Chris Jordan & Sarah Waller: Tuna 2009. The artwork depicts 20,500 tuna, the number taken from the world's oceans every 15 minutes.

In the 2009 documentary "The Age of Stupid", a fictional historian who is possibly the last man on Earth looks at archival film footage from 2008 and contemplates the last years in which humanity could have saved itself from global ecological collapse. “Why didn’t we save ourselves when we had the chance?” Were we just being stupid? Or was it that “on some level we weren’t sure that we were worth saving?” The answer has little to do with humans being stupid or self-destructive but everything to do with culture.

Human beings are embedded in cultural systems, are shaped and constrained by their cultures, and for the most part act only within the cultural realities of their lives. The cultural norms, symbols, values, and traditions a person grows up with become “natural.” Thus, asking people who live in consumer cultures to curb consumption is akin to asking them to stop breathing—they can do it for a moment, but then, gasping, they will inhale again. Driving cars, flying in planes, having large homes, using air conditioning…these are not decadent choices but simply natural parts of life—according to the cultural norms present in a growing number of consumer cultures in the world. Yet while they seem natural to people who are part of those cultural realities, these patterns are neither sustainable nor innate manifestations of human nature. They developed over several centuries and today are actively being reinforced and spread to millions of people in developing countries.

Preventing the collapse of human civilization requires nothing less than total transformation of dominant cultural patterns. This transformation would reject consumerism—a cultural orientation that leads people to find meaning, contentment, and acceptance through what they consume—as taboo and establish in its place a new cultural framework centred on sustainability. In the process, a revamped understanding of “natural” would emerge: it would mean individual and societal choices that cause minimal ecological damage or, better yet, that restore the biosphere to health. Such a shift—something more fundamental than adoption of the new technologies or government policies regarded as key drivers of a shift to sustainable societies—would radically reshape the way people understand and act in the world.

Transforming cultures will require decades of effort in which cultural pioneers—those who can step out of their cultural realities enough to critically examine them—work tirelessly to redirect key culture-shaping institutions: education, business, government, and the media, as well as social movements and long-standing human traditions. Harnessing these drivers of cultural change will be critical if humanity is to survive and thrive for centuries and millennia to come and prove that we are indeed “worth saving.”

The Unsustainability of Current Consumption Patterns

In 2006, people around the world spent $30.5 trillion on goods and services. These expenditures included basic necessities like food and shelter, but as discretionary incomes rose, people spent more on consumer goods—from richer foods and larger homes to televisions, cars, computers, and air travel. In 2008 alone, people around the world purchased 68 million cars, 85 million refrigerators, 297 million computers, and 1.2 billion mobile phones  Consumption has grown dramatically over the past five decades, up 28 percent from the $23.9 trillion spent in 1996 and up sixfold from the $4.9 trillion spent in 1960 (2008 dollar values). Some of this increase comes from the growth in population, but human numbers only grew by a factor of 2.2 between 1960 and 2006. Thus consumption expenditures per person still almost tripled.

As consumption has risen, more fossil fuels, minerals, and metals have been mined from the earth, more trees have been cut down, and more land has been plowed to grow food (often to feed livestock as people at higher income levels started to eat more meat). Between 1950 and 2005, for example, metals production grew sixfold, oil consumption eightfold, and natural gas consumption 14-fold. In total, 60 billion tons of resources are now extracted annually—about 50 percent more than just 30 years ago. Today, the average European uses 43 kilograms of resources daily, and the average American uses 88 kilograms. All in all, the world extracts the equivalent of 112 Empire State Buildings from the Earth every single day.

The exploitation of these resources to maintain ever higher levels of consumption has put increasing pressure on Earth’s systems and in the process has dramatically disrupted the ecological systems on which humanity and countless other species depend. The Ecological Footprint Indicator, which compares humanity’s ecological impact with the amount of productive land and sea area available to supply key ecosystem services, shows that humanity now uses the resources and services of 1.3 Earths. In other words, people are using about a third more of Earth’s capacity than is available, undermining the resilience of the very ecosystems on which we depend.

In 2005 the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, a comprehensive review of scientific  research that involved 1,360 experts from 95 countries, reinforced these findings. It found that some 60% of ecosystem services—climate regulation, provision of fresh water, waste treatment, food from fisheries and many other services—were being degraded or used unsustainably. The findings were so unsettling that the MA Board warned:

Human activity is putting such strain on the natural functions of Earth that the ability of the planet’s ecosystems to sustain future generations can no longer be taken for granted.

The shifts in one particular ecosystem service—climate regulation—are especially disturbing. After remaining at stable levels for the past 1,000 years at about 280 parts per million, atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide are now at 385 parts per million, driven by a growing human population consuming ever more fossil fuels, eating more meat, and converting more land to agriculture and urban areas. A 2009 study that used the Integrated Global Systems Model of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that unless significant action is taken soon, median temperature increases would be 5.1 degrees Celsius by 2100, more than twice as much as the model had projected in 2003. In other words, policy alone will not be enough. A dramatic shift in the very design of human societies will be essential. 

