The Root Cause of Ecological Crisis

When the consequences of climate change accumulate enough, as we approach 2020, we will name the crisis. Public testimony since the 1980s foresaw the particular problems of environmental degradation that reduces the availability of water, food and shelter for people. Hope was that proposed government regulations and industry controls would limit the damage and control the worst consequences.

As of early 2016, what we witnessed argues that basic causes are rooted in combined actions of corporations pushing politicians toward a utopian self-regulating market system.  A free market never existed and never will because the environment and humanity would be destroyed before the fairy tale ended. Making commodities of land, labor and money in the market economy has degraded the environment, increased poverty and inequality, and supported predatory financial institutions.

We argue that by 2020 a surprise reaction to the consequences of climate change will lead to a crisis period of five to ten years unlike any in the history of America or the world.  An ecological disaster and human crisis of global proportions.  As a result, our system of democracy will improve with increased participation and we will embed the market economy within a broader economy, and embed that within the social fabric of society.

Key Measures

• Ad hoc actions leave uncorrected the root causes of the coming crisis and usually encourage the root causes to grow stronger and multiply consequences.  Relieving the symptoms and not curing the disease only happens with terminal patients or when the patient will get well on their own.
• The global community of scientists and engineers contributed to diagnosing, understanding and suggesting treatments for the root causes based on technology and innovation without considering the systemic relationship of the environment and people exploited by the market economy.
• All of the threats to humanity’s survival are traceable to one root cause: the utopian self-regulated market economy without a moral or ethical compass.  The individualism promoting a lifestyle that has no moral code.  The corporate propaganda that has no ethical compass.
• The market economy and society interact through the democratic political process.  However the check and balance system is now corrupted by the individual and corporate propaganda saying that the market economy is the only way to improve the quality of life, when in fact the dominance of the market economy is the root cause of our present impending crisis.
• The only possible entry point, to add a feedback loop to balance the system, appears to be when society embeds the market economy within an overall economy using a democracy with increased citizen participation.  This means that the wealthy and politically well connected who believe the present world order must be maintained will lose much of their individual influence and power.  Citizens will be empowered to participate in decision making.
• The dominance of the market system, over society’s needs for clean air and water, productive cropland, human rights and access to capital, is the root cause of the global crisis that will surprise everyone in the 2020s.  In the real world, beyond the myth of the market economy, the approaching crisis is witnessed by: 

• drought and floods degrading access to fresh water and food
• increasing flow of refugees away from destabilized regions
• inability of government financial institutions to properly manage capital.

• The change in our values, thinking and behavior has already begun but only by a few people relative to the impact of a global reaction to the coming ecological and human crisis.  There are a growing number of business leaders and politicians who wish they could change but feel unsafe, threatened or that it goes against tradition.

• Changes will be local, regional, national and global.  Changes impact government, education and military organizations because the assumptions used to build the myth of the self-regulating market economy are fiction.  Land, labor and money are not commodities that fit the economic theory of a market economy.

No one can predict the specific outcome, the details or results of the changes in the 2020s that will transform government, the economy and society.  We know that the present pattern of disruption, based on the alignment of generations and events, leads to a crisis climax with a successful transformation of society after about 2028.

We conclude that the next few years, until about 2020, involve futile peace negotiations like COP21 to appease the public, governments and businesses, without taking action to deal with the root cause of the crisis.  Like the beginning of WWII and Pearl Harbor 80 years earlier, the surprise catalyst will trigger a period of extreme transformation of governments, society, education and business.