of others, and will accumulate into a different kind of civilization.

In any given day or week, make one small change. Things that seem trivial. Conserve. Water, light, heat, fuel, food. Ask yourself with every purchase, "do I need this or merely want it?" "Is there a more efficient way to get it?" With every act of "throwing something away, realize it doesn't go "away," it just moves to another part of the planet.

And then in every new week or month, make one more small change and stick with it, build it into a new way of looking at the world and your relationship with the planet. You are redefining your role, from the role of an uncritical consumer, to a role of partner with the rest of the species, living in balance with the earth.

Eat less meat. Cook at home more.

As Michael Pollan says, stop eating "food-like substances" and eat food, real food. Don't buy edible products that use excessive packaging or that have more than five ingredients. Buy local. Eat more healthy food until you notice how much better it makes you feel, physically and mentally.

Reinvest your time.

Walking, biking, using public transportation takes longer but gives you a different perspective on and identity in the world.

Expand your mind.

Learn something new. Build new skills. Learning new things, at any age, is an investment in your own wealth, confidence and autonomy. Practice thinking differently for its own sake.

Rethink work.

Work at something you love. The lower pay will be balanced by lower stress and greater satisfaction. Get involved in anything that connects you with new people, gives something back to your community, makes you think differently. Notice how much plastic you throw "away." Don't ever buy anything that is advertised. You pay the "advertising tax" and you only encourage them.

Turn off the TV. Get away from the internet. Test yourself on your levels of addiction: to driving, to being distracted, to being in a hurry, to any piece of technology. Bring your attention to notice how each tool, every man-made article extends some part of your mind or body into the world, how it gives you power, and how it changes you and the patterns of your daily life. Realize that every technology has hidden costs, unintended negative consequences. Uncerstand that every new tool forces you to adapt in ways that you don't notice until it has become difficult to change back.

Recreate something from your past. Do something a different way. Transform tasks you think are boring by really focussing on them and doing them in a more creative way. Observe and admit that you appreciate your own creativity doing things no one else notices or thinks of as creative.

Write a journal. Make notes of everything you like and dislike about the changes you think you face. Write down your own best and worst case scenarios, for your life and for the future of the planet.

It is within our reach.

Everything we need to build it, to get there, to move in and adapt to a sustainable world. All the knowledge, technology investment, resources. Except, at the moment, the vision and the political will. But that too is changing. Isn't it? You decide.

 

HOW WAS WEALTH “DISTRIBUTED” IN THE FIRST PLACE? ECO-DAMAGE + POVERTY = GLOBAL BANK. IT’S A DEBT COME DUE. TOTAL GLOBAL REPARATION.

The "Conceptual Emergency"

affects us all at both local and global levels. It's nearly impossible for any one of us to wrap our head around the complexity of the situation. It's hard for us to imagine the delicacy of the balances that comprise the biosphere or the billions of years it took for those living balances to evolve. It's a huge mental stretch to think of the speed and momentum of the global industrial machine, or to imagine how to slow that momentum or change its direction.

Imagine this.

It will take a global consensus on the gravity of the crisis. And it will take a global vision of the economic imbalances that are both the cause and the product of the catastrophe. And then it will take a dynamic global information network (I think that one is pretty much in place) and a global, participatory, informed democracy to outline and then implement the essential, inevitable " .. revolutionary change in the distribution of economic power." Those words were spoken in 1968, by Martin Luther King, a week before he was murdered.

THE RECKONING ...

... will come when somebody does the "global math." Please prove me wrong. I'll wrap it up and go away. It is possible to calculate the total accumulated wealth in the world: the value of property held, the quantity of cash invested in various stocks, bonds, derivatives and default swaps. The money sitting in bank accounts. The money and other value lost in crime, waste, war and a grossly inflated fake economy. It will be in the thousands of trillions of dollars. This figure represents one side of an equation.

Then add this up.

Start with the long term total cost of the Gulf Spill. Add the costs of cleaning up the thousands of other "superfund" type sites that global corporations have left in the wake of their mindless greed. Calculate the other hidden, deferred and "externalized" toxic costs of oil wells, coal mines, "fracked" gas wells and tar sands projects. Add in the hidden costs in the industrial food system: deforestation and greenhouse gasses from factory farming, chemical fertilizers and pesticides, plastic waste, the overuse of hormones and antibiotics.

Now calculate and add in the costs of global poverty: the legacy of slavery, the damage to the health and lives of human beings, and the cost of the loss of their creativity. Include the costs in human suffering of inadequate water, shelter, food, education and health care experienced by a quarter of the global population, plus the costs of "normal" poverty in the developed and developing countries. This figure represents the cost of the poverty created by centuries of crimes, by the abusive powerful, on the weak and the poor.

Now contrast and compare. On one side the total wealth of the world. On the other the costs in human suffering and environmental destruction.

