State of the world
Bruce Sterling and company are doing their yearly "state of the world" ruminations over on The Well. They're covering an lot of ground (financial crisis first and all that), but this is the quote that got me...
When you can't imagine how things are going to change, that doesn't mean that nothing will change. It means that things will change in ways that are unimaginable.
One thing I get a lot is that Greenpeace should come up with answers instead of yelling about problems all the time. The truth is we're not smart enough to know all the answers. We just know they're out there. (Though we've got some ideas about solving climate change and marine reserves among other things.)
Anyway, here's the full quote from Bruce...
Last, and slowest, and worst, there's the climate. The planet's entire atmosphere is polluted. Practically everything we do in our civilization is directly predicated on setting fire to dead stuff. Climate change is a major evil. It's vast in scope and it's everywhere. The climate crisis would be a major issue even for a technically with-it bright-green secular Utopia, where every single citizen was an MIT grad. Of course our world looks nothing like that. Nor will it.The people fighting climate change -- they look like Voltaire combatting Kings and Popes. They're still eighty percent witty comments. They have a foul, hot wind at their backs, but they don't yet have the battalions.
Communism, capitalism, socialism, whatever: we've never yet had any economic system that recognizes that we have to live on a living planet. Plankton and jungles make the air we breathe, but they have no place at our counting-house. National regulations do nothing much for that situation. New global regulations seem about as plausible as a new global religion.
None of this a counsel of despair. Seriously. We dare not despair because in any real crisis, the pessimists die fast. This is a frank recognition of the stakes. It's aimed at the adults in the room.
Let me put it this way. People don't have to solve every problem in the world in order to be happy. People will always have problems. People ARE problems. People become happy when they have something coherent to be enthusiastic about. People need to LOOK AND FEEL they're solving some of mankind's many problems. People can't stumble around in public like blacked-out alcoholics, then have some jerk like Phil Gramm tell them to buck up.
When you can't imagine how things are going to change, that doesn't mean that nothing will change. It means that things will change in ways that are unimaginable.
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