GREEN VISIONS

Towards the Rainbow

Dr. Uygar Özesmi in Green Visions

May 07, 2009

While looking at a future horizon it is not possible to see what lies behind. The future is somewhere ahead… what is waiting for us there? We don’t know… on our journey towards the horizon we create that future. But for a future in which all of us wish to live we need imagination, determination and action. In this monthly column – Green Visions, we will try to provide you with dreams of that future, the decisions that need to be made and what we all need to do.

On this journey we need to come together and embrace everyone. Like it or not we are sharing this little blue planet with many different people. The future we create will need to be based on respect for difference and diversity. Our peace with the planet is dependent on this. In this column we want to bring people of all interests, beliefs, knowledge, occupations, and obsessions together. We want to imagine, decide and take steps together.

With the dreams, opinions, and visions that we share here we can extend our network and join forces. On this page we will bring together opinion leaders, artists, scientists, philosophers, spiritual leaders and even politicians. The opinions of readers are just as important as those of the writers and we hope these opinions will come together to lead a path to green horizons which are also respectful to universal human values.

Humans started imagining a future from the moment that they discovered the power of thought. But at that first instant of development what they could not conceive fully was that their world is finite. And maybe it’s still a reality that they deny. Once upon a time, across all cultures, people were part of nature’s cycle of life and death. Nature was grandiose enough to put back what people took from it, and recycle what they disposed. Then fossil fuels were discovered, becoming an addiction during the industrial and agricultural “revolution”, destroying cultures in the process. The new world order was not organized based on cycles and diversity, but on production lines and standards. The means of production today was not formed based on reuse and the transformation of one product to another. People invented two new concepts “consumption” and “waste” which were not part of the natural system and meant depletion and destruction. As a result our planet started warming, and the cycles of the world together with biodiversity started to disintegrate causing the extinction of thousands of species which continues today. The cogwheels and springs of the clockwork of life started to come apart.

So what are the steps we need to take then? How should life be beyond the horizon? We need to take lessons from life’s 3.45 billion years of experience. There are three ecological principals we need to implement. First (1) for our energy needs we must rely only on sun and geothermal energy, which are practically infinite and all other energy sources are derived from. Second (2) we need to create cyclical production processes. All products that come from a production process must be used in the production of another. “Waste” that harms other beings and is not used again in production must become history. The term waste needs to disappear from our vocabulary – all products must be inputs into other industries, and be transformed. Third (3) we need to limit our ecological footprint – what we take from nature – within nature’s resilience. We cannot cover the whole planet with agricultural fields and plantations, factories and human habitation.

Even if we built this system certain social values cannot be ignored, otherwise we will have a hegemonic nightmare in a supposedly green economy. We can never let go of four social principles (1) respect for diversity, (2) social justice, (3) individual rights and choices, (4) cooperation and mutual benefit. These four principals are valid within the cultural or geographic scales of local, regional, national, and global, as well as across time from minutes to centuries. So that ecology does not turn into a nightmare, respect for universal human rights is as important as respecting the planet. If today’s nation states and their organizations remain behind the horizon, then their job should be to ensure the conditions for the ecological and social principals mentioned and protect their rights.

We still have a long way to go for that green horizon, however what is behind will be shaped by our dreams, will get stronger by our decisions, and will be born by our actions. One day we will look up and see the rainbow…

http://www.greenpeace.org/mediterranean/news/uygar-ozesmi