Marcelo Gleiser & Lourenço Bustani
- A revolution of the mind must occur in order for humanity to succeed on a finite planet.
- 150 years of unchecked industrial and economic growth have changed humanity in profound ways but at a high and untenable environmental cost.
- We must move from the plundering mindset that sucked our prosperity from the bowels of the Earth to one that collects the energy that the skies serve us.
Rarely, if ever, do we stop to think about how remarkable certain everyday comforts are: to flick an electric switch and have light inundate a dark room; to turn on a faucet and have drinking water; to take a hot shower; to live in a home that is cool in hot days and warm in cool days; to step into a metal box and move wherever we want; to go to a store and buy food; to talk to someone across the world; to dump dirty clothes into a machine and have it wash it all. The list is endless.
Now, go back 200 years to 1823. Life was completely different. Energy was scarce; animals pulled plows and carriages; steam engines were beginning to flourish; technology was very primitive compared to today; medicine had yet to understand disease and sterilization. There were no telephones. Cars and airplanes were not invented yet. Light bulbs were still a laboratory curiosity. People drank crude oil as medicine. The first gasoline-fueled combustion engine car was still five years away, invented by Carl Benz, in Germany. The world population was about 900 million.
But look at us now! Fossil fuels transformed the world. Technology transformed the world. Life expectancy in the U.S. went from 39.4 years to 78.8 years. During the last century alone the world population grew from 2 to 8 billion.
It’s an amazing story of material success for our species. And of catastrophic environmental devastation.
Even if technological innovation has its roots in basic research, the driver for the transition from the lab to the marketplace is money. Growth is still measured by sales, and sales generate profit. In the past 150 years, the gross domestic product per capita in the U.S., Australia, New Zealand, and Canada (known collectively as Western Offshoots) grew from $4,647 to $53,757 (corrected for inflation and measured in international 2011 prices).
What feeds these fat pockets? Fossil fuels, deforestation, mining, the depletion of the oceans, industrialized agriculture. The obvious truth is becoming clearer to a growing number of people: we live on a finite planet, with finite resources, and with a finite capability of cleaning the mess we make. The time of treating the oceans and the rivers as giant sewage dumps, the atmosphere as an endless sponge for noxious fumes, and the forests as inconvenient obstacles to be removed for expansive cattle grazing and agriculture is over.
The essential question, then, is what can be done?
Can we continue growing more while polluting less, given that science has not yet proven that growth and emissions can be decoupled? Or it possible to maintain the current growth aspirations based on a profoundly different worldview, one where the fuel that feeds growth is not unchecked environmental destruction but a symbiotic relationship between our species and the planet we inhabit?
Simply put: can the economy adapt to a new worldview before we inflict even more irreversible damage to the planet?
The first point to keep in mind is that we are not separate from the environmental devastation we perpetrate. If the environment goes, we go. We need clean air, clean water, and clean energy to survive. The more of us there are, the more urgent this obvious fact becomes. The inventiveness and resourcefulness that we have traditionally applied to industrial and warfare innovation must now be applied to our own survival on this planet. We need to reinvent how we relate to the world.
We must move from the plundering mindset that sucked our prosperity from the bowels of the Earth to one that collects the energy that the skies serve us.
This change in mindset represents a reversal from an aggressive relation to the environment — the metallic machines that dig holes to suck fossil fuels from the underground — to one that embraces what is already here: the sun, the wind, and the carbon-fixing capabilities of forestlands across the world.
We must change the way many still think about renewable energy being averse to economic profit. The old worldview, based on the past 150 years of the industrial growth motto — that is, let’s consume the bowels of the Earth to get rich — is dead. It’s unviable. It’s unsustainable. It’s self-destructive. It’s immoral. And this is not a change relegated to governments and large corporations. This is a change where each human takes part, where each one of us has a role to play. The first step is easy: think of how you use the resources that keep you alive: air, water, energy, food, and see what changes you can make to ensure they remain available to you. The essential concept is LESS: less energy, less water, less meat, less pollution, less waste.
And yet we must also recognize that regardless of our efforts to scale down consumption, some degree of irreversible damage has already been done. Science tells us that we have probably already overshot the boundaries of six of the nine planetary systems that sustain all Life on Earth. Much of the world, particularly the Global South, is already shouldering the burden of this multisystem collapse, in the form of heat waves, floods, wildfires, food shortages, and other extreme climate-related phenomena. And let’s face the truth: despite widespread commitments to limit global warming to no more than 1.5℃, current trends point to a future 2.4℃ — 2.7℃ warmer than pre-industrial levels.
Therefore, we must also come together as communities, through bioregional collaborations, and lean on each other to soften the landing of whatever fall may lie ahead.
The changes to come will be as world-changing as the ones that exploded during the early 20th century with rampant industrialization: an economy based on the passive extraction of renewable energy from the skies; vast reforestation programs for carbon fixing; a complete overhaul of the auto industry; a retraining of the workforce to adapt to the growing automation of production and to the need for versatility in the marketplace due to the new jobs of the digital age; a redesign of school curricula to retell the story of our relation to the environment to raise awareness among younger generations; and most importantly, an emergent new ethics of life that embraces the planet and all living creatures we share it with as partners and not targets, what we call biocentrism.
A decade or so ago, these views would be dismissed as utopic or at least naïve. But not anymore. The new worldview is taking root, and foolish is the country that won’t embrace it quickly. Instead of a dystopic and defeatist mindset, let’s celebrate the opportunity we have to reinvent our own future.
To read this article in Portuguese, click here.
Marcelo Gleiser is a physics, philosophy and astronomy professor at Dartmouth College and the 2019 Templeton Prize laureate, an honor he shares with the Dalai Lama, Mother Teresa, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and the scientist Freeman Dyson.
Lourenço Bustani is a Brazilian entrepreneur, consultant, board member and investor.
