By David Korten
On this 53rd Earth Day, April 22, 2023, there is wide public awareness that the growing environmental crisis has put humans on a path to self-extinction. This raises the question: “Can we navigate fast enough the seemingly impossible transformational changes that a viable human future requires?”
I find that a great many thoughtful people are inclined to answer, “It is too late. But thankfully, Earth will recover and will be the better for it once we humans are gone.”
In my most realistic moments, I am drawn to the same conclusion. I regain my commitment to advancing the transformation to an Ecological Civilization only by reminding myself that we humans are a species of exceptional potential. If we assume we are too late, we will guarantee our self-extinction. That may set back life’s evolutionary unfolding by millions, if not billions, of years. We owe it to Creation to do all we can to find our way to a viable relationship with one another and Earth.
There are many videos and books I might have chosen to communicate an appropriate Earth Day message. The two I highlight here are from colleagues who bring exceptionally powerful messages and have drawn on my work in important ways.
In 2018, when Joshua Wright was in 9th grade, he was struck by the scientific warning that humans had no more than 12 years to address global warming before Earth passed a 1.5ºC temperature rise and a potentially unrecoverable climate emergency. Recognizing the implications for himself and his generation, he dropped out of school to pick up a camera, form a film crew that included his father and uncle, and produce Eden’s Last Chance. The video, which includes footage from Joshua’s interview with me on the prospects for transformation, documents the insanity of financial interests mobilizing to profit from the unconscionable devastation of two of Earth’s most wondrous surviving natural habitats – one in Australia and one in the Pacific Northwest corner of North America.
I find Joshua’s cinematic presentation of the massive disruption of the beauty and order of Earth’s natural systems to be powerful and meaningful. The dramatic images have a much greater impact for me than the essential yet often dry and complex statistics with which we commonly report on this existential crisis (e.g., the IPCC’s 2023 Climate Change Report). I especially appreciate the clarity with which Joshua identifies corporate financial interest-driven consumer demand as a primary driver of the destruction.
Turn now to the United States, China, John Perkins, and the 3rd edition of Confessions of an Economic Hitman. In his first two editions of Confessions, Perkins told the story of his years as an agent of U.S. imperialism, advancing corporate control of the resources of the world’s poor countries. In this 3rd edition, he lays out how China has followed the pattern of the United States—and even outdone it—to take control and turn the global economy into a competitive battleground that China now dominates. Ultimately, however, it is a competition everyone is losing for the obvious reason that it is killing Earth. There will be no winners on a dead Earth.
Joshua Wright’s video begins and ends with this inescapable truth. John Perkins spells out the devastating Economic Hitman strategies that drive the crisis and offers suggestions for individual and collective action. In a related article for Common Dreams, Perkins offers a list of profound transformational changes that must be achieved by all countries if there is to be hope for a human future.
It is evident that our discussion of solutions must go far beyond anything currently discussed in official circles. As Wright and Perkins both make clear, we can create a future consistent with our true needs and nature only if we the people — all people — put extractive competition behind us.
I am because you are. My wellbeing depends on your wellbeing, as yours depends on mine.
We are one people born of and nurtured by one finite living Earth. Our time has come to acknowledge the depth of our mutual interdependence and respond together accordingly.
Dr. David C. Korten is the founder and president of the Living Economies Forum; co-founder and board chair emeritus of YES! Magazine; and a full member of the Club of Rome. He is best known for his seminal books framing a new economy for the Ecological Civilization to which humanity must now transition. Learn more here.
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