Getting Back to Basics

What goes up must come down. Every beginning has an end. Those aren’t the ideas by which the world has been living for the last century or so. It’s been more like “Progress at all costs, and damn the torpedoes.” But sooner or later, at least one torpedo is bound to find its target and things will go “boom!” The big news right now is the economy, with stupid banking and dirty credit right at the center, but even with governments stepping in and providing crutches for the self-inflicted cripples, all will not be well, and we will not live happily ever after.

Bank failures and mortgage defaults are just the obvious face of the problem, the big splash in the water that takes everybody’s attention. Always lurking in the background, soon to become foreground, is the costs of climate change and of the generalized environmental havoc that we’ve been happily contributing to.

What those costs will be and how we will deal with them has barely entered the public conversation. We need to get down to basics, and that means much more than going green and living frugally. It means rethinking the whole basis for our civilization: where it’s going, why things have gone so wrong, and what we can do to heal the damage and create a sustainable world for everyone.

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