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Aleksandar Malečić
282 days ago |
Geoengineering is not only a technological challenge. It’s also societal and natural. The environment doesn’t momentarily respond to outside conditions. We’ve been misusing it for quite some time. Also, there are too many of us and the global population is still growing. Globalization forces emerging national economies to be globally competitive and loosen agriculture and local communities. The global economic crisis is a logical consequence of value systems (slaves producing food and taking care of water), industrialization, fastening competition and modern social stratification (the top disconnected from the bottom, rich people spending money on luxury and competing who is more rich and arrogant). The crisis is a phase in a lifecycle of modern society and economy. Anyone willing to independently change the direction is possibly a lunatic. Still, the change must be done. We are brain-washed and addicted to the idea of economic success, glamour and egocentrism, just like chronic gamblers. Even worse, through globalization “developed” countries tend to spread that soap for brain-washing across the world.
We need a global project that would last for more lifetimes. We need to decrease the global human population (this limited planet doesn’t understand the idea of freedom to plan a family), fix the damage (post peak oil (and other peaks), renewable energy and green products, biodiversity), stabilize climate (carbon sequestration (capture and storage), physics applied to solar radiation, melting of ice and permafrost…) and voluntarily move to the background and let the environment “breathe” and transform according to its natural rhythm. If we somehow start moving along the path of sustainability (it’s not very likely), there will still be many challenges. A forest used for carbon capture is vulnerable to forest fires and climate change and trees change their capacity for carbon sequestration during their lifecycle. There isn’t much fun in spending the whole life in fixing the damage, especially if there is a long temporal distance between a cause and its effect. The society as a whole will hesitate. We need more than one whole lifetime just to fix the mess and we still haven’t properly started.
I shall hesitate, just like you. I am like a smoker who knows that cigarettes are bad for health. But, just like a caring pregnant mother who will quit smoking for the sake of health of her future child, I must do something. We need each other in order to persist. Something is going on around the world. Perhaps in these times of global economic changes there is some space left for a change in the right direction. I am ready, but I need other people to show me the way, to reorganize the society and encourage me to persist during the change. We need each other. Are you there?
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