Scientists Warning has invited Poems for Parliament to submit a paper addressing the cultural causes of climate change. The working title is ‘Scientists Warning proposes a Road Map to Ecological Justice’.
The pdf is publicly available as a preprint on SSRN
Abstract
This ‘Roadmap to Ecological Justice’ challenges two common cultural issues which are preventing genuine mitigation from climate breakdown and ecological collapse. These two issues are: coercive consumerism, and peer-pressure to procreate. Commercial advertising creates peer pressure to approve and indulge in non-essential consumption. The prevailing human mindset admires financial wealth and economic growth and prioritises financial profit over the wellbeing of ecosystems. This mindset has caused chronic global ecological overshoot for over fifty years.
The narrow and short-sighted focus of growth economics has now destabilised the climate and our shared ecosystems. This is causing instability in our global economy. Whilst we remain in overshoot, the financial model of growth economics contravenes the human right to a healthy environment.
This roadmap seeks to inspire and empower everyone to become involved in global social change. It proposes a formally ratified global aspiration to equitably minimise the average ecological footprint per capita. The proposed ‘UN Charter for Ecological Justice’ is brief and clearly worded. The roadmap describes how this concept might serve to inspire every individual to take pride in being part of a global collaboration to equitably minimise consumption, and facilitate prudent family planning throughout the global community. The roadmap focuses the collective mindset to jointly and peacefully aspire to achieve maximum mitigation as rapidly as possible, in order to protect both living and future generations. We shall all be called upon to reframe and rethink our priorities in order to reflect this new and radical Degrowth objective. The Degrowth mindset will soften the unfolding collapse and address the inequalities that have resulted from the growth mindset. This roadmap seeks to minimise the number of our global community, both living and future, who will endure brief, challenging, unhappy or unfulfilled lives.