The analysis - Summary

(This is basically an excerpt from the main document)

Man is an integral part of nature. Global heating and massive destruction of nature is an existential threat for life on earth, including humans. It is a joint challenge and a joint responsibility. What all of us do today has wide consequences for life and humans far away both in distance and time. We cannot grow or buy us out of the crisis that we have created.

Handling global heating and destruction of nature requires reducing our general material consumption and our use of areas substantially (both inside and outside own nation-state). Luckily, there is no direct connection between consumption and quality of life and welfare, especially not for rich industrial countries and other elites. Quality of life and reasonable welfare can still be kept.

Our relation to nature must be based on sound knowledge. We must make total knowledge effectively available for the common good. Measures for handling global heating basically mean specific regulations of physical natural resources together with technological solutions. Measures for preserving nature, however, often also require more specific and local competence and more nuanced regulation and accountability. Measures in both fields should be considered jointly. We need a healthy information ecosystem to be able to cooperate constructively. This information ecosystem cannot, as is the case now, build on systematic and massive exploitation and manipulation of the weaknesses of human nature from the interests of economy and power. Large private interests without any legitimacy must not be allowed to ruin community conversation globally. It is also unacceptable that authoritarian regimes exclude their populations from global community conversation.

The dominating mainstream economic mindset using finances, price mechanisms, markets, and financial instruments to solve the crisis of nature and climate is not working. This mindset in fact is a hindrance for real solutions. Green growth mainly transfers problems from rich countries to poor countries. The goals of rich nations obviously are to avoid disruption of the present systems, structures, relations, and way of living in rich countries, hardly to save nature and climate. We need an understanding of the economy starting with considering value for society. Nature and human needs must obtain priority based on their intrinsic value, not priority as a biproduct of production and consumption. The logics of the financial sector only focussing on pure financial goals, pulverization of accountability, and short-termism must be replaced by focus on results “on the ground”.

Human rights and democracy must be taken seriously. What that means must be revitalized and anchored. Technological development, included military technology, must be governed from a joint ethical perspective.

The world needs global governance with sufficient legitimacy and resources reflecting all of this, and finally the abilities to enforce and follow it up. The global society must cooperate regarding the decisive common global challenges.

Hopefully you now have got a better basis for rethinking.

You should ask yourself in your busy and important everyday life:

What on earth are we really up to? Must we rethink matters? – Think what we so far have considered “unthinkable”.