IF WE CAN’T IMAGINE A BEST CASE SCENARIO OR A PATH TO GET THERE, CREATING A BETTER WORLD WILL REMAIN IMPOSSIBLE.    

Everything we need to manage ...

the crisis is present and available: technology, money, knowledge, imagination and expertise. We lack only the vision and the political will: a shared belief the crisis is critically important, and the political power to make timely decisions and take action. The only stumbling blocks in our path are the mindsets, blind spots and denial that prevent us from imagining the possibilities.

Artists are visionaries, McLuhan

told us. They are prescient in their ability to clearly see the present moment. Hence an aptitude for foresee the future. Other thinkers agree and include poets and scientists.

Artists and scientists can see and understand subtle patterns in the present moment that most of the rest of us don’t see, patterns that point to emerging trends. They do this from multiple points of view and for very different objectives. They are able to set aside their assumptions and preconceptions and view the present without shadows and biases cast by the past. They don’t assume the future will be much like the past. They see the dynamic possibilities for change and discovery in every moment.

On one hand, history is critical.

Steven Colbert’s ironic character makes a great joke, “My next guest believes that those who fail to remember history are … something, something, something.”

At this millennial tipping point the lessons of history have never been more urgent. But at this same moment the information environment has become dense and fragmented, and our attention spans have shrunk. We've nearly lost the thinking skills to see where we are and imagine where we want to go. The lessons of the Titanic, of Viet Nam, of the environmental movement that has been ignored for sixty years: offer us deep insights into the dilemma of the moment, but we’ve forgotten how to make the connections.

This is in part the legacy of a government and a people who have been operating for thirty years on

obsolete worldviews,

narrow thinking and a stifled public conversation. Most blatantly it is the blowback of an administration that could not question its assumptions or imagine being wrong.

On the other hand, history lessons are not enough, even when they are accurately applied. It is also critically important to see the present and imagine the near future unconstrained by yesterday’s image of what is possible. When we use only what we know about the past to see the present or anticipate the future, we will miss the clues, the emerging patterns that will make the future very different from the past.

This paradox lies at the core ...

of creative thinking, imagination, invention and insight. And it’s a powerful clue to “different thinking.” Flexible thinking has the power to remember history and bring it to bear in present context, yet, simultaneously to see the present moment clearly and to imagine a spectrum of possibilities. It has the ability to shift its attention, examine and question assumptions, observe the present moment through mental lenses both complex and simple, in both fine detail and wide-angle views. Artists and scientists develop the mental skills to: “zoom in on the problem” or “take a step back,” “look at it from a different point of view,” “imagine what we ‘know’ is dead wrong,” “speculate that an obvious answer is staring us in the face, hidden only by our preconceptions and ‘groupthink’." Many artists, scientists and inventors look to their dreams and their half-waking reveries for clues. They train themselves to questions assumptions and imagine possibilities. And they believe in training and using their intuition.

To question, or even “observe” our thinking we have to use a different “level” of thinking. You can’t think outside the box unless you notice there is a box. Thinking inside the box can seem perfectly correct until something smashes a hole in the box and reveals the different thinking world outside.

THE RECKONING ...

... will be a true awakening, not only to the possibility, but to the absolute necessity of a making a different world. We in the U.S. will come to terms with the fact that we have no choice but to bring our lifestyle into balance with the earth and the rest of humanity. Then the path to that world will become crystal clear. We will understand that living in harmony with the rest of the world means completely re-balancing our economy. We will see that we can live much more modestly and simply and peacefully and after all have a better quality of life.

We have everything we need.

There is enough food, land and food technology to feed everyone, if we simply plan better and produce food in a clean, sustainable manner. Available technology can bring fresh clean water to the hundreds of millions who don’t have it. We can reduce child mortality and disease simply by redirecting a fraction of our defense spending. Universal education and health care will help to stabilize our numbers, and can help us get to zero population growth. The next phase of civilization, assuming there is one, will be notable for initiating disarmament. War has a terrible environmental impact. It’s a waste of intelligence, material and lives. When we recognize the primitive, unconscious urges that lead us to consume and destroy beyond all reason, we will slow and then stop those suicidal practices.

