CHAPTER ONE
Understanding and Facing the Deepening Global Crisis Anka, I’m frustrated. Global disaster is staring us in the face, but we seem to be wandering about in confusion like lost sheep! Why have we become so hesitant to act?
Many people are overwhelmed and depressed, needing a clearer perspective of what we are facing and what a different future could look like. And helping them to know about and join with the many people and organisations who are already collaborating in all kinds of surprising, innovative and effective ways, is vital.
BEGINNING WITH QUESTIONS… We seem to be so busy with our project deadlines, budget balancing and donor demands, but how often do we stop to look for what really matters? Are our projects really shifting power in ways that make any longterm differences? Many of us know we should change how we go about social action and that this requires us to collaborate more, to tackle the big questions of the future. But how do we free ourselves from the forces that keep us trapped and tinkering in our isolated initiatives? Challenging questions, but let’s begin with this one:
What really matters? OVERSTEPPING THE PLANETARY BOUNDARIES AND CLIMATE CHANGE Burkhard Gnärig (2015) identifies several megatrends that have combined to produce the grave reality that is being faced in our world today, characterised as humanity being at “the edge of a precipice”. The most significant of these coalescing crises are climate change, poverty and inequality.
Slowly, like the rising sun, it is dawning on us, as we wriggle out the past, that we find the present most perilous and the future daunting with its quiet and relentless refusal to completely reveal itself...” Mongane Wally Serote
For the last 150 years, the exploitation of the Earth’s resources to feed rampant consumption and economic growth for the profit of a few has become unsustainable, beyond the planet’s capacity to provide and restore itself. In 2009, the Stockholm Resilience Centre and the Australian National University introduced the concept of planetary boundaries as the “safe operating space for humanity”. If any of these boundaries were exceeded there would be an increasing risk of “irreversible and abrupt environmental change”.
Nine vital categories were identified and at that time it was claimed that we had already overstepped in the categories of climate change, loss of biodiversity, the destruction of soils as a key carbon sink and interference with the Earth’s nitrogen and phosphorous cycles. Chapter 1: Understanding and Facing the Deepening Global Crisis
1
