AlterNet: How Food Riots, Pricey Gas and Home Foreclosures Point to a Better Future

[marmar]

How Food Riots, Pricey Gas and Home Foreclosures Point to a Better Future

By Marjorie Kelly and Paul Raskin, AlterNet. Posted May 10, 2008.

We are beset today by a systemic global crisis that could open the way to hopeful transformation. It is up to us.



Can anybody make sense of what the heck is going on today? A lead story in the news covers the rioting in Haiti and a half-dozen other nations as food prices soar. Another front-page column reports that the U.S. subprime mortgage crisis is seizing up credit markets worldwide and contributing to housing woes -- possibly even economic destabilization -- in Ireland, Spain, Britain and elsewhere. Other news reports the discovery of a huge fracture in Antarctica’s vast Wilkins ice shelf, drawing attention to the slow-motion crisis of climate change. And there are ongoing reports about water shortages in Africa and Asia, droughts in Australia, sky-rocketing oil costs, the razing of the Amazon and images of war and terror.

Is the conjunction of these various crises simply a coincidence? The answer is no. From a historical perspective it is possible to see an overall pattern that connects the dots. What is unfolding today is a systemic crisis, heralding the beginning of a large-scale shift at the deepest levels of cultural organization. We are in transition -- for the first time in history -- to a tightly interconnected global system. We have entered the planetary phase of civilization, in a passage that may prove as significant as the advent of agriculture or the Industrial Revolution.

When keeping our thermostats high melts ice sheets at the bottom of the world, when our housing crisis erodes the world economy, when filling our cars with biofuel from corn contributes to hunger a world away, we’re not in Kansas anymore. We need a new map of the world. The old one -- with its geopolitics based on the competition of self-interested nation-states and its economy growing exponentially atop a natural world of unlimited resources -- is vanishing, along with cheap gasoline.

The new map conceptualizes the world as a single global system with interacting, nested subsystems. In this view, lines of connection reach beyond national borders to embrace all of humanity -- linking the poor in Haiti to homeowners in Spain to investors in the United States -- and reaching beyond society to the larger earth community, encompassing even the very air itself. All are entwined in a common fate. All compose a single system and must find their place on a new map, as we rechart the world for a new era.

Transitions announce themselves in the language of crisis. We are in a time of turbulence as old patterns give way and new ones form. The multiple crises today signal a system transformation operating at the scale of the planet. Transformation is distinct from adaptation, which is the normal process of incremental adjustment to new conditions. Transformations are rare moments in history when dominant societal structures cannot cope with emerging developments and change in fundamental ways. With the converging lines of crises we face today, we may be entering a perfect storm of destabilizing stress. ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/environment/84960/

[Wednesdays]

1. Since we're moving towards interdependency

One good thing to come of this, is that war will become obsolete.

[tama]

2. Nope

If one takes a good look instead of mere hoping, globalized "civilization" is not moving towards interdependency, but sense of less interdependency and more egotistic greed and fear. Consequense is not that war will become obsolete but that war becomes more destructive and more suicidal.

[lame54]

3. I see you're a glass half-full kinda guy...