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david korten
Earth Is Warning Us We Must Change. Will We Listen?
The Earth is strong, but also vulnerable. As Earth cares for us, we either care for it or bear the consequences of our recklessness.
Aug 04, 2020
Our present course puts humans on track to be among the species that expire in Earth's ongoing sixth mass extinction. In my conversations with thoughtful people, I am finding increasing acceptance of this horrific premise.
The COVID-19 pandemic, along with climate change, drives home the lesson that we must honor and care for Earth. The increasing frequency of the appearance of deadly viruses reminds us of the consequences of disrupting the natural systems by which life on Earth organizes to create and maintain the conditions essential to both its own existence and ours.
This is a time for learning and conscious collective choice like no other in the human experience. Defining lessons are coming from a variety of "teachers," including the pandemic and climate change, protests against systemic racism, and oddly enough, Donald Trump.
Perhaps we can now recognize and accept the limits of Earth's regenerative systems and our need to help Earth heal from the damage of our recklessness. The Earth is strong, but also vulnerable. As Earth cares for us, we either care for it or bear the consequences of our recklessness.
The pandemic may be seen as a not-so-subtle warning to humanity that we may be sacrificed, if necessary, to protect the health of the planet. On the path to human extinction, the most vulnerable will go first, but there will be no human winners.
"Returning to business as usual is neither possible nor desirable."
COVID-19's attack also exposes the culpability of the economic system that bears major responsibility for our assault against Earth and each other. We now see with ever greater clarity the disconnect between two economies. One is a financial economy devoted to generating unearned profits for monopolists and speculators. The other is an economy of Earth's regenerative systems and humans doing work essential to the well-being of people and planet. We can get along just fine without financial speculation, and labor devoted to wasteful or destructive purposes to make money for rich people. We cannot survive without the regenerative systems of a living Earth and the beneficial labor of both human and nonhuman beings.
We also see more clearly the devastating consequences of concentrating power in the hands of the financial elite. For example, the pandemic has exposed the long and vulnerable supply chains that only serve the interests of exploiters who locate industry where wages and taxes are lowest and environmental regulations are most lax to produce consumer goods for the world's affluent. Disruptions of those supply lines led to shortages of critical products, such as nose swabs and face masks, that we're only now realizing can be more quickly and securely obtained through local producers--assuming we still have some that can take on the job.
Another lesson we're learning involves the nature of money. COVID-19 prompted the U.S. Congress and Federal Reserve to create trillions of dollars in instant money for purposes both good and bad. Never has it been so clear that money is just a number that national governments can create from nothing. Consequently, lack of money should never be a society's defining constraint so long as idle or misdirected resources are available for new money to put to work meeting real needs.
Of course, meeting essential needs is very different from creating money to keep stock prices inflated and to bail out businesses, such as the corporate travel industry that electronic communication may have rendered obsolete. Too much of the money instantly created by Congress and the Fed was aimed at propping up financial markets while the real economy floundered. Therein lies another lesson: Follow the money and know its purpose, which takes us to the lessons of the Trump disaster.
With his perpetual deceptions, his assaults on the integrity and competence of government, and his persistent denial of responsibility for their devastating consequences, Trump reminds us of how much we depend on honest and functioning government at all system levels. He is forcing state and local governments (and also other nations) to take on new responsibilities because they know they cannot wait for leadership from his feckless administration.
In sending unidentified Department of Homeland Security officers to impose his will on the people of Portland, Oregon, and other cities, Trump is reminding us of the dangers of tyranny and the importance of having political leaders who are honest, intelligent, of sound mind, and committed to a strong democracy. We are becoming ever more conscious of the fatal error of electing politicians who believe government is inherently burdensome and best minimized.
These are all lessons essential to the future we seek and to our choices in the upcoming election.
