“In This Boat We’re All Integrated,” 1963. Published in the Washington Post, August 7, 1963.

Stopping the ship is necessary but insufficient.  Not only do we have to stop the ship and turn it around, we have to get it going in a useful direction as fast as possible.  In other words, we need to fix what we broke.

We are all on the same ship. See There is Only US, There is no Them.  Everything is connected, when anything changes, everything adjusts.  Based on our current trajectory, we need to turn the ship around and set sail for a better destination.  Besides, why should we slow things down when we can design and get to a better, not just a less bad, tomorrow.  Why choose anything else?  Of course this also means fulfilling and rewarding work!

We can design tomorrow in such a way that makes things better as it also prepares for possible disasters.  This is a future that is an Idealized Outcome.  Many examples exist.  One example is how The Netherlands did this in their country when they were flooded in the 1950’s.  They choose to build a for a better tomorrow. Realizing their land was below sea level, instead of just cleaning up each time they were flooded, they redesigned their country to make it better as it also prepared them for likely flooding.  See “The Dutch Solution”

We can use the “The Dutch Solution” in all areas.  We have to do better, as shown in the documentary “Burned“, in the quest for dollars, poorly thought out solutions did not help and caused damage. According to the story outlined in Burned, due to accounting chicanery, companies are receiving government subsidies while causing more pollution.  The chicanery comes about when trees are clear cut and harvested in America and burned in Europe.  Both countries pretend the carbon is accounted for on the other end while in reality neither do. Besides not accounting for the potential carbon release from clear cutting or burning the trees, these energy supplying wood pellets cause 50-60% more carbon to be put in the atmosphere than if coal were burned.

Some suggest we broke earth.  I don’t know that we broke earth, but we did create a different path. The perfect Holocene Era on earth that made life for humans not only possible, but ideal, was turned into the Anthropocene Era.  This era is a proposed epoch dating from the commencement of significant human impact on the Earth‘s geology and ecosystems, including, but not limited to, anthropogenic climate change.

Eugene Robinson’s Washington Post column, Climate Change Is No Longer Just a Theory  explained climate change in simple terms.  He explains how we are now experiencing, not just predicting the changes scientists have been discussing for some time. In other words, we must take action to make things better, or in other words, we must Turn the Ship Around. It is possible with work and this has has been demonstrated, most notably by nature.