Smog filled clouds rolling in over a lish rainforest

The Quadra Project: Humanity’s Choice

Antonio Guterres, the Secretary-General of the United Nations, said in his introductory comments at the COP 27 meeting in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, in November 2022, “Humanity has a choice: either co-operate or perish.”

This is simply because we are one humanity, living on one planet. Whether we recognize it or not, the time for differences is over. All the imagined parts that we thought were separate, are interconnected. Whatever happens in one place has an effect everywhere.

This is now obvious with environmental matters. If Brazil continues destroying the Amazon forests, the whole world will suffer. A warming Arctic is already changing global weather patterns. Melting glaciers and ice caps will eventually raise ocean levels sufficiently to inundate all coastal cities, everywhere. If we don’t accelerate our conversion from fossil fuels to renewable green energy, we will cook ourselves off the planet—the rich will only survive a little longer than the poor. And if some mistake or miscalculation should unleash a barrage of nuclear missiles, the remnants of human civilization will be difficult to reassemble.

But this “co-operation” principle applies in economics, as well. We trade and share on a global scale. No country can isolate itself from other countries; no country “is an island unto itself”. So the trade and sharing must be done with consideration and fairness. In a globalized world, our self-interest cannot be separated from our collective-interest. This is why Brexit, as the United Kingdom is discovering, was a bad idea.

And this is why Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was an even worse idea. Not only is it a barbaric effort to take control of another sovereign country and a rejection of the international norms of civilized behaviour that were established at the end of World War II, but it is a violation of the essential principle of co-operation that is essential to maintain the functioning of our modern world. Wars generally are the most crude, brutal and destructive option for resolving anything. But this one is simply an unmitigated imperialistic quest. It is also a serious distraction from the focused attention that we must give to a planet in ecological crisis. Russia seems not to care. It is now a rogue state, and an embarrassment to humanity.

Russia gives us war when our real need is trust, understanding and co-operation. The challenges of feeding the world’s 8 billion people will require the whole effort of an integrated world. And managing an orderly transition from fossil fuels will be difficult enough without Russia using this energy as a weapon of war. Trying to calculate our way through an artificial energy crisis induced by Russia is creating reflex responses that could set back by decades our goal of a global economy of net-zero carbon dioxide.

As a globalizing world forces us closer and closer together, the circumstances require us to think more expansively. Our self-interest has to make concessions to our collective interest. Interconnections mean that we are not free to do exactly what we want because the effects of our actions ripple out beyond our individual initiatives. The idea of unrestrained individual freedoms is an outdated notion that is becoming less and less applicable in our new reality of compacted space and time. We are running out of space to make mistakes, and we are running out of time to make them.

On our little island in the wholeness of things, we too are running out of space and time. The world is crowding us. And we are crowding ourselves. Like everywhere, the grandiose solutions to our problems have an ironical way of becoming new problems. The most immediate escape from this conundrum doesn’t reside in large schemes, but in individual acts of thoughtful restraint. Voluntary simplicity is the term for thinking smaller, for living more efficiently, and for reducing our consumption, travel and waste. The cumulative effect of little acts of conservation and consideration can be enormous. It is the power of one, multiplied by many. The climate crisis is becoming too serious to give to the responsibility of someone else. We have reached the place in an unfolding crisis where we can no longer afford to absolve our individual selves of any responsibility for the predicament in which we find our collective selves.

The longer term solution to our problems is for each of us to make thoughtful and strategic decisions that concur with our collective well-being, to remember these decisions, and then to abide by them.

The myth of unlimited individual freedom is over. It no longer exists on a planet where we must “either co-operate or perish.” We have a choice of surviving together or failing collectively. If we haven’t noticed, we are social beings who were never free to do whatever we wanted. We had to conform to cultural norms, to respect proprieties, and to obey laws. Unnoticed by us, a shrinking planet has been steadily limiting even our imagined freedoms. The old notion of a frontier mentality does not apply when we no longer have geographical frontiers. But information is rapidly expanding our choices, and the ones we must now make have become a matter of life or death.

Ray Grigg for Sierra Quadra 

Top image credit: Morning clouds rolling in over a rainforest – Photo by Boudewijn Huysmans on Unsplash

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