These projected levels of temperature change mean the odds would be great that ocean levels would increase by two or more meters due to the partial melting of Greenland or W. Antarctic ice sheets, which in turn would cause massive coastal flooding and submerge entire island nations. The one sixth of the world who depend on glacier or snowmelt-fed rivers for water would face extreme water scarcity. Vast swaths of the Amazon forest would become savanna, coral reefs would die, and many of the world’s most vulnerable fisheries would collapse. All of this would translate into major political and social disruptions—with environmental refugees projected to reach up to 1 billion by 2050.

Climate change is just one of the many symptoms of excessive consumption levels. Air pollution, the average loss of 7 million hectares of forests per year, soil erosion, the annual production of over 100 million tons of hazardous waste, abusive labour practices driven by the desire to produce more and cheaper consumer goods, obesity, increasing time stress—the list could go on and on. All these problems are often treated separately, even as many of their roots trace back to current consumption patterns.

According to a study by Stephen Pacala, the world’s richest 500 million people (roughly 7% of the world’s population) are currently responsible for 50% of its carbon dioxide emissions, while the poorest 3 billion are responsible for just 6%. These numbers should not be surprising, for it is the rich who have the largest homes, drive cars, jet around the world, use large amounts of electricity, eat more meat and processed foods, and buy more stuff—all of which has significant ecological impact. In 2006, the 65 high-income countries where consumerism is most dominant accounted for 78% of consumption expenditures but just 16% percent of world population. People in the United States alone spent $9.7 trillion on consumption that year—about $32,400 per person—accounting for 32% of global expenditures with only 5% of global population. It is these countries that most urgently need to redirect their consumption patterns, as the planet cannot handle such high levels of consumption.

Indeed, if everyone lived like Americans, Earth could sustain only 1.4 billion people. At slightly lower consumption levels, though still high, the planet could support 2.1 billion people. But even at middle-income levels—the equivalent of what people in Jordan or Thailand earn on average today—Earth can sustain fewer people than are alive today. These numbers convey a reality that few want to confront: in today’s world of 6.8 billion, modern consumption patterns—even at relatively basic levels—are simply not sustainable. Add to this the fact that population is projected to grow by another 2.3 billion by 2050 and even with effective strategies to curb growth will probably still grow by at least another 1.1 billion before peaking.

It therefore becomes clear that while shifting technologies and stabilizing population will be essential in creating sustainable societies, neither will succeed without considerable changes in consumption patterns, including reducing the use of certain goods such as cars and airplanes. Habits that are firmly set—from where people live to what they eat—will need to be altered, and in many cases simplified or minimized. These are not changes people will want to make, since their current patterns are comfortable and feel “natural,” because of sustained, methodical efforts to make them feel just that way. Indeed, human behaviors central to modern cultural identities and economic systems are not choices that are fully in consumers’ control. They are systematically reinforced by the increasingly dominant cultural paradigm of consumerism.

 
Chris Jordan's Midway: Message from the Gyre, 2009, a photographs of an albatross chick on Midway Atoll in the N. Pacific. Nestings are fed bellies-full of plastic by their parents, who soar out over the vast polluted ocean collecting what looks to them like food for their young. On this diet of human trash, tens of thousands of chicks die yearly of starvation, toxicity, and choking. 

     .   
Consumerism Across Cultures

To understand what consumerism is, first it is necessary to understand what culture is. Culture is not simply the arts, or values, or belief systems. Rather, it is all of these elements—values, beliefs, customs, traditions, symbols, norms, and institutions—combining to create overarching frames that shape how humans perceive reality. Cultures, as broader systems, arise out of the complex interactions of many different elements of social behaviors and guide humans at actors and institutions and by the participants in the cultures themselves.

Today the cultural paradigm that is dominant in many parts of the world and across many cultural systems is consumerism. It is a cultural pattern that leads people to find meaning, contentment, and acceptance primarily through the consumption of goods and services. While this takes different forms in different cultures, consumerism leads people everywhere to associate high consumption levels with well-being and success. Ironically though, research shows that consuming more does not necessarily mean a better individual quality of life. Consumerism has now so fully worked its way into human cultures that it is sometimes hard to even recognize it as a cultural construction. It simply seems to be natural. But in fact the elements of cultures—language and symbols, norms and traditions, values and institutions—have been profoundly transformed by consumerism in societies around the world. Indeed, “consumer” is often used interchangeably with "person" in the 10 most commonly used languages of the world.

