contaminant media

Change

Change is coming; social change on a massive, unprecedented scale. There are three potential avenues through which this change will manifest.

In the best case scenario we ourselves will be the architects of this change, working collectively and creatively to reshape social structures and ways of life from the bottom up to build a new paradigm based on equity and sustainability, and the kind of lifestyles that can still afford us a high quality of life and the opportunities for joy and prosperity that our own generation has enjoyed – albeit with much lower levels of material consumption.

The second option is to allow / demand the state, and very likely other powerful transnational institutions, to impose change from the top down, accepting massive curtailments of our personal freedoms and a new paradigm characterised by unprecedented levels of social control, state intrusion and global governance and enforcement in order to ensure that atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations remain at or below safe levels.

The third option is to continue on our present path, and invite change to be visited on us, abruptly, at some point in the nearish future, through the medium of humanitarian catastrophe and eco-system collapse. Society will be certainly be restructured as a consequence; but into something chaotic, unplanned, dreadful, bereft. Only a very small proportion of the humans alive when the shit finally hits the fan will survive this new paradigm. They will be the ones with the access to guns and the lack of conscience required to use them. What will the ‘society’ they build look like?

Doom and gloom aside, what seems clear to me is that there are plenty of alternative models of ways of life we could easily choose to adopt at the level of our local communities – alternatives that could not only avoid ecological Armageddon, but also result in an improved quality of life for those enacting them. What is to be done at the national and geo-political scale is much less clear, but I would point to the work of the New Economics Foundation for some very clear thinking on this problem. Profligacy and materialism are not only bad for their victims; they are bad for their beneficiaries too.

Surely we can do better than this?