The past is why we are in kairos-climate-time in our time. The past is why we are working hard in the present to overcome climate change and to avoid dangerous tipping points in the future.
The climate story stretches back in geological time hundreds of millions of years before dinosaurs roamed the Earth and experienced their own extinction event. Pressure and heat and time transformed dead organic matter into coal and oil and natural gas — coal coming from plants and oil and natural gas from plankton of long ago.
The digging up and burning of this transformed dead organic matter in our more recent past, starting in the Industrial Revolution, is why we are looking for hope in the present and why our future is in peril.
Those who created what came to be known as the Industrial Revolution didn’t know anything about climate change. Whether they just wanted to make a buck or make a difference or both, climate destruction was not a thing.
As the Industrial Revolution came into its own societies were run on fossil fuels, giving people power and wealth and opportunities the likes of which the world had never seen. As can be seen from the graph above, wealth shot up like a rocket. In comparison to times past, in industrialized countries “ordinary people became rich.”1
Ordinary people became rich, escaping the Malthusian Trap.
For the first time in human history beneficiaries of industrialization escaped the so-called Malthusian Trap. Before this, every meager advancement by society led to an increase in population. There would be a slight rise above subsistence, and as times were good people felt secure enough to have more children. And then progress would be snuffed out by increasing human numbers, by more mouths to feed, plunging them right back where they were, one bad harvest away from hunger or worse.
With the Industrial Revolution, made possible by the immense power of fossil fuels, the rate of technological change accelerated and allowed human progress and economic growth to burst through this Malthusian Trap. This acceleration, or ARTC as I have called it, became so identified with its polluting power source that many of industrialization’s defenders couldn’t tell the difference. For these boosters progress and pollution became synonymous. Pollution was seen as a sign of progress. In short, pollution equaled progress. For these folks, attacking pollution meant killing the goose that lays the golden eggs.
The Industrial Revolution did indeed create human progress for its beneficiaries; however, its power source, fossil fuels, created harmful and deadly pollution and the climate crisis we now face. Climate pollution is now the opposite of progress, and has been for some time.
Today we recognize the problem and the systemic nature of its causes, but that is not the focus of our story together.
Rather, our story is about how through freedom we can choose to overcome climate change by creating a just and prosperous sustainability that enhances wellbeing for everyone and everything, brought about by the 4 Catalytic Sources of Transformation, the Catalytic-4, working together. Our story is about living in and living out our values and taking building blocks from the past to help us achieve victories on all of our Olympian Fields of Action:
stories of heroes,
social change approaches that provide wisdom,
the creation of useful knowledge that makes our future come faster,
technologies that can help us today and be improved upon in the future,
government policies and business practices that help us achieve our vision, purpose, and Major Goal.
The past, where pollution equaled progress, created a problem that was not forseen. The past also created the seeds we must plant and nurture in the present to grow our future. We can let the past be our prison, let it be stumbling blocks instead of building blocks. Or we can choose to set ourselves free to build our brighter future on all of our Olympian Fields of Action.
Our Better Future Covenant proclaims that human progress is our birthright, it is what we and our children and their descendants are due. Today we know that we don’t need fossil fuels to power human progress; they are, in fact, holding us back and will wreck our future. We must choose to change. Join us!
If you are new here check out our Intro Series, and also check out other posts in this Our Story Together Series. If you like this post, please “like,” comment, and share. And thanks for all you are doing.
David Warsh, Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations (2006), p. 334