THE GLOBAL CRISIS

John Papworth

Despite everything we are letting the grass grow under our feet. Many organizations are springing up to protest or reform some or other of the effects of the global crisis; they are often doing useful work, but we are concerned with its causes. On this there is still no unity, no clarity and consequently no activity. Environmental degradation continues non-stop.

There is a need now as never before to define those factors which are preventing human societies from flourishing on a sustainable basis, a basis which enables us to work with natural forces rather than seeking to dominate them and which expresses an innate respect for the environment rather than automatically and unthinkingly abusing it.

The 19th century isms which have dominated the radical scene for so long, such as communism, socialism, liberalism and so on, are played out and give no indication today of how they might tackle an environmental crisis so monumental as to threaten to wipe civilization off the pages of history altogether.

We have allowed our societies to become dominated by values, which are destructive, demeaning, and ultimately suicidal. The moral imperatives by which any society needs to live are being marginalized by market and political forces too powerful to be controlled by citizen moral judgment. They are too powerful because they are too big.

How do we achieve a non-centralized, power-dispersed, multi-cellular, organically structured society within which citizen moral judgments can be effective in terms of controlling policy decisions? The fact that today they don't and that on a mass basis democracy proves to be an oxymoron because power accrues to centralized structures, which in turn control rather than serve the citizen interest, is why we are in a state of crisis at all.

What next?

We give notice of a consultation exercise to discuss ways and means by which we CAN unite to counter the lowering shadow of the global crisis whilst there yet seems time to do so.

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