Planet In Peril
The human community faces two momentous challenges today that will loom ever larger in the years ahead. One is to establish the social and economic conditions necessary for everyone on this planet to flourish: to live with dignity and purpose and fulfill their life’s potentials. The other is to safeguard the natural environment on which we depend from the callous harm caused by an economy dependent on unrestrained extraction and consumption. These challenges to our collective well-being are bound to grow in severity and urgency over the coming decades. To meet them successfully calls for a transformation in the vectors that drive the economy both nationally and globally.
Our current dominant economic system is pushing us toward a precipice, and we’re careening forward with hardly a thought for the plunge that lies ahead. If the model conforms to the contours of the real world, the policies that flow from it will be realistic, constructive, and socially benign. But if the model is rooted in a distorted picture of the world—a picture that omits some crucial features while giving excessive weight to others—it will lead to unwise policies that damage both the social fabric of our lives and the natural environment. That the model we currently work within involves severe distortions of the actual world, distortions in both its human and natural dimensions, is the crux of our present predicament. The economic model that reigns today is powerful, compelling, and logically rigorous, but as we can see from the inescapable global crises it repeatedly triggers, it is terribly flawed. The model harbors inherent pathologies that infect both our social order and our relationships with nature. In the social dimension of our lives, the model leads to glaring inequalities in wealth and income, to violations of social equity, to pockets of deep poverty in the midst of plenty, to conflict and wars over vanishing resources. It divides the world into rival military camps that spend billions on weapons of deadly power while millions in their own lands live in utter poverty.
Our relationship to the environment is even more vicious. This model promotes a purely utilitarian orientation to nature, an outlook that compels us to chip away at the fragile geophysical and biological pillars that sustain human civilization on this precious planet. If the destruction continues, everything we cherish is bound to collapse. If we are to successfully resolve these two problems—to promote greater social and economic justice and to preserve a natural environment congenial to human well-being—we need a new economic model directed toward these two overriding objectives. The model must be governed not by mere quantitative measurements of production, growth, and financial profitability, but by standards that reflect a moral point of view. British economist Kay Raworth has proposed the outline of an alternative economic model that captures, in a clear visual image, the goalposts we must pursue to overcome the two interlocked hurdles facing humankind today. A Senior Associate at Oxford University’s Environmental Change Institute, where she teaches Environmental Change and Management, Raworth has designed a model she calls “doughnut economics.” She has presented this model at various conferences, in YouTube videos, on her website, and in a full-length book called Doughnut Economics, which the Financial Times selected as the best work on economics for 2017. [ The Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy
CASSE is another advocacy site that offers a different comprehensive strategy on how to achieve a no-growth steady state society that functions within an ecologically balanced economy.] https://www.commondreams.org/views/2021/11/22/can-doughnut-heal-our-world?utm_term=AO&utm_campaign=Daily%20Newsletter&utm_content=email&utm_source=Daily%20Newsletter&utm_medium=Email
One more thing: We often hear that we cannot make sudden, drastic changes to our economy or society. This article by George Monbiot shows that this is what President Roosevelt did during World War Two. Read it.
