The Great Disruption by Paul Gilding Read Free Book Online

process occurred again in Johannesburg at the Earth Summit 2002.
    At each of these meetings over two decades, increasingly earnest speeches have been made, I’m sure mostly genuinely felt, about the critical risks that humanity faces and the urgent need for action. From the outside, it looks as though all the important people are in the room and all the power required to change the world is there, ready and able to act. Yet on the inside, what actually happens is that pretty much no one is in charge, because as we’ll discuss later, the system has become so large that no one can be.
    Over the fifty years of the Scream, we’ve learned that in reality global change is much more a bottom-up process. Our political leaders, with rare exceptions, respond at best to what they think the politics allows them to do rather than what they feel they should do. As we saw in Copenhagen, even when our political leaders are personally convinced of the need to act, the strategy of keeping one eye on what is politically acceptable at home and the other eye on protecting national economic interest merges with an immature and chaotic global decision-making process to make progress glacial.
    So critically for our story, and the good news here, is that while little happened over these decades at the upper ends of political power, except for a greater understanding of the challenge, enormous strides were taken in the bottom-up process. Many, many millions have joined the ranks of the passionate and committed people working as activists, scientists, entrepreneurs, policy makers, corporate sustainability champions, and ordinary citizens. They have slowly but surely changed the way we all think, so that today everyone’s an environmentalist.
    When the history of environmentalism is written, 2010 will be the point when pretty much everyone was on board and has agreed: “Someone should do something!” Now all we have to do is work out who that’s going to be. We’ll return to this at the end of the story.
    However, despite the extraordinary levels of activity, the millions of people and billions of dollars focused on the effort, nothing of any real systemwide consequence has happened in response. We have all agreed the science is clear and indicates a major problem. We have fixed this river and that town, we have saved forests here and there, we have banned numerous toxic and dangerous chemicals, and we have become highly knowledgeable, now being able to monitor the total earth system as never before.
    But where have we got to in the system as a whole?
    That’s the next part of the story. For fifty years we’ve been saying we have to act on these issues or our children’s children will suffer the consequences. Well, we are their children’s children. So what’s going to happen?
    To quote Winston Churchill (November 12, 1936):
    They go on in strange paradox, decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all-powerful to be impotent.… Owing to past neglect, in the face of the plainest warnings, we have entered upon a period of danger. The era of procrastination, of half measures, of soothing and baffling expedience of delays, is coming to its close. In its place we are entering a period of consequences.… We cannot avoid this period, we are in it now.…

CHAPTER 3
    A Very Big Problem
    I have argued that humanity, the economy, and the planet’s ecosystem operate as a single interdependent system and that this system is in serious trouble. We will now look at the scientific and economic evidence for this.
    Our story now moves from the past to the present. This means we need to understand the condition the planet’s ecosystem is currently in. What is our starting point?
    At the Rio Earth Summit nearly twenty years ago, our leaders—representatives from 172 countries, including 108 heads of state—gathered in a momentous meeting that