Editor’s note: This commentary is by Elizabeth Courtney, co-author of “Greening Vermont: The Search for a Sustainable State,” and former executive director of the Vermont Natural Resources Council. She was a member and chair of the Vermont Environmental Board and a 1995 Loeb Fellow at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design.
[I]t’s a grim title, but it gets your attention. “The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future” is a fictional work based on an accurate accounting of the past and present realities of climate change. This 50-page would-be white paper is a gripping, highly plausible glimpse into the future. The book’s authors — Harvard’s Naomi Oreskes and California Institute of Technology’s Erik Conway — wrote this sobering account hoping to ward off the disaster they describe in it.
The year is 2393 and the writer is a scholar from the Second People’s Republic of China, documenting — on its 300th anniversary — the history of the Great Collapse. It was 2093 when, after decades of ignoring the symptoms of climate change — drought and floods, soaring temperatures and rising sea levels, pandemics, plagues and mass migrations — the final collapse of world order occurred with the dramatic melting of the Western Antarctica Ice Sheet.
Throughout this short accounting, the writer reflects with amazement at the opportunities missed in the 2010s and 2020s to avert the disaster, citing a lack of preventative or precautionary action on the part of governments and the power of laissez-faire capitalism as possible root causes. Our scholar refers to the Carbon Combustion Complex as the force responsible for the ultimate collapse, citing its stranglehold on government’s ability to act boldly or bravely in the fight to combat climate change.
Which brings us to our present reality.
It’s important to realize that we’re all enmeshed in a highly centralized economy run by the 1% of the population hell bent on business as usual — a system that brings great wealth to the few and allows the 1% tight control over government. Clearly, we need a new economic model, decentralized, egalitarian and one that supports a clean healthy environment and vital communities. Broad interest in the New Economy Week’s activities demonstrates that there is a growing movement to build a new economic model here in Vermont and in other states.
There might very well be no polite shift to a new economic model, but what Vermonters are quietly doing up here in the Green Mountains with the localization movement could prove to be a relatively peaceful transition to a new, clean, green, egalitarian economy.
Naomi Klein — author and 350.org board member — makes the case that there will be no polite transition to a new economic model. She predicts in her new book, “This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs Climate,” that nothing less than “slaying capitalism” is in store, because “climate change is not about carbon it’s about capitalism.” Klein, on the other hand, notes in a Huffington Post interview, “I think people are just incredibly depressed and hopeless about the prospects for change. There just isn’t a vision for what the next economy would look like.”
Hopeless? No vision?
There might very well be no polite shift to a new economic model, but what Vermonters are quietly doing up here in the Green Mountains with the localization movement could prove to be a relatively peaceful transition to a new, clean, green, egalitarian economy. If part of the problem is the accumulation of wealth and power into the hands of the few, then it stands to reason that distributing that power to the many, should be a part of the solution. The localvore, local-motion, renewable energy, resilience, next economy movements are all headed in same direction — toward a decoupling of the people from the Carbon Combustion Complex and its highly centralized capitalist system.
At this point in the uprising some say there are too many people who can’t take the time to act or can’t afford to eat local or to go solar or button up. On the other hand, we can’t afford not to, because the climate is changing and ignoring the dire predictions only makes them more likely.
Leaving the New Economy Week with the simple marching orders to go local, could be a positive first step in heeding the warnings from the future about the dangers of climate change, capitalism and the carbon combustion complex.
