That image doesn’t really fit the following, but I just so want to use it for something (more on the image, at the end here).
The Copenhagen Climate Talks go on, marginal to most lives (except governments, leading capital, and activists). Anyone would agree that it’s important, but the complexity escapes us?
It escapes me, I think. I don’t believe the following captures it. Nonetheless...
Just as the G20 are implementing constraints on global capital (constraints on recursive or exponential finance capitalism) while commodity markets in recession are desperate for capital stimulation, the Copenhagen Talks are about further constraining the global economy for the sake of future generations, but to the detriment of developing nations’s near-term welfare. Globally controlling productivity when developing nations feel a right to do what developed nations have done for a century without controls, while then not adequately compensating the developing nations for self-motivated sacrifice in the wake of a century of exploitation by developed nations, altogether seems to be a new brand of global imperialism. I don’t believe there’s any imperialism involved, but warranting that belief won’t happen here.
No doubt, though, controlling climate for the long term involves blowback in the short term for prospects of developing nations. Globally-networked governmental economies of constraint are going to be allowed to design the rate and structure of economic evolution to the designed detriment of the capitalist energy economy (good), but also to the undesigned detriment of nations longing for the license that developed nations can now afford to forego, all for the sake of everyone’s unborn—but with some unborn to be far more charmed at birth than most everyone else.
It’s all marginal to the scale of most lives in developed nations. We worry about how to get through another month’s budget, how to balance our sense of need (what’s invalid, what’s really necessary, what’s most important, what’s the best prioritization) with our sense of commitment to community, nation, and abstract narratives about planetary legacies.
In 1978, Theodore Roszak, already famous for The Making of A Counter Culture, published Person/Planet, which initiated (I believe) the domain of “ecopsychology,” which is inquiry into the interface of deep ecology and humanistic psychology, as a matter of human self-understanding. But it’s also the matter of scale in political action: how the continuum of “think globally, act locally” goes. The butterfly effect is just too abstract without strong leadership, widely distributed across levels of life and clearly aligned with the hyperintegration that humanity has become.
We are each a living well of emergent evolution, development, and self understanding. Some of us are shallow, some not. Yet, for each person, there is some depth of engagement, both unwitting (inheritance, natural and culture) and deliberate (legacies we’ve made or endorsed)—engagement with the The Deep we inevitably face on Earth: an elusive continuum of mind, life, culture, evolution, and planet—planet granting and bearing our evolution, evolution granting and bearing manifold cultures, cultures granting and bearing manifold lives, and lives granting and bearing manifold minds having too little time (or ability) to understand where we so complexly are.
We yield to summary understandings (e.g., forming voter opinions from proximal common sense available through a few newspaper articles or chats with friends), as if something essential, thus reliable for action orientation, is easily available by which one’s preferences and decisions can be regarded as reliable, good, and right. Otherwise, we accept our cluelessness and yield to the power that seems to know—until it implodes.
Most all of what goes on in powerful organizations is never known and only becomes more known as it becomes unbearably dominant or implodes. Then it suffers the market of attention (but that’s only ephemeral—part of doing business). Power regains its privacy after crisis periods are pacified and the tip of power’s iceberg is no longer remembered as the tip of anything hidden. What’s below the radar of market-constituted news returns to being left to its discretionary estate that is supposed to be nobody’s business but its own.
June 11, 2017
The image was made in association with the health care industry which—from the inside (which I know well)—is a corporate business largely resistant to ObamaCare, such that fiercely competing conglomerates pressure healthy living services (preventive, educational, and team-based chronic care) out of the market for the sake of maintaining high “margin” on medicalization of “health.”
