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If Not Now, When? Exploring Sustainable Initiatives that Need an Extra Push

Burgess COMMENTARY

Peter Burgess

If Not Now, When? Exploring Sustainable Initiatives that Need an Extra Push

What if this beautiful planet, and all its living creatures and operational systems and institutions, were all in collaboration with each other so that everything could, would and did thrive, together?

What If…

What if all the world’s religions honored people and planet, and all, as one big ol’ interconnected ecosystem, of which all are vital parts of the whole? With Green Faith, Sustainable Traditions, Vedic Ecology Hindu temples, Islamic approaches to Sustainability and Deep Ecology, this ‘what if’, is possible.

What if the capitalist growth model was not shackled by a 4+% hockey stick growth trajectory? With Post Growth and Regenerative Capitalism, this ‘what if’ is possible.

What if we stopped debating global warming and started addressing solutions to the unequivocal new norms like extreme weather? With ventures like Close to Home, a post-disaster housing marketplace, or Hydrobee, a portable turbine to harness power to charge your cellphone, these new responses to problems are possible.

What if developing consciousness, instead of a stock portfolio, were the norm? With practices like Vipassana Meditation and startups like SelfSpark, the ‘what if’ of personal transformation is possible andcleaning-up-ocean-beach happening—for the first step towards changing the world is to change one self.

…We Looked at Waste Differently

What if people shared with each other today, the way humans have for the majority of our existence? With initiatives like the Buy Nothing Project, directories like The Mesh and startups such as Village Green, a new way for entrepreneurs and any and all people to help one another through sharing is possible.

What if we didn’t treat the ocean like a landfill, and the Great Pacific Garbage Patch were cleaned up? With solutions like the Boyan Slat Cleanup Array, this what-if is possible.

…Thrivability and Availability Were Important

What if enterprise were a vehicle for thrivability and never an environmental and social detriment? And what if more than 3% of all startups got funded and entrepreneurship were fully inclusive and truly open to all? With Pipeline Fellowship, The Responsible Entrepreneur Institute and ‘conscious company’ startup incubators like Fledge, all this is possible.

And what if we took pause, turned off our smart phones, our tablets, our televisions and our Monday-Wednesday-Friday-between-noon-and-three availability and listened deeply to our own individual heartbeats? Is there a greater truth than the truthfulness we accept to be the inevitable reality of ‘now’? Can we hear a call to something bigger and brighter and more genuine than the next new, shiny object to hit the shelves?

What if the next limited-availability-clockbest thing wasn’t a thing at all, but an end to the big business, big capitalism and the big old Gordian knot that is the way things are, for a greater truth or system that actually serves all living creatures?

There Is a Human Being with the Power to Change It All

Pull any thread in the current fabric of humanity and you find a maze of twisted logic that serves the few at the expense of the many, which quilts no one from the current imbalance that is planet Earth and its people.

Take Genetically Modified food, Clarence Thomas and Michael Taylor, the US FDA and the Supreme Court of the United States, Monsanto and global food dominance. Monsanto, the self-titled ‘sustainable agriculture company’, is a publicly traded American multinational chemical, agricultural biotechnology corporation. Monsanto grew into the corporate giant it is today by copyrighting seeds that are the heart of the world’s food supply. They then force farmers – big and small – to purchase and use only these seeds, and require the use of their own pesticide called RoundUp to protect the growth of these seeds. Then they entered the Genetically Modified food industry sector, of which they dominate and control over 90% of the world’s GM food supply.

They didn’t exactly get there by accident, or by merit, or by the magic bus of free market capitalism.

Clarence Thomas and Michael Taylor were key instruments in this corporate coup. Thomas was a high level attorney for the Monsanto Corporation, before he was nominated to be a US Supreme Court Justice, where he ruled in favor of every case brought against Monsanto, including the Monsanto Protection Act, which shields the corporation fromGMO-corn-researchers any liability from its genetically engineered food. Taylor, also an attorney at Monsanto, left the corporation to become deputy commissioner of the FDA, the organization that made nearly every crucial decision of approval for the inception of GM crops. Once the governmental policies were enacted, Taylor returned to Monsanto to become the company’s vice president of public policy.

Behind every big corporation, big industry, big political decision and big mess that the state of the world is in, lies a human being with the power to change it all.

So what if we voted with our dollars and fostered a new vision and way forward that served us all—what if?

What if this vision were the reality? What if this vision were not a future possibility, but our current reality. And what if, just possibly, we embraced this transition to a more sustainable world today? What if, instead of ‘what if’, we become a united chorus asking: “If not now, when?”