What a Way to Go-Walter comments

"What a Way to Go - Life at the End of Empire"

Here is the full comment from Walter:

Thank you and NSF very much for hosting the showing of this important analysis of the issues and challenges confronting us. It is critical that people - particularly decision makers - see it to help face the realities confronting us now, not in some distant future.

While the issues and urgency raised were not new, what was valuable was the analysis of why and how people in the US in particular avoided - or were able to deny - the consequences confronting them. However the lack of any analysis of what we could or need to do to take responsibility of the mess we have created was of concern. It is our mess; we are responsible for it and for clearing it up. Contrary to US history there is no new Mayflower or boat that will sail us over the horizon to find, colonize and exploit a new virgin resource base and allow us to ignore our obligation to restore what we have so fundamentally and rapidly degraded.

The North America that the Europeans invaded and appropriated 400 years ago was one of the richest, most bio-diverse and bio-productive regions of the planet. We have only one livable planet and can not afford to junk and discard this part of the planet's natural capital just because our greed has degraded it. We have a responsibility and imperative to restore it. There is no new continent left to plunder. Even if there were, our attitudes to the sustainable management and restoration of natural capital would need to change fundamentally to make such environmental refugees welcome and viable.

Fortunately, but far from being a magic bullet, we know a great deal about how and why we have degraded the soils, water, fisheries, bio-diversity and natural ecosystems that have sustained us and what we need to do to restore them so they can again sustain viable healthy communities. We have the capacities and eco-technologies to design and implement far more sustainable water, food, waste and energy systems able to overcome many of the challenges now facing us. The issue is do we recognise the need - and have appropriate committed societal structures - to take the essential action in time. Although there is much that we still need to learn, this does not negate our obligation for taking responsibility and enhancing our response ability to restore the capacity of these bio-systems to again sustain life including our own.

Consequently let the boat trip take us to the virgin opportunities of our own backyards, our communities and ourselves for us to restore as sustainable productive ecosystems and equitable, inclusive and tolerant societies. We have the knowledge, the resources and the responsibility to restore what we have degraded. And through that restoration secure a more balanced but qualitatively better future for communities in close accord with other species and natural eco-systems.

Without question climate change, the end of cheap oil, food insecurity, population pressures, pollution and epidemic diseases will impact on these eco-systems. However, the extent to which they will impact will depend inevitably on how buffered and resilient the sustainable eco-systems that we have restored are. We, like all species and communities, are subject to natural selection and evolution. However we have the advantage of being able to use our intelligence to learn, to design and to adapt to the pending realities, here and now, rather than escaping in some magical lifeboat or to a past unspoiled world. Our simple choice is will we take the first step. There may be many others keen to help and join on the way.

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Last updated 31 August 2007. For more information about the Nature and Society Forum, e-mail our office