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The Restorative Pathway
Dear readers, please note that the web address of the previous post (A Great Mindshift, Part Two) has been changed to https://kathleenmccroskey.substack.com/p/240170114
This post has more comments on that Ripple et al. study.
The authors indicate that we can adequately mitigate global warming with minor use of carbon capture and without the necessity of “geoengineering,” which is the dimming of the sun by various means. This is good news and a source of hope for human survival and for all other life forms. However, for any established hope, there is always a counter-force ready to oppose it.
From that study:
“High-income countries may not need continued economic growth, and it has been shown that positive social outcomes can occur without growth (Hickel et al 2021); but this subject may be controversial.”
“… this proposed scenario could include greater convergence of per-capita GDP, meat consumption, and energy use throughout the world (Hickel et al 2021). This would ensure that for both the global north and south, energy and resource consumption moves toward equal per capita levels, thus promoting socio-economic justice, universal human well-being, and the preservation of ecological capital (figure 1 (l); Millward-Hopkins and Oswald 2023). By prioritizing large-scale societal change, the proposed pathway could limit warming much more effectively than pathways that support growing consumption in wealthy nations (Kuhnhenn et al 2020).”
“Ecological overshoot or the over-exploitation of the Earth is the cause of multiple environmental and social crises, and policies should focus on addressing this issue rather than simply treating the symptoms. As human demand continues to exceed planetary boundaries and the regenerative capacity of nature, we are at increased risk from not only climate change, but a confluence of crises, including biodiversity loss, species extinctions, freshwater shortage, food scarcity, civil unrest, international wars, pollution, and zoonotic diseases and more pandemics (Guterres 2023, Rockström et al 2023). Mitigating overexploitation and these crises will require global cooperation to address inequality and injustice.”
“Adding a restorative pathway-like scenario to climate models would provide a more comprehensive picture of what could lie ahead and help decision-makers prepare for a sustainable future that may look vastly different from the current paradigm of population and consumption growth.”
Herein lies the rub: The 1%, let alone the 10% highest-income earners, will fight any such reduction in their income levels, especially in their relative income level, with all the resources available to them. The “restorative pathway” requires income as well as energy and resource consumption to merge toward world-average values. The “rich” countries use about 30x world average energy consumption. Can YOU cut your energy use to 1/30? But in that assumption, poor nation’s use does increase, so perhaps you have to cut only your usage to 1/20 of present. In any case, it means you STOP flying - stay on the ground. Drastically cut your total resource demand, vastly reduced economic activity. A massive cut in rich nation’s GDP is necessary, meaning they need to learn to exist in a zero- or no-growth economy. Remember, the Great Depression (1929 onward) was only about a 10% drop in GDP. It was, however, like the so-called “Great Recession” (2007-2009) a “bear-raid” in which the Rich just swept their chips off the table and went home. Thus, this “restorative pathway” may be “controversial.”
In Dr. Maja Göpel’s The Great Mindshift book (2016), she indicates that it doesn’t take a large portion of the population beginning to think a new way to start to have a snow-balling effect of main-stream thought. But is must start at whatever small level and keep increasing, as they call it in the Ripple et al. study: “radical incrementalism.”
Remember the section in The Great Mindshift:
“The radical repurposing agenda could be summarized as recoupling economic processes with human well-being and nature’s laws by making the economic dimension the one that needs changing. Given the structural reality of today’s path dependencies, the foremost strategy for successive change in this direction—the incremental strategies that can achieve it—is double-decoupling:
1. Decouple the production of goods and services from unsustainable, wasteful or uncaring treatment of humans, nature and animals (do better).
2. Decouple the satisfaction of human needs from the imperative to deliver ever more economic output (do well).
The latter has been given much less attention because the worldview informed by the mainstream economic paradigm cannot even countenance it.” (Göpel, 2016)
“Transformation or transformability in social-ecological systems is defined as the capacity to create untried beginnings from which to evolve a fundamentally new way of living when existing ecological, economic, and social conditions make the current system untenable” (Stockholm Resilience Centre 2012). To create untried beginnings we need new social imaginaries, sets of ideas including values, institutions, laws and symbols through which people imagine their social whole and envisage how alternative systems would differ from the current situation—and the courage to let go of that to which we have grown accustomed.” (Göpel, 2016)
Thus, the time to get some courage is now, start imagining a better future for all! Remember the statement from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., in 1967:
“A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”