The global environmental crisis is a clear and present danger to the planet and our collective future. The roots of the climatic crisis are deeply entrenched in carbon-based economic growth, corporate driven speculative markets, fixation on short-term profits over the long-term common good, and spiraling unsustainable consumerism. Our collective ability to meaningfully confront and address the increasing probability of global systemic collapse has been sequestered by fossilized self-serving economic interests, short-term myopic thinking, and political inertia.
Transformative systemic change is required and it’s required now. Nonetheless, the arch of history has taught us that large-scale fundamental changes – triggered by societal crisis – are politically difficult, economically contentious, and socially disruptive.
The extractive global economic system is not only destroying the planet’s fragile ecological sustainability, it is also destabilizing the corporate mirage that unregulated markets and economic growth represents progress for all. We are, in effect, witnessing the eruption of a profound sense of disillusionment in the prevailing economic system and in the workability of our basic institutions at the local, national and global scales. The distortions in the foundational elements supporting and legitimating the existing economic, political, and social architecture are systemically bankrupt and morally exhausted. And, for a growing number of disenchanted folks, it is abundantly clear that the emperor has no clothing. The so-called system – as currently structured – serves neither people nor our fragile planet.
The magnitude of the climatic crisis – if it is to be meaningfully addressed, requires a fundamental restructuring the global economy and local forms of human engagement. As things stand large-scale, complex, and technologically driven firms and institutions are the foundational blocks that lubricate and legitimate an undemocratic expert dominated corporate economy that favors the few over the multitudes, and privatized top-down expert knowledge over localized bottom-up participatory democracy. Existing life-draining mega structures must be replaced with economic ways of doing things that operate at a sustainable human scale that minimizes ecological destruction.
If we are to avoid systemic ecological collapse we urgently need to fundamentally dismantle and reconstruct undemocratic corporate driven global and local priorities. This requires a shift from privatized large-scale global structures to a localized and sustainable approach that focuses on face-to-face economic and social relationships that highlight basic human needs instead corporate profits, local democratic engagement instead of corporate driven technocracy, conviviality instead of competitive self-interest, and a revitalized set of core values and socio-economic practices that support long-term ecological stewardship instead of amoral corporate planetary plunder.
Some might claim that this proposed approach is a “pie-in-the-sky” scenario. To the contrary. As the author and social critic Naomi Klein states, with regards to the ecological crisis: “This changes everything.” In short, we are facing a transformative historical moment where the reigning extractive growth-based conventional market “wisdom” has failed us as a species. And if the proverbial climatic tipping point has not yet arrived, it’s clearly lurking around the corner.
The magnitude of the crisis calls for a radical paradigm change. How this change will emerge is a prophetic question. Be that as it may, systemic reconstruction must, in the final analysis, creatively meld bottom-up humane values, local forms of sustainable economic and democratic decentralization, and a deep and abiding sustainable respect for nature. Are we up to making these difficult and necessary decisions? As the saying goes: not to decide is to decide.
Arturo Ignacio Sánchez, Ph.D. is chairperson of the Newest New Yorkers Committee of Queens Community Board 3. He has taught courses on immigration, entrepreneurship, and globalization at Barnard College, The City University of New York, Columbia University, Cornell University, New York University, Pratt Institute and at various universities in Colombia, S.A.