During a July 23 webinar hosted by YES! Media that I took part in, Nafeez Ahmed, executive director of the System Shift Lab and research fellow at the Schumacher Institute for Sustainable Systems, noted that the emergence of the new depends on the disintegration of the old. While many of us have been eager to welcome the new, we are not always so ready to accept the disintegration of the old. Yet the point that Nafeez drove home in our webinar is that both are part of the process of transformation.
As the institutions of the imperial civilization of our past disintegrate, it exposes the extent to which their power has rested on a foundation of war, racism, and violence devoted to enforcing mass servitude and securing the rights of property owners. Succumbing to the enticements of money worship, we celebrate the successes of a miniscule super-wealthy minority, and the fiction that we might one day join them.
Let us welcome the growing recognition that returning to business as usual is neither possible nor desirable. We must accept our current mission to birth a new civilization devoted to the well-being of people and Earth: A civilization in which money is just a tool, and nurturance of life is the prime purpose.
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You Can't Put Capitalism Over Sustainability--and Other Lessons From China
Humanity’s existential crisis can be resolved only when we the people stand united behind a vision of the world we truly want.
Aug 20, 2019
I just returned from a conference of influential decision-makers in China, where I presented on economics for an ecological civilization in the 21st century. China and the United States are very different, but when it comes to current threats and missed opportunities, we share a great deal more than we may realize.
The message I took to China will be familiar to readers of my column. It begins with recognizing the fundamental truth that humans are born of and nurtured by a living Earth. Forgetting that basic fact, we became captive to a deeply flawed economic theory that gained global prominence in the mid-20th century, is destroying Earth's capacity to sustain life, and puts us on a path to self-extinction.
The countries that embraced the fallacies of 20th century economics now face an imperative to transform their culture, institutions, technology, and infrastructure to align with the eight principles of a 21st century economics outlined in my previous YES! column. Among other things, these principles call on us to abandon the goal of increasing GDP through consumption in favor of growing the well-being of people and Earth by supporting culturally rich, low-consumption lifestyles. Also, we must dismantle profit-maximizing corporations and convert the pieces to worker and community ownership. And we must redesign urban infrastructure to eliminate most dependence on automobiles.
I was eager to learn how these principles would be received in a country with a population more than four times that of the United States, devastating environmental problems, and the world's most aggressive capitalist economy managed by a Communist Party that is nominally committed to an ecological civilization.
I find China especially interesting because of its government's demonstrated ability to make big changes in the country's direction with seemingly impossible speed, which we must now do as a species if we are to find our way to a viable future.
What I experienced during my brief visit was a deeply conflicted country with a political system that offers little room for open public debate, and which is stuck in an economic framework known in China as the Two Mountains theory. One "mountain" represents a commitment to a healthy environment of clean water and vibrant mountains lush with life. The other represents a commitment to maintaining one of the world's highest GDP growth rates by catering to the interests of big business. An article by economic historian Richard Smith on China's recent economic history underscored for me the deep and largely irreconcilable conflict between environmental health and maximizing GDP.
The conflict between growth and sustainability is all too frequently resolved in China by prioritizing the second mountain--with harsh consequences for human and environmental health. It seems closely connected to the conflict between the presumed commitment of China's government to advancing the interests of workers, who struggle under harsh conditions and low pay, and an economy that churns out new billionaires at a rate of two per week.
My overall message in China boiled down to this: If your goal is to turn out billionaires, then concentrate on growing GDP by giving control of the economy to profit-maximizing corporations. If your goal is instead to increase the well-being of people and the Earth, then abandon GDP as a relevant indicator and focus instead on growing indicators of the outcomes you want while shifting power to people and community.
We assume that once elected, the new president will single-handedly wipe away the corruption.
Seems like a rather straightforward choice for a government dedicated to an ecological civilization and workers' well-being. Indeed, it would seem to be such for all governments that presume to represent the interests of their people. Given the extent to which my message challenged the official commitment to growing consumption to grow GDP, it seemed to get a remarkably positive hearing.
