During the 1968 student
unrest in Paris a slogan appeared scrawled on the wall of the Sorbonne –“owing to a lack of interest the future has been
cancelled”. Not wishing to be tarred by this accusation a group of ENIRDELM
participants who gathered at a conference on educational leadership started a
Community Action for Spaceship Earth (CASE) initiative in which we will try to
promote the metaphor that we live on a planet akin to a finite spaceship that
cannot accommodate infinite exponential growth of human crew and their
activities. In my presentation at the workshop I used the tag O-F-F
(Overshot-Finite-Full) to sum up what many are concluding about the state of
the planet’s capacity to cope with human impacts. I illustrated human ingenuity with the photo
below from Hong Kong showing tourists wanting a clear view of the city’s
polluted skyline.
Human ingenuity,
backed by released fossil energy and by exploited cheap immigrant labour, has
empowered our species to dominate nature in a remarkable number of ways such as
the transformation of the Persian Gulf into high-priced housing on artificial
islands, as illustrated by the second slide.
The aim of the new project, starting in four countries, is to inject into
development programmes for educational leaders and teachers some key concepts
relating to the Spaceship Earth metaphor. Subsequently they will promote action
by students to spread these ideas within their communities in locally
appropriate ways. Networks of schools
will share their experiences, first within specific countries and then between
countries if ways of funding this can be found.
Of course, the
almost universal and free availability of knowledge via the internet which
gives access to the best research and scholarship around the world, makes
networking more feasible than ever before. The availability of this information
and communications technology is making the high cost, labour-intensive
‘factory’ structures of educational institutions look increasingly
obsolete. My co-initiator of the CASE
project, Kamran Namdar, uses a beautiful metaphor from Sweden’s freezing winter
ponds to justify our small efforts: the first ice crystals in autumn begin to
form around nuclei in different parts of the pond; they grow outwards in
different ways from these nuclei and gradually the crystals around the nuclei
come together, coalescing until the pond’s water has been transformed into a
mass of ice. Thus, every nucleus can make its own small contribution to ‘The
Great Transformation’ needed to make Spaceship Earth a Safe Operating Space for
the web of life.
Here are
annotated introductions to two short video presentations that support the
Spaceship Earth metaphor. Both can be watched with sub-titles in a variety of
languages:
http://www.ted.com/talks/paul_gilding_the_earth_is_full.html?utm_source=newsletter_weekly_2012-03-02&utm_campaign=newsletter_weekly&utm_medium=email
– “The
Earth is Full” - Paul
Gilding on our failure to act in the face of overwhelming evidence of a
coming global collapse due to the global economy that now needs 1.5 earths to
sustain it at our current level of demand. We are living beyond our
means, burning through our capital, mortgaging the future. Economic growth,
central to our societies, will stop when resources run out. It is based on a crazy
idea of infinite growth on a finite planet. In less than 20 years China
plans to quadruple its economy. The global economy plans to quadruple in the
next 40 years to support 9 billion people in 1950. The end is growth is
inevitable and we must prepare for it – there are many indicators of this
breakdown and we need to use our imaginations to respond beyond denial, anger
or fear. The threat is no longer external; the threat is we ourselves. We need
a response to the crisis, for example the emission of greenhouse gases, of the
sort that war evokes. We have enough
technological power but do we have the wisdom to wage this war for civilisation
to make this ‘our finest hour’? [16 mins.]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RgqtrlixYR4&list=PLOGi5-fAu8bFffao7gN1rhkbE1yfsPNwc
– Johan Rockstrom portrays Planet
Earth as the overlooked main ‘stakeholder’ in a sustainable future. He traces
the development of humanity over the last 100000 years leading to the
climatically very stable last 10000 years (the Holocene) during which
agriculture underpinned the rise of ‘civilisation’ and finally, the rise of
technology which, in the last 250 years, led to exponentially
increasing impact of humans on nature. He talks of this impact as ‘quadruple
squeeze’: population growth to over 7 billion (20% rich/80% aspiring
for lifestyles of the rich) + climate destabilisation + ecosystem decline + the
surprise of non-linear events or ‘tipping points’. Our present decade 2010-20 is seen as our last
chance to reverse this exponential impact of humans which is crossing
‘planetary boundaries’ or the limits to what the planet can sustain.
This unprecedented human pressure on the planet has accelerated exponentially
since the 1950s and cannot be sustained. Unless it is, then the SAFE
OPERATING SPACE FOR HUMANITY will be lost with catastrophic
consequences. He concludes with three success stories but reminds us that
incremental change is not an option when a shift of mindset from local to global is
needed from the universal desire for unsustainable exponential growth to the
desire for a sustainable future. [18 mins.]
To receive CASE mailings contact d.oldroyd@wp.pl
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