IT IS HIGH TIME TO CHANGE THE OPERATING SYSTEM OF THE WORLD

The year 1972 saw two major reports on the state of the world with respect to concerns about the damage to the environment from the rapid post-World War 2 spread of industrialization. The first report, Limits to Growth, from the Club of Rome, indicated that, at the rate of the then-industrialised expansion, we would run out of essential materials, including petroleum, while destroying our health and that of ecosystems from pollution and toxic contaminants. The second report, Blueprint for Survival, from the editors of the Ecologist Magazine, called for a drastic change to the way we lived our lives, from material throw-away consumerism, to one of carefully nurtured conservation and the protection of what we have now come to describe as essential ecosystems. The year 1972 was also the year of the first-ever United Nations Conference on the Human Environment (UNCHE), which tried to bring to light the growing concerns that we were ruining our environment in the headlong rush to industrialise. Climate-related issues were not then the order of the day. 

Since the environmental awakening of 1972, modern humans have slowly woken up to the realisation that the Earth, once seen as a limitless treasure trove for the taking, with its cornucopia of minerals, forests, grassland for cattle, oceans of fish, coal, oil and natural gas, could be irreversibly damaged by the growing consumerism demands of an expanding world population. Although not considered in 1972, human-caused climate change, with the chaos brought about by an ever-increasing incidence of extreme-weather events, has become the face of the widespread damage we have done to the natural world and to essential ecosystems, such as the grand forests which we had inherited before the industrial revolution took place some 200 years ago. 

As the adverse impacts of climate change make themselves increasingly evident, it is becoming clear that we are unlikely to achieve in time the calls for reductions in greenhouse gas emissions to net-zero, while simultaneously sustaining our economies with renewable energies and resorting to energy-costly schemes of carbon capture. To meet the aspirations of future generations, we must come to understand that the climate we endure, and from which we have benefitted, is in grand part a product of the interaction between life-support ecosystems and the Earth’s surface, including its soils and oceans. In that respect, we need to recognise that the atmosphere, with its oxygen content and its greenhouse gases, is primarily a creation of life and its aeon-long evolution. For the sake of our futures, we must get away decisively from those economic practices which lead to ever more environmental destruction and degradation, while simultaneously instituting the way to restore and regenerate a healthy environment. That way, we will cool the Earth.