Climate Change or Consciousness Change?

I got involved in an online discussion ostensibly about climate change, whether it's real or not, etc. the other day and offered a couple of posts to that discussion that I thought I'd repeat here since the theme of interconnectedness ran fairly strongly through them.  Any time someone wants to debate the validity of global warming I end up feeling like they're missing the point.  So I offer this as a possible alternate way of approaching the issue, and other related issues dealing with the various major changes we're now in as a society and a planet...

The simple fact of the matter is that the world is changing. Rapidly. And for the worse in a lot of ways. It's changing physically, socially, economically, and in just about any other way you can define, at a pace we haven't experienced before. We all know it. We all feel it, see it, sense it, experience it, and are unsettled by it. It's changing in ways that threaten the lives and well being of virtually every creature on the planet to one degree or another, and those degrees (no global warming pun intended) are only going to keep ratcheting upward as long as all we do is sit here arguing with each other about whether it's really happening and who or what's responsible for it.

Change is unsettling, especially big change and change we aren't in full control of or don't really understand. And I think there is a large subset of the population that, when faced with such conditions, wants to beat a hasty and fear-driven retreat back to the old days, the old ways, when we couldn't see where the road was leading yet so it was okay to remain on it. It's a natural response, but it's one that we can't afford to indulge in now I think.

We are into the 6th mass extinction in the history of life on this planet now, and the first caused by man. That in and of itself should be indication enough that we can't keep proceeding down, or retreating down, the well-worn path of ever-increasing mass consumption and environmentally destructive fossil fuel-based energy production. Have our lifestyle and energy consumption choices had an effect on this situation? Of course they have. How could they not, given their scales? The degree to which one choice or another has contributed to this situation is essentially irrelevant at this point.

To me, given the dominion we exercise over the other life forms and affairs of this planet, and given the amount of impact the human footprint has on the condition of the planet, we must also now more fully accept our great shared responsibility for stewardship of the planet and all its inhabitants. The planet can no longer exist first and foremost to serve us, with our insatiable hunger for consumption and immediate personal gratification and our abhorrence of the least bit of personal discomfort or sacrifice, or relatively soon none of us will remain in existence. We must now exist to serve the planet. And we have to start there, standing together on the common ground of commitment to that perspective, before any of these other discussions can do anything but drive deeper wedges between us at a time when we need to be uniting as one global family.

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Once past that milestone, "what can we do about it?" becomes the central question, after we've all agreed we want and need to do something about any of these major changes and once we've come to see that these are global, not national, issues, and they'll require coordinated global responses from all of us acting together.

The whole 'us vs. them' mindset must be transcended, especially when it's devolved to the remarkably juvenile level that it has with respect to our own country's political environment. I think that as a country we can start by really challenging that and overcoming it so that we can begin to take effective action together. Then I'd suggest we also apply that change to how we view other countries, and stop waiting for smaller, poorer nations who have contributed the least to the issues to take the lead in making changes to address those issues. We as a nation can also commit to ending our exploitation and domination of those less devleoped nations in all the ways that we historically have in service of our own self-interest, economically, militarily, and politically,. And we can all stop living from the mindset that growth for the sake of growth is the ultimate purpose and goal of all life and must remain the bottom line driver for all nations. I saw a great quote by Edward Abbey the other day - "Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell."  The fact that we in this country have lived from that mindset for so long, and are finally becoming more aware of the cost of doing so, doesn't mean that we and other nations can't now learn from that and shift to a more sustainable and more highly evolved way of being.

And we can, and indeed must, begin to take personal responsibility and action as individuals first and foremost. Maybe retrofitting one's home to full solar power isn't economically feasible for most of us now. But we can commit to consistently doing the little things first, like recycling and reusing all that we can, attending local discussion forums to explore local ways of making positive change together, transcending old rigid political ideologies in favor of supporting candidates and ideas that we believe will act in the greater good to address these issues effectively, and learning to live a life of service to others much more consciously and fully in our own lives. And as we do these things, the change we seek and need will begin within each of us, it will develop in others too and solidify locally, it will affect things more regionally, then nationally, and then globally. It has to start with personal transformation and commitment though I think. And as others have argued, I too think faith is hugely important, but faith without action is just a way of trying to relieve ourselves of any personal responsibility or internal conflict over our part in perpetuating the issues.

Finally, I think whether we act or not, whether we end up on the extinction list too or not, the universe will continue onward, with or without us humans. But we are the only beings, on this planet anyway, who have the power to consciously shape our own evolution and that of the planet as a whole. And with that unique gift and power I think we have a tremendous opportunity to further our own individual and collective development if we choose to actively face the challenges before us now. Or we can choose to sit back and assume that somehow it'll all work out and basically do nothing. But what a profound waste that would be of this tremendous opportunity.