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Global Chorus

Global Chorus is an interesting hybrid of book and daily reader, on the environmental theme. The book contains the responses from 365 eminent concerned people across the globe to this question:

Do you think that humanity can find a way past the current global environmental and social crises? Will we be able to create the conditions necessary for our own survival as well as that of other species on the planet? What would these conditions look like? In summary, then, and in the plainest of terms, do we have hope, and can we do it?

global-chorus-coverThe contributors come from all walks of life, not just the usual suspects; environmental, religious, social, political, business leaders and activists, professors and researchers, but also farmers, chefs, carpenters, factory workers, architects, artists, athletes, and musicians.

Among some of the more widely-known choir members are Gary Snyder, Rob Hopkins, David Suzuki, Satish Kumar, Paul Hawken, Jane Goodall, Stephen Hawking, Edward O. Wilson,  Helena Noberg-Hodge, Jamie Oliver, Maya Angelou, Les Stroud, Bruce Cockburn, Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu, Mikhail Gorbachev, Justin Trudeau, Elizabeth May, Temple Grandin, Farley Mowat, John Ralston Saul, and the Dalai Lama.

As a Canadian publication, to raise funds for The Jane Goodall Institute, The David Suzuki Foundation and The Canadian Red Cross, perhaps, it seems people from Australia or NZ are under represented, with the noticable exception of the pair who conceived permaculture some four decades earlier, David Holmgren and Bill Mollison.

It is set out as a daily reader, filled with words of wisdom and food for daily thought. We have no idea though how the specific date is assigned to the contributor, Rob Hopkins (Feb 13) and Mollison (Feb 17), though David Holmgren (Sept 23) likes to note at the equinox how people all around the world are joined by the experience of equal daylight and night.

Compiled for your reading as a set of 365 pieces, Global Chorus presents to you a different person’s point of view for each day of your year.

More about Global Chorus.

Here is Holmgren’s contribution (Sep 23).

Organised international responses (between nation states) to the current global environmental and social crises are unlikely to be effective or in time, and are more likely to worsen the crises because they will all be designed to maintain growth of the corporation dominated global economy and protect the power of nation states.

Despite the pain and suffering from the ongoing, and likely permanent, contraction of many economies, the explosion of informal household and community economies have the potential to ameliorate the worst impacts of the crises by rebuilding lost local resilience.

I believe the diversity of integrated design strategies and techniques associated with concepts such as permaculture will be most effective at building household and community economies as the global economy unravels. The diversity of these strategies and techniques promises that at least some will provide pathways for longer term survival of humanity while the adverse impacts of some strategies will tend to be more local and limited allowing natural systems (especially at the global scale) to stabilise.

Because the future will be more local than global, the critical path is the ongoing development and refinement of effective local designs, while the internet and other aspects of the failing global systems still have huge potential to allow the viral spread of the most effective and widely applicable designs.

Systems ecology and indigenous wisdom both suggest that in a world of limited resources, the ethics of “care of the earth”, “care of people” and “fair share” will prove more advantageous to local survival than those based on greed and fear, that have been so powerful during a century of unprecedented abundance. To put it crudely, hungry dogs hunt cooperatively and share the results, but given an abundance of food, they fight each other for the spoils.

I have great hope that the diverse local cultures that emerge from the ruins of industrial modernity will be based on these ethics and informed by design principles found in nature. The uncertainty is how much more pain and despoiling are yet to unfold before fear and greed prove maladapted to a world of limits.

Comments

1 thought on “Global Chorus”

  1. Okay, I’ll dip into this despite the inevitable resounding silence that I’ll be met with.
    I am constantly sobered these days by the rise of nations like China whose strong arm government will be more able to cope with the rigours of a changing climate. Likewise, Scandinavian countries are showing an ability to cope with the challenges.
    Assuming the ‘ruin’ of industrial society ignores the fact that different countries will have vastly different ways of dealing with the challenges, but there is very little likelihood that the world will descend into some sort of crazy free-for-all that you constantly allude to.
    It’s equally improbable that 9 billion people are going to turn back to food-raising as a reason for existence.

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