Imagine a revitalized real economy, one in which the fake economy is reassigned to support it. Think about a shift away from a global economy organized around war, waste and deception. Such a move will allow us to imagine a different economic structure where the same amount of wealth creates limited economic growth, while it expands a modest and sustainable quality of life, leading to modest prosperity for everyone. When we in the U.S. abandon alienation and materialism as high cultural values, we will be able to appreciate the experiences and the qualities of life that are really at the core of our values and our ideals: peace, justice, equality, health, learning, self-realization.

Amidst all the bad news, and in spite of the worst case scenarios, there are hundreds if not thousands of localized success stories and innovations that can quickly scale up to fight the crisis and benefit the health of the ecosystem, one region or resource at a time.

EXAMPLES:

Giant kites are engineered to float in the upper atmosphere, carrying arrays of large wind turbines which will send clean electrical power to the ground. The Dutch have found a way to burn trash, generate heat and electricity and emit near zero, or actual zero airborne pollutants.

Battery technology, electric cars and the expansion of public transportation can put a huge dent in CO2 pollution from transportation.

Regulations on the destructive practices of industrial agriculture can have enormous environmental and health benefits: from reducing antibiotics, methane and waste pollution in the meat industry to limiting the practice of monoculture, and the over-use of pesticides and chemical fertilizers in farming.

Trade agreements that were designed by and for international corporations, can and will be rewritten, as will corporate charters. The revisions will mandate that corporations and trade agreements prioritize benefits to the public and the work force, to efficiency and to sustainable practices across the globe.

But we have yet to focus on one of the biggest and easiest strategies to begin to turn the global eco-crisis around: conservation. We in the U.S. waste a quarter of our food and large percentages (50%-90%) of our fossil fuel and water. If we address this as the moral equivalent of war, as Al Gore and others have suggested, we could cut wasteful consumption to less than half in a decade, simply by conserving, recycling and reusing more.

ZERO SUM

The vast accumulated wealth in the world is one side of an equation. It represents the biggest gap between rich and poor in human history, and it multiplies regularly, even in recessions. The other side of the equation is poverty and starvation, plus the legacy of slavery and cheap labor, plus the trillions in damage to the environment. It’s time to understand this equation, the injustice inherent in it, and come up with a new equation. This “zero sum” argument leads to regulations and tax policy that will shrink the fake economy and incentivize investment in the green industrial revolution.

RE-IMAGINE THE FUTURE

Utopia may the only option. Utopian visions have become taboo. On one hand we are in various stages of denial. We don’t want to think about how bad it could be. It IS scary. It WILL force us to change in ways that sound threatening. But we are also cynical, jaded, short on hope or imagination, unable to imagine best case scenarios.

We must imagine a world ...

much like the one we inhabit, but with a completely different circulatory system for money. It will quite possibly be a world with better food, cheaper shelter, better health care and education, better work, even better sports and entertainment.

Envision a world with nobody homeless and nobody wasting vast fortunes and resources. Imagine quality of life being defined in terms of honest work, honest wages and an educated public. The Berkeley bumper sticker happens to be true:

THE MORE WE KNOW
THE LESS WE NEED

We have to imagine the fake economy being dragged into the daylight, deconstructed and reorganized on the principles of efficiency, sustainable investment and development, and justice.

Living in harmony with our fellow humans, in balance with nature, need not be a ridiculous utopian fantasy. It may be our only choice. Let’s imagine it happening, plot a course and decide to get there as fast as possible.

IF WE CAN’T IMAGINE A WORST CASE SCENARIO, WE WON’T BE ABLE TO PREVENT IT. IN FACT WE'LL HELP MAKE IT INEVITABLE. 

