The Speech We Need to Hear from Our Leaders

I encourage our leaders to steal this speech.

We are in the middle of the largest environmental crisis mankind has ever faced and will likely ever face. Climate change is already starting to ravage our world. Limiting global warming to only 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels is likely no longer achievable.  The goal of 2.0°C warming is more likely more realistic. That may not sound like much but, each additional tenth of a degree of warming has exponential negative impacts on our lives, on our economies, and on our ability to survive.  Other planetary boundaries such as the acidification of our oceans, nitrogen, and phosphorus pouring into our waterways, plastics polluting our world, and land-system changes, have been breached already, and threaten our lives and livelihoods in the long term.

We are consuming Earth's resources as though we had 1.6 earths to use, and in the Western world, that level of consumption is around four earths worth of resources we use every year. This is unsustainable. Earth Overshoot Day, the day in which we exhaust our budget for the resources we use each year is creeping slowly towards the beginning of the calendar. It will be July 25^th this year. It was August 2^nd, last year.

Our way of life is unsustainable. As a leader, I'm not supposed to say that because that usually will get me fired. Would you rather me lie to you as you've been lied to up until this point?

I won't do that.

The leaders of governments, companies, and investment firms around the world – they know what I'm saying is true. But they are afraid to say so because saying so will likely remove them from their positions of power.

So be it.

The way we are living our lives is unsustainable. That doesn't make you a bad person. It only means you have not been told the truth. The people who lead this world have not been square with you, because that would hurt their bank accounts, and might take away their power. We are destroying our world and making it unlivable for future generations so that we can have more things now - not what we need - but what we want. Earth can supply what we need to live, but not all of what we want.

I'm sorry to say that, but it is true.

Time to pick a different path.

This year is a big election year around the world. Every politician will promise you growth. That's how they get elected. They will tell you that they will deliver growth. The assumption is that growth and a good life are the same thing, that growth is the thing in your heart of hearts that you want. But that's not how the natural world works. Things don't grow forever. You don't grow forever, the trees outside your house don't grow forever. The only thing that grows forever is cancer. It grows until it kills its host, and then it dies too.

We live on a planet with finite resources, and we live as though we do not. Now that wouldn't be such a big deal if the time when we hit those resource caps was 500 or 1000 years from now. If that were the case we would have plenty of time to figure out how to adjust. But that time is today, that time is now, and if we're being completely honest with ourselves that time is actually many, many, yesterdays. We should have come to this realization before today, but by and large, we have not. We are now playing catch up to figure out a way to not destroy ourselves in the pursuit of forever growth.

We should just give up on the dream of forever growth. It is a dream that is destroying our world.

An economy that grows only 2% per year will still double every thirty-five years. We already don't have enough resources on this earth to support current growth. Doubling our demands on this planet in thirty-five years will be catastrophic, and then doubling it again in 35 years after that? We simply won’t get to that point with an intact civilization.

I will not promise you growth because that is irresponsible.

But I can promise you a better way. I can promise you a way that is sustainable. I can promise you a way that is better for your children 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, and 100 years from now. But that will take a change that is quite uncomfortable. Do you want to keep your comfort for today and doom your children, or do you want to make uncomfortable changes and save them? After this speech, you will hear many people saying what I just said is a lie, but it is not. Unfortunately, it is our reality.

You can have a capitalist system that depends on unlimited growth forever for a very short time or you can have a long and prosperous future. You cannot have both. They are mutually exclusive.

I'm not talking about some Marxist or socialist dream. Those don't work either. What I'm talking about is changing our relationship to nature, because that's where we live. If we destroy it, we destroy ourselves.

Limits to growth.

About 50 years ago a group of academics wrote a seminal piece on this topic when they wrote the report, Limits to Growth. The researchers forecasted several scenarios for the future, most of which predicted a point where natural resources would become so scarce that further economic growth would become impossible, and the quality of human life would drastically fall. The report predicted a collapse of global populations due to food and resource scarcities.

We are ahead of schedule.

Research done more recently, revisiting the results of the original Limits to Growth, has reaffirmed these findings. We are on the path of our self-destruction. I take no joy in saying that but in the position that I am in I have a responsibility to say it. I have the responsibility to tell everyone who can hear my voice, or read these words that we must change the way we live our lives. This doesn't mean going back to caves as some fearmongers would have you believe.  In 1970, Earth Overshoot Day was December 23^rd. So it isn’t that long ago in the history of humanity that we were living within our means.  This does not mean we need to go back to the technologies of 1970. It means we need to go back to using energy more judiciously or in some cases, not at all.

