Earth Hour

Tonight was Earth Hour. For a symbolic moment we turned off lights and hopefully not spent as much energy by lighting candles. Earth hour is meant to connect us a bit more to the Earth we live on. But how and where are we today able to be connected with Earth and nature? Most of us live in cities, where by turning off the light we can find darkness but not the true light of the night.

I had the privilege this evening to be standing by the sea, at a location where I could easily count the number of artificial lights but was overwhelmed by the number and brightness of the stars in sky above me. Standing there made me think about our past as a species, when we were observers of a world bigger than ourselves. Today, we are living in and creating the Anthropocene, where we are dominating the Earth, changing its biology, chemistry and geology while harvesting the bulk of all resources for our own species.  And we are supposed to be Homo sapiens, the wise man?

Next week the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will be presenting their latest report on the consequences of the climate change we are inducing on our planet. It will be bad news, to say the least. Floods and famine, droughts and disease are what lie before us if we stay on the path we are on. And an avalanche of recent scientific reports, describing everything from the destabilisation of Greenland’s glaciers to reduced food production while the demand increases, has corroborated this bleak outlook.

But it is not only the science that indicates that we are living our lives in a fundamentally wrong way. Some time ago I was passing by the central station in Stockholm and I needed a coffee.  So I asked for a single espresso at one of the fast food restaurants in the station. To my astonishment, the barista brewed a double espresso and then just spilled half of the coffee away.  Upon my asking, she just said that this was the standard procedure….

This carelessness for resources resonates so much trough our society. From computers and cell phones to food and clothing, we use abundance and novelty as signs of reward and success. Pay day shopping is a cultural phenomena. The message “shop ‘til we drop”, as a friend of mine wrote on her Facebook, is met with a multitude of “likes”.

A model study presented last week found that the main factors that tend to cause societal collapse were overuse of resources (check!) and vast differences between the elite and the greater population (check!). Forget that; let’s book a trip to Thailand!

It is easy to be overwhelmed and passivized by all the facts and signs. Personally, I state that I am a dystopic optimist. My dystopian views you have just read, so what do we DO?

To me, I believe that we have to find connections. Yes, we need science and facts, technology and solutions, but that will not be enough. To change our behaviour we need more. We need connections to friends and family, to dear and loved ones but maybe most of all to all the people we don’t yet know and to the planet itself. What we do and how we act have consequences. If we burn oil on our shopping trip to London, the collateral damage will be caused in Bangladesh and at the same time we rob our children and grandchildren of their opportunities. It is a question of morality, not some kind of from above induced religiously based morality but we do need to find our own compass from within. And to do that, we need to spend less time on defining our differences and more time on valuing or likeness, as individuals and as societies.

Coming back to coffee, I had the good fortune the other day to listen to a lecture by Günter Pauli, author of the book “Blue Economy”. He gave a brilliant and inspiring example of how we can work to create opportunities based on the triple pillars of People, Planet and Prosperity.

When you drink coffee, you extract less than one per cent of the matter. Usually, the remains are dumped in a landfill, burned our in the best case composted. But coffee remains are excellent as a substrate for growing mushrooms, high quality mushrooms that can be sold to first class restaurants at a premium price. The spill from the mushrooms can be used as animal feed. Coffee remnants can be used in shoe linings, to get rid of bad smell and the kind mushrooms you don’t want to grow on your feet. Etc etc. Instead of a waste problem you suddenly had a multitude of possibilities.  

So I am dystopian in my views AND still hopeful and optimistic. There are so many more opportunities just waiting to be found and enjoyed. We can find them if we step of the beaten track for a moment. But only if we do it together.

Now back to stargazing!