Notes on A Necessary Revolution

http://www.changethis.com/49.01.NecessaryRevolution/download

"The wealth of the 200 richest people of the world exceeds the combined annual income of the world's 2.5 billion poorest people"

Corn ethanol is only a short-term fix.

Ages do not end abruptly. When faced with challenges of this magnitude, the vast majority of people and institutions try harder to maintain the status quot. The brain downshifts in distress. Societies are no different. Fortunately, societies are not monolithic.

"What would an economy look like that operated on entirely energy income rather than energy capital?" ~Buckminster Fuller

Do we protect the ways of the past? Or join in creating a different future? People and organizations around the world are already planting the seeds for new ways of living and working together. Yes, they are a minority. No, they are not part of the mainstream. Either within their industries or usually within their own organizations. But, unlike previous periods of profound change, it is unlikely these seeds will take centuries to mature and spreads, because in today's interconnected world, the problems are global, and the changes are as well.

Ideas for sustainability
1) There is no viable path forward that does not take into account the need of future generations. Others shall always inherit all our current problems
2) Institutions matter. Networks shape and influence. No one person can destroy a species, but collectively that is exactly what we are doing.
3) All real change is grounded in new ways of thinking and perceiving.

We need to work together differently than we have in the past.

We will talk about challenges in:
*energy and transportation
*food and water
*material waste and toxicity
and the imbalances when too many resources are concentrated in too few hands

No one has THE answer as to how 7, 8, or 9 billion people can live together sustainably, but an ultimate solution is exactly what is NOT needed. No one had a plan for the industrial revolution. No single business led the way. Instead, countless acts of initiative and daring created a critical mass of unstoppable changes. The next age will be innovated in the same manner, gradually.

Nature, and not machines, shall be the inspiration.

The leaders are hard to find in advance. They do not occupy positions of obvious power, they are not the flag-wavers campaigning vocally for change, but rather passionate individuals working to transform their organizations from the bottom up. They are most often open-minded pragmatists, people who care deeply about the future but who are suspicious of quick-fixes, emotional nostrums, and superficial answers to complex problems. They have a hard-earned sense of how their organizations work, tempered by humility by what any one person can do alone.


How did we get to the point where we are running out of resources that support life itself?
The short answer: our success


1750-1820 :: Industry and standards were booming. Production grew 30 fold! Quality of life expanded and life expectancy doubled throughout world. Literacy increased from 20 to 90%
In late 1800s, London's Great Smog killed more than 4000 people and galvanized the government to create air pollution regulations.

Industrial Waste - US Economy consumes over 1 million tons of raw materials every year, more than 90% by weight becomes waste. Air and Water pollutants travel far.

Consumer and Commercial Waste and Toxicity - 8 billion tons of carbon per year are emitted globally through the burning of fossil fuels for transportation, heat, and electricity worldwide. This is 5 billion tons more than the biosphere can absorb

More than 90% of electronics end up in landfills. 30million cars are taken off the road around the world. Packaging waste has grown 400% in the last 20 years- mostly cardboard and plastic. In the US, 93% of plastics wind up in landfills.

Toxins embedded in everyday products also pose significant health risks, even before they are discarded to landfills, for example, immunologists have shown that a great many diseases such as many cancers, have become far more prevalent today due to toxins in our bodies that not only come from food ingredients, but also from chemicals, dyes used in cloth, and plastic compounds in children's toys, computer screens, and household appliances

Non-regenerative, Non-renewable resources - US consumes about 20 million barrels of oil a day, about 25% of global consumption. About 80% of oil consumed in US is imported. Other resources in significant decline include Zinc, Copper, and Iridium, all critical for technology. Coal is relatively abundant-- but the single biggest air pollutant.

Regenerative, Renewable resources - More than 1/5 of the world people do not have reliable access to clean drinking water and many are chronically dehydrated. Roughly 2/3 of the water we use goes to agriculture. Runoff from pesticides and fertilizers is the single biggest polluter for our water supply.
Topsoil - overproduction is a huge problem
Fisheries - over 70% of fisheries are overfished; species depleted beyond point of recovery -- fishing industry will suffer too... and cause unemployment and migration
Forests - More than 1/3 of the world's forests have disappeared in the past 50 years. Their loss, especially in the tropics, affects communities and CO2 absorption

Declining ecosystems and increasing pollution tends to correlate with the erosion of our sense of spiritual and non-material well-being. Growing social stresses are all too often taken as the norm today. We are plagued by anxiety, over-work, stress, mistrust, fear, and anger.

People living under growing stress, whether physical, psychological, or economic, have great difficulty acting as stewards for the future.

The industrial revolution that brought as many benefits has also brought us many dangerous side-affects. Either we keep on with business as usual, leaving the accumulating side-affects growing until they overwhelm us, or we step back far enough to rethink where we are headed.

When we first acknowledge problems, our instinct is the apply exactly the same kind of thinking that created these challenges in the first place. We focus on the symptoms first -- the river is dirty -- and ignore the underlying problems. Over time, this neglect leads to a worsening of the symptoms.

Shifting the burden to experts, scientists, consultants, or even government (and so lobbyists), has only marginal impact.

The consequences of local actions are no longer local. The earth is a finite system. The time for rethinking and redesigning is at hand. Let's look at the big picture.


1) the industrial system: what we make, buy, and use
2) natural world resources: oil, minerals, forests, crop land
3) regenerative resources can sustain human activity indefinitely so long as we don't overharvest
4) the non-regenerative resources can only be depleted
5) in the process of extracting, the industrial system generates waste and damages ability of nature to replenish
6) industrial system sits in a larger social system of communities, families, schools, and culture

^ our history since 1750

most official only address the systems within a system... such as how to keep the industrial system expanding

Only in the last couple of years have we seen more front-page articles about the economy, business, and technology that mention the declining health of the ecosystems that enable the global economic system to function.

A little more than a decade ago, a number of nations came together to shape the Kyoto Protocol, the first inter-governmental agreement to confront climate change, which the US never signed. The accord focused on curbing emissions growth, but as we now know, stopping the rise of CO2 levels in the atmosphere, the primary source of climate change, will actually require significant emission reductions. Accomplishing this will require a change in the kinds of energy we use, cars we drive, buildings we live and work in, cities we design, and ways both people and goods move around the world, as well as other changes no one can even imagine.

start on disk 2