One of the issues your correspondent helps you keep talking about is that complex adaptive systems (such as the global one we live in) can jump from one state to another when they succeed at a tipping point.
Unfortunately, the maximum ecological problems that climate scientists replace are, say, a bearish human civilization.
For example, the melting of permafrost can release large amounts of greenhouse fuel methane into the environment, causing sudden and out-of-control warming. Excessive melting of Greenland’s glaciers can lead to a terminal slowdown in the thermohaline cycle, which would likely make large tracts of land virtually uninhabitable and create large deaths in the ocean.
Faced with incredibly pessimistic discussions about turning points, it was exciting to sit back and talk to John Perkins, the new e-book called Touching The Jaguar and co-founder of Pachamama Alliance.
Perkins a lot about turning points.
After a series of meetings with South American shamans, the murders of several heads of state who had resisted their charms and many other heartbreaking adventures, Perkins learned that the life he led was crazy. After reaching his turning point, he crossed the door and did not prevent him until he returned to the Amazon, a domain in which he had lived while in the Peace Corps.
Perkins argues that today, points like the Covid-19 pandemic and disappointing news about climate replacement are the way Mother Nature gently pushes human society toward a point of mental and non-secular inflection. If we pay attention to Mother Nature (“Pachamama” in the Inca tradition), Perkins argues in his e-book that we can make a transition as wonderful as when he left the life of an economic killer.
The main thing that must respond productively to Pachamama’s elbows according to Perkins is to perceive that perceptions shape reality.
We must, he says, abandon the perception that success means more and more materialistic consumption.
Perkins believes it’s up to us how to organize our societies and economies. There’s no one “out there” to save us, we have to make the adjustments we need to see.
To make the changes, we want a new belief: the belief that good fortune means creating a long-term that our youth and grandchildren will want to inherit. This belief will result in movements that will initiate many of our existing problems, adding climate change.
Making those adjustments is scary and requires a kind of irritating courage that is absurd at first, just as achieving and playing a jaguar is frightening and absurd. To create this kind of courage, we will first have to perceive what project we must carry out in this world. This procedure of self-discovery bureaucracy is the center of a shamanic adventure that he undertook at the time of his death in an Amazonian village years ago and which he described in detail in Touching the Jaguar.
“The carpenter, the teacher, the father,” Perkins writes, “you can have other missions, but if we all move toward the purpose of a sustainable and regenerative future, we’ll get there.
For unwavering readers of this column who know their correspondent as a stalwart realist who mockingly writes about “unwashed hippie types,” my mention of locating climate responses through a non-secular adventure of self-discovery would possibly seem irrelevant.
In fact, I spoke to Perkins when we spoke and requested concrete recommendations for those seeking to take active service to build a more sustainable and moderate economic system.
“Write letters,” he replied.
Perkins told me that the CEOs of countless giant and hard corporations have told him that they too are involved with the environment and are deeply at odds about the role of their corporations in replacing the climate and other environmental issues.
However, these industry titans also describe themselves as in a stalemate; If they unilaterally redirect investor capital to sustainable progression projects and their percentage value suffers, they will be driven from their elegant C-suite digs faster than you can say ‘anthropogenic global warming’. Perhaps, fear, that your replacement in the C-suite will be so sensitive to ecological problems and will oppose the provisional and progressive steps they tried to take.
Perkins told them to encourage people to write letters to their Boards of Directors and post the messages every chance they get on social media. The letters should read something like this:
“Dear Sir, ma’am,
“I love your product and cannot get enough. In the past, I have recommended all my friends to buy your product too. I’m telling you that, from this day forward, I refuse to buy anything that you market or even to buy any product which uses your product until your company commits to taking concrete steps to reduce emissions and build a truly sustainable business model.”
“CEOs tell me,” Perkins says, “that when they have hundreds of these messages, they can show them to their large investors and say ‘These are our customers. We need to listen to them.’”
That’s also my message to you. Not everyone has the delight or ability to create a company like Carbon Engineering, GlassPoint Solar or Heliogen, but that doesn’t mean everyone is disconnected. Please write to the CEO of your favorite corporations a personalized letter like the one above.
I did it and it feels — a moment of “Alice’s Restaurant” for the 21st century.
Now, to close out this admittedly out-of-character article about making a personal decision to change the economic underpinnings of our society, I want to append a personal note.
My daughter was born 20 years ago last week.
Since that happy occasion, the earth has seen nine out of 10 of the warmest years on record (her brother was born two years before her, which was the 10th of the 10 warmest years), atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have risen nearly 15% to a level not seen in millions of years, and Ocean Heat Content has increased by hundreds of percent.
Slowly but surely, we, the young people of the trade revolution, are forcing our own environment to emerge from the climate that gave rise to 10,000 years of human history.
My daughter is – justifiably in your correspondent’s opinion – frustrated with her elders (your correspondent included) for having dumped such a frightening grab bag of problems into her and her peers’ laps.
There’s no point in wringing our hands about what we should have been doing in 1985. The oil companies have done what was legally required of them – maximize profits for their shareholders. We have done what is convenient for us – bought bobbles and trinkets that make us momentarily forget that we have lost something important in the process of generating cash to buy them.
This whole story and all those resolutions is us. Every resolution taken since then serves as a progressive vote that will make a resolution the fate of life on our planet.
Smart take note.
I am passionate about making an investment in public and personal corporations that focus on tactics to help civilization mitigate and adapt to the effects of climate change. My
I am passionate about making an investment in public and personal corporations that focus on tactics to help civilization mitigate and adapt to the effects of climate change. My experience in comparing personal and public corporations has been sought through leading institutions, adding the World Bank, and I have participated in national television systems such as The Nightly Business Report and in foreign media. In 2014, I published The Intelligent Option Investor: Applying Value Investing to the World of Options (McGraw-Hill) and before I became a Forbes contributor, I worked as a hedge fund threat manager, investment banker in Tokyo and New York, market strategist for Morningstar and as a study manager for a new money knowledge company in Chicago.