Paul Gilding - The Great Disruption: Why the Climate Crisis Will Bring On the End of Shopping and the Birth of a New World

Copyright 2011 by Paul Gilding

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner
whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief
quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information address Bloomsbury
Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

Published by Bloomsbury Press, New York

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Gilding, Paul, 1959
The great disruption : why the climate crisis will bring on the end of shopping and the
birth of a new world / Paul Gilding. 1st U.S. ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-60819-223-6 (hardcover)
1. Social ecology. 2. Economic developmentEnvironmental aspects. 3. Economic
developmentSocial aspects. 4. Social change. I. Title.
HM861.G55 2011
304.2dc22
2010035843

First published in the United States by Bloomsbury Press in 2011
This e-book edition published in 2011

E-book ISBN: 978-1-60819-367-7

www.bloomsburypress.com

To the prescient pioneers of sustainability of the 1960s and 1970s who spent their lives alerting us to what was coming: Rachel Carson, Donella and Dennis Meadows, Jorgen Randers, Paul Ehrlich, E. F. Schumacher, Denis Hayes, Steward Brand, and many others. And to those who have and will follow in their footsteps as we decide to realize their hopes, instead of their fears. I salute you all.

Contents

The earth is full.

In fact our human society and economy is now so large we have passed the limits of our planets capacity to support us and it is overflowing. Our current model of economic growth is driving this system, the one we rely upon for our present and future prosperity, over the cliff. This in itself presents a major problem. It becomes a much larger challenge when we consider that billions of people are living desperate lives in appalling poverty and need their personal economy to rapidly grow to alleviate their suffering. But there is no room left.

This means things are going to change. Not because we will choose change out of philosophical or political preference, but because if we dont transform our society and economy, we risk social and economic collapse and the descent into chaos. The science on this is now clear and accepted by any rational observer. While an initial look at the public debate may suggest controversy, any serious examination of the peer-reviewed conclusions of leading science bodies shows the core direction we are heading in is now clear. Things do not look good.

These challenges and the facts behind them are well-known by experts and leaders around the world and have been for decades. But despite this understanding, that we would at some point pass the limits to growth, it has been continually filed away to the back of our mind and the back of our drawers, with the label InterestingFor Consideration Later prominently attached. Well, later has arrived.

This is because the passing of the limits is not philosophical but physical and rooted in the rules of physics, chemistry, and biology. So passing the limits has consequences.

If you cut down more trees than you grow, you run out of trees. If you put additional nitrogen into a water system, you change the type and quantity of life that water can support. If you thicken the earths CO blanket, the earth gets warmer. If you do all these and many more things at once, you change the way the whole system of planet Earth behaves, with social, economic, and life support impacts. This is not speculation, this is high school science.

In all this though, there is a surprising case for optimism. As a species, we are good in a crisis, and passing the limits will certainly be the biggest crisis our species has ever faced. Our backs will be up against the wall, and in that situation we have proven ourselves to be extraordinary. As the full scale of the imminent crisis hits us, our response will be proportionally dramatic, mobilizing as we do in war. We will change at a scale and speed we can barely imagine today, completely transforming our economy, including our energy and transport industries, in just a few short decades. Perhaps most surprisingly we will also learn there is more to life than shopping. We will break our addiction to growth, accept that more stuff is not making our lives better and focus instead on what does.

This is why we shouldnt despair in the face of what the science is telling usit is precisely the severity of the problem that will drive a response that is overwhelming in scale and speed and will go right to the core of our societies. It is the crisis itself that will push humanity to its next stage of development and allow us to realize our evolutionary potential. It will be a rough ride, but in the end, we will arrive at a better place.

This is the story we will tell here. It is a story that starts in the past, passes through the present, and extends into the future. The past is the story of warnings issued and decisions made. The present, the story of today, is the factual result of our failure to heed those warnings. But rather than a platform for issuing recriminations, our present situation is the foundation for our future story, a story of great challenges and comparably great opportunity.

This is our story. It is about our world, what has been happening in it, the state it is currently in, and what is going to happen next. It is not, however, a passive commentary about the world we live in. It is a call to armsa call to decide what kind of world we want to live in and what kind of contribution we can each make to define that. It is about a future we must choose.

By coincidence, this story also spans my lifetime. As I was being born in Australia in 1959, the start of this dramatic story was unfolding in the United States. The U.S. Department of Agriculture banned the sale of cranberries, just before Thanksgiving, due to the poisoning of the national crop by the excessive use of inadequately controlled pesticides.

It was what I consider the beginning of modern environmental awareness. It was the moment people on a large scale started to wake up to the fact that there were limits to the earths capacity to cope with our abuse, that we had grown so powerful as a species that we had now acquired a fateful power to destroy nature, as scientist Rachel Carson stated. It was when people came to realize that while we had for ten thousand years learned to control nature around our houses, villages, and farms for our immediate benefit, the scale of our impact had now changed the game.

Our story will go through this period to give us context for our present situation, where we find we have ignored earlier warnings and have now exceeded the limits, breaking the rules on which our system and its stability is based.

As you read this history, you may share the angst many feel about the lack of response to the decades of warnings. Environmentalists like myself also have to acknowledge a sobering reality in this. Given that we were unsuccessful in convincing society to respond to the challenge that was coming, there must have been failings in the approach we took. While I too lament the result and wonder what we could have done differently, I have now moved on. It is what it is. We can only change the future.

In that sense, this is a kind of guidebook to that future. While my views are shaped by decades of experience and a thorough analysis of the facts, they are of course my views. I hope they will help you come to your own conclusions on where we are and where we are going and, most important, how you personally are going to respond.

Before we start the journey, though, lets consider our starting point. If youre one of the billion or so people at the top of the global economic tree, and if youre reading this, then you probably are, then how good is this? We get a good meal whenever we want it. We all have housing that prevents us from being exposed to the elements. Most of us rarely face violence in our day-to-day lives, and if we do, we can get a response that pretty much reduces the threat to a manageable level. We generally get basic health care needs met, with even the poorer-quality care light-years ahead of what the average person received just a few generations ago.