While we all stare at the financial crisis, while governments rush to embrace socialist philosophies to prop up the banks, while Bush slides another $2.5bn as a soft loan to the car manufacturers to prop them up at least until November, there's another, greater crisis looming,
It won't change the election, but will impact us all soon.
George Monbiot has described it in the UK Guardian. ,
On Friday, Pavan Sukhdev, the Deutsche Bank economist leading a European study on ecosystems, reported that we are losing natural capital worth between $2 trillion and $5 trillion every year, as a result of deforestation alone(1). The losses incurred so far by the financial sector amount to between $1 trillion and $1.5 trillion. Sukhdev arrived at his figure by estimating the value of the services - such as locking up carbon and providing freshwater - that forests perform, and calculating the cost of either replacing them or living without them. The credit crunch is petty when compared to the nature crunch.
more below the fold
Mobiot is one of the few who has really looked into this all the way through. His book 'Heat' is a detailed description of how the UK could meet its own climate change limits, how it could reduce its CO2 output by 80% without destroying the civilian infrastructure. A year ago, I'd have said it was impossible for any politician to come close, but a year ago I'd have said nobody could nationalise 2 of the country's major banks and survive the political fall-out. We live in changing times and 'Heat' may yet prove a template to survivial
But before all of this, Monbiot said some time ago in relation to Peak Oil, that,
The chances of a soft landing from Peak Oil depend on two things:
- that the energy companies are telling the truth about their reserves
and
- that Governments act before they have to.
I hope this makes you feel safer.
quoted in
The Transition Handbook
by Rob Hopkins
As one who doesn't feel safer, two things have recently given me hope. The first was reading 'Earth as Lover, Earth as Self' by Buddhist scholar Joanna Macy, and then 'The Great Turning' by David Korten which takes her ideas and moves them forward, particularly the concept that this is a time of political and spiritual upheaval where the old frameworks will (must) dissolve and be replaced by a new way of seeing the world. Clearly the wing-nuts think the same; this is the basis of the Rapture - but those of us not wedded to rivers of blood can envisage instead an opportunity for personal and societal growth as the old systems collapse.
Reading it, I had not imagined the old systems would collapse quite as far or as fast - or as soon - as they have done, but if we can embrace this as a means to change - and if Obama is serious about being the agent of change, then we could be at the start of something very, very different.
The second thing that has given me hope is the emergence in the UK of the Transition Town Movement. These are communities coming together to build a plan - and to begin to act on it - for a post-carbon economy and a post-carbon way of living. When Rob Hopkins began in Totnes 2 years ago, it was alone in the UK. Now there are 400 TTs worldwide and more coming on board by the day. I live near a small town in a border county and we had our first meeting last week. It'll be a slow process, but a good one: we're building community, we're looking forward, not back, we're re-skilling and re-finding ways to wean ourselves from our addiction to oil.
this isn't about the election, but it is about the future. If McCain gets in, the entire world will be set back by decades.
If Obama gets in, we might yet move forward together.
I leave you with a final world from George Monbiot's article.
But what Daly suggests is that nations which are already rich should replace growth ("more of the same stuff") with development ("the same amount of better stuff"). A steady state economy has a constant stock of capital maintained by a rate of throughput no higher than the ecosystem can absorb. The use of resources is capped and the right to exploit them is auctioned. Poverty is addressed through the redistribution of wealth. The banks can lend only as much money as they possess.
Alternatively, we can persist in the magical thinking whose results have just come crashing home. The financial crisis shows what happens when we try to make the facts fit our desires. Now we must learn to live in the real world.