09 Oct

unconsumption:

A sustainable future is not only possible, but will be better to live in. But it’s going to require some radical change.

It’s easy to look at the long list of problems facing the
environment—mass extinction, dying oceans, climate change—and wonder
whether things might have gone a little too far to fix. A recent study
argued that we’ve already passed four out of the nine “planetary
boundaries” needed for Earth to keep working the way that it has for the
last 12,000 years.

But despite the scale of the problems, one of the authors of that
study believes that the world as we know it—the only conditions that
have ever supported humans—can still be saved.

“The window is still open, barely open, to transition back into a
safe operating space,” says Johan Rockström, executive director of the
Stockholm Resilience Center in Sweden. In a new book, Big World, Small Planet,
Rockström lays out the case for hope, and explains how we can
transition to a fully sustainable world—energy, food systems, cities,
transportation—without sacrificing quality of life.

The technology that can make that happen is ready to scale now. “We
know, for example, that to get back to a stable climate future we need
to basically decarbonize the world economy by 2050 or 2060,” he says.
“Just five years back, that was utopian. Now we can actually say we know
we have the solutions.

A thoughtful weekend read. Continue here: The Case For Optimism About The Future Of The Planet | Co.Exist | ideas + impact

— rw