Our home, planet earth, is
on an uneven keel and our dominion over nature is untenable. If we cannot see
ourselves as part of nature, embrace planetary stewardship as new cultural paradigm
and spawn a sustainability revolution, the survival of our civilization will be
in doubt.
Our civilization is on an
unsustainable path, on a collision course with the earth’s ecological system.
We are on a collision course with the earth for two reasons: first, the
scientific and technological revolution has vastly amplified our power to
manipulate and abuse the world around us; second, free market capitalist
economics is supremely successful at valuing manufactured goods and labour but
ignores the services of nature – freshwater, clean air, forests, wetlands and
pollinators, just to name a few; and third, our relationship with the world is frightfully
altered. We see the earth as separate from human civilization and feel
unaccountable to posterity for consequences of our present action.
As the scale ingenuity and
power of our technology continues to increase apace, we are awakening to the
limits of growth. In 2009, a group of prominent earth scientist advanced the
planetary boundaries hypothesis, postulating that there are hard global
biophysical limits to human development, including freshwater, land use change,
climate change and biodiversity.
Here in Kenya we are
pushing hard against biophysical boundaries, courting catastrophic consequences
for the economy and human wellbeing. Consider the denudation of the Mau forest,
overgrazing in arid and semi-arid rangelands, excessive sediment loading in the
Winam Gulf of Lake Victoria, the poisoning of the air in our cities and the destruction
of the floodplain ecosystem of Tana River Delta.
The industrial revolution
gave humans such an immense and transformative power over nature. We are in
essence, a natural force like a hurricane, a plague or a tsunami. This era is
now widely known as the Anthropocene, a term popularized by Nobel Laureate Paul
Crutzen.
According to Donald
Worster, a leading environmental historian, capitalism meant indoctrinating
everyone to treat the earth as well as each other with unsparing, energetic
self-assertiveness. People must think constantly about profit and growth. As
wants and the quest for growth and profit expanded, the relationship between
humans and of nature was reduced to raw instrumentalism.
Thanks to the traditional
paradigm of Western science, much of our conception of the socio-economic and
environmental problems we face is largely trapped in a paradigm of simple linear
causality. We organize our knowledge of complex and often linked socio-economic
and environmental issues in narrow reductionist ways. In our thrill with the
parts, we lose the holistic perspective of the dynamic and complex consequences
of our seemingly discrete and private actions.
There is consensus among
citizens, economists, and scientists and increasingly among politicians that
global ecological constraints or scarcities related to our current use of the
earth’s use and associated emissions, undermine human wellbeing, forestall
economic growth and despoil nature.
The
Millennium Ecosystem Assessment report released in 2005 concluded that human
activity is undermining the resilience and biological capacity of the world’s
ecosystems.
Wise stewardship of the
earth’s resources will require a deep and fundamental shift in how we think
about our relationship with nature. We need a revolution in the profound sense
of the industrial and agricultural revolutions, which got us here in the first
place. How we relate to planetary resources needs a revolution that puts us on
a path of sustainability.
Like the industrial and
agricultural revolutions, a sustainability revolution will take several
generations to bloom. In my view, a global paradigm shift is already underway.
Successive United Nations conferences and summits, from Stockholm 1972, to Rio
1992, to Johannesburg 2002, and Rio+20 we have made progress, albeit slow,
toward understanding that human wellbeing is inextricably bound to individual
responsibility, national policy and global governance, which promote wise
stewardship of the earth’s resources.
More than at any period in
our tenancy of the planet, we now understand that the planet our forbears
bequeathed to us is our responsibility. We must now collectively ask an
inconvenient question: Are our personal habits, national policies and global
institutions accelerating planetary collapse or enhancing sustainability?
We must not see the
Anthropocene as a crisis, but as the beginning of a new geological epoch, which
can be harnessed for sustainability. For instance, a globalized social media
has revolutionized how we connect and collaborate, vastly expanding our
capacity mobilize shared narratives and global conscience.
A sustainability revolution
could re-frame our relationship with nature, re-calibrate our personal choices
and national policies and re-configure our institutions global governance and
collective action. A sustainability revolution could subvert the dominant
acquisitive logic of industrial capitalism – personal profit and infinite
growth in global GDP through exploitation of the natural world.
A sustainability revolution
would dethrone human hubris, subvert planetary collapse and enthrone planetary
stewardship.
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