By Tom Braford
The world is waking up, even the United States and St Louis! We realize that we are facing serious challenges that we must address sooner rather than later.
As we confront the facts about climate change and many other social and economic challenges, we see that there are solutions, and that some contain the seeds of huge opportunities. This is certainly true for developing comprehensive communities.
When he formed the Hunger Project in 1977, Werner Erhard said that if we can get at why hunger and starvation persist on the planet, we will be at the source of all unworkability. They soon discovered that when a challenge seems too huge, we tend to make gestures that make us feel better, but we don’t wholehearted commit to doing whatever it takes in collaboration with others to create real solutions that are commensurate with the challenge.
Prior to 1977, hunger and starvation were generally viewed as unsolvable until the actual facts were known and faced head-on with comprehensive action by groups of dedicated people.
The same is now true of the climate challenge. Prior to the recent publication of Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming, edited by Paul Hawken, many assumed that global warming was unsolvable, that it was too late or that the most we could hope for was limiting the damage by staying under 2 degrees Celsius. The response has been individual gesturing, a search for a silver bullet solution and even talk of abandoning the planet as a lost cause.
But once again, a group of dedicated people have come together to fearlessly look at the facts and have concluded that together not only can we solve global warming, but we can actually begin to reverse it by 2050.
Others of us are out to harness the power of committed comprehensive communities to bring the Drawdown solutions to scale and substantially restore the climate to 300 ppm by 2050, eclipsing global warming with community.
To learn more, join our sustainability events with Sim Van der Ryn in late September and visit online at www.ArizmendiEcovillage.com for details.
Questions?
Contact braford@sbcglobal.net.