We think of “Climate Change” as one problem among many,

of greater or lesser importance, some related to the environment, some not. And we tend to think about and try to fix one isolated crisis at a time. Is health care more important than jobs? Is the environment less important than the economy? What is the role of the media? … or the financial markets?

THE INEVITABLE LIST:

Dozens of factors push the global environmental crisis toward a worst case scenario.

It is not just a Global Warming or Climate Change problem. It is not only a fossil fuel addiction problem. Coal, oil, gasoline, natural gas and nuclear: each has unintended consequences and incalculable hidden costs. The entire industrial system consumes and produces, burns and wastes with a momentum that is hard to imagine, and seems impossible to slow or stop. Massive oil leaks drive more endangered species to extinction.

Oceans are filling with plastic and chemicals. Fisheries are ailing or depleted. Completely aside from the immeasurable damage the Gulf Spill will create, tons of floating plastic trash and chemical pollution are changing the pH and the oxygen balance in the world’s oceans.

Many fresh water tables, already drying up, are contaminated by chemicals from “fracked” natural gas wells.

Every living organism on the planet has in it traces of a dozen highly toxic compounds. Thousands of new chemicals are rushed into widespread use without any tests of their toxicity.

Depleted Uranium weapons and careless storage of nuclear waste contaminate hundreds of square miles across the planet.

The earth could barely support the global population in the 1960s, and it has doubled since then. Increases in food production efficiency can barely keep pace with the loss of arable land and population growth. Will we be forced to decide whether starvation is an appropriate method of population control?

Factory farming of beef causes vast deforestation and adds tons of methane, one of the most destructive greenhouse gasses, to the atmosphere. Agribusiness giants practice monoculture, demanding excessive use of pesticides and fertilizers. The overuse of antibiotics invites regional if not global epidemics of newly evolved diseases.

And for a whole host of reasons, agricultural systems in many parts of the world are failing. And each of these crises, causes or examples of eco-disasters compounds the impact of the others.

Each individual example is at least a regional crisis of the first order. In combination, accelerating and expanding, they represent a level of risk that is impossible to calculate or predict.

Still reading? There is a natural impulse to turn away. This writer, having analyzed and criticized personal and cultural denial in many forms, has gone into willful denial over the Gulf Spill. I can no longer stand to see, hear or read about oil-covered wildlife. Sorry to even have to mention it.

Denial may be a natural reaction.

When the big picture reaches a certain level of ugliness, it may be mentally healthy to refuse to think about it. One negative aspect of information overload is that we see and read of more and more tragedies that we can neither ignore nor affect. But as a coping mechanism or a political strategy, denial just pushes the levels of risk higher. Averting our eyes and minds from the worst case “big picture” only makes us less prepared to cope.

The International Futures Forum calls it

“a conceptual emergency.”

Quoting from their website:  “… the world we have created has outstripped our capacity to understand it. … (It is) a new world, raising fundamental questions about our competence in key areas of governance, economy, sustainability and consciousness.”

This is the scariest possibility

... of the crisis: the mess we have made has compounded and accelerated to the point that it has choked our information media, boggled our collective minds, and paralyzed our democracy. The world we have made literally exceeds our abilty to understand and is spinning out of our control.

THE RECKONING …

… means coming to terms with the fact all the crises are connected. In combination they represent the inevitable death of an obsolete world view and the possible crash of civilization. The environment will emerge as the single most urgent issue, the “umbrella” that will engender an integrated response. Once that sinks in, two more things will get reckoned:  the organizing principles of the sustainable economy, and the epidemic of denial that blinded us to our self-made fate.

A BETTER WORST CASE?

In a globalized economy, all nations are interdependent, the more industrialized the more interconnected. As we are observing. So a breakdown in any one economy, resource supply or currency flow will affect many others. Chain reaction economic problems are on the verge of creating widespread economic collapses. There are two outcomes, in spite of or because of this international linkage.

