System change not climate change

Its one of my favourite slogans for change.

And not just because it sounds nice, but because it seems truly necessary to me. There is no solution to our ecological and well being crisis within our current mindset. In fact I find this exciting. Consider it a challenge, consider yourself having the possibility to shape a new future, downscale, readjust, take care of your own resilience and that of your community, care deeply for your local environment, and by doing so help us all.

I can strongly recommend listening to Nate Hargan talk about out how energy underpins all of our life options and societal constraints, as we operate on this planet as an energy greedy super organism. He explains how we have run up a massive debt in energy via our fossil fuel consumption during this ‘carbon pulse’ that we live in, and how this is actually an emergent behaviour of our humanity. He advocates for preparing ourselves for ‘The Great Simplification’ that must come, he believes within the coming decade. So if you want to spend a valuable hour then watch this:

As a civilisation we need to be brave enough to instigate system change to protect our environment and secure a future for all the life on our planet. We live on a limited resource planet but right now our lifestyles ignore that fact. We need a human society that reflects our existence as being from, and part of, nature not pitched against it. All our human-made systems are ours to change so lets change for the better and win our future quality of life back.

Check out: Institute for the Study of Energy and Our Future for more on the central role understanding energy plays in understanding how we got here and how to move forward, and Reality 101 to watch a condensed version of Nate Hagens university course.

About lindsey

Environmental scientist. I am glaciologist specialising in glacier-climate interactions to better understand the climate system. The point of this is to understand how glaciated envionments might change in the future - how the glaciers will respond and what the impact on associated water resources and hazard potential will be.
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