Our response can be simple or incomprensibly complex

by Robert McLean

Response to climate change either for the individual or on a society-wide basis can be simple in the extreme or so complex it is almost incomprehensible.

Our earth needs a "cooling" hand

Whatever it might be, it needs to be considered, articulated among friends, workable and in the greater good.

Interestingly, it seems the entire world is trapped in an economic paradigm from those struggling to survive in the most destitute of circumstances to the wealthy, who should they wish, can have more for breakfast than many have to eat for a whole week.

Those at both extremes live in a world that is dominated by economics.

The destitute, however, and despite what appears to be disarray, live closer to the idea of community, an idea that will evolve into a workable concept, a way of living to which all of us will ultimately be indebted.

Writing in Nation of Change, Charles Eisenstein said: “. . . community is nearly impossible in a highly monetized society like our own. That is because community is woven from gifts, which is ultimately why poor people often have stronger communities than rich people.

“If you are financially independent, then you really don't depend on your neighbors—or indeed on any specific person—for anything. You can just pay someone to do it, or pay someone else to do it,” he said.

Charles Eisenstein

Any response to climate change, personal or societal, will be hobbled until we can free ourselves from the disabling economic paradigm that only worsens the difficulties from which escape is a must.

Eisenstein has discussed the idea of “gift circles” in which each person, in turn, talks about the one of two things they need and then in going around the circle again, each person talks about things they have to give.

Of course, those in the circle can mention that they would like one of those things on offer.

Notes of needs and what is offered are kept and circulated via email among those in the group.

Finally, the circle is used a third time, to provide the opportunity for those who took up a previous offer to articulate their gratitude.

Eisenstein said: “It confirms that this group is giving to each other, that gifts are recognized, and that my own gifts will be recognized, appreciated, and reciprocated as well.

“It is just that simple: needs, gifts, and gratitude. But the effects can be profound,” he wrote.

The Eisenstein discussed process effectively disconnects us from the consumerist way of living that the economic hawks argue is the lodestone of the good life.

What is and isn’t the “good life” is remarkably subjective being inextricably linked whether you are or not are among the comparative few who live within the ease of the economic paradigm or, rather, stand with the many who look-on with curiousity and envy from the outside, remote from the good life and who experience a life of real want.

There is, however, sliding through all this imagined or genuine want, created openly, but strangely surreptitiously, by the legions of marketers who engineer within each of us a need for the “new”; the idea that last year’s model, of whatever, is no longer what we should have, although the newest edition is frequently, in a practical and pragmatic sense, essentially no different from that we already have.

The ideal of the consumerist world, the idea that we must have the “latest, newest and best”, is what is exhausting the world’s finite resources and driving us further up the “don’t go there” climate change scale.

The welfare of humanity, according to countless scholarly economists and business and political theorists, is linked to an ever increasing growth-based economy; an economy that under close examination favours only a few, gouges at the world’s finite resources, pays little attention to innovations that contribute naught to the traditional growth-based economy, but which are critical to the broader well-being or happiness of people.

It is so difficult for us to imagine a society that is not linked to, or driven by, a growth based economy, but if our response to climate change is to have any influence or impact we must be intimately involved in the creation of a whole new paradigm in our communities, and beyond that our broader society, of a way of living that does not revolve around the money-based economy.

Our contemporary economy compartmentalizes and individualizes everything, ignoring the reality that everything of worth in the world is inextricably linked through nature’s network epitomizing the adage about the flapping of a butterfly’s wings in an Amazon jungle can be a pivotal happening in a typhoon that sweeps through some other and distant part of the world.

Within Eisenstein’s “gift circle” are the beginnings of what will be the underpinnings of a new way of living, one that escapes the present growth-based economy and hinges on the idea of sharing.

Long have I imagined that a family home would be just that – remaining within the family for generations and changing shape and size to meet the ever changing demands of families and never to be sold, rather to be given away with the proviso that the existing occupants can live there until they die.

The idea is that the older generations can live in the house until they die, passing on their wisdom and knowledge to younger family members and so re-igniting a dynamic which is lost humanity when older people are “hidden” from society in old peoples’ homes.

Should houses be built with an understanding that they were to be the family home for a long, long time, construction would be different in that it would be planned and built in such a way that it would fit more comfortably with the environment and designed in such a way that it would allow those who live there to survive without heavy reliance on energy derived from sources other from those integral to the house itself.

Sharing would be common – rather than every house having a complete set of tools (garden and otherwise) as it does now, neighborhoods would have one central repository of tools that would be shared among 20-30 households to allow for allow for the upkeep and maintenance of those respective homes.

We will have fewer houses, but more homes for more people, fewer overall tools from large to small, and because of that, more sharing of skills and knowledge about some of life’s most fundamental tasks.

The added bonus, of course, is more personal interaction among neighbours and subsequently a stronger community.

Just two thoughts that would help us ease our way out of the present economic dilemma as no longer would people be bound to what are often life-long mortgages or the relentless and inexplicable variations of the real estate market and nor would we, along with thousands of others, spending untold sums to accumulate tools that research has shown that those same tools (both in monetary and environmental terms) are frequently used for just one or two minutes in their 20 year life.

This is somewhat extreme,
 but trains are unquestionably
the best way to move people.

That suggests, inarguably, that those same tools should be drawn from a central neighborhood resource, set up for the purpose of sharing.

Public transport is about sharing, private transport is about individualism and so there is the crux of society’s challenge with climate change – as long as we adhere to individualism it will worsen (although we are already locked into difficult times because of the long-life of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere), but through sharing, pretty much everything, we can ease our future's decided difficulties.