We need to redesign the way we live, travel, eat, and use energy. Yes, we should replace internal combustion engines with electric vehicles when necessary. But we should also look at reducing our reliance on personal cars in the first place. Car companies aren't going to like me saying that, but it's far better for a society to have people walk, bike, or take public transportation than it is for one person to drive one car. In many developed countries there are nearly as many cars as there are people. For each of those cars, we need to mine precious metals and use myriad other natural resources, each of which requires encroaching a little more on the natural world.

We also need to change the way we eat. Abundance of food is not the problem. Over 1/3 of adults in the world are obese. Yes, there is hunger in the world, and we need to do better at getting food where it is needed. But we produce enough food.

We need to change what we eat. Beef is the most egregious of the greenhouse gas-producing foods we eat. I enjoy a good steak and a good burger now and again. You don't have to be vegetarian to save the world. If as a planet we just consumed 10% - 15% less beef we would help tackle multiple environmental challenges. Raising cattle uses huge amounts of water. A 10 -15% dip in beef production would solve the water use problems in the Colorado River and other stressed water systems around the world. Cattle produce a lot of methane, and beef production and transport are carbon intensive. If you cut that by 10 – 15% you do a lot to tackle climate change. Most of the forest loss in the world is to accommodate more grazing land for beef. Cutting back the global demand for beef can save the Amazon and other forests that we depend on for carbon sequestration, fresh water, and clean air. Beef production takes up huge amounts of land. Freeing that land up for rewilding of forest and prairie land can help our lands heal, and support the wildlife and ecosystems that help us live. I slightly higher price for your steak or your burger is worth that.

At home that means incentives on diet. If we cut down on our beef consumption as a nation, and rewild some of those areas that were formerly used to raise cattle, while fairly compensating those that will be shutting down ranches, we tackle issues with water use, land use, pesticide runoff, and climate change all at once. We need to make eating beef more expensive. Not to punish anyone, but because it is best for our society. We need to encourage other nations to do the same.

The same goes for palm oil and other agricultural inputs. We need to put a global cap on the use of these inputs so that we allow for the restoration of the forests that we depend on for the air that we breathe and the clean water that we use. The forests of Borneo are a shadow of their former selves primarily because of palm oil plantations. The story is similar in many forests. We can reverse those developments.

Look at Costa Rica for an example. In the 1940s, Costa Rica was a tropical paradise. At the time about 75 percent of the country was considered rainforest. But by 1987, Costa Rica had lost half of its forest cover, which led to a system in which the government paid local communities to protect the forest through its Payments for Environmental Services Program. This allowed Costa Rica to become the first tropical country to reverse deforestation, perhaps serving as a model for tropical countries looking to rebuild their forest cover. 

I proposed that North America take responsibility for paying for the ecosystem services of South and Central America to reforest and bring lands back to their former states. We will do so at home as well. Our neighbors in the global South need our help and we should offer it. Europe can do the same and should do the same for Africa and the Middle East. Australia, Japan, China, Singapore, Hong Kong, and the developed nations of Asia can do the same for their Asian brothers and sisters.

Give rights to nature.

The indigenous people of this world have been managing these environmental issues for millennia and we will need to lean on them for their knowledge and ask for their help. We should do more to marry our modern world with these traditional ways of seeing the world. We should offer legal protection to our rivers, to our land, to our mountains, to our air, to our oceans. If a corporation can be a person, why can't a river or an ocean? The ocean provides more wealth and more services to humanity than any corporation ever has, and yet that corporation has innumerable more legal protections than the ocean does. If that company fails, oh well, that's unfortunate, but other companies will pick up the parts of that company and start over. A company can even declare bankruptcy and start over.

That doesn’t work with an ocean, or any of our other natural systems. We need to protect the natural world that protects us. So, I propose giving those legal protections to our natural world. There are efforts to do this in many jurisdictions around the world. We should do it here and do it more.  

Most of the plastics of the world that wash into our oceans come from Asian rivers they simply don't have the systems we have for recycling for trash management. For example. landfills in Europe are less full than they are in America because you must pay more to use a landfill in Europe. Governments need to put rules and regulations in place to ensure we are doing the right things for ourselves in the long run not what's politically or economically expedient today. We should eliminate plastics that can’t be recycled or for which there is a natural substitute. Those that can be recycled need to be recycled at a much higher rate.

We have the technology to capture plastics from most of the rivers in the world where plastics are discarded. First, we need to work with countries where the most plastic pollution originates and help them implement plastic reduction and management policies. Then we can capture plastics from rivers before they reach the ocean. We have the responsibility to help countries that do not have ways to manage and recycle those plastics to do so. We should phase out plastics where we don't need them. I understand that plastics are a large industry. But the needs of humanity take precedence over profits.

