Using imagination to address climate change

by Robert McLean

Imagination will resolve climate change, or at least allow humanity to address the dilemma it has created.

Oddly and confusingly, it was that same imagination, that saw humans engineer the world in such a way that drove the changes that now bedevil us.

It was human ingenuity and persistence to achieve something better that ignited and drove changes to the slither like atmosphere that surrounds planet Earth and which plays a critical role in the maintenance of the Goldilocks-like conditions in which humanity has prospered.

And so here we are at the heart of the impasse understood by Albert Einstein when he said: “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”

Yes, it is imagination that will help us resolve this encompassing trouble, but it is a new imagination; an imagination that takes us beyond the ideologies, beliefs, values and fantasies in which humans are deeply embroiled.

In grappling with this “new imagination” we equally have to become new people; new people who better understand civility; new people who can see that for what we grasp is intricately implicated in failed economic system; an economic system that is drawing humanity closer to the abyss.

Much has been said about this being the critical decade in terms of addressing climate change and this being the eve of a new year, we are now nearing what might be described as “the pointy end” of that decade in that as of tomorrow we have just three years left to put right a set of circumstances that, depending upon which authority you adhere to, will bring outcomes varying from catastrophic to grim or not so bad to changes we can adapt to,

Implicated in most every scenario, from catastrophic to changes we can adapt to, is the death of people, ranging from millions (catastrophic) to a relative hand full (successful adaptation), with either outcome being sufficient, surely to drive our “new imagination”.

We live in a world in which the idea of “public” has been prostituted to private enterprise and the idea of the common good has been lost to individualism, taking along with it, our sense of community, our civility, and generally corrupting our morals.

And so for 2017 we need to reimagine how we should be living; examining our ideologies and searching for, and electing leaders with an empathy for what it is the enriches an entire community, rather than just a handful of people.

Yes, until we can again make the economy a servant of man, rather than vice-versa, then what we are now the nexus of climate change, will continue unabated.

Yes, we can only change it and stop the damage we are doing to the Earth’s atmosphere if we can imagine how we can live contentedly in what might be described as a “powered-down economy”.