Rethinking Our World: an invitation to rescue our future

RETHINKING OUR WORLD

Dr Maja Göpel is a political economist and an important voice for a sustainable transformation of society, working at the intersection of the economy, politics, and society. From 2017 to 2020, she was secretary-general of the German Advisory Council on Global Change, and in 2019 was appointed honorary professor at the Leuphana University of Lüneburg. She is a member of the Club of Rome, the World Future Council, the Balaton Group, the German government’s Bioeconomy Council, and a co-founder of the Scientists for Future network.

Scribe Publications

18–20 Edward St, Brunswick, Victoria 3056, Australia

2 John St, Clerkenwell, London, WC1N 2ES, United Kingdom

3754 Pleasant Ave, Suite 100, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55409, USA

First published in Germany by Ullstein Buchverlag as Unsere Welt neu denken in 2020

Published by Scribe 2023

Copyright © Maja Göpel 2020

Translation copyright © David Shaw 2023

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in, or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publishers of this book.

The moral rights of the author and translator have been asserted.

978 1 957363 36 3 (US edition)

978 1 925322 61 3 (Australian edition)

978 1 911617 42 6 (UK edition)

978 1 761385 11 7 (ebook)

Catalogue records for this book are available from the National Library of Australia and the British Library.

scribepublications.com

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For Juna and Josephina — my two amazing daughters

Contents

1 An Invitation

2 A New Reality

3 Nature and Life

4 Humans and Behaviour

5 Growth and Development

6 Technology and Progress

7 Consumption

8 The Market, the State, and the Common Good

9 Fairness

10 Thought and Action

Suggestions for further reading and action

Acknowledgements

Notes

1

An Invitation

‘In the middle of the twentieth century, we saw our planet from space for the first time. Historians may eventually find that this vision had a greater impact on thought than did the Copernican revolution of the sixteenth century, which upset the human self-image by revealing that the Earth is not the centre of the universe.’

From the United Nations’ Brundtland Report ¹

London, October 2019. During the morning rush hour, two men clambered onto the roof of a tube train, preventing it from leaving the station. The commuters wanting to board the train to continue their journey to work were confronted with closed carriage doors. The interruption soon paralysed the entire tube line, and the station platform grew ever more crowded and noisy. As it slowly dawned on the increasingly angry crowd that they were now bound to be late for work, the men on the roof of the train unfurled a banner bearing the slogan Business as usual = death.

For these commuters, ‘business as usual’ meant going to work in an office, perhaps, or a factory. Sitting down at a computer, or in a meeting, or at a machine, to manufacture something or to order the manufacture of something. To increase sales and profits, to contribute to growth, to secure their own job and their own economic future. To pay their rent, service their debts and buy themselves and their children something nice. In short: to continue their lives just as they, and all of us, have become accustomed to.

What can be so wrong, or even deadly, about that?

The two men protesting on the roof of a tube train that autumn day in London belonged to a group of activists calling themselves Extinction Rebellion.* The ‘extinction’ they were ‘rebelling’ against is not just the demise that we have come to accept of a rapidly increasing number of animal species. The men were not just concerned with whales, bees, or polar bears. Without a trace of irony, they meant the extinction of our own species, the human race. They meant us.

[* Here my aim is simply to give an example of non-violent civil disobedience as a form of protest. I expressly dissociate myself from individual statements made by the leaders of this movement in England.]

Compared to Greta Thunberg — the girl whose school strike triggered one of the most widespread protest movements in human history — the members of Extinction Rebellion are the civilly disobedient ones among climate protectors and environmentalists. Like others, they demand that politicians and policy-makers finally take sustainable action to stop and reverse global warming, for which they also offer specific proposals. But rather than just joining marches, they deliberately set out to disturb public life, often wearing colourful costumes, and always with the basic rule of remaining friendly at all times. On that autumn day in London, hundreds of activists blocked streets, chained themselves to bridges, and glued themselves to an airport floor. Using as little violence as possible to make as great a public impact as they could, their aim was to disrupt in a tangible way what they see as the true cause of climate change and the rampant destruction of life on Earth: our normal, everyday life.

For the people who were prevented from boarding their train that morning, the situation was so intolerable that they began pelting the two activists with sandwiches and drinks. Eventually, when that failed to remove them, one of the commuters climbed up and dragged the men off the roof of the train and onto the platform, where the activists were beaten by the angry mob until the police were able to intervene and arrest them.

That confrontation was not about a nourishing piece of bread, a drink of clean water or a protective roof over somebody’s head, or even the last litre of petrol. All that was at stake was a couple of minutes’ delay on people’s way to work. One side wanted to save the world; the other wanted to get to the office. One side wanted to break with old habits; the other wanted to cling onto them. Although we must recognise that both sides were basically concerned for their future and that of their children, their concerns appeared to be mutually exclusive. It appears one side has to lose for the other to win. It can only be either ‘us’ or ‘them’.

Is that what the future looks like, in times of climate change?

