As the larger system we are part of finds itself failing it is easy to see why people start looking for local strategies for survival. But small local efforts, while short-term survival efforts are unlikely to scale to the level of the global CO2 blanket. For several years I have been clear that the normal group of organizations, corporations, and government agencies, are also too small to affect the kind of change we need. The First is the significant avoidance of fossil fuel burning. Any institution such as a government agency or corporation is too bound by law and contract to make proposals that make a difference because one aspect of such proposals would be a direct attack on the originating institution.
Second is depowering financialization which means crippling capitalist control and establishing new forms of work and reward distribution. Back a few months I was exploring the idea that cultures with their diffuse presence are bigger than nation-states with their rigid borders. The borders prevent nations from acting outside their boundaries and climate coping needs to operate more broadly than any nation-state, including the big three, China, India, and the US.
Reading Toynbee's Study of History suggests that cultures (civilizations) are the more powerful influences serious change the law or philosophy, and that spiritual orientations of leaders have a bigger influence than their ideas leading to the adoption of their views by the general population and success in the following history or where the people avoid alignment with the weak spiritual orientation of the leaders and as a result, the societies collapse.
We have slight spiritual leaders in our time. Probably the last candidate that almost made it is John Kennedy whose light has shrunk to that of a fizzily candle. People my age, remember that his photograph was on the wall in the halls of the pour in all parts of the world. We need that kind of alignment with a spiritual feeling for the world or, I am proposing, there is no possibility of humanity, gaining a friendly grasp of the Earth we live on. We need a seduction of the Earth by Humanity. It will take modesty and a full use of our engagement to make this couple a success. In summary, it will take institutions as large as all of humanity, a reinvigoration of the best of ideas and feelings spread throughout the religions of the world. Not just those that emerged with the big empires, but those of earlier people who lived on a few acres of land, fished and hunted, gathered and walked. sang songs and carved and painted, cared for each other, and the animals. The nation-state is above all an obstacle to such a return.