We are a species in crisis, broad ecological decline is impacting negatively on global biodiversity. Our climate altered, a result of increased atmospheric greenhouse gasses has produced a warming planet driving an escalation in the instances of extreme weather events.
Both drought and floods impact directly on our ability to produce food. The melting of glaciers globally has reduced our planet’s global storage of precious fresh water. Ecological services which provide habitat upon which the web of life thrives are decimated. Global inequality has broadened, poverty is no longer predominantly a symptom of developing nations, it has become a state of the working poor.
Group think, prevalent in society, has generated cavernous divisions between people, battle lines drawn between the political left and right. The global poor seeking to escape war and crumbling environmental conditions are rejected by first world nations as fear intensifies. The clear story of the human experience in the early twenty-first century is one of rampant deterioration.
We are all products of our environment, subject to the influence of our social and physical surroundings. How does human society condition us as a whole? We are reluctant to question the fundamentals of society which describe how we must work to pay to live, lending us all to become consumers in a cyclical act which ensures the slow grinding decay of our natural world. A system which predisposes us to judging each other based on wealth and employment.
Consumerism has developed to be our global cultural norm and this prevailing social environment has conditioned us to see the world through a lens which lends us to perpetuate these behavioural propensities. Even if those actions lead ultimately to our own demise, to our own extinction. The human experience, reduced to consumerism. With money as our chief metric all our problems begin to look financial, while the cause underpinning the preponderance of human, social and environmental declines on our shared planet stem unequivocally from the financial system itself.
If our species can make use of its intellectual tenacity to arrest anthropogenic biosphere and societal declines in time to prevent self destruction, is as yet unclear. One thing is certain, if we remain reluctant to engage in deep consideration of widespread systemic changes to our contemporary social design there will be scant hope for the future of humanity. The time for change is upon us.
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