We should institute similar efforts to remove pesticides from our agriculture. There is strong evidence showing that these chemicals are making us impotent and causing cancer. We don’t need them at their current levels. We should manage a phase-out of the use of these chemicals, especially where natural solutions exist.  We can feed the world with a more limited use of these chemicals, or no uses of them at all.

These are all examples of things we can do to save ourselves. These all come down to stepping away from growth as the purpose of humanity. The purpose of your life is for you to decide, and it should be something that makes you happy and fulfills you. People find the most purpose in belonging to something larger than themselves. That thing is not shopping.

We need to step away from measuring gross domestic product as the way we measure whether we are succeeding, or failing. Success metrics such as education, lifespan, health, happiness, well-being, and quality of life are things to measure whether we are succeeding as a nation. A nation is its people, not its corporations. Measure how your people are doing.

So, I propose to take our country off this self-destructive track. I propose we move away from GDP as our measuring stick. I propose we institute things such as a four-day workweek, universal basic income, universal basic services, job guarantees, and other policies that are meant to serve people not profit. You can have your profit but not at the expense of the public, which is what we are currently doing.

Capitalism isn't evil. It is just the system that we have, and if we are honest with ourselves, we can see that it isn't working for us. It is working for a handful of folks at the top of the economy. Good for them, but bad for the rest of us. We will always have markets to value things, trade things, and buy and sell things, but we need to change the system that we have now because it is destroying us.

Will we find the will to save ourselves in time?

The only thing keeping us from addressing the environmental problems that threaten our future is will. Political will.

We have the understanding to fix these problems. We have the technology to fix these problems. We have the means to do this. We have plans to do this. But we lack the political will because doing this would be very disruptive for the wealthy and powerful on this planet. Business as usual will continue to be profitable for those who benefit the most from business as usual. But business as usual will destroy our civilization.

We are trapped into thinking that we can't do this because those in power tell us that changing things would be too disruptive. It’s like those mob movie movies where the mobster says, “It’s a nice economy you have here. It would be a shame if anything happened to it.” We are being told that our current system is the only one that works, and any other system is too scary to adopt. That simply isn’t true.

The solution to this problem isn't going to come from the top. Those in power aren't going to change things without those at the bottom making them do so. Make them do so. Refuse to participate in this any longer. Demand a healthier world. Demand guardrails on our planet. Demand a limit to the use of its resources. We can put limits on the use of resources. We can put limits on the use of palm oil, the use of plastics, and the use of oil and gas.

Capitalism as we know it is not inevitable. We've had markets for as long as we've had human interaction. We’ve traded food, goods, and services for tens of thousands of years. So don't let anyone tell you that if we change capitalism we're throwing out the best system humanity has ever known. We'd be changing a flawed system that is harming us.

In speeches like this by leaders around the world, the first and the last thing they talk about should be the health, well-being, and happiness of the people of that nation. Not profits or growth, because those things aren't always the priority.

Accept our limitations. Accept our maturity.

We need to accept that as a society it's okay to be mature. A full-grown person, a full-grown tree, a full-grown whale, or a full-grown anything reaches maturity and then goes about its life as a mature beings. They don't need to grow anymore. They have all they need, and the point of their lives beyond that point is to sustain what they have for as long as they can.

Why are human civilizations any different? Why should the super-organism of a civilization be any different? Why do we insist on being a cancer that needs to grow forever until it kills its host? Because that is what we are doing.

We are a mature civilization. It's okay to accept that. We don't need to grow forever. It is detrimental if we grow at the rate we are growing. Some parts of our economy may grow, and some parts may not.  Focusing on growth for growth's sake is killing us and destroying our civilization.

So, I propose something different. I propose that we accept all of the great achievements we have had as a civilization. I propose that we accept that we are a mature civilization. We can stop worrying about growing. Let's start taking care of our people and our resources. Let us focus on being better stewards of this planet and of each other. We will put the lives and the well-being of each other above all else. We will still have markets. We will still have companies. We will still have almost all of the trappings of the mature civilization that we have today. We will just make the conscious choice not to destroy ourselves. That will take some adjustment. That will cause some pain for those in power. They will have to give away some of that power.

To lead is to serve. To lead is not to exploit.

Think of those in power where you live. Do they serve you, or do they exploit you. Are you led, or are you ruled?

Have some humility. Pursue some justice.

We mistakenly believe we have dominion over this earth and the nature in it. We do not. We are but stewards of this planet. Stewards of the environments in which we live. We destroy them at our peril.

We will stop grading ourselves on GDP growth. We will grade ourselves on our education, our health, and our happiness. We will judge ourselves on the health of our rivers and oceans and mountains and forests and all the things that live in those places.