The excesses in the global economy will get wrung out. The early signs are obvious, though the causes and connections remain obscure. The huge gap between rich and poor continues to widen. Yet governments, powerless to correct the gap, act it out by cutting services to the bone and deeper. Economic injustice gets worse instead of better. Luxuries, waste, and hundreds of trade imbalances will get squeezed. The entire global market will begin to get “wrung out” and hung out to dry. The worst aspect of this will be the devastating impact on the global poor, because they will feel the negative impacts well before the positive results begin to become evident. The positive outcome? Essentials will become global priorities: food, water, health care, education. Waste will become too expensive. Unnecessary spending, from military hardware to luxury lifestyles will fall to an essential move toward global, interdependent efficiency. And the global economy will be set on a different path, one of sustainability and economic justice, quite likely and sadly after many millions have suffered the transition.

Enlightened groups of countries - the EU and Latin American come to mind as candidates - will engage actively in this emerging trend. They will choose to boycott large, wasteful and destructive economies. They will plan to isolate themselves and to become more self-sufficient. And they may be able to hasten the U.S. for example to make the adjustment: wringing out and hanging out waste and trade inequities; pushing sustainability and economic justice as prerequisites for participation in a revitalized but much more modest system of global trade.

BIG PICTURE: FIVE REVOLUTIONS

We … members of the human race

… are in the middle of five global revolutions that we don’t recognize as such.

ONE: We are in the third or fourth stage of the Industrial Revolution, while we are just beginning to understand the consequences of its earlier stages. Technology continues to evolve and expand, and we adapt our lives to it much faster than we can notice or assess its long-term impact.

TWO: Social revolutions of different types are developing on every continent. Population growth continues to threaten the stability of many nation states. While in other regions, population growth moves happily toward zero. Both create or result from a host of social upheavals.

THREE: We are in a global Political revolution in which democracy continually redefines itself yet falls short of its promise. The arguments between “freedom” and “free markets” act themselves out across the planet, with only glimmers of a resolution. “Communist” China has created a weird hybrid form of Capitalism, merging open markets with central control. And we continue to prop up anti-democratic dictators because we need their alliance. The Political revolutions are inseparable from ...

FOUR: We are in an ongoing Economic revolution in which vast wealth continues to accumulate in the hands of a very few Mega-Rich. Most of that treasure horde was acquired through the fake economy built on war and waste, exploitation, speculation and deception. The conspicuous consumption of the super-rich, like the economies that created them, continue to impact the environment by generating more and more waste. Less and less of the wealth is put into constructive investment, to promote productivity or efficiency in the real economy.

FIVE: And most critically we are in the latest phase of an Information revolution that started with the printing press. The paradox of the Information Age is that we are engulfed in a sea of data and have access to the broadest imaginable array of global knowledge; and yet we have but a fraction of the information we need to make the life and death decisions that leap up in our path. The critical links between Information and Democracy are weak or failing, the result of many different forms of media censorship, from the obvious to the invisible.

These five revolutions have created a SIXTH, a catastrophic de-evolution in the health of the living planet that supports our life. The human-made industrial machine has spun out of control and become a parasite on the earth, and we mostly continue to deny it, even as it threatens our civilization.

So a Seventh Revolution is essential: A Revolution in Thinking. When every new crisis requires “different thinking,” the argument goes, obsolete thinking is the real crisis.

An obsolete mindset continues to dominate the thinking of the power elite, the politicians and the corporate executive class, the bankers and the entrepreneurs. The evidence of the dying mindset is literally poisoning us all. Yet we continue to try to use that same thinking to understand and correct the problem.

Once we face the failed thinking behind this destructive and short-sighted culture, we may see a silver lining. If we busted it, we can and must fix it. If faulty thinking caused it, different thinking can imagine the solution. If we can imagine a solution we can make it happen.

When the veil of denial is forcibly removed, and the interwoven nature of the crises is understood, a radical and difficult, but integral and comprehensive fix will emerge from the invisible and become obvious.