You really do have to wonder whether a few years from now we’ll look back at the first decade of the 21st century — when food prices spiked, energy prices soared, world population surged, tornados plowed through cities, floods and droughts set records, populations were displaced and governments were threatened by the confluence of it all — and ask ourselves: What were we thinking? How did we not panic when the evidence was so obvious that we’d crossed some growth/climate/natural resource/population redlines all at once?
The Earth Is Full - Thomas L Friedman / Paul Gilding / NYTimes.com
Josh Haner/The New York Times
Thomas L. Friedman
“The only answer can be denial,” argues Paul Gilding, the veteran Australian environmentalist-entrepreneur, who described this moment in a new book called “The Great Disruption: Why the Climate Crisis Will Bring On the End of Shopping and the Birth of a New World.” “When you are surrounded by something so big that requires you to change everything about the way you think and see the world, then denial is the natural response. But the longer we wait, the bigger the response required.”
I met Paul Gilding at the Tällberg Forum a couple of years back, when he presented an earlier version of his view of the future, called the "One degree war plan".
If we are convinced that dramatic change will come, forced upon us, then the key question is to anticipate what will characterize the change and how we can prepare for it.
Dramatic, complex changes to society typically follows an "S"-curve. First there is little visible change for a long time, while change agents are building momentum. Then, when critical mass for change is reached, the larger effects of the change comes very rapidly, and then it slows down again for the finetuning and to get the last 10% of laggards on board. Think of the revolution in Egypt as an illustration.
How can we understand and prepare for the much bigger transformation needed with respect to our lacking global environmental sustainability, which Gilding is talking about?
