My friend Ivan had recety started a new blog, Restored World. In Ivan’s words:
I have created this website to share my thoughts and reflections on how we might respond in new ways to the needs of our damaged, ailing world. What has led me to speak out here is my belief that our current way of thinking and doing things is not only inappropriate but continues to harm us.
It is clear from our collective struggles to even begin to address the climate emergency, the mass species extinction, increasing inequality, or other challenges such as the present spread of the Covid-19 pandemic, that we appear trapped … within an outdated mode of thinking that determines our functioning, a mode no longer appropriate to the immense challenges we face in the present global crisis.
We collectively all need renewal, myself included, if the world in which we live is to be restored. My hope is that this website, which is a personal account of my search for that renewal, can be a small contribution to our collective effort in imagining how we will restore our world.
Although Ivan and I are coming at the problem from different perspectives (and this blog is more wide-ranging) we seem to be singing from the same hymn sheet. Ivan is a thinker, and as a professional writer is much more eloquent in expressing his views than am I.
One thing reading Ivan’s thoughts has done is to goad me into finishing something I started long ago: encapsulating the way I see the complexity of environmental reform in a diagram.
Environmental reform isn’t easy. As the above diagram shows it involves a whole interdependent network of actions and effects which revolve around three core necessities:
- Reform of Agriculture and Fisheries
- Reform of Natural Resource Usage
- Reform of Energy Production.
There are a number of obvious entry points to the network, although starting anywhere one can is better than not starting at all.
What this doesn’t show is the necessity to reduce our reliance on product, and reform both our dominant capitalist hegemony and our broken political system. Each will be another complex network and connecting these reform networks will be yet another level of interdependent network – and I haven’t thought about any of that, yet! We could start on this anywhere, in any of the networks, and hopefully actions in one place will flow through into the other networks.
None of this is easy. But we have to start somewhere and hopefully the current Coronavirus pandemic will trigger the paradigm shift we need, which will flow over into real action on climate change and global reform.
Wish us luck!