The longest and hardest of journeys
It is hard for an old person to admit that the goals they have lived for all their life were the wrong ones…
This article first appeared in the Jersey Evening Post on 29 June 2017
T his is, or should be, a time of great change. Our civilisation is no longer in a position to continue to extract, manufacture, sell, burn and waste without limit. In the last few centuries to do so seemed given. The main political issue was to decide how best to divide up the wealth that our cleverness withdrew from the living Earth. Today the economics, the science and our own felt intuition, indeed our sense of right and wrong, tell us that this always was an illusion and that the time left for its headlong pursuit gets shorter by the year.
It is hard for an old person to admit that the goals they have lived for all their life were the wrong ones. How much harder is it for an old civilisation such as ours to admit that the polluted and depleted living world is struggling to sustain our profligacy, and will very likely soon fail altogether if we continue with such greedy ways.
So a complete turnaround in necessary. How many processes have been proudly mechanised, replacing muscle power by fossil fuels? How many natural materials have enthusiastically been replaced with toxins and synthetics, which depend on fossil fuels and which soil and sea cannot decompose? How much human ingenuity is spent competing, keeping secrets and perjuring the truth, when we could be cooperating and learning from one another? I don’t know what an ideal, just and sustainable world will look like or how it will work, but I — and most other people — know injustice, greed and lies when we see them, and we regularly do.
Here in Jersey we don’t make or manufacture much anymore, except perhaps our few agricultural products. We sit atop of and aside to the world’s extractive industries. Looking after some of the money — fiddling with the taxes, harbouring the wealth, processing the funds. That doesn’t put us outside of the system, it really makes us utterly dependent upon it, indeed upon mere details of its working — upon it continuing precisely as it is — for our cream to rise exactly as expected.
For the longest and hardest of journeys we must not rush, but we must set off as soon as possible. We don’t need bitterness, arguments and enemies, we must bring everyone along together. To travel though, inevitably means to leave things behind. Farewells to old illusory goals can be especially hard.
The following had not been published when this piece was written, but came out the same week: World has three years left to stop dangerous climate change, warn experts — The Guardian.
