Founders Imperative

 

Founder's Imperative: Intro
Our Disease
Our Diagnosis
Our Prognosis
Our Options for Survival
Our Legacy

 

Founders Imperative

 

Dad smoked; Mom was a food (and cream!) enthusiast. Fair to say, their choices, habits and thought processes had long-fated the likelihood of their aged illnesses and framed the declines of their eventual endgames.

As any of us might have done in their places, faced with difficult options, my parents experienced phases of denial, delayed action, questioned medical prognoses and often resisted recommended treatments.

Having embraced too late the realities of their predicaments, Dad succumbed to esophageal cancer and Mom to chronic kidney failure after difficult, prolonged struggles.

What's this got to do with the environment, you ask?

For decades the world has lived with the ever-present danger of nuclear war and/or nuclear disaster. But the imminent threat posed by climate change is a global illness greater than any challenge humanity has ever faced before.

It's a perfect storm that has, for the most part, gestated unseen. The immediate impacts — the kind we are best wired to react to — are well disguised as anomaly. The harsh realities are often denied in favor of political-economic agendas, the media's disproportionate thirst for conflict and the comfort we get from calculated, fossil fuel industry-funded 'uncertainty' and 'debate'.

One analogy compares what Al Gore refers to as the climate crisis to a supertanker that takes a lot to gain steam, but then becomes very difficult to turn or slow, let alone reverse.

Unlike a supertanker, however, the advance of climate change toward a global average temperature increase tipping point (wrongly promoted by governments and most environmental organizations as +2 C or more, when it has in fact been shown to be +1.5 C or less! — read about NASA's James Hansen's conclusions and Climate Code Red's conclusions) is now rapid and, if surpassed, a phenomenon called feedback loops would threaten exponential and irreversible acceleration — well beyond survivable extremes, well within the lifetimes of today's children!

That's right, at present, the world's atmosphere is on course to reach a state of unsurvivable extremes within the lifetimes of today's children and the only plausible response that *may* be able to prevent the worst, cascade impacts in time is…

immediate, radical, responsible, global economic revolution.

As outlined in the essential book, Climate Code Red, this requires the worldwide rejection of 'business as usual' in favour of an urgent international declaration of a state of global emergency to allow for a 'greater than WWII-scale' global mobilization to confront the climate crisis.

climateye.com was born out of the realization that we all suffer from a collective illness: the homocentric, human-first way we've chosen to think and live (as opposed to ecocentric, environment first) and our resultant eco-genocidal and — if continued — soon-to-be mass-suicidal, global economic system.

The way we see it, not only do the dominant economies of the world encourage wasteful, rapacious, infinite expansion and relentless, pathological consumption, they absolutely require these characteristics in order to thrive.

Which would all be fine, except:

  1. It is unsustainable because our planet's resources, oceans and atmosphere have limits (See: Global ecosystems 'face collapse').

  2. It is immoral because, with 50% of all greenhouse gasses contributed by only 13% of the world's total population, the way we (rich nations) have CHOSEN to live, KILLS the people of the poorest, undeveloped nations — those least responsible for the problem and least able to cope in the face of our shameful, negligent, on-going releases of global heating emissions.

  3. It is insane because, despite all of these facts, we continue to do it and will be sure to join the millions of innocent people (or more!) we may have already condemned to death, not to mention species we've already condemned to extinction, unless we take immediate, aggressive action to reverse our negative impacts — FAST!

And even then, the hard truth is, there are no guarantees.