WARNING: This post deviates slightly from the tone you might expect from Another-Day in an effort to shed light on the fact that we need to make a whole bunch of changes in order to have another day, one day.
My friends call me Captain Planet, or “Sustainable Steve”, or a host of monikers aimed at ridiculing the fact that I’ve dedicated a portion of my life to saving the world. I haven’t, but that’s what they assume. Besides, girls dig guys that give a fuck about pandas, so I’m not correcting anyone anytime soon. They don’t understand what I do for a living. That’s probably because I couldn’t find anything meaningful to do as a profession in the conventional sense, so I invented my own job. After learning how to design buildings and things, I thought about the future, and about our Earth and arrived at the conclusion that it would be a pretty good idea to spend my days designing a new future for it, ‘cos the present isn’t such a great place to be when you look at it closely.
In my forthcoming posts, I’ll try my best to debunk some of the myths about what is actually going on with our planet and add some perspective to the actual state of affairs regarding the challenges we face as the only species which needs an app to communicate with each other.
Enough about me, let’s get down to the dark and dirty of how mankind has managed to fuck up our only home faster than it could learn how to accept that people of the same sex sometimes want to get married – Roughly 1 500 species of animals openly display homosexual tendencies, most likely because they didn’t invent a god to tell them not to feel that way.
Consider this (I’ll be using smaller numbers to avoid inevitable confusion): Planet Earth has been around for 4.5 years, the rise of mankind occurred roughly 2 days ago, and in the last 10 seconds we have managed to consume over 50% of our available natural resources, destroy key planetary systems, produce enough waste each year to cover the entire USA 10 meters deep in composting shit and artificially alter the natural course of the key systems that give us food, clean air and water.
And this has all been done supposedly in the name of “global progress”. The shocking realization though is that less than a third of the people that live on Earth benefit from any of this so-called “progress”. If the world were a village of 100 people, 50 of them wouldn’t eat regularly and 20 would be starving. Twenty-five villagers wouldn’t have any clean water to drink, 30 would be breathing in air that was destroying their lungs and 2 people would own 90% of the things in the village.
To get some perspective on how fast we’ve reached this chaotic space, 2000 years ago there would have been 3 people on the planet: historically, we know them as Jesus, David Attenborough and Yo-landi Vi$$er.
But fear not! The world is not coming to an end. In fact the planet will be just fine. It’s weathered itself through catastrophes far greater than anything mankind could throw at it. The Earth, like the clever machine that it is, is prewired to correct imbalances in its systems. Over time, it will gradually fix all the fuckups we are making. The problem is that this will take a very long time, and in the meantime, it will most likely become a place that’s not very hospitable for us to live on.
So how did we get here?
The short answer is that we aspired to become great, to invent and to alleviate struggle while waging wars with each other about whose god was bigger and who was entitled to more of what we have been provided with by the Earth. We just did it without really understanding what the collateral damage would be: climate change, loss of biodiversity, economic disparity, food insecurity, peak oil, islands of plastic waste, polar bears involuntarily undertaking long distance swimming marathons, enduring tyrannies of the strongest (read: most manipulative) elite. The list goes on.
And what caused this global mess?
You did. That’s right, You. Not big bad corporations, or greedy politicians or religious differences. You make the decisions you make and that’s the way it’s been since the beginning of our short stay on Earth as a ‘ civilization’. You are the consumer and the consumer is ultimately to blame for the current shithole we call home. It’s largely due to the fact that you are ignorant. Every thought you have, every injustice you turn a blind eye to and every Rand you spend is voting for the kind of world you live in, and you are blind as an endangered Greater Horseshoe Bat to the truth of how your actions ultimately affect the planet (Google it before it doesn’t exist anymore).
Big business made friendly by advertising is the single biggest evil we are facing right now. I’m not only talking about the people who put women who are proud to have thrush on TV in between episodes of Master Chef. I’m also referring to conventional media at large: the propaganda machine we have apathetically handed our decision making ability over to when choosing our products, our wars, our governments and our friends. Governments are big businesses too, except buying from them is civil requirement.
Hitler murdered 6 million Jews. Big business now threatens the well-being of 7 billion people.
I’m not advocating being a conscious consumer either. I hate to be the one to tell you that sipping on your Fairtrade latte, kitted out in your organically produced Adidas Originals while you drive a blue motion diesel and run your design agency off solar power won’t do shit.
We’ve reached the point of no return. The only solution is something very few, especially big business, wants to hear: we need to do much more, with much less.
We need to slow down our rate of consumption dramatically, and simultaneously find new, innovative ways of driving growth and providing for a population that’s rate of expansion is spiralling out of control. By the time you’ve finished reading this, just over 1 300 new little humans would have been born. Humans who need to be fed, cleaned, educated and entertained for the next 60 years.
In plain simple English, we need to stop accumulating so much shit, stop going so many places and stop producing any waste. The fundamental mechanisms we use to power, govern, design and promote our civilization need to radically shift.
And all of this needed to happen 25 years ago.
I’m often asked what I see for the future of mankind. I don’t have anything good to say unless mankind becomes something more useful than an obese disease throttling it’s lifelines and shitting in it’s own backyard. We are not doomed, but we have a very rude awakening approaching us, and there seem to be very few who are willing to step outside of their comfort zones and realize the implications of what life in the not-so-distant future will actually be like.
There are positives: rising sea levels might mean that I won’t ever have to visit the hell-on-Earth that is Durban in order to have a relaxing swim in the sea. Plus I know how to build a wind turbine to power my Apple gadgets. The good news is the news of technology, and innovation, and revolution that’s sparking up all over the planet. The Occupy movement is asking us to question the conventions of our current paradigm. Google enables everyone Internet access to learn new things. Another-Day has given it’s 4 visitors the opportunity to read this post and start asking questions.
It’s time to stop kidding ourselves. The future as it is today isn’t a pretty place. But creating a new one might just be the most magical thing we could ever dream of being a part of.
We’re living on borrowed time, using inefficient systems to create things we don’t need. The world we could create is abundant, driven by the sun, designed intelligently, shared without propriety concerns over ownership and governed for the benefit and not the oppression of man. It is a world where mankind starts exploring more complex ideas.
In the village of the future, all 100 villagers need to be able and resourced to participate in the creation of a home planet that is testament to the incredible potential we have has a subjective species experiencing our lives objectively.
And if all else fails, the Mayans gave us the option to press CTRL+ALT+DELETE and start all over again in 5 months.
Till next time. Don’t be afraid. Be useful.