Phase Shift Has Arrived!
The Pandemic as a Catalyst for Transformation
COVID 19 / cooperatively redesigning the human impact on Earth
By Daniel Christian Wahl
Let’s make this the catalyst for the re-design and regeneration of the human impact on Earth — we can heal the Earth and her people, regenerate ecosystems everywhere, regenerate our cooperative nature, and build renewed social cohesion through community solidarity …
This is the time to accept that change is no longer an option but now forced on us at a scale that the current economic system will AND SHOULD NOT recover from!
The time to (re)create vibrant bioregional economies that incentivise ecosystems regeneration and a re-regionalisation of production and consumption is here.
Time to switch to Game B — a globally cooperative humanity worth its name … united in the commitment to create conditions conducive to life and redesign the human impact on the planet from exploitative and degenerative to healing and regenerative.
Yes, this pandemic is upon us and the stock markets are collapsing, production, air travel, air pollution, … are dropping … recent predictions based on a model by researchers of the Universities of Based and Stockholm suggest that even with a summer dip in the rate of increase the COVID-19 virus could infect 100 million people (at a time) by Winter 2020/21.
Let’s not plan for return to business as usual after this — the climate emergency and obscene levels of in equality within and between countries clearly indicate that BAU (Business As Usual) was not working and heading for imminent collapse and synchronous failure anyway.
We are now pushed to a global mobilisation of resources and civic participation that the planet has not seen before. Let us not waste time by pretending that what we had before was working or is worth returning to.
What are some of the measures that communities, cities and regions will have to have to begin to explore anyway?
How do we feed our population at the bioregional scale from food grown mainly regionally?
How to we provide energy from regional renewable resources as oil production and oil prices force us out of fossil fuels (for good)?
How to we switch to regional transport systems that are not dependent on expensive imports of fuel?
In short, we need to redesign for community and regional resilience to a turbulent economic future, while increasing food, water energy sovereignty at those scales.
This kind of resilience building was needed in any case as a global preparation for a worsening climate crisis, and to avoid cataclysmic runaway climate change.
The scale of collaboration needed for the response to climate change seemed impossible to catalyse in the time we had left.
Now COVID 19 is forcing us to mobilise in unprecedented ways and we are doing so as one global species facing a calamity that we can only solve collaboratively and together — for all equally — or we will not solve it at all! Does that sound familiar? The same holds for climate change!
COVID 19 might become the catalyst for the transformation of the human presence and impact on Earth that climate change should have been but was too diffuse of a thread for our species to come together around in an effective way.
Now that we are and have to achieve this, let us make the most of the effort and resources spent!
The world will never be the same and that can be a good thing too!
Already the lives saved by dropping air pollution in China alone might soon begin to out-number the tragic and catastrophic loss of lives that the viral pandemic is and will continue to cause.
With suffering and loss at that scale it is inappropriate to draw comparisons, and comparing numbers does not reduce the suffering for those affected.
“Corona virus lockdown may save more lives by preventing pollution than by preventing infection” (Jeff McMahon, 2020).
Even if the viral death tall ends up being much larger than currently estimated, it will remain a fraction of the death toll caused by the systemic dysfunctionalities of our current system and expected to be caused by the kind of climate change and ecosystems collapse scenarios we were heading for in the short to mid-term in any case.
Phase shift is here! We will surprise ourselves with our capacity to collaborate across boards as one global species!
Let’s make our efforts count and design for human and planetary health, as we build a new future together based on diverse regenerative cultures everywhere.
Diverse bioregional economies supporting cultures that heal their local rivers, regenerate forests, grasslands, soils, wetlands and oceans.
Cultures that are elegantly adapted to the bio-cultural uniqueness of the bioregions, we now have the opportunity to re-inhabit as healers and in a globally collaborative way!
—ooo000ooo—
Daniel Christian Wahl – Catalyzing transformative innovation in the face of converging crises; advising on regenerative whole systems design, regenerative leadership, and education for regenerative development and bioregional regeneration.
Author of the internationally acclaimed book Designing Regenerative Cultures
Source: Taken and lightly adapted/formatted from https://medium.com/age-of-awareness/phase-shift-has-arrived-who-declares-pandemic-83da330fdc5d