A month ago I presented a reflection on this blog entitled “Societal Breakdown.” It left open the huge question of what to do. I propose now to address this question in slightly more detail. Thomas Homer Dixon, in The Upside of Down, Knopf Canada, 2007, outlines several areas of preparedness for major change: population, energy, food, the environment, finances.
There is no doubt that, at this point, the growth in population itself poses a distinct threat to the equilibrium of the planet. There are varieties of approaches possible here and they are hotly debated. As someone who has worked in international cooperation, I would simply underline the fact, indicated in many studies, that population growth tends to level out as people are given the security that their basic needs for living with decency are met. Even more it is at that precise level (at about $13,000 per person) that the greatest level of happiness in society is attained. Below that, people tend to scramble to survive. It cannot be forgotten that almost half the population of the world lives on $2 a day or less. When income surpasses that equilibrium figure, strangely enough, the happiness dimension in life tends to diminish as more energy is devoted to trying to maintain or increase their level of contentment through “having more.” The best thing that could happen for the planet’s population would be for everyone to be able to find themselves at that level of equilibrium in their part of the world that allows them to find their basic needs satisfied and without enormous disequilibrium between the rich and the poor in any society.
Every civilisation, as noted in the earlier reflection, is based on energy exchange. Energy is absolutely required for a society to exist. The sources of energy have varied over the millennia. Sometimes it was just human labour; other times it was water (and agriculture that produced food), more recently it has been oil and gas. We know that the oil-based world is coming to an end. Increasingly oil will become difficult to provide at a reasonable cost. The nuclear option is out. The proliferation of nuclear reactors as an energy source is too expensive, terribly dangerous to the population, highly vulnerable to terrorist attacks and we still don’t know what to do with the depleted uranium waste.
Alternative energy grids need to be developed based on hydraulic sources, the sun, wind and geo-thermal sources. As Rifkin says, every building on the planet needs to be turned into a power station linked to a continental grid. In this way the population will have an adequate and sustainable source of energy to continue functioning. The problem of course is that this will require an enormous outlay in money and construction in order to transform the whole base for energy sources.
We cannot continue globalizing our food sources. As oil becomes less available the transportation costs will be prohibitive. We need to find ways to eat what is produced regionally, at least as the large base of our diet. This shouldn’t be impossible. Our grandparents certainly knew how to do that and with some of the newer advances in preserving food it should not be a major difficulty—if we are willing to alter our diets.
In this same logic we have to do away with the automobile and trucking industry as we know it. There has to be a major shift to motors that are electric or hydrogen driven. Moreover public transport has to become the major means of moving people.
We are learning more and more to recycle and to compost. However there is still a long way to go toward the reduction of waste. In Montreal practically all plastic, glass, paper and metal is recycled through a city-wide program. There is a plan to introduce industrial composting and compost pick-up by the city. We need to get rid of the manic overuse of packaging of everything we buy.
However, recycling is only the tip of the iceberg. Manufacturing, the airlines, the military and many other major sectors of the economy need to radically reduce their output of pollutants.
Finally the gap between the rich and the poor has become a crime that is destroying our civilization. The wealth and power of a few major corporate leaders and the transnationals they head up are becoming the unnamed government of the world. The idea that the capital they gather from their shareholders is to be used uniquely and solely to advance the interests of those shareholders and the corporation itself has to be definitively abandoned in favour of real social responsibility and that will entail decentralization and strict governmental regulation as outlined by Joseph Stiglitz in this recent book, Freefall, Norton, 2010.
Each of these needs to be addressed if we are to be prepared for an eventual breakdown. The European Union seems to be that area of the world where these concerns are being taken the most seriously and where concrete action is already underway and, in some countries, quite advanced. We can learn from them and with them.
Obviously, as mentioned in the earlier reflection, there has to be a strong, shared, grounded set of values that can take us through. From a purely secular point of view Jeremy Rifkin attempts to address this question in the latter part of his recent book, The Empathic Civilization, Tarcher-Penguin, 2009. In what I consider a deeper way, Thomas Berry addresses the same question in The Dream of the Earth, Sierra Club, 1989 and again in The Great Work, Harmony-Bell Tower, 2000. The development of this “planetary consciousness” and of a sense of empathy with all its (human and other) creatures is fundamental to motivating the enormous effort that an effective response will require. If we take up the challenge, the possibilities for creativity are enormous.
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