I’d love if we could roll back the clock and choose a different future.
If we had started remaking our society to be more sustainable when the crisis was first becoming obvious — 50+ years ago — we could have avoided most of the catastrophes that are now unavoidably our lot.
Had we got going when the science was clear and sustainability solutions readily available (say, two decades ago), the desolation we now face would have been much reduced.
Heck, if we were even responding at the speed demanded today (instead of our slow-if-inevitable march towards a less harmful economy), we wouldn’t be bracing for such unforgivably massive destruction.
Action is happening, sure, and will accelerate. Unfortunately, even if we move much more quickly than we currently are, that will mostly mean a reduction in the future magnitude of the crisis, rather than a reversal of the climate change and ecological collapse we’ve already set in motion.
There’s a huge gap between how most things function now, and how they realistically need to work to limit the crisis and thrive in this hard new future.
Being outdated brings consequences. When assets remain stuck on the old side of the gap, they end up devalued; when institutions do, they become destabilized; when people wind up on there, they get #displaced and #impoverished.
Hundreds of millions of people around the world live in dire poverty — usually in places already struggling with massive, complex, and deeply-rooted societal challenges. They now face the transapocalyptic realities of poverty in a planetary crisis.
If we think of the widespread displacement and ruination now rolling over people as the prize in a sort of terrible lottery, these poor folks have already been issued a winning ticket.
In the real world, there’s little they can do to give back that ticket, and little appetite in the wealthier countries for cancelling the transapocalyptic sweepstakes.
We in the wealthy world — the vast majority of people reading this — are still lining up to find out what kind of tickets we’re holding.
https://alexsteffen.substack.com/p/you-too-can-be-a-climate-refugee