A zero sum theory assumes and predicts ...

that the two sides of the equation are nearly equal. Within some variables, margins of error, adjusted cash value, interest, the estimated value of ecosystems destroyed; the total accumulated wealth of the world will be shown to be roughly equal to the total devastation, to humans and the planet.

Price v. Cost

The economy has been rigged ...

in different ways at different times. Partly with willful, greedy intent, partly by accident and coincidence, partly through "unconscious conspiracies" and partly by a kind of structural evolution. One way is in the difference between the cash price of any man-made thing, and the hidden, deferred and "externalized" costs, of its manufacture, use and disposal. For example, the environmental cost of the typical American $4. hamburger is over $100. The actual environmental cost of a $3. gallon of gasoline is something upwards of $20. Per gallon. The environmental cost of "free" plastic bags, packaging and "disposable" pens for example is probably high enough to force them off the low-price but high-cost market.

The reverse trend is already happening.

Europe has started a more radical re-regulating of its financial industry. The U.S. congress has raised the cap on oil company liability. A whole host of environmental initiatives are going to be funded by carbon taxes, fines on toxic corporate practices, and by progressively higher taxes on big incomes, huge inheritances, held wealth, toxic investments (both economically and ecologically toxic), and on a completely different corporate tax structure, which will eliminate tax evasion, off-shore havens and accounting fraud.

Investment in the green economy will be heavily incentivized and investment in, and profit from, toxic industries will be regulated out of existence.

When global trade is re-regulated on principles of human rights, real efficiency, sustainable agriculture and "cradle to cradle" design, a different world will suddenly just happen. What was unimagined and believed impossible will emerge as a natural outcome of a new intelligence, a global culture rising to the next level of civilization.

When the completely unnecessary costs of war, crime and waste are calculated and then eliminated, the real economy will suddenly begin to flourish in an unprecedented manner. When deceptive and manipulative advertising and self-censorship in the commercial media is ended, democracy and the knowledge to run it will redefine the future. When the rigging is dismantled, the back room emptied, the waste controlled and the illusions of the fake economy exploded, the real economy will present an entirely different set of options, careers, investments, industries, the cost of living and the quality of life.

There's another "zero-sum" equation, a different way of understanding the balance. The hundreds of trillions of monies held in secret Swiss banks, the fortunes gambled in global market casino, and the cash extracted from the financial "services" balloon, represents exactly the investment needed to turn the world's economy around. But that turn-around will not happen voluntarily, because it is protected by the power of wealth over democracy, the fear, among the ruling class of the loss of either real or symbolic power.

Neither the informed individual mind nor the representative government seems capable of a realistic mental picture of how we got here, how bad the reality is or what are the first steps back from the brink.

The global financial system, most of which falls into line with the U.S. model, cannot survive. It will collapse under the false premises and obsolete mindsets that define this unprecedented tipping point. The system has been rigged for at least 150 years to suck the life out of the planet and cheap labor out of humanity, and to convert them to waste and profit (zero sum), as fast as possible.

Look at how the financial crisis revealed the fact. The profits from wild speculation are privatized, banked, hidden and protected, but the risks, of fraud, deceit and collapse of the ballon are "socialized," borne by the taxpayers.

It is only a pathological greed, the active face of an unconscious fear, that needs that wealth as a sign of symbolic power. It's purpose is not to reinvest or create anything new or of value, but only to multiply its own abstract numbers, for the unconscious need for an illusion of superiority.

Yes, the wealth of the world WAS created through invention, initiative, the entrepreneurial spirit, efficiency and competition. But it has also required the exploitation of slave labor and cheap labor, access to cheap and stolen resources, waste, war, and the belief the earth is a bottomless toilet, landfill and dumpsite.

Much as we promote the ideal of democracy, kept on track by an open information system and an informed public, we can't quite picture that any people or government can define the problem, agree on the definition, imagine a solution, or begin to act within a decade. While the devastation hits a new high every couple of months.

The "zero sum" equations listed above - eco-damage + poverty + global bank; profit = waste; held wealth = investment needed - must be seen as a debt come due. Copenhagen and activists in the global south have started to use the term "climate debt." "Global commons" and "environmental justice" have entered the lexicon.

The Reckoning is three things:

a realization of the severity of the crisis, a coming to terms with the causes and the essential remedies, and settling of accounts. The settling of accounts will be based on the "zero sum." I call it Total Global Reparation.

The only issue to be determined,

by democratic choice or by necessity, is how that wealth will be quickly reinvested: by the obvious dictate of shared human pragmatism and the image of an egalitarian civilization, by reframing the obligations and responsibilities inherent in held wealth, by persuasion, by choice, by regulation, by decree or by class war and revolution. Better to start with a quantum jump in mental perspective and keep the whole thing civilized.