Consider symbols—what anthropologist Leslie White once described as “the origin and basis of human behaviour.” In most countries today people are exposed to hundreds if not thousands of consumerist symbols every day. Logos, jingles, slogans, spokespersons, mascots—all these symbols of different brands routinely bombard people, influencing behaviour even at unconscious levels. Many people today recognize these consumerist symbols more easily than they do common wildlife an almost invisible level. They are the sum of all “social processes that make the artificial (or human-constructed) seem natural.” It is these social processes that shape people’s realities. Most of what seems “natural” to people is actually cultural. Ultimately, while human behaviour is rooted in evolution and physiology, it is guided primarily by the cultural systems people are born into.
 
One norm of particular interest is diet. It now seems natural to eat highly sweetened, highly processed foods. Children from a very early age are exposed to candy, sweetened cereals, and other unhealthy but highly profitable and highly advertised foods—a shift that has had a dramatic impact on global obesity rates. Today, fast-food vendors and soda machines are found even in schools, shaping children’s dietary norms from a young age and in turn reinforcing and perpetuating these norms throughout societies.

There is strong evidence that higher levels of consumption do not significantly increase the quality of life beyond a certain point, and they may even reduce it. First, psychological evidence suggests that it is close relationships, a meaningful life, economic security, and health that contribute most to well-being. While there are marked improvements in happiness when people at low levels of income earn more (as their economic security improves and their range of opportunities grows), as incomes increase this extra earning power converts less effectively into increased happiness. In part, this may stem from people’s tendency to habituate to the consumption level they are exposed to. Even products around only a short time quickly become viewed as necessities. Half of Americans now think they must have a mobile phone, and one third see a high-speed Internet connection as essential.

A high-consumption lifestyle can also have many side effects that do not improve wellbeing, from increased work stress and debt to more illness and a greater risk of death. Each year roughly half of all deaths worldwide are caused by cancers, cardiovascular and lung diseases, diabetes, and auto accidents. Many of these deaths are caused or at least largely influenced by individual consumption choices such as smoking, being sedentary, eating too few fruits and vegetables, and being overweight. Today 1.6 billion people around the world are overweight or obese, lowering their quality of life and shortening their lives, for the obese, by 3 to 10 years on average.

Traditions—the most ritualized and deeply rooted aspects of cultures—are also now shaped by consumerism, which is now deeply embedded in how people observe rituals. Choosing to celebrate rituals in a simple manner can be a difficult choice to make, whether because of norms, family pressure, or advertising influence. Christmas demonstrates this point well. While for Christians this day marks the birth of Jesus, for many people the holiday is more oriented around Santa Claus, gift giving, and feasting. A 2008 survey on Christmas spending in 18 countries found that individuals spent hundreds of dollars on gifts and hundreds more on socializing and food. Increasingly, even many non-Christians celebrate Christmas as a time to exchange gifts. In Japan, Christmas is a big holiday, even though only 2% of the population is Christian.

Chris Jordan: Barbie Dolls, 2008 depicts 32,000 Barbies, equal to the number of elective 
breast augmentation surgeries performed monthly in the U.S. 

Institutional Roots of Consumerism

By the early 1900s, a consumerist orientation had become increasingly embedded in many of the dominant societal institutions of many cultures—from businesses and governments to the media and education. And in the latter half of the century, new innovations like television, sophisticated advertising techniques, trans-national corporations, franchises, and the Internet helped institutions to spread consumerism across the planet. Arguably, the strongest driver of this cultural shift has been business interests. On a diverse set of fronts, businesses found ways to coax more consumption out of people. Credit was liberalized, for instance, with installment payments, and the credit card was promoted heavily in the United States, which led to an almost 11-fold increase in consumer credit between 1945 and 1960. Products were designed to have short lives or to go out of style quickly. Workers were encouraged to take pay raises rather than more time off, increasing their disposable incomes.

Perhaps the biggest business tool for stoking consumption is marketing. Global advertising expenditures hit $643 billion in 2008, and in countries like China and India they are growing at 10% per year. In the United States, the average “consumer” sees or hears hundreds of advertisements every day and from an early age learns to associate products with positive imagery and messages.

Clearly, if advertising were not effective, businesses would not spend 1% of the gross world product to sell their wares, as they do. But they are right: studies have demonstrated that advertising indeed encourages certain behaviours and that children, who have difficulty distinguishing between TV advertising and content,  are particularly susceptible. In addition to direct advertising, product placement —intentionally showing products in television programs or movies so that they are positively associated with characters—is a growing practice. Companies spent $3.5 billion placing their products strategically in 2004 in the United States, four times the amount spent 15 years earlier.

