What would it take to achieve World Peace?
Let us start in a kindergarten with young children squabbling over a toy.
It’s mine. No, it’s mine.
When we live in a culture of manufactured scarcity and the deliberate propagation of winners and losers, we will get an endless fight for the spoils.
When we have bratty, egocentric, self-centred leaders of business and government, the fight for the spoils will be amplified—big children in a power game.
When we hold the profit margin as the holy grail of all things worth measuring, then we export labour offshore, decimating our local ability to make things in the process, placing a massive risk on a supply chain that we do not control, we are hollowing out any possible future for all of us.
When our rewards are only considered in the short term we are robbing the future of everything alive and beautiful. We can go crazy trimming costs so we can get the bonus, knowing well that the costs we are trimming will come due somewhere down the track, but no worries, that is someone else’s problem.
Except it is not someone else’s problem. It will be our problem. It is our problem.
When we refuse to regard our home planet as a WHOLE, when we insist on dividing it up, when we consider whole systems issues like poverty, climate, health and species extinction, ensuring that we over here are safe. At the same time, you over there suffer, and we fail to realise we all pay the price.
Planetary security and peace cannot be achieved without a climate-safe future.
Crop failure, the land rendered useless, species extinction including the pollinators, intractable floods or sea level rise, and fires. The cost is being seen and felt now and will only amplify. If we think refugees and immigration are serious issues today, strap in. We might be the climate refugee in the next decade. Whole communities in Australia know their homes are no longer viable. Where do they move to, and at what cost? Who foots the bill? The bloated oil companies, who like the cigarette manufacturers before them, have become obscenely wealthy while they have known the cost to humanity and our home Planet’s future in the sale of their dark energy, prohibiting, in the most nefarious ways, any innovation that would enable a transition to light energy.
When we have failed to do the all-in-accounting for everything including
- the cost to Mother Nature to make the raw materials, fossils, clean water and trees
- the cost for humans to find, extract, refine and use the raw materials
- the cost of those same products when discarded – be that the toxic effects of chemicals, the plastic mountains in our waterways, or the PBCs in our blood,
then eventually, we will pay the after-tax of our failed accounting.
Ecological Integrity is the foundation stone for human security and peace.
Let me repeat that. Ecological Integrity is the foundation stone for human security and peace.
But I cannot lead the change – I cry. My company employs all of these people. I have bills to pay. The sunk costs are too high. My startup has a great purpose, and I will accept that predatory capital that will have me, as the founder, sell my soul and my company’s purpose to the devil as we bloat with success and excess.
This change you are asking for is too big. Too hard.
So let’s keep going, as we are, pretending it will all be OK.
How is your sleep going? And your mental health?
The definition of insanity has been said to be doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.
Is it time to declare insanity as a human collective?
The power of big business makes it impossible, we cry.
Except that is a lie. Big business is not immune to failure. Big business always fails. History is clear on that.
Someone has to start the change. Someone has to step into the arena for change.
Someone has to say we can do better, humans.
I am one of those someones. Are you?
We start. We turn to Nature’s Laws and Nature’s coordinate system. We keep a low profile as we build alternatives designed to be Syntropic – to leave everything better.
- Models based on an infinite game where there are no losers, including the future.
- Where exploitation of others, our creatures and Earth is refused all the way up, down and through.
- Where we treat life, all of life, as sacred and precious.
- Where we invest in the development of people, not just their education to do and create things in the world, but their interior ability to consider the whole, act in service, and be humble and kind.
- Where we do not rest even as one child goes hungry.
- Where the growth we revere is the growth of wisdom, love, care, connection, beauty, and delight.
- Where we are trained to think and act for the long term – seven generations at minimum.
- And our Home Planet creates a Global Coordinate Collaborative that addresses the Planetary issues as a whole because we have seen the sham of artificial scarcity and winners take all.
There is no OVER THERE to throw things away to.
It is here. Now. My rubbish thrown over there becomes my poisoned water, air, and food.
My heartbreak at the dying fish and the plastic-strangled turtle has infected my mind, and the colours of my life have become despair. Are we suffering this despair as an epidemic of mental ill-health?
This week on my Beauty of Beginnings blog, I wrote this.
Business as a living system
I propose we design and create the structure and architecture of everything that supports human coordination, alignment around a purpose, currency, provisioning and flows, how we account for value and measure the immeasurable, and how we hold each of us accountable and responsible for our actions as a living system.
I reflect on what humanity has done – how we have done all of these things so far – as constructs divorced from life, often serving an anti-all-life-thriving purpose.
And we wonder how we got to this point of extinction of 70% of our creatures in the last 50 years, with poverty an endless and growing story as large parts of our planet have become uninhabitable.
We have separated how we do things from life, just as we have separated our humanity from connection with Nature and life.
The pain we feel is real.
A Syntropic World creates living systems all the way up, down and through. Not separate from Nature. Instead, the expression of Nature herself as the coordinate system of all human activity.
We must start today: you and I. The life of the unborn child and the unborn wolf is in our hands.
Choose how. Here are some options.
Become an activist. Write, speak, protest, film.
Build models and tools that make the existing obsolete.
Educate.
Be the model.
Work on your inner development – including your ability to speak truth to power, to say NO as a transmission, and to weed out the unreconciled places of anger and diminishment that reside in most of us.
Surround yourself with people who see the whole of you and will not let you get away with your BS.
Be braver than you have ever been because you care more than ever.
Do all these things as we are committed to doing in Syntropic World. We are far from perfect. Indeed perfection is not our aim. Deep, whole system consideration – a word meaning to be with the stars – is our aim. For a more beautiful world, one that works for all of life.