I was still sorting out the contradictions when I returned home to the U.S. just in time to view the most recent round of debates in the contest to choose the Democratic Party's 2020 presidential candidate. Both the Republican and Democratic parties are controlled by their corporate establishment wings, and our political debates are controlled by these same parties and by the corporate media. As the CNN moderators pounded the candidates with questions scripted from far-right talking points, I asked myself, "Could our politicians feel as constrained as most Chinese political figures do by the equivalent of a Two Mountains theory?"
Surely politicians like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren don't sound constrained. But no one among the current candidates is suggesting that we abandon GDP as our primary measure of economic performance. While some have called to break up big tech giants, no one suggests we break up and restructure all big corporations and subordinate them to the communities in which they do business. And no one is suggesting restructuring urban areas so that most people have no need of cars.
Yet corporate media pundits dismiss "unserious" proposals, such as Medicare for All and increasing taxes on corporations, as too extremist to win against presumably mainstream Republicans, who want to eliminate all public health care and environmental regulations, continue to separate children from their parents at the border, block any meaningful reform of gun laws, and are working to make abortion illegal nationwide.
Our political system has become so deeply divided by a psychopathic fringe intent on growing their own fortunes that we can't even assure all Americans have access to basic health care and a quality education, let alone an adequate means of living in return for honest labor. We are so caught up in debates about who is most oppressed and who most deserves what reparations that we don't even ask how we might create a society free from oppression in which all people can have lives of material sufficiency and spiritual abundance on a beautiful and healthy Earth.
We act as if we believe that we need only figure out who among 20 candidates has all the best answers to the problems that confront us. We assume that once elected, the new president will single-handedly wipe away the corruption, restore the integrity and competence of government, secure the health of the environment, liberate the oppressed, and secure good jobs for all in the face of relentless opposition from powerful psychopaths protecting their interests.
We should be spending far less time debating the relative merits of 20 presidential candidates, and far more time bridging all the divides that separate us. We should be building an unstoppable movement of the world's people that crosses all boundaries, united in a commitment to create a world that truly works for all. The deep transformation of culture, institutions, technology, and infrastructure on which our common future depends will be a difficult struggle and will require persistent and determined support from powerful social movements.
We the people will need to lead that discussion and demand that the politicians follow. We will need to frame the possibilities of that future and the path to its achievement through countless overlapping conversations in forums open to everyone.
Let us not be distracted from that cause by political debates structured by corporate media to divert our attention from proposals that might break the power of the corrupt system. It is a tall order, but so, too, at this moment is human survival.
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Re-Inhabiting Planet Earth
What may be history’s ultimate moment of human arrogance: the belief in a sense of separateness from and superiority to nature so thorough that we have, with our monstrous intelligence, the ability and therefore the right to play Bad God and make the whole planet go poof
Mar 06, 2019
"I believe that for a moment I thought the explosion might set fire to the atmosphere and thus finish the Earth, even though I knew that this was not possible."
These words of Manhattan Project physicist Emilio Segre, quoted by Richard Rhodes in his book The Making of the Atomic Bomb, refer to the Trinity blast on July 16, 1945, at Alamogordo, N.M., the first atomic explosion in history and, so it appears, a turning point for all life on this planet.
The atmosphere didn't catch fire at 5:30 that morning, but Segre's words remain relevant, sort of like radioactive fallout. They encapsulate what may be history's ultimate moment of human arrogance: the belief in a sense of separateness from and superiority to nature so thorough that we have, with our monstrous intelligence, the ability and therefore the right to play Bad God and make the whole planet go poof.
Turns out the Trinity test set into motion something even more profound than the nuclear era. The bomb didn't just "defeat" Japan and define the Cold War, with its suicidal nuclear arms race. It is also, at least symbolically, marks the beginning of what has come to be known as the Anthropocene: an era of profound climate and "Earth system" destabilization caused by human activity and therefore, like it or not, establishing humans as co-equal participants in activity of the natural world.
