The State of the World & Where We Go From Here
This blog is the first in a series of twelve posts over the next several months that we hope will stimulate you to think regeneratively and motivate you to take informed actions that will help our human family, the natural world, and importantly, your sense of mental well-being.
In this first segment, we’ll start off by taking stock of the current situation and how we got to where we are now. Next, we’ll look to change your perspective on our situation into one of challenges and opportunities rather than doom and gloom. We’ll then spend some time on how to take care of ourselves so that we can stay ‘in the game’, and in the final few posts we’ll turn our attention to crafting solutions that move the needle. Are you ready for this? Let’s begin!
If there is one thing that most of the world agrees on these days, it is that we are in turmoil. Our economic, social, environmental and governance systems are all under threat, and our communities are increasingly fractured and polarized. Some folks refer to what is going on as the Global Polycrisis, while others describe it as VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous). Still others call the situation we find ourselves in a ‘Wicked” problem. Regardless of what you call it, we have a situation for which there are no easy or known solutions, our well-intended (but often not well thought out) actions could make the problems we are trying to solve worse, and there are often unintended consequences of our actions on other parts of the system that we never saw coming.
If you are reading this article, you are no doubt aware of the urgent need to reduce Greenhouse Gas emissions within just a couple of decades, you are aware that we are in a human-caused mass extinction crisis, and you have a sense that many governments around the world have started to shift toward a ‘me-first’ approach to politics and governance. But sometimes, and especially when talking with folks who may not agree with us, it helps to put things into perspective.
For example, during the last 25+ years, human-emitted greenhouse gasses have been adding heat to our oceans at a rate equivalent to the heat from five Hiroshima-sized nuclear explosions per second, year after year, and that rate is increasing. That is a lot of heat! Further, our loss of nature is mind-numbingly large. The latest study (from 2023) estimates that the global ratio of human + mammalian livestock biomass to wild terrestrial mammals is 98.1% to 1.9%. And because we add over 200,000 humans to the planet daily, this ratio is only getting worse, every single day. It’s no wonder that humans have become disconnected from nature- because there are more humans and less nature every day.
How have our governments and elected officials responded to these crises? Mostly with cognitive dissonance and/or deafening silence. Following the lead of the new Trump administration, corporate America and a growing number of countries have stepped back from their commitments on climate action, there is a growing backlash against immigrants, and programs aimed at benefiting the less fortunate are being slashed. What is the result of what appears to be backsliding in so many areas all at once? Many of us have literally become paralyzed as we have no idea where to intervene.
While the exact origin of our highly interconnected problems and losing hard-won ground may never be fully knowable, there are some ‘smoking guns’ that have likely contributed. As we consider possible ways to move the needle on things we care about, we should keep in mind that:
We have increasingly ignored the fact that as human beings, we are all related- there is no “other”. Mother Theresa, a Catholic Saint, once said that: “The problem with the world is that we draw the circle of our family too small.” We believe this statement to be true as it helps explain how occurrences such as separating thousands of immigrant children from their families while intentionally having no way to reunite them could possibly happen.
We ignore the fact that we are a part of nature, not separate from it, and that we cannot exist without it. If you personally don’t believe this, try this very simple test: don’t use the oxygen produced by plant photosynthesis for about 5 minutes…
We have ignored our inherent need to be around nature and as a result have not prioritized nature as a key part of human existence.
The ancestral forces of our “Ancient Brain” (self-interest, desire for status, social imitation, short-termism, our primitive approach to risk management, and distracted mind) lean us toward actions that make our problems worse: a me-first mentality, consumption and conspicuous travel, security rather than community, unthinking flock behavior, lack of long-term planning/consideration of the future, unrealistic perception of risks, and immersion in social media. In short, the fact that humans have only existed in the modern world for about 10 generations means that we have not fully evolved to live in a world where collaboration, cooperation and community are of much more value than our ancestral priorities that helped us survive for our first 9,990 generations.
We have ‘inattention blindness’, but we do not acknowledge it. Our brains are, in fact, alert for things that violate our expectations of what is normal, but our focus at any given moment tends to be narrow. An example in nature is a red tail hawk zooming in on a rodent in the median strip of a highway– totally ignoring the cars that it might collide with. Also, if we have already dismissed something as not relevant or important, we do not focus on it. In the case of information that we have had many times before and don’t believe (think climate change for many people), it has little to no effect when we hear it again—the information literally becomes invisible to us.
Our prevailing worldview is one where life and the environment are treated separately, and where life is a competitive struggle for existence and not mutualistic. This worldview has been reinforced by our reductionist approach to science as well as our abandonment of Mitákuye Oyás’iŋ (Lakota term for a world view of interconnectedness that is widely practiced by native peoples all over the world). This has led us to a marked lack of ability today to fully consider possibilities for beneficial co-existence.
In spite of the fact that there is no such thing as a leader, only people exercising leadership, we willingly hand over decision-making to those in authority. This allows us to place blame on those in power and morally let us off the hook for bad things that happen. So while we may say that we care about what is happening, we have a built in excuse for inaction that keeps us from owning our piece of the mess.
Far too often, we don’t see our individual actions as contributing to the problems we face. We believe that the problems we face are happening to us, not for us. Being a victim allows us to continue to do things like advocate for governments and businesses to change what they do because they are the bad guys- while we continue to consume and vacation conspicuously as if we have no responsibility for the climate crisis, biodiversity crisis, etc. In short, we can ignore the feedback that is calling us to change.
A prevailing belief seems to be that technology can save us, and therefore we don’t need to do the heavy lifting that is involved in changing our behavior. A simple example is that we pay for and install occupancy sensors on our lighting systems to reduce energy use when areas of buildings are unoccupied, instead of getting people to turn off the lights when they leave.
So where does all of the above lead us?
Hopeless and helpless, or well-informed about how to proceed? Can we look at these smoking guns in a different light- one that helps outline what our actions should be framed around?
In future posts, we’ll examine this question in detail.
Sources:
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