The media are a second major societal institution that plays a driving role in stimulating consumerism, and not just as a vehicle for marketing. The media are a powerful tool for transmitting cultural symbols, norms, customs, myths, and stories. As Duane Elgin, author and media activist, explains: “To control a society, you don’t need to control its courts, you don’t need to control its armies, all you need to do is control its stories. And it’s television and Madison Avenue that is telling us most of the stories most of the time to most of the people.”  Between television, movies, and increasingly the Internet, the media are a dominant form of leisure time activity. In 2006, some 83% of the world’s population had access to television and 21% had access to the Internet. In countries that belong to the OECD, 95% of households have at least one television, and people watch about three to four hours a day on average. Add to this the two to three hours spent online each day, plus radio broadcasts, newspapers, magazines, and the 8 billion movie tickets sold annually worldwide, and it becomes clear that media exposure consumes anywhere from a third to half of people’s waking day in large parts of the world.

During those hours, much of media output reinforces consumer norms and promotes materialistic aspirations, whether directly by extolling the high-consumption lives of celebrities and the wealthy or more subtly through stories that reinforce the belief that happiness comes from being better off financially,from buying the newest consumer gadget or fashion accessory, and so on. There is clear evidence that media exposure has an impact on norms, values, and preferences. Social modelling studies have found connections between such exposure and violence, smoking, reproductive norms, and various unhealthy behaviours.

Government often reinforces the consumerist orientation. Promoting consumer behaviour happens in myriad ways—perhaps most famously in 2001 when George W. Bush and several other western leaders encouraged their citizens to go out and shop after the terrorist attacks. But it also happens more systemically. Subsidies for particular industries—especially the transportation and energy sectors, where cheap oil or electricity has ripple effects throughout the economy—also work to stoke consumption. And to the extent that manufacturers are not required to internalize the environmental and social costs of production—when pollution of air or water is unregulated, for example—the cost of goods is artificially low, stimulating their use. Between these subsidies and externalities, total support of polluting business interests was $1.9 trillion in 2001. Government actions can also be driven by regulatory capture, when special interests wield undue influence over regulators. In 2008, that influence could be observed in the United States through the $3.9 billion spent on campaign donations by business interests and the $2.8 billion they spent to lobby policymakers.

A clear example of official stimulation of consumption came in the 1940s when governments started to actively promote consumption as a vehicle for development. For example, the U.S., which came out of World War II relatively unscathed, had mobilized a massive war-time economy—one that was poised to recede now that the war was over. Intentionally stimulating high levels of consumption was seen as a good solution to address this (especially with the memory of the Great Depression still raw). Victor Lebow explained in 1955:

Our enormously productive economy demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfactions, our ego satisfactions in consumption.

Today, this same attitude toward consumption has spread far beyond the U.S. and is the leading policy of many of the world’s governments. As the global economic recession accelerated in 2009, wealthy countries did not see this as an opportunity to shift to a sustainable “no-growth” economy—essential if they are to rein in carbon emissions—but instead primed national economies with $2.8 trillion of new government stimulus packages, only a small percentage of which focused on green initiatives.

Finally, education plays a powerful role in cultivating consumerism. As with governments, in part this is because education seems to be increasingly susceptible to business influence. Yet perhaps the greatest critique of schools is that they represent a huge missed opportunity to combat consumerism and to educate students about its effects on people and the environment. Few schools teach media literacy to help students critically interpret marketing; few teach or model proper nutrition, even while providing access to unhealthy or unsustainable consumer products; and few teach a basic understanding of the ecological sciences—specifically that the human species is not unique but in fact just as dependent on a functioning Earth system for its survival as every other species. The lack of integration of this basic knowledge into the school curriculum, coupled with repeated exposure to consumer goods and advertising and with leisure time focused in large part on television, helps reinforce the unrealistic idea that humans are separate from Earth and the illusion that perpetual increases in consumption are ecologically possible and even valuable.

Eric Assadourian is a senior researcher at Worldwatch Institute and Project Director ofState of the World 2010. The above is an edited synopsis based on his article The Rise & Fall of Consumer Cultures  which WWI has available for downloading as a PDF here.

It is undeniable that the world wants to change Chevron. People from all over the globe are signing this petition, people young and old, from so many backgrounds. We’ve had celebrities, musicians, investors, and Chevron employees standing up and demanding change from one of the largest corporations on the planet.

As the new leader of the 3rd largest oil company in the world, CEO John Watson can right the wrongs of his predecessors and transform his company into one that cares.

150,000+ are saying “Enough is enough. Energy shouldn’t cost lives.”

From Ecuador to Richmond,CA to Burma and everywhere the oil giant operates in-between they leave a trail of environmental devastation, human rights abuses, and a legacy of health problems.

150,000+ say ENOUGH to Big Oil destroying our environment and the health of our communities.

Chevron, and their Big Oil cohorts, spend hundreds of millions of dollars on lobbyists and political contributions to buy off politicians and destroy policies that would be good for our climate and our future.