This transformation can be dictated from above, but that won’t work. We need your help. These things will all start from a community perspective. A community knows its river, its forests, and its wildlife best, not some bureaucrat in Washington, Brussels or some other capital. A community knows best the resources they have in their town and their neighborhood.

That's where it starts. It starts with the solidarity of communities understanding this problem and coming together to solve it. It means those communities need to tell us in the corridors of power what they need to solve these problems. It is then our job to serve those needs. So that's what I propose we do from this day forward. Our system is currently set up to support the powerful, to drive further growth. That system has gotten us to our current state. It doesn’t work.

Let’s change it.

History will look back on us at this pivotal moment in the story of humanity and judge whether this moment represents the beginning of our triumph or the culmination of our failure.

We need to incentivize the behaviors that we need and disincentivize those that harm us. But just telling individuals to make certain personal choices on their own won’t get that done. We must incentivize those behaviors and help our partners in the Global South improve how they use energy and interact with their environment. That will take the passing of laws and regulations that put the right incentives in place.

A topic that isn't often thought of in the boardrooms and the corridors of power when we talk about climate and nature is the idea of justice. But for our brothers and sisters in the Global South that's first and foremost what this is about. We should acknowledge this. Historically most of the greenhouse gases in the world were put there by the developed world over centuries. China is now the largest polluting country in the world, but on a historical basis, they're not even close to the top. A just transition to a greener and better world means that in the developed world save our brothers and sisters in the Global South from the damage we have done and the damage we will do.

No one can escape what is coming. So fix it.

Those in the developed world may not like to hear this, but our world is interconnected. Problems that we cause in the Global North that impact the Global South, will come back to negatively impact us as well.

If we do nothing or simply not enough, in the coming years and decades you will hear about “sacrifice zones” on our planet. These will be places where people won't be able to live and won't be able to survive. We will start to sacrifice these places because life will be unlivable there. It will be too hot, and too degraded to support life. We will abandon these places to nature. This will mean sacrificing whole cities and societies because it's impossible for people to live there anymore.

That's the world we are creating. And if we get to that world we will see a migration crisis that you cannot imagine. Think of events in recent years. The migrations from Syria started with a famine. There was a civil war, but much of that was caused by a famine, in which climate change played its part. The millions of people who have left Ukraine from the war there, are nothing compared to what is coming if we do nothing. Walls on borders can't keep out people who have nowhere to go and will risk death in going to a new place when their death is assured at home. If you want people to stay in the countries they live in, make sure their countries remain good places to live.

Very few people want to migrate. It’s not fun. They don't do it on a lark. They do it because there is no other option. They don't want to leave family and friends and the life they know to go to another country with a different language and different customs and where they know they are not wanted. They go only if they have no other choice.

Tell me how to do this.

All the changes that I have mentioned are possible. But they will take a change in our culture, a change in how we live. This calls for changes in how we use energy, how we eat, how we interact with each other, how we travel, and how we see ourselves in our nations. But they are gravely needed.

We need to better understand that what we need is much different than what we want. Our societies today, especially in the developed Western world, focus on consumption-driven economies so we can have more wealth, bigger houses, better vacations, more food, and more of everything. What we need is to survive as a society and as a civilization. Confusing our wants for our needs is part of what has gotten us into this problem.

Study after study shows that the people who are happiest in their lives and most content in their lives are people who feel they belong to something bigger than themselves. It is a human connection. It is loving and being loved.

We will need those human connections to get to where we need to be. As I've said before, this work will need to start in every community. Local and national governments will play a role, they will implement incentives through regulation, laws, taxes, and so on. A bureaucrat thousands of miles away can't mandate a community garden. But a community garden set up by a local community can bring a neighborhood together. Local governments can't mandate care for the elderly in your town, but citizens who band together to do so can have a great impact. There are hundreds of other initiatives that can begin in your community.

So, what I ask of you is to talk about what I've said today with the people that you love and love you. Ask them what they think. Ask them if they think it is doable, what they want to do, and how you can help. We are all in this together and it is only together building from the bottom, building community by community that we will save ourselves. If this is something that governments could do by themselves, or corporations could do by themselves, it would have already happened.

It has not.

You listening to this, reading this, you are the answer. I ask for your help.

Please help us save ourselves. Please help us save you. Please help us save our children and future generations. We know how to do this. Some of the things I've laid out in this talk are the steps we need to take but some steps will develop on the local level that I haven't thought of that I could never dream of. We need the will to do those things. We need to decide as a people that's what we're going to do, and then get on with doing it.

Thank you for listening to what I had to say. I'll stop talking now. Now it's time for me to listen.

What do you have to say?