(Not the actual Rubicon)
In 49 BC, Julius Caeser crossed the Rubicon River which led to the war that marked a significant point in the history of Rome. Caesar had been a governor of a region North of Rome, and by crossing the Rubicon with a standing army, Caesar and his men were outside the law and would have been condemned to death if they did not win the following civil war. His crossing the Rubicon made armed conflict inevitable. With the benefit of hindsight, we of course know that Caesar eventually prevailed in the conflict and became emperor for life.
I’m embarrassed to say that I did not know what “crossing the Rubicon” meant until I was in my late 20s. After a friend of mine mentioned that she had “crossed the Rubicon” in a certain situation, I sheepishly asked, “what does that mean?” She appropriately looked at me as though I was some kind of uneducated idiot and filled me in. I guess I had never been adequately obsessed with the Roman Empire.
We have crossed the Rubicon …
The point of no return as far as climate change, overshoot and collapse are concerned is in our rearview mirror.
Scholars in the future will argue about when exactly that was, but there was no one day when that happened, just a cascading collection of poor decisions, deliberate misinformation and lack of leadership that led us here - to a place where some level of ecological, economic and societal disaster is already baked into our future. Pinpointing when that moment was is a waste of time, but it’s clear that it is back there somewhere, now fading further and further into our rearview mirror.
We have crossed 7 of 9 planetary boundaries. Our leadership, whether political, corporate or cultural sloughs off alarming climate and ecological collapse evidence as an inconvenient annoyance. It is reported, but rarely and with no sense of urgency. Just another story between celebrity gossip and political intrigue.
But everyone talks as though we haven’t.
For the most part, our world operates as though we have not crossed the Rubicon. A small group of people wishing to be informed and wishing to be prepared congregate in places like this. Our numbers are small, and we tell ourselves that the small growth in those numbers makes a difference or will someday.
But most of the world is oblivious. Climate change is a concern when people are surveyed, but no action is taken. Knowledge of planetary boundaries or collapse is rare. Stocks are at all-time highs. People want to be entertained, not informed.
The whole sustainability industrial complex of consultants, investors, Chief Sustainability Officers, media figures, and policymakers operate as though the Rubicon has not been crossed. They tell us it is out there in the future and that we better get our act together or we will cross it some day in the far future. But we had already crossed it long before they came along. They often lack the understanding of what and where the Rubicon is. Their positions only require them to sell the next green solution.
Preparing for the apocalypse might be the most prudent thing to do - but it is not profitable.
Accepting reality shouldn’t be a courageous act. It should just be using your senses and your common sense.
What to do?
We have passed the point of no return. We need to say that. It is impolite to say, and uncomfortable to hear. But it is the truth. The more time we waste on helping our fellow man continue to live in a fantasy world, to deny that truth, the more time we waste. The more people will suffer and die, because it is embarrassing to admit that we had the perfect climate that would allow us to thrive for eons to come, and we fucked it up.
We fucked it up. That’s in our rearview mirror. What is through the windshield is the most treacherous road anyone has ever driven. Grab the wheel tight and proceed with caution.
“there was no one day when that happened”
Actually, there is. It is August 29, 1972. In Phoenix, Arizona.
That’s when and where the National Commission on Uniform State Laws promulgated the Uniform Management of Institutional Funds Act. This Model Law recommended the codification of the conclusions of the Cary & Bright Report to Ford Foundation on The Law and the Lore of Endowment Funds, that the Legal List is too constraining and the Prudent Person is the right standard of prudence and loyalty for Pensions & Endowments.
The Prudent Person soon became, in fiduciary practice, the Prudent Investor, where “Investor” came to mean “participant in the securities trading markets “, as a special pleading for the self-interest of securities trading markets professionals. That resulted in the expulsion of common sense from fiduciary accountability and the creation of a new accountability, to the expert knowledge of experts at outperformance in maximizing the highest possible purely pecuniary profit from volatility and growth in market clearing prices for securities in the markets for maintaining volatility and growth in market clearing prices for those securities.
This is illegal, and if the securities trading market professionals had failed in their campaign to exercise hegemony of society’s shared savings aggregated into social trusts for socially provisioning the social safety nets of Workforce Pensions and Civil Society Endowments as private benefits that are also a public good, those professionals would have been subjected to new regulation written to lock them into their authentic purpose, of mediating the tensions between individuals with our need for liquidity in increments in our investments and enterprise with its need for longevity at scale in their financings.
But the securities professionals did prevail, and that has locked humanity into a trajectory of financing of future of Growth in extraction, while recklessly not reckoning with the consequences of that extraction.
The good news is, there is still time.
We can’t go back, but we can correct that wrong turning, by reasserting our common sense of what makes sense as the proper lawful standard for fiduciary prudence and loyalty.
And now what?