Living in Our New World Part 1: Time for a New Normal
September 29, 2008
For the next week, I am going to focus on a subject that a good number of people will not want to read about. I understand. But I still need to speak. If the subject makes you uncomfortable, I am sorry. If it frightens you, again, I am truly sorry.
But our only hope for the future is to understand the present.
When our leaders and those who have pledged to serve us fail to do so, it is our responsibility to look after ourselves and one another, and to protect our children. And all children are our children. We are in the terrible situation we are because at first we didn't know better. Our parents didn't know better either. But things have changed and now we do. We can't claim ignorance any more. Besides, looking around for a suitable candidate to blame will accomplish nothing. It will only exhaust us and rob of us of valuable time. The reality, which we all know at some level, is that each of us is to blame to some degree.
Earlier this year, I wrote a paper about Climate Change and Peak Oil. I imagine my experience leading to the writing of that paper was similar to that of others who write on these subjects. At first, those of us who stumbled across the right sources of information learned about climate change. Gradually, we read the more frequent reports of what respected scientists, like James Hansen director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, were discovering. It seemed that the forecasts were no longer about the next century or even just five or six decades in the future, they were sliding down the timeline towards us. Rapidly.
Then we began to read increasingly of peak oil, which seemed even closer to us on the timeline than climate change. We realized that these changes were not going to happen many decades away. They were going to happen in our lifetime.
Some people became aware of climate change and peak oil a few decades ago. Some of us have learned much more recently. But I imagine each of us went through a similar learning curve whether it happened gradually or has come rushing at us so fast it's been a constant struggle to adjust.
Recently, as we felt like we were beginning to adjust just a little bit, we began to read more about financial difficulties in the United States. So then we moved from climate change being a few decades off and peak oil affecting us in five or ten years to a financial crisis that was unfolding on the evening news. With the evening news came the realization that we just slid down that timeline so far, that we're no longer in the future. We're here.
We now have a subprime mortgage crisis. Freddie and Fannie, banks, and insurance companies are failing. Retail stores are closing and companies are cutting back their workforce and days worked. Shortages of food and gas are being reported from different cities around the country.
But this is not just a US problem. Whether you look at it from the perspective of globalization or the principle of interconnectedness in Buddhism, one thing is clear—we’re all connected. We’re all in this together.
What is happening in the US will affect every country in the world to some degree. Countless financial institutions worldwide hold US dollars as well as US investments and packages of those subprime mortgages. Also, imports and exports lie at the heart of almost every national economy. Over the past few decades, as the US closed factories and sent production overseas to cut back on operating expenses, it no longer focused on making things. Instead, it became the world’s consumer; a consumer with one very large shopping cart.
A major filler of that shopping cart is China. So the Chinese economy is tied to that of the United States. The interconnectedness doesn’t stop there however. According to an article in the Asian Economic News on May 12, 2008, “China has overtaken Japan to become Australia's largest two-way trading partner in 2007 [and t]he United States is Australia's third-largest trading partner.” So what affects the United States, affects China and Australia and Japan. And then there’s Vietnam, India, Cambodia, and Korea who we have been increasing our trade with. You get the point. One pebble (and the US financial collapse is one extremely large boulder) tossed into the pond of our globalized world will quickly send out—not ripples—but waves of economic repercussions.
So we here sit. I’m in Australia as are a good number of readers. Maybe you’re in the US or Malaysia or Canada. Or maybe you’re in Europe or in one of the dozens of countries that people come from periodically to read this blog. If you’re still with me (and I hope you are :-)) you’re probably wondering where this is leading. Or perhaps you’re thinking that you really don’t want to know and are calculating when this week will be up and you can safely come back and start reading again. ;-)
If we let it, what we have learned can lead us to despair. But we know by now that we have the capacity to focus and control our minds if we try hard enough. I wrote that our only hope for the future is to understand the present. Hopefully, we now understand our “present” just a little better. It’s not the rosy picture we have been lead to believe.
But just because it’s not, doesn’t mean it has to be such a bleak picture that we want to go out and spend like there’s no tomorrow or climb back into bed and never leave again or pretend that the world situation is just a blip in the timeline and that soon everything will return to normal.
The truth is we need a new normal.
And the reality is that it’s already begun.
(Tomorrow: Living in Our New World Part 2: Sleeping Beauty and the Fairy Godmother)
Reader Comments (2)
May much good come of the changes ahead.
Now we must go beyond good intentions. Intentions gives us a picture of going from point A to point B. This comes with rules and boundaries IT IS LIMITED. We need to keep moving beyond "good intentions and knowing."
We now move into not knowing.
How does this help with climate change? I don't know.
Amitoufou,