150,000+ people say ENOUGH to Chevron’s control of our government and our democracy.

To truly change Chevron and the oil industry, we are going to need to be 150,000 x stronger and louder and more powerful than we ever have been before. Our communities, our climate, our planet, and our future depend on it.

You in?

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MY NBC NEWSCAST COMPETING FOR THE VIRGIN EARTH 30 MILLION $ CONTEST.

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TEXTURE MACHINE AND SPRAY ON ANY SURFACE TO MAKE A WATERPROOF

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I SPRAY IT ON STRAWBALES AS THE SOLUTION TO MAKING STUCCO WATERPROOF.

OTHER THINGS ARE POLITICAL COMMENTARY IN THE NEWS RELEASE BELOW:

JUNE, 2008 {SOCIALIST ASSEMBLIES}I agree with scholar Haynes that the IRS should police the pews for partisan politics to remove tax exemptions. First the Alliance Defense Fund should not be called 'Christian' and second those houses should not be called places of 'Worship'. By definition Christianity cannot exist without 'Church' and what we have today in evangelical ministries is not 'Church' nor is the activity 'Worship'. Church is Orthodox. A socialist assembly beamed electronically is neither Orthodox nor 'Church'.These televised socialist assemblies can be as sweet as Joel in Houston or as sour as Reverend Wright- but neither are 'Churches' and none conduct 'Worship'.Orthodox is Catholic (East and West) and includes the America variants of Mormon, German Baptist, Amish, Mennonite Jehovah's Witness and a few others. None of these are or can be promoted as socialist electronic assemblies. If they are - then they are not. There is no future in pastors.To put it simply: If it comes from the tube- it ain't Christian.Fundamentally, America needs to re-think its road.Rance DeWitt
JULY 2008Letter to the Editor

One thousand militarized bully pulpits have replaced a God-fearing Congress and Senate. Our very government has been compromised. It all began with Billy Graham and television.

Archimedes put the mathematics of Pythagoras into words.

Today, electronic tube religion separates man from the Church. All that is left is a multitude of loose cannons shouting Jesus for money. He said, you will shout my name from every street corner but I do not know you and you are not mine.

Christianity is no religion.

 Email your Senators and tell them to VOTE YES on Clean Energy Jobs for America.

There's a clean energy bill sitting, waiting in Congress.

A bill that the Natural Resources Defense Council Action Fund says "will break foreign oil's stranglehold on our country, reduce carbon pollution, and create jobs right here in America--good jobs that pay well and can't be outsourced."

And the NRDC Action Fund wants you to do something about it. It's simple enough-- visit thisisourmoment.org to email your senators and ask them to pass the Clean Energy Jobs & American Power Act. They even got an all-star cast including Leonardo DiCaprio, Jason Bateman and Edward Norton cracking jokes and urging you to do this one, simple thing.

"Flood the inboxes of your senators, it freaks them out," Bateman says. "They don't even know how to use e-mail, then they see a bunch of stuff in the inbox, they know they gotta do something."

Let's hope so. Justin Long even takes off his pants to get the point across.

Watch this great video here.  thisisourmoment.org

SOURCE:  The Huffington Post   http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/01/28/nrdc-clean-energy-bill-ce_n_440104.html

Share this video with a friend and help spread the word.
This should take less than 5 minutes -- here is what you can do:

1. Tell your senators This is Our Moment, by clicking this link

2. Spread the word about this video by posting this link on your Facebook wall

3. Update your Facebook status to "Thisisourmoment.org" so friends will see our video

4. Tweet ThisIsOurMoment.org and tell your followers to take action today!

5. Post ThisIsOurMoment.org on your personal blogs

And now, still learning educating and training the younger generation’s to involve individually and collectively in all eco-development activities and decision makings  I have individually conducted hundreds of seminars and converted them to eco-actions,

24 hour x 7 days Snake Rescues along with a trained team,

Free seminars, slid shows and movie for the all local and surrounded educational institutions,

Conservation based weed removal action for Tribal livelihood development trainings

Clean renewable energy solar lamp implementation to rural and tribal those not accessed with power,

And many innovative initiatives like craft from the plant lantana camera which is considered as a weed destroying native forest and farm lands, GREEN CROSS eco action clubs, and more to bring a change in the un-mind full living of the most populace   even though we find very tuff and hard to move every step without any support, I believe that we can make it, I also swear that what ever happens I am not going to quit my duty towards nature, of conserving the only home at least in this 11 hour... 

I believe in the world

Overturned truck in the 9th Ward, New Orleans-- from Chris Jordan's powerful exhibition,
In Katrina's  Wake - Portraits of Loss from an Unnatural Disaster  (2005).
The picture might also be seen as a metaphor for the Copenhagen conference. Social
futurist Sara Robinson takes a long view that recognizes 6 steps in any major change. 
We are, she states, collectively only half-way through the process of big and deep social 
change in relation to the climate crisis.

