Dreams of a Livable Future
(Page 3 of 5)
May / June 2003
By Paul Hawken, Utne magazine
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A Nigerian tribal chief once said, “If you don’t share your wealth with us, we will share our poverty with you.” It is less expensive to share our wealth than to continue this extravagantly self-centered system we call corporate capitalism. This is not the most economical system. The idea that sustainability costs more is upside down and backwards. It costs less to maintain the earth in real time.
A world where 20 percent of its people get less than 1 percent of its resources, where nearly a billion go to bed hungry, a world torn by strife, riddled by greed, controlled by small, petty men bankrolled by large transnational corporations is not cheap.
We know how to transform this world to reduce our impact on nature by severalfold, how to provide meaningful, dignified living-wage jobs for all who seek them, and how to feed, clothe, and house every person on earth. What we don’t know is how to remove those in power, those whose ignorance of biology is matched only by their indifference to human suffering. This is a political issue. It is not an ecological problem. The way to save this earth is to focus on its people, and particularly those people who pay the highest price: women, children, communities of color, the localized poor. The sustainability movement—without forsaking its understanding of living systems, resources, conservation, and biology—must move from a resource flow model of saving the earth to a model based on human rights, the rights to food, the rights to livelihood, the rights to culture, community, and self-sufficiency. The environmental movement must become a civil rights movement, a human rights movement. Without that, it will simply be a failed white man’s movement from the North.
Sustainability has to be about improving the quality of life of all people on earth and honoring all forms of life.
The world is waiting for answers, and right now the main providers are fundamentalisms, whether they be political, religious, or economic. But we have to rebel against that which oppresses our imagination and our ability to dream to realize that not only is another world possible, but that we have the means at hand here and now to create it. Is it too late? Yes, it’s late, but people never change when they are comfortable. The world is anxious. Author Margaret Drabble wrote, “When nothing is sure, everything is possible.” We have nothing to fear. The worst is happening right now. Helen Keller once said, “This is a time for a loud voice, open speech, and fearless thinking. I rejoice that I live in such a splendidly disturbing time.”
I was recently asked by a journalist, “Aren’t you just dreaming?” I replied, “Absolutely I’m dreaming; somebody’s got to dream in America.” The dreams of a livable future aren’t coming from George Bush and Dick Cheney, and it is our right to dream. It is something we owe our children’s children. A dream is a gift of the future, and the future is begging.
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