Lifestyles must change, too, if we are to save the planet
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Posted on May 7, 2007
Filed Under Justice, Global warming/Climate change, Deep ecology, Greenhouse gas emissions, Ecological overshoot, Ecological hope, Consumer culture, Population growth, Fossil fuel dependency, Earth spirituality
Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:
Most of what we read about the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Mitigation of Climate Change, is focused on new technologies and policies to enable them as the way to ‘fix’ our global warming problem.
But we all know somewhere inside that this will not be enough. So this morning I found this article from Inter Press News Service (IPS) in my NewsGator feeds and wanted to share it with you. So it turns out that some folks in India know what else we need to do — consume less, alter our lifestyles.
But, ouch, this always brings on a bit of defensive behavior, doesn’t it?
”This is for a change of lifestyle without a change in comfort,” said Rajendra Pachuri, the US-favored chairman of the IPCC.
Change lifestyle without a change in comfort? Sure. That will certainly comfort the comfortable — technology will simply alter one support for my comfort with another. Everything will be okay.
To be fair, he does also say, “One has to try to accept a different threshold of comfort.” But I end up not knowing exactly what he means.
The reality is that this world is already becoming more uncomfortable and only the wealthiest are able at this point to shield themselves from it. But just like what happened in the big northeast blackout of 2003, we are all going to begin to experience increasing discomfort.
But it is good to know that this point was raised, and with some real support from many delegates to the IPCC meeting.
You see, denial of reality is part of our culture. We are not just dealing with global warming and the need to switch a few technologies to become carbon neutral. For one thing, it will take decades to accomplish the transition from fossil fuels to clean energy sources, and that’s if we begin to make the investment now. Meanwhile, global demand for energy will soar — if only because of the needs of the 2-3 billion additional human beings that are about to join us on this planet.
There is no way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and to bring the Earth back into eco-balance unless we drastically reduce human consumption. And the great burden of that reduction lies with those who right now consume way beyond our needs, way beyond any decent proportion in this world of growing scarcity, and way beyond the capacity of the planet to support us.
The three IPCC reports remain a critically important but cautious exercise, result of the consensus of 192 UN member nations. But the call for drastic lifestyle changes won’t come from there, at least not yet, though it will come more and more from the developing world where poverty is the story for the majority.
And so it is up to us, and to our cultural, religious, educational, and other social institutions to take up this call — with urgency.
Technorati Tags: Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, lifestyle change, earth carrying capacity, carbon neutral
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2 Responses to “Lifestyles must change, too, if we are to save the planet”
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Love the ideas but most people are still clueless on this stuff. What is needed is a way to show people what their current environmental impact (carbon usage) is and how it is broken down in the different aspects of their lives (auto, food, household, etc.) If you cant measure, you cant improve it.
Hi Andy,
Have been thinking about your comment. It’s true that people need to be able to ‘SEE’ their environmental impact, their ecological footprint, in order to grasp what is going on. There is also, however, a strong resistance to this message. I think people know drastic changes are required, but to let that sink in, well, that ain’t easy.
I hope to have much more dialogue with folks about how to do this, how to break down that resistance. If you have other thoughts about that, do share them here.
Margaret