Changing the Story - September 14, 2104

This is good news indeed ... the most important thing we need to do is to change the story we believe about our planet, from a massive resource, to a complex web of biologic, chemical, and physical possibilities and limited resources that are deeply impacted by our behaviors. Our behavior flows from our beliefs and luckily those can change much more rapidly than the forces of natural selection and DNA mutation.

That is why, in my mind, large public organization on the climate change issue is fundamentally important. Some reasons:
  1. Climate change action is at the hub of numerous other social ills and inequities and progress here will impact other problems such as social injustice, poverty, unemployment. When people invested in these issues align around climate change, as they are, it is a force for shifting the big story that impacts the larger social fabric.
  2. The conventional leaders are too entrenched in the current political, corporate, and monetary stories that create disproportionate wealth, status, and resources for themselves to be invested in changing those fundamentals.
  3. We are a social animal that learns through mimicry and good ideas spread by people watching others especially those they can relate to in terms of similarities.
With gratitude for inspiring and telling the story of our story to:

Dr. Yuval Noah Harari and his course called A Brief History of Humankind based on his book, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, due to be released in the US  in 2/2015.

I wrote this yesterday and feel much more sober today about the possibility of changing the story in time. In fact I wonder if just letting the heating up rip, party on, extinguish the species rapidly and start over in normal evolutionary time isn't a better strategy. We have been abusing our power for 70,000 years, how likely are we to change in decades?



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