Climate activists are expressing enormous disappointment about everything left undone at Copenhagen. There was overwhelming urgency to get a strong global agreement to get the laggards off their butts and launch the structural reformations most of us know were needed need to fix the problem. A lot of us loaded all our highest hopes onto this one conference, wanting desperately to believe that this would finally be the moment the long-awaited Grand Transformation would occur.

But the hard truth of the matter is this: change of this magnitude never happens with a single conference, a single treaty, or even a single disaster. The structural changes required to get us off carbon and onto a truly sustainable footing challenge economic assumptions that humans have lived by for a couple of thousand years. Change that wide and deep will be the work of an entire century, maybe two. (If we’re smart and lucky, our grandchildren may live to see it mostly done.) All of us are well aware of the precarious time crunch we’re under here; but humans change only as fast as they change, and forcing the issue isn’t likely to help. We didn’t get into this mess overnight, and we’re not going to get out of it in one dazzling planetary stroke of universal enlightenment, either.

The good news: big, deep changes like this one tend to proceed in a fairly predictable order. If we understand the whole arc of that process, we can have a little more patience with where we are, and think a little more strategically about what comes next. Various theorists on the subject of change disagree on the number of stages in the process—but they all describe more or less the same progression. For our purposes, we can think of it in six stages:

Stage One begins when a small subgroup of people realizes that there’s a problem, and then figures out just what that problem is. In this case, it was the climate scientists who noticed the first hints of a problem over a century ago, and spent the next several decades accumulating overwhelming evidence that it was a monster threat that couldn’t be ignored.

Stage Two is in many ways the very hardest one: getting everybody else in the group to see the problem, admit it’s a problem, and agree that it needs to be fixed.  Note that there are no solutions proffered at this stage; right now, you’re just getting people to crack their minds open wide enough to accept the present truth and future implications of the matter.

This battle for hearts and minds is never a small victory—and those of us in the fight for climate change have already substantially won it. The deniers keep trying to take it away from us; but like the tobacco companies in the 1960s, they’re on the defensive and in the minority now, and they’re well aware that time is not on their side. Creating a broad global consensus around the basic idea that climate disruption is happening and needs to be addressed was one of the longest, hardest, most important battles of the whole revolution, and it’s very nearly over. Just getting to this point has been an enormous global victory for the movement, and we deserve to let ourselves claim it and savour it.

From here, it’s on to Stage Three, in which the group tries to see if tweaks to the existing system will fix the problem. This is where we are now: what’s came out of Copenhagen; in essence, a laundry list of tweaks.

This isn’t an irrational step. After all, as we go through life solving problems, tweaking something does in fact fix things better than 90 percent of the time. It’s very natural for people—especially people who are more change-averse than your average climate activist, which is about 90 percent of everybody—to comfort themselves with the belief that we just need to do a little of this, a little of that, and it’ll all be better.

We are now at Stage Three not just with climate change, but the economy too. Everybody knows we need change; not everybody understands yet just how thorough the overhaul is going to have to be. And large-scale change won’t happen until they figure it out themselves, on their own time, in their own way.

There is no avoiding this stage of the process. It’s frustrating for the foresighted people who’ve already figured out that mere tweaks aren’t going to do it this time; but the bitter truth is that there’s no way through this stage but through it. You cannot skip steps, and you cannot rush people through their process. Everybody’s got to go through all of them, on their own schedule.

Change agents have two clear choices here: enter the discussion, engage the crowd, and position themselves as clear, calm, credible leaders on the issue; or get out too far ahead of the laggards and whine at them to catch up. The latter strategy pretty much guarantees that they’ll only resent you—and later on, when they get finally serious about change, your name won’t be on the list of credible people who are qualified to make the really transformative decisions. No matter how much you know about the subject, you won’t be at the table when the ultimate choices finally get made—which leaves those choices in the hands of people who want to shape the future for their own ends. Over the long haul, failure to exercise a little restraint and gentle patience while people are catching up almost always carries potentially fatal credibility costs on the back end.

As we approach the end of Stage Three, the process begins to accelerate rapidly, as people’s heightened awareness of the problem makes them more willing to connect external events to the climate change issue.

Stage Four will be a reckoning, still to come (but almost certainly closer than anyone currently expects) that proves beyond arguable doubt that those hoped-for small tweaks have not been enough, and that the only remaining option is an immediate and thorough overhaul of the whole system. This is the tipping-point event that moves the whole population through several stages in the space of a few days or weeks, catching everybody up (or at least a critical mass of everybody—you need at least 70% of the population really on board by this point) and levelling the field for change.