Any institution founded on such myths and illusions - that the planet is ours to exploit, that some people matter more than others, that national borders are real, that dehumanizing and killing one another (a little activity called war) keeps us safe, that money equals God - cannot and will not survive the Anthropocene.
There's more to this "co-equal" status than nuclear weapons, of course. They may be the tip of our arrogance, but we've been exploiting and rearranging the planet for nearly 12,000 years, since the beginning of the era we are now leaving, the Holocene, an era of climate stability in which human civilization and all written history emerged. From the development of agriculture to the industrial revolution - the plundering of the Earth for oil and coal, the spewing of infinitesimal plastic nurdles across the planet, the creation of continent-sized trash mounds afloat in the oceans, the replacement of biodiversity with monoculture, the poisoning of the air and water and, yes, nuclear testing and the spread of radioactive fallout - humanity, or at least a small portion of it, has exercised an intelligence with a serious moral void.
And now the chickens are coming home to roost. Or as David Korten put it: "Humans might be the first species to knowingly choose self-extinction."
What's crucial about all this goes well beyond the dangers of climate change and the need for techno-fixes to our socioeconomic structures. History professor Julia Adeney Thomas puts it this way: "The Anthropocene's interrelated systematicity presents not a problem, but a multidimensional predicament. A problem might be solved, often with a single technological tool produced by experts in a single field, but a predicament presents a challenging condition requiring resources and ideas of many kinds. We don't solve predicaments; instead, we navigate through them."
She adds: ". . . the hardest challenges will be about how to alter our political and economic systems."
These aren't just technical problems for "experts" to solve while the rest of look on (or go shopping). What's emerging from all this for me is that humanity has to evolve for its own survival, and evolution is going to take all of us - or at least all of us who can think beyond the structures of thought in which we grew up, in which we came of age. The first premise for navigating the Anthropocene may be this: We're all in it together.
Simple as this sounds, the implications of such a statement, if it is true, begin mushrooming into unfathomable complexity, especially when "all" refers not simply to all 7.4 billion human beings out there but all of life: the biosphere, the planet. We have to rethink who we are in a way that has, quite likely, never before happened.
"In the Anthropocene the old simplicities are gone," writes Mark Garavan. "We are no longer human subjects acting upon an objective nature 'outside' us. Nature and human are now bound together. Free nature is over. Free humanity is over. They are relics of the Holocene. In our new age, Earth and Human are entangled irrevocably together. Welcome to the era of Earth-bound responsibility! The assumptions, the myths, the illusions of the Holocene no longer apply."
And any institution founded on such myths and illusions - that the planet is ours to exploit, that some people matter more than others, that national borders are real, that dehumanizing and killing one another (a little activity called war) keeps us safe, that money equals God - cannot and will not survive the Anthropocene, and the "solutions" that emerge from such institutions, e.g., solving the climate crisis, are rooted in failure. "The challenge," says Garavan, "is to re-think and re-inhabit our planet."
That is to say, we have to start over.
And I think that's what's happening. New values are percolating. So are old values - the values human beings once embraced as they claimed the right to occupy Planet Earth. These values include interdependence and cooperation, and profound reverence for the planet. Rupert Ross, in his book Returning to the Teachings, points out, for instance: "The Lakotah had no language for insulting other orders of existence: "pest . . . waste . . . weed."
Indigenous understanding is not "primitive." It includes cooperation and compassion in its grasp of how things work, of what it means to live within the circle of life. The indigenous peoples of the planet have remained its protectors.
As Jade Begay and Ayse Gursoz point out at EcoWatch: "Even the seemingly groundbreaking Paris agreement neither includes human rights in its text nor acknowledges Indigenous rights -- even though lands and waters stewarded by Indigenous communities make up 80 percent of the world's biodiversity. What we need is for climate policy and the overall climate movement to address problems of inequality, because climate change is just as much a social issue as it is an environmental issue."
In other words, biodiversity and social diversity are both precious. Knowing this means re-inhabiting the planet, not setting it on fire.
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