Today the condition of unsustainability is widely recognized, but not many realize that we don’t have a hundred years before it reaches a tipping point. It predicted that in the absence of major change, the world system would collapse in less than a hundred years. In 1962, in her seminal book Silent Spring, Rachel Carson told us that the way we treat our environment is not tenable and is bound to backfire, and in 1972 the Club of Rome published The Limits to Growth, a computerized world model with social and economic and not only ecological parameters. We should have long known that the world we have created is not sustainable. The same thinking that got us here will bring us to the critical tipping point - and to the irreversible leap which is then likely to be down, rather than up. Einstein told us that we can’t solve a problem with the same kind of thinking that gave rise to the problem, and if our problem is the obsolescence of the world we have created, we need to shift to a new paradigm for our life and civilization. The question is, whether we also have the will. We have the technology, the money, and the know-how to achieve it. The wiser option is to try to transcend the current system and find ways of organizing ourselves that allow us to live in peace with ourselves, with others, and with nature. Their efforts can delay the coming of the tipping point, but cannot avert it. They are trying to restabilize it in business, finance, and politics, and refuse to admit that doing so is futile. It has not reached the tipping point because some people - for the most part those whose economic and political interests are tied to the status quo - believe that the current system can still be maintained. The breakout from the old has started already, but it is not yet committed to a breakdown or to a breakthrough.
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