The good news is that by the time you get this far along, everybody who matters really understands the issues at stake, accepts that tweaks won’t do it, and can visualize the kind of structural change that’s needed. The earlier stages have mentally and emotionally prepared them to drop their last remaining resistance, and move ahead with solutions that are truly revolutionary. And those experts who haven’t squandered their authority by whining and bitching their way through Stage Three emerge here as the natural leaders of that revolution.

In Stage Five, the changes happen—a process that almost always also changes you forever. We may be the foresighted ones, and the natural leaders; but there’s a lot that happens at this stage that can’t possibly be foreseen. We must be prepared to have a lot of our cherished beliefs and core assumptions melted away in the heat of the transformation. Some of our dreams will be incinerated, too. But others will come true beyond anything we could have imagined, due to opportunities we never could have anticipated. Such is the nature of the process.

Stage Six is the wrap-up phase. The revolution is over, the change is mostly accomplished (though the little tweaks and upgrades will go on for a long while), the newly rebuilt systems are coming online, and the new regime becomes the new normal.  If it’s done well, people feel good about what happened—or, at least, are fairly well convinced that they’re better off than they would have been without the change.

Given the current climate, it’s tempting to deride this perspective as “incrementalism,” which has become an 'epithet du jour'. But everything we know about change says that the deep civilizational shifts we’re looking for will not happen any other way.

There are other forces at work, too. Climate change has turned into a generational issue that pits older people, who are deeply economically and emotionally invested in the status quo, against younger generations who are convinced that the status quo is untenable and that their own futures depend on creating something new. With every passing year, the power and influence of those younger generations grows, increasing the momentum behind the push for change. At the same time, climate-related events are going to increase; and as the change cycle spins forward, people are going to become more willing to identify them as such.

We have to trust the process, and understand where we are in it. The forces are gathering, and the process is accelerating—it’s just not easy to see the deep currents yet, because they’re still well below the surface. While it’s tempting to see Copenhagen as only a lost Chance, it’s probably more accurate to view it as the first of a series of efforts that are going to come faster and thicker now as that generational momentum and general understanding of the issues continue to build.

Copenhagen, for better or worse, was still the next step forward, and we’ll accept it with greater equanimity if we accept that the resulting tweaks are a natural and necessary phase the world’s more conventional thinkers have to work their way past before they’ll accept the need for a more wholesale transformation. If we’re serious about leading on this issue, we need to take the long view—which means respectfully meeting people where they are, and then gently bringing them along through the next stage, then the next, then the next. That’s what real leaders do.

Sara Robinson is a social futurist with special interests in the role religion, culture, and other cognitive frameworks play in the way individuals and societies imagine the future and choose their strategies for approaching and managing change; and especially how personal and social fears are used—or overcome—to alter the change equation. She is a fellow at the Campaign for America’s Future with expertise in trend analysis, scenario development, futures research, social change theory, systems thinking, strategic planning, journalism and long-range planning. 

Smoke clouds from Station Wildfire rise above Haines Canyon, Tujunga,
CA - August 29th 2009. 

The first decade of the twenty-first century was the hottest since recordkeeping began in 1880. With an average global temperature of 14.52 degrees Celsius (58.1 degrees Fahrenheit), this decade was 0.2 degrees Celsius (0.36 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than any previous decade. The year 2005 was the hottest on record, while 2007 and 2009 tied for second hottest. In fact, 9 of the 10 warmest years on record occurred in the past decade.

Temperature rise has accelerated in recent decades. The earth’s temperature is now 0.8 degrees Celsius (1.4 degrees Fahrenheit) higher than it was in the first decade of the twentieth century, and two-thirds of that increase has taken place since 1970.

Even with these seemingly small increases in global temperature, natural systems are already starting to respond, as evidenced by melting ice sheets and glaciers, shifting weather patterns, and changes in the timing of seasonal events. If temperatures continue to rise on their current trajectory, by the end of the century they will have left the narrow range in which human civilization has developed and flourished.

Though temperatures are rising around the globe, some areas are warming faster than others, with the greatest warming taking place in the Arctic. Paleoclimate records from Arctic lakes, tree rings, and ice cores reveal that the past decade was the warmest of the past two millennia. Warming is amplified in the Arctic for a number of reasons, including the loss of the region’s extensive snow and ice cover: as temperatures rise and light-reflecting ice melts, it is replaced by darker water, which absorbs more energy from the sun, thereby accelerating warming. In parts of the Arctic, average annual temperatures have increased by as much as 2–3 degrees Celsius (3.6–5.4 degrees Fahrenheit) since the 1950s. In 2007, Arctic summer sea ice shrank to its lowest extent on record, leaving the Northwest Passage completely ice-free for the first time in human memory. Then 2008 and 2009 brought the second and third lowest extent of Arctic summer ice on record.

