You Can't Have Infinite Growth On A Finite Planet

“Responding to the Global Crisis” takes aim at the fundamental idea behind environmental and social devastation – the idea that you can infinite growth on a finite planet – and challenges each of us to respond in our own unique ways.

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CREDITS:

CLIPS:
The 11th Hour http://www.topdocumentaryfilms.com/11th-hour/
TED talk with Paul Gilding http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZT6YpCsapg
Koyaanisqatsi http://www.koyaanisqatsi.org/films/koyaanisqatsi.php
Baraka http://www.spiritofbaraka.com/baraka
Show Me Your Face by Ian MacKenzie http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8PHeuVfyg40
The Revolution Is Love by Ian MacKenzie http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BRtc-k6dhgs
Sacred Economics by Ian MacKenzie http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EEZkQv25uEs
Home - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqxENMKaeCU
Children of Men - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NikEQy1XxDE

MUSIC:
The End Of The World - Dramatic Instrumental - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0KHS-AD14w
Oblivion - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZXBbexOBkk
Suspense Music - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BC_BShb5UrA

For any concerns or questions, you may contact us at http://sustainablehuman.me/contact

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The Earth is full.

It's full of us.

It's full of our stuff.

Full of our waste.

Full of our demands.

Our economy is now bigger than its host:
our planet.

What this means is that
our economy is unsustainable.

When things aren't sustainable,
they stop.

Economic growth.

It will stop because of the end of
cheap resources.

It will stop because of the
growing demand

of us on all the systems of the Earth.

It is based on a crazy idea.

The crazy idea being

that we can have
infinite growth on a finite planet.

The Earth doesn't care what we need.
Mother nature doesn't negotiate.

She just sets rules,
and describes consequences.

We tend to look at the world not as
the integrated system that it is,

but as a series of individual issues.

We see

the Occupy protests.

We see spiraling debt crises.

We see growing inequality.

We see money's influence on politics.

But we see, mistakingly,
each of these issues

as individual problems waiting to be solved.

In fact, it's the system in the painful process
of breaking down.

I could give you countless studies
and evidence to prove this

but I won't

because if you want to see it

that evidence is all around you.

The crisis is now inevitable.

The issue is:

how will we react?

Imagine our economy

when the carbon bubble bursts.

When the financial markets recognize

that they don't have any hope of
preventing a climate spiraling out of control.

The oil and coal industries are finished.

Imagine the Middle East
without oil income,

but with collapsing governments.

Imagine China, India and Pakistan
going to war

as climate impacts,

generates conflict over food and water.

Imagine our highly tuned
just-in-time food industry

and our highly stressed
agricultural system failing

and supermarket shelves emptying.

Imagine 30% unemployment in America

as the global economy is gripped
by fear and uncertainty.

Imagine what it means for your

personal security

as a heavily armed civilian population
gets angrier and angrier

about why this was allowed to happen.

So how do you feel

when the lights go out

on the global economy in your mind?

When your assumptions

about the future

fade away.

And something very different emerges?

Just take a moment,

and take a breath.

And think: what do you feel?

When we think about
the kind of possibilities I paint,

we should feel a bit of fear.

We are in danger.

All of us.

And we've evolved to respond
to danger with fear.

To motivate a powerful response.

We have achieved remarkable things

since working on how to grow food
some 10,000 years ago.

Those people that have faith
that humans can solve any problem,

that technology is limitless,

that markets can be a force for good
are in fact right.

The only thing they're missing

is that it takes a good crisis to get us going.

When we feel fear and we fear loss
we are capable of quite extraordinary things.

After the bombing of Pearl Harbor
it just took 4 days for the government

to ban the production of civilian cars

and redirect the auto industry

and from there the rationing of food and energy.

Think about how a company responds
to a bankruptcy threat

and how trades that seemed impossible
just gets done.

Think about how an individual responds
to a diagnosis of a life-threatening illness

and how lifestyle changes,
that previously were just too difficult,

suddenly become relatively easy.

We can transform our economy.

The only thing we need to change
is how we think and how we feel.

I know the free market fundamentalists
will tell you that more growth, more stuff

and 9 billion people going shopping
is the best we can do.

They're wrong.

We can be more.
We can be much more.

We can choose this moment of crisis
to ask and answer the big questions
of society's evolution.

Like: what do we want to be
when we grow up?

When we move passed
this bumbling adolescence,

where we think there are no limits
and suffer delusions of immortality.

Well, it's time to grow up.

To be wiser, to be calmer, to be more considered.

Like generations before us,
we'll be growing up in war.

Not a war between civilizations
but a war for civilization.

This could be our finest hour.