Has it dawned on you yet? The world we took for granted no longer exists and is not coming back. The virus is not an anomaly in an otherwise healthy world it is the signal of the collapse of the globalized neo-liberal free market dream. It always was a fragile system, it doesn’t matter which straw it took to break the camel’s back but the certainty always was our economic paradigm is fundamental unsustainable.
Halving emission the decades in a row still isn’t going to be enough to make the climate stabalise. We need to invent carbon capture and storage machines and completely change we the way we manage landscapes so that they absorb much more carbon than they emit. So if this economic pause feels difficult try multiplying it by 30 years. It really is time to think completely differently, we have to embrace a different future.
I am not smart enough to fully understand the money markets but they are in deep trouble, the American government is pumping trillions of newly printed dollars to prop up a system that seems to be on its last legs. This crisis on health is triggered by a crisis in the environment and our susceptibility to this threat is bought about by a deeply divided society of super rich and on the breadline poor. Neo liberalism has failed us horribly, the materialist, reductionist view has brought the world to the edge of its own destruction. The 2020 economic collapse is going to be many times worse than 2008. Here are some new ways to think, to understand our wider predicament: firstly some thoughts after a meeting with Fritjof Capra by Daniel Wahl.
“Capra clearly articulated something that I had intuitively known and was trying to understand better. He suggested that the ecological, environmental, social and economic crises we are facing are not separate but interconnected expressions of one single crisis: a crisis of perception. … The neo-Darwinist story of individuals and species in fierce competition for limited resources is an inadequate and limited conception of life. Nature sustains life by creating and nurturing communities. In today’s leading life sciences, evolution is no longer seen as a struggle for existence but as a collaborative dance and exploration of novelty. Capra pointed out that “sustainability is a dynamic process of co-evolution rather than a static state. Sustainability is a property of an entire web of relationships” (personal comment) rather than a characteristic of a single individual, company, country or species. The understanding that the common root cause of the multiple crises we are facing is in fact a crisis of perception offers us hope that we will be able to respond before it is too late.”
Daniel Christian Wahl
The innovators creating tomorrow’s regenerative economy have all, in their own ways, learned how to see the larger system in which they live and work. They look beyond events and superficial fixes to see deeper structures and forces at play, they don’t allow boundaries (either organizational or culturally imposed) to limit their thinking, they make strategic choices that take into account natural and social limits, and they work to create self-reinforcing cycles of innovation — change strategies that mimic how growth occurs in the natural world. They have learned to see systems by cultivating an intelligence that we all possess. Human beings are natural systems thinkers, but like any innate capacity, this talent must be understood and cultivated.
Peter Senge (2008)
Permaculture is systems thinking, permaculture recognizes that everything is connected to everything else. To fix the problems and challenges we face we need a whole new way of thinking. More so we need to embed that thinking into our planning, training, education, into our every action. Decision making cannot run on short term or partisan objectives, that is what has brought the world to the very brink of its own destruction.
Sector are based in Wales, and are linked to the Permaculture Association of Britain, Re-Alliance and Norwegian Refugee Council. We have built up a skill base and network of trainers in the UK, as well as across East Africa. We are ready to lead on the re-skilling and re-education that is needs to help0 address the huge challenges we currently face
“I’m absolutely sure that there are going to be more diseases like this in future if we continue with our practices of destroying the natural world,” says marine ecologist Dr Enric Sala
Dr Enric Sala