The earth’s temperature is determined by a number of factors. One major influence is the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO). This cycle, which involves large shifts in atmospheric and ocean temperatures over the tropical Pacific, has two phases: El Niño, which typically raises average global temperature, and La Niña, which lowers it. Year-to-year temperature variations are also influenced by the amount of energy the earth receives from the sun: increases in solar activity tend to raise global temperatures, while decreases in solar activity lower them.

These natural cycles alone, however, fail to explain the temperature patterns of the last decade. While the strongest El Niño of the century pushed 1998 temperatures up to their then-record high, temperatures in the hottest year (2005) did not receive a boost from El Niño. And 2007 was tied for second hottest year on record, despite the development of a cooling La Niña. Furthermore, while global temperatures have been climbing to record heights, incoming solar energy has in fact been declining since the beginning of the decade. In early 2009, solar activity reached its lowest level in a century.

Rather than ENSO cycles or variations in solar irradiance, human-induced warming from heat-trapping greenhouse gases has become the dominant climate influence. Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere have risen rapidly since the start of the Industrial Revolution, climbing from 280 parts per million (ppm) in the late eighteenth century to 387 ppm today. Researchers recently reported that the last time atmospheric carbon dioxide levels were this high was roughly 15 million years ago, when sea level was 25–40 meters (80 to 130 feet) higher, and temperatures were approximately 3–6 degrees Celsius warmer.

The risks posed by rising global temperature are widespread. As the atmosphere warms, mountain glaciers that provide water to over a billion people are melting. Melting ice sheets and thermal expansion of oceans raise sea levels, threatening coastal populations. Increasing temperatures bring decreasing crop yields, putting world food supplies at risk. And ecosystems worldwide are irrevocably altered, placing large numbers of species at risk of extinction.

Higher global temperatures also bring with them more frequent and severe extreme weather events. Over the past few decades, scientists have noted an increase in hot extremes and a decrease in cold extremes across the globe. As temperatures rise further, heat waves will become more frequent and intense. Longer and more severe droughts will take place over wider areas; an upsurge in global drought since the 1970s, associated with higher temperatures, has already been observed. At the same time, as temperatures rise, the water-holding capacity of the atmosphere increases, leading to more intense storms and flooding in areas that are already wet.

The past decade saw many record-breaking extreme weather events, providing examples of the kinds of incidents expected to become more frequent with global warming. In the summer of 2003, Europe experienced an intense heat wave that led to over 52,000 deaths. In the United States, where daily record high temperatures occurred twice as often as record lows over the last 10 years, persistent drought plagued parts of the South and West for much of the second half of the decade. A 2006 heat wave affecting the West and Midwest was blamed for 140 deaths in California.

The combination of high temperatures and drought makes a dangerous recipe for wildfire; indeed, 2006 and 2007 saw the worst fire seasons on record in the United States. A similar combination led to disaster in southeastern Australia in early 2009: on what is now known as Black Saturday, intense, rapidly spreading bushfires killed 173 people and burned over a million acres.

Other areas have experienced unusually heavy rains and flooding over the past decade. Record flooding hit Central Europe in 2002, causing over 100 deaths and forcing 450,000 people to evacuate. In summer 2007, the worst flooding in 60 years in England and Wales killed nine people and caused billions of dollars worth of damage; that May to July period was the wettest in the region since recordkeeping began in 1766. In 2008, extensive flooding occurred in several parts of the African continent; Algeria saw its worst floods in a century, while Zimbabwe’s floods were its worst on record.

As temperatures rise, warmer oceans provide more energy to feed tropical storms. The past few decades have seen an increase in the frequency of the most severe hurricanes, and researchers have identified rising sea surface temperatures as the primary cause. The 2005 Atlantic hurricane season was the worst on record, with 27 named storms, 15 of which were classified as hurricanes—including Hurricane Katrina, which caused over 1,300 deaths and $125 billion in financial losses.

In 2007, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), an international body of over 2,500 scientists, released its Fourth Assessment Report, in which it called the recent warming of the globe “unequivocal.” The report projected a rise in average global temperature of 1.1–6.4 degrees Celsius (2–11 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of the century. Based on the most recent scientific assessments, if greenhouse gas emissions continue to grow at their current pace, the temperature rise by the end of the century will likely reach or exceed the upper end of these projections. Already, effects of increasing temperatures such as accelerating ice melt and sea level rise are outpacing the IPCC’s predictions of just three years ago. Without significant cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, global temperature will rise dramatically by the end of the century, creating a world that looks vastly different from the one we know today.

This is a policy release from Earth Policy Institute, one of our preferred sources for up-to-date information with integrity. It was written by Amy Heinzerling, & the Global Temperature Index data are from NASA.. EPI is directed by Lester R. Brown and is dedicated to planning a sustainable future, as well as providing a roadmap of how to get from here to there.