What does a sustainable world look like

Tackling climate change means letting go of systems that aren’t working but also envisioning and manifesting new systems that respect planetary boundaries and promote human flourishing. What we are facing and need to accomplish can feel daunting, but we have the opportunity to create a healthier, greener, and more equitable world.

Read a round up of the headlines:

“The climate crisis has been “framed as a set of problems that need to be solved through intellectual ingenuity, engineering, and technology. These solutions are critical, but they do not require grappling with the underlying issue … They do not look beyond doing, to being.’“

Part of the problem, Baker pointed out, is that in discussing climate change, we frequently approach it in terms of what we must give up to live more sustainably — but not in terms of what we gain by living simply and mindfully.”

One Earth Sangha, The Power of Embodied Simplicity

“The diagnosis and acceptance of our problems is crucial but – much like when visiting a doctor –along with wanting a clear, detailed diagnosis, we also want to know what we can do to improve or even cure our condition. This is what I wanted to offer up to my now five-year-old daughter. A story that focuses on the solutions to our environmental dilemmas and reveals a different version of the future. Because as the neurologist Viktor Frankl explained in his Auschwitz memoir, Man’s Search for Meaning, if hope or faith in a better future becomes absent, the human spirit rapidly deteriorates.

Over the last three years I’ve been making a film called 2040. It’s a visual letter to my daughter showing her what the world could look like that year if we put into practice some of the best solutions that exist today. I call it an exercise in “fact-based dreaming”, as everything I show her in the future has to already exist today.”

The Guardian, A vision of 2040: everything we need for a sustainable world already exists

“When I reach home, I visit with several of my neighbors, who are sitting outside chatting. We hear an owl, and notice the bats swooping overhead. The move to designate our city a National Park City slowed the decline of biodiversity to the point of recovery by reunifying previously fractured wildlife corridors, green spaces, and woods, so that I now regularly notice new kinds of insects and louder and more complex birdsong. With so much around me moving, changing and thriving, I settle down to sleep with a feeling that the future is rich with possibility.”

Yes Magazine, The Sustainable Future Town of Your Imagination

“Doughnut Economics is a theory proposing a change of economic model as a response to humanity’s major challenge of eradicating global poverty within the means of the planet’s limited natural resources. In a typical introductory economics lesson, you will be taught that the definition of economics is to study the allocation of scarce resources.”

Earth.org, What is Doughnut Economics?