Understanding our dilemma as a species is not simple, but many of the required actions are clear. We must clean up our act, physically as well as mentally and spiritually. Life on Earth is much larger than we are, and will likely survive any conceivable biological or chemical disruptions we could cause to the global environment; but we as a species may not do so well under much harsher or more toxic conditions. As Margulis and Sagan point out,
Beyond short-term technological fads are the long-term trends of life — extinction, expansion, and symbiosis — which seem universal. We, the species Homo sapiens, will reach extinction, with our without a nuclear war. We may, like ichthyosaurs, seed ferns, and australopithecines, leave the annals of earth history without an heir, or we may, like choanmastigotes and Homo erectus, the respective ancestors of sponges and us, evolve into distinct new species.
If we are to aspire to the latter we must, as a minimum, stop fouling our own nest. The creation of toxic wastes is noted mainly among species in the throes of wiping themselves out, like the anaerobes who created oxygen demonstrated. Eventually life can adapt to temperature change, or to massive radiation, or chemical contamination, but it may well do so without us, and our contribution to the unfolding of the universe will have been lost. But this does not need to be the way the story ends.
Because this is our story, we get to choose. We may not be able to prevent some of the outcomes that are “baked in” to the present global warming scenario, but we can take action to stop making things worse, and perhaps to correct some of the damage that has been done by working to restore the soils, the oceans, and the atmosphere to a balance that is favorable for ourselves and our cousins. Here are a few of the practical ideas we’ve been working on:
Financing clean energy, and supporting the development of clean energy and resiliency projects in a variety of ways.
Supporting ecovillage development initiatives to create better eco-living communities.
Supporting the development of a global monetary policy to provide a “positive carbon reward” for emissions reductions and carbon drawdown.
Proposing the idea of a “clean economy cooperative” to undertake profitable initiatives in support of the transition
Publishing the GreenEconomyNJ.org web site
— and these are just some of the initiatives that are possible. What’s important is not simply what we do, but also what it stands for: the possibility that anyone and everyone can create their own economically-viable model of restoring, maintaining, and operating optimally within our ecosystem.