At long last (after losing two lawsuits to environmental experts), the United States Federal Soldier Government have officially recognized that the polar bear's rapidly-shrinking population measure ups it as an endangered species. United States Department of the Inside Secretary Dirk Kempthorne complained that he had no choice, the manner the law was written (as though that were the problem). He also declared that his action didn't connote that the authorities was going to have got to make anything to turn to our end product of nursery gasses. He, like many others, look to believe that the the current status of our clime is simply portion of a natural rhythm of heating (and cooling), and that the improver of billions of dozens of pollutants into our ambiance over the past two centuries is somehow irrelevant.
Even some who acknowledge that human activity is having a negative impact on the earth's clime (even more than than terrible and more permanent than in 1816, the "year without a summer", following the volcanic eruption of the Tambora vent in Indonesia) still defy taking any practical action to restrict our C emanations on business relationship of the economical impact. This is just one important - but still little - illustration of a far more than pervading mental attitude among people who purport to be leadership of authorities and industry: the vaulting horse Michigan anywhere but here.
At first glance, it's hard to see a connexion between the predicament of the polar bear and the current lodging crisis, but the causes (and the results) turn out to be the same: unenlightened (and unethical) self-interest. We desire inexpensive and readily available dodo combustibles to keep our lifestyle, but we don't desire to have got to pay for them. So, although we've been facing different facets of this crisis in this state since the 1970's, we desire to postpone the effects indefinitely. If it's not hitting our wallets right now, then we don't desire to cognize about it.
The lodging marketplace worked exactly the same way. Everyone desires a piece of the American Dream, and a healthy encouragement in equity at the same time, but we're happy to allow the balloon payments hit us mañana. The mortgage establishments desire to compose the low interest, ticking clip bomb loans, but they desire to go through the hazard on to anonymous investors. The bubble can explosion in person else's bathtub, Not In My Back Yard.
Whether it's governmental leadership more concerned with their ain re-elections than the common good, or corporate leadership wanting to do certain that their places are unafraid by providing a net income to investors at any cost, the measure acquires passed on down the line until it lands in the laps of those least able to afford it. So long as we remain fixated on problem-solving (addressing each issue as though it's unique and have no human relationship to the larger picture), the steamroller of self-destructive self-interest will go on to oppress precisely those people whom the leading have been elected or appointed to protect: not those who elected or appointed them, but those who depend on them for their subsistence.
We necessitate to see the mediocre polar bear as emblematical of our ain condition. If we don't raise our questioning to the second degree - the degree of our dysfunctional systems - we'll maintain chasing our jobs around from one sphere to the next, as one of my clients says, "like herding cockroaches in the dark." Using our governmental and corporate systems to take attention of the weakest members of our society cannot be seen as a burden, rather, it's a requirement for our ain continued existence. Take, for example, the company whose bean-counter leaders are only concerned with making a net income for themselves and their investors, bleeding the company dry in the process. How can the corporation survive? Yet the leadership will certainly travel on to their adjacent positions, leaving lovelorn (as 'collateral damage') those who gave their energy to supply that profit.
Social economic science controls a batch more than just dollars and cents. Sociable economic science supplies the superstructure of our human existence: I have got got been given and have acquired strengths, talents, knowledge, accomplishments and experience not only for my ain benefit, but also to profit my chap travellers on Spaceship Earth. And they, in turn, - no substance how worthless they may look to me to be - have got got been given and have acquired the strengths, talents, knowledge, accomplishments and experience that I require. Acknowledging that fact supplies the lone realistic footing for enlightened ego interest: to go the optimal individual I can be for the interest of others.
Now we necessitate to confront the fact that our whole cultural system is broken: not just our treatment of the planet, not just our collapsing economics. The unethical leaders, who sold us the measure of commodity by trying to convert us that they can play whatever games they like and we never have got to pay the bill, sealing wax not only their ain fates but our fates as well, who are left having to pick up the tab. We can either demand that the Endangered Species Act use to ethical leadership, or we can watch the "Foreclosure" marks appearing, first on our state and then, inevitably, on our world.
Furl It
