The only thing we need to change is how we think!
We can transform our economy.
We can do it with proven technology. We can do it at an affordable cost. We can do it with existing political structures. The only thing we need to change is how we think and how we feel.
And this is where you come in.
When we think about the future I paint, of course we should feel a bit of fear. But fear can be paralyzing or motivating. We need to accept the fear and then we need to act.
We need to act like the future depends on it. We need to act like we only have one planet.We can do this. I know the free market fundamentalists will tell you that more growth, more stuff and nine billion people going shopping is the best we can do. They’re wrong. We can be more, we can be much more. We have achieved remarkable things since working out how to grow food some 10,000 years ago. We’ve built a powerful foundation of science, knowledge and technology — more than enough to build a society where nine billion people can lead decent, meaningful and satisfying lives. The Earth can support that if we choose the right path.
We can choose this moment of crisis to ask and answer the big questions of society’s evolution — like, what do we want to be when we grow up, when we move past this bumbling adolescence where we think there are no limits and suffer delusions of immortality? Well it’s time to grow up, to be wiser, to be calmer, to be more considered. Like generations before us, we’ll be growing up in war — not a war between civilizations, but a war for civilization, for the extraordinary opportunity to build a society which is stronger and happier and plans on staying around into middle age. We can choose life over fear. We can do what we need to do, but it will take every entrepreneur, every artist, every scientist, every communicator, every mother, every father, every child, every one of us.
What do you think?