By PeakProsperity. Originally published at ValueWalk.
Dr. Nafeez Ahmed is an award winning 15 year investigative journalist, noted international security scholar, best-selling author and film-maker. He authored The Guardian’s Earth Insight blog and has twice won the prestigious Project Censored Award for outstanding investigative journalism.
In his new book Failing States, Collapsing Systems, Nafeez points out, as we often do here at PeakProsperity.com, that everything in our modern society is connected to energy, and that our pursuit of ever more, ever higher growth is finally colliding with planetary limits. Scarcity and strife will be the dominant trends from here, unless we, as a species, start looking for different ways of living better-suited for a finite world:
The most fascinating thing for me is how so much of what we take for granted becomes questionable as a result of the breakdown we’re seeing. When we begin questioning the exponential growth model then we begin questioning the value system driving our material production/consumption. It’s not that it hasn’t produced amazing knowledge of our environment and our place in the universe. It’s not that there haven’t been a huge amount of amazing technological developments, like the internet which has enabled people to be interconnected in ways that they never were able to before. In a way has paved the way for us to be able to think globally in a way that centuries ago would have never happened.
It’s not that everything about this paradigm is bad. It’s just that it has very clearly outlasted its usefulness and is now fundamentally responsible for escalating the biophysical rupture that we see happening and manifesting in so many different ways. What that tells me is that we have to grow up as a species. It’s an evolutionary moment.
When we apply systems theory to this, when we apply our knowledge of complex adaptive systems and the history of evolution, it does seem to me that it is absolutely clear really that we’re at an unprecedented moment. For the first time in human history, we are standing at a point where we need to basically undergo fundamental systemic adaptation. Exactly what that looks like we’re still trying to work out. But what is very clear is what it doesn’t look like. It doesn’t look like seeing each other as separate material entities that just fend for themselves and produce and consume to an endless degree. It looks quite different.
The ideas and the values and the ethos of that different approach has been percolating in different civilizations in different ways. There’s evidence from indigenous civilizations, from tribal societies, and even from projects that are now being seeded here and now in our current context where people are trying different things. I think we are at a moment where we’re rewriting that story and making a new story of what it means to be human.
It’s particularly important because when people look at this with fresh eyes, it’s very easy to be overwhelmed by a sense of powerlessness. That’s being reflected now with the rise of Trump and everything else. There is this sense of things getting worse. And I think in many ways it is going to get worse before it gets better. All of this is symptomatic of the crisis that is at play.
A question we all need to be able to ask ourselves is To what extent can I make myself useful going forward, building and planting seeds for what comes after this moment?
Click the play button below to listen to Chris’ interview with Nafeez Ahmed (55m:52s).
