The election was only a step. we need now to redouble our efforts to break the back of corporate hegemony, protect and restore our ecosystems, and replace the current unsustainable economic paradigm with an ecological economics.

Wall Street’s insanity of growth at any cost on a very finite planet, and this
growth’s damage to both the world economy and global
ecosystems, is bad news for already faltering efforts to
craft a new international climate change treaty. Yet,
current global economic difficulties must not stop urgent
ecological measures — like dramatic emission reductions
and natural habitat protection and restoration — necessary
to maintain a habitable Earth. Pledges to cut emissions by
80% by mid-century are utterly meaningless if immediate
concrete measures to cut emissions now and in the mid-term
are abandoned with every bit of economic or other troubles.

The global growth machine is seizing up because it is
hitting ecological and economic limits, and because of its
own greed. Long predicted crises including climate change,
collapsing ecosystems, biological homogenization, economic
decline, abject poverty, over-population, energy scarcity,
extreme weather, food and water shortages, diminished
oceans, political instability and endless resource wars –
are unfolding as expected, and are converging into a new
global economic AND ecological crisis of unprecedented
proportions.

The fundamental root cause of this “ecological bubble” is
that humans and their economies depend upon destroying
ecosystems necessary for all life, to feed and house
themselves. Global ecological sustainability depends
critically upon establishing a steady state economy,
whereby production and meeting basic human needs for all
does not diminish natural capital, and our and other
species’ natural habitats. Whole industries like coal and
ancient forest logging will be eliminated, even as new
opportunities emerge in solar energy and environmental
restoration.

The current economic cooling may offer a welcome respite to
reconsider the growth at any cost madness devouring the
Earth’s life giving ecosystems. Growth in economies, human
populations and resource use turns ecosystems into
resources and then into financial investment papers and
consumption. A year later the consumer products are in the
landfill, the paper wealth may be further over-priced or
just scrap paper, and there are both fewer resources and
ecosystems — but always more people. The ability to live
well based upon long-term steady-state interdependence with
intact, healthy ecosystems and their natural capital is
lost forever.

Humanity’s critical transition to both economic and
ecological sustainability is simply not happening on any
scale. The challenge is how to carry out necessary
environmental policies even as economic growth ends and
consumption plunges, and before a precipitous crash in
either limits future options. Your government must resist
the temptation to liquidate even more life-giving
ecosystems, and jettison sufficient climate policies, to
vainly try to maintain high growth and personal
consumption.

One thing is clear — more unbridled growth based upon
unsustainable resource use will not solve the global
ecological problems associated with unbridled growth and
unsustainable resource use. The human enterprise and each
global citizen’s consumption aspirations must be
right-sized to a scale appropriate to ecosystem limits. It
is time to get back to making honest, good livings from
actually making or doing something of societal value, by
making a living with the land and Earth, and that does not
depend upon liquidating ecological being and financial
speculation.

The Earth is blooming with responses to each of the
symptomatic crises. From relocalized economies to community
gardens, from having fewer children to better educating
those we have, from driving less while living more richly
where we find ourselves, by finding meaning in experience,
knowledge and truth rather than competitive consumption, by
rejecting ancient superstitions for an understanding that
the Earth is alive and sacred — a slowly awakening public
is showing where there is knowledge and will there is hope.

If you look, you can see a New Earth Rising. This new
global dream will stress working to globally protect and
restore core ecological reserves necessary to maintain
ecosystem services, while planting organic gardens and
restoring woodlands locally; promoting incentives and
sanctions to reduce population, while personally reducing
consumption; demanding an end to coal and ancient forest
logging, while resisting greenwash wherever it is found and
refusing to buy all Earth destroying products; and urging
investment to meet the full range of human needs for all,
while personally living rich and simple lives full of
laughter, love and happiness.

I challenge you and other world leaders to not ignore
looming apocalyptic global ecosystem collapse, in a vain
effort to return to unbridled and inequitable economic
growth which caused the problems in the first place.
Climate change is a deadly fact, action cannot be delayed
and its solution will help, not harm the economy.