Is this how our lives, and our future struggles, will be?

In the world we now live in, systems that have for decades supplied us reliably every day with ever more energy, food, medicines, and security are coming under pressure everywhere and almost at the same time. They shaped an epoch in which, generally speaking, increasing amounts of everything were constantly available; prosperity, even for the poor; progress in every branch of science and technology; and peace, even between countries with fundamentally differing political systems. When there is a constantly increasing supply of everything, questions of distribution become less important. The fact that people are astonished at the idea that this epoch might come to an end, that they resist even the thought of this happening, and that they are at a loss to imagine what might come next, shows how accustomed we have become to this situation, how normal we consider it to be. What was thought of as a privilege by our parents’ generation has become routine for most people today.

At the same time, we know that ‘business as usual’ is not going to work.

It’s not just about climate change, plastic in our oceans, burning rainforests, or factory farming. It’s also about exploding housing costs in our cities, out-of-control financial markets, the ever-growing gap between rich and poor, the increasing incidence of burnout syndrome, and the incalculable and multilayered consequences of gene technology, and digitisation. For some time now, our perception of the world has been coloured by a feeling that times are changing. Our present seems fragile, while our future appears to be heading unstoppably for those scenes we associate with apocalyptic sci-fi films. The utopias so touted by the Modern Age have become dystopias. Our confidence in the future has turned into worry and fear. The solutions that worked so well on a small scale, and that promised such comfort, turn out to be threats when scaled up to the global level. We have a sense that we are about to face immense upheavals.

It has become increasingly difficult to explain our immediate future in terms of our recent past; everything that could be relied upon, all the tried-and-tested answers, fall apart. Every answer to one problem seems to aggravate another. And so disagreements over which problems should be addressed first are bound to increase. But what if we found ways to tackle multiple problems at once? Ways that might involve questioning old certainties, but that allow us proactively to shape a future we want to live in, rather than simply reacting to each negative situation as it arises?

So my invitation to you is to come along with me to explore those ways. The future is not something that just comes out of the blue. It’s not something that just happens. In many ways, the future is the result of the decisions we make in the present.

That’s the reason I’d like to invite you to take a closer look at the world that is my, your, and everybody’s home, to rediscover what is possible in our world. People have done this many times through human history, typically in times of crisis. Many technological breakthroughs were born out of the need to find alternative solutions. This is happening today in the case of renewable-energy sources. Many fundamental societal changes were born out of a conviction that things could be run differently. And, lo and behold: women can vote, and even head national governments.

The scale of the upheavals we currently see means they do not just affect certain sections of societies, but societies in their entirety. Academics describe them as major transformations in economic, political, social, and cultural processes, which also means they alter the way we see the world. The Neolithic Revolution, or the much later Industrial Revolution, are often cited as examples of such upheavals in the past. The former refers to the adoption of a sedentary lifestyle by small groups of nomadic people, later leading to the development of a feudal, agrarian society. In the latter, the use of fossil fuels in particular opened the way for a complete reorganisation of economic activity and of society itself, leading to the growth of a bourgeois middle class and the rise of the nation-state.

Our modern world differs fundamentally from that of 250 years ago, when the Industrial Revolution began. And yet we still usually try to find solutions with the worldview of that time. We have forgotten how to assess whether our ways of thinking are still fit for purpose in our times. But learning to question those thought patterns will reveal the tools that will enable us to escape this crisis and shape the future in the twenty-first century.

This is book is not a ‘climate book’. It is not about how many degrees the average temperature of the global climate will rise by in the coming years, and the consequences that will have for life on our planet. It doesn’t tell of melting ice sheets, constantly rising sea levels, or regions that can no longer support human habitation because they are now under water, have been turned into deserts, or are regularly visited by devastating storms. This book doesn’t describe the largest mass extinction since the demise of the dinosaurs, or the acidification of the oceans, or drought, famine, epidemics, forced mass migration, or any of the other countless scenarios that scientists all over the world have been warning us about for decades and that are now becoming real far more quickly than even the researchers who document them thought possible.

I am not a climate scientist. I am a social scientist, and my main academic interest is political economy. I study the ways people organise their economic and social activities, their relationship with nature, and their interactions with other human beings. I examine their use of natural resources, energy, materials, and labour. I look at the rules people adopt when organising work, trade, and financial exchanges. I scrutinise the technologies people develop and how they put them to use.

But, most of all, I seek to understand why the specific solutions that arise do so, and why some ideas become established in society while others do not. What ideas, values, and interests lie behind those ideas? Where do these ideas come from? How do they develop into the powerful theories that dominate not only our modern economies, but also our thoughts, actions, and lives in general — and sometimes even our feelings? And why are the ideas that have been perpetuated in these theories for the past 250 years no longer necessarily helpful as we strive to turn the current ecological and social crises into opportunities for the future?

It may feel as if our economic system developed naturally, just as plants and animals once evolved without our interference. But human-made systems work in a different way. We assess