'The Reason' for Beneath the Wisteria

By Robert McLean

 

George Monbiot has helped me understand the reason for Beneath the Wisteria.



George Monbiot's
Age of Consent.

Writing in “Age of Consent: A Manifesto for a New World Order”, the English thinker, author and newspaper columnist, discussed how rarely an upheaval happens spontaneously and how existing institutions are unable to reform themselves.

Considering that climate change, humanity’s greatest ever threat, will only be abated if our way of life is subjected to an upheaval and if existing institutions are reformed, then those who gather Beneath the Wisteria face a significant challenge.

We are the “specific you” discussed by Monbiot and although it is important we personally instigate changes that will ease the dynamics of climate change; the overriding importance to we, “specifically you”, is to act and behave in such a manner that encourages, enables and ensures the broad sweep of our community to become sensitive to the societal needs and demands of this new and emerging world.

Monbiot discusses the need for a “shift” adding: “This shift, in other words, depends not on an amorphous them, but on a specific you.

“It depends”, Monbiot added, “on your preparedness to abandon your attachment to the old world and start thinking like a citizen of the new; to exchange your security for liberty, your comfort for elation.

“It depends on your willingness to act”, he wrote.

Beneath the Wisteria is the medium through which we can act.

The need to address the foundational paradigm that is manifesting itself as climate change is urgent and demands more than simply gathering each month to really only “talk among ourselves” and so have little or no influence on the unfolding dilemmas.

True, it is beneficial to gather with like-minded souls, have your emotional resources refurbished and refreshed to return to the respective parts of our communities and be willing to again discuss climate change realities with your counterparts.

Many, it seems, acknowledge that our climate is changing and those same people all want to do something that will help, but within that most are unsure what it is they need to do. Changing a few light globes will not help.

Gathering Beneath the Wisteria each month, and supporting the essence of its reason, illustrates that you are conscious that the human story has become somewhat distorted and that we need not simply start a new chapter, but re-write the entire book.

Our society’s adherence to an extremist ideology, namely capitalism, for the past couple of centuries is what has brought us to this troubling position.

Writing in his 1999 book, “The Post Corporate World: Life After Capitalism”, David Korten said “Societies based on extremist ideologies of either the far left (rigid collectivization) or the far right (ruthless individualism) are inherently unstable”.

Korten continues: “There is nothing inevitable or immutable about the ways in which we choose to structure our economic lives. Choices as to the rules and structures that define our economies are human choices. Because those rules and structures play such a powerful role in expressing our values and shaping how we live, it is proper that they be subject to thorough public debate and dialogue informed by serious, critical and non-ideological analysis.”

It has been the voracious appetite of the world’s corporations that has lead us to this point; a place at which inequality abounds, the earth’s environment is in absolute disarray and the “common” upon which we all depend, the atmosphere, has been, and is being, fundamentally changed, putting humanity at risk.

David C. Korten's
'Post-Corporate
World'.

Turning to Korten again: “Although capitalism claims to be an engine of wealth creation, in fact its primary vehicle, the corporation is more accurately described as a powerful engine of wealth extraction – it profits dependent on imposing enormous costs on the rest of society so that a few top executives and large shareholders may enjoy unconsciously large financial rewards.

“If market rules applied, most of the dominant corporations would have long ago found themselves unable to cover their own costs and gone bankrupt or been restructured into smaller, more efficient firms,” Korten wrote.

Korten, an enthusiast of the traditional market, but not the all-consuming corporation notes that far less than one per cent of the world’s population has a consequential partnership in corporate ownership.

“This leads”, he wrote, “to a rather shocking conclusion. The triumph of global capitalism means that more than half of the world’s one hundred largest economies are centrally planned for the primary benefit of the wealthiest one per cent of the world’s people!

“It is a triumph of privatized central planning over markets and democracy. Even more it is the triumph of the extremely wealthy over the remainder of humanity,” Korten wrote.

It is clear that neither the ideologies of either extreme (the far left or far right) have within them the capacity to mitigate the dilemmas of climate change and so we need to choose a middle road built on sharing, co-operation, mutuality and collaboration, values that are somewhat foreign to those extremist ideologies.

The sad and confusing part is that those from the capitalistic side of the spectrum believe they adhere to those values and yet a wounded earth and a community in which the ever-widening fiscal gap between people suggests otherwise.

We gather Beneath the Wisteria in the hope increasing our understanding of the damage we are doing to environment; what we can do about that; enjoying the company of like-minded people; and, hopefully, helping our community to see that the “business as usual” belief of the corporate world is absolutely inadequate and, importantly, inappropriate.