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Buckminster Fuller is one of my favourite inventors, a designer of geodesics and the famous ‘retreat pod’ and other ‘living systems’. The above quote is of an age that was a lot more innocent than today, but certainly gives any designer ‘pause for thought’.
'Fighting' is an extremely oppositional term, but aspects of the 'existing reality' certainly need to be opposed by our direct choices. This means taking our energy out from planet-wrecking consumer capitalism and putting it into more wholesome and 'sustainable' activity. Many people are doing this already in finding relative simplicity - but will this conscious and thinking minority ever be enough?
The Earth is in crisis. Yet when we belong to and contribute to the 'system' about half or more of our energy is deducted in taxes and used to fund all sorts of things we would rather not think about, including wholesale environmental degradation. With very few exceptions it’s impossible even to invest in a bank account or pension without investing in earth destruction. This contributes to an unsustainable ‘economy driven’ machine that is a conveyor belt to a cliff's edge and we all follow the Pied Piper.
Living sustainably and leaving a small footprint is now more important to our continued survival as a species than contributing to GDP (or GNP in USA). In essence this means closing our bank accounts, refusing to pay taxes and refusing to drive cars or fly in planes. It means giving up jobs that pollute and taking ultimate responsibility for all of our actions.
It means inventing new ways of supporting each other and investing in a future that does not 'cost the Earth' by exploitation. It means re-examining every aspect of our lives in the light of global warming and pollution. It means being aware of food miles and not shopping at supermarkets. It means not burning coal or oil or wood and cutting down on energy consumption at all levels. It means avoiding sometimes harmful sunshine, purifying water, sourcing decent food, changing the 'existing reality' to a new way of being at an individual level at least.
This level of change is too much to ask of many people who would simply rather not think about such things and expect our governments to ‘take care of it all’ after all that’s what we pay taxes for! Phew - no wonder James Lovelock, the originator of the Gaia hypothesis advocates nuclear power as a short-term / lower pollution solution to our energy problems.
Mostly though, we just won't look at this situation until its too late in fact Lovelock claims it is already too late because of the ‘momentum’ built up in the shifting planetary ecology. Mostly though - we are still in denial and will remain so until cataclysmic climactic events change our viewpoint. As Oswald Chambers claims, 'until the pain of remaining the same becomes greater than the pain of change'.
But what can be done to help this change process by overcoming our ‘denial’? The Rt. Reverend John Oliver writing in Resurgence Magazine suggests we tackle the problem of denial in different ways:
"..using different arguments - from the philosophical to the practical - and appeal to a variety of motives. First we have to try and recreate a sense of the holiness, the sacredness of the created order, and of reverence for it."
He quotes Prince Charles in his Reith Lecture as saying:
" I believe if that we are to achieve sustainable development, we will first have to rediscover or re-acknowledge, a sense of the sacred in our dealings with the natural world and with each other."
Lets face it - the alternatives are bleak indeed, and neatly summed up by a Cree Indian prophecy:
Only when the last tree has been cut down,
Only when the last river has been poisoned,
Only when the last fish has been caught,
Only then will you find
That you cannot eat money.
It would certainly be a great act if we could design our way out of environmental disaster as Buckminster Fuller suggests, and new and intermediate technologies will help with this. But it also seems to me at any rate that we have to actively oppose the interests that are investing in planetary breakdown to turn a profit, starting right now.
Quotes from Resurgence 228 ‘Art of the Possible’ by Rt. Reverand John Oliver
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