Reviewing the motivation: Plan B 4.0

Sept 23

A Challenge Without Precedent

Given the need to simultaneously stabilize climate, stabilize population, eradicate poverty, and restore the earth’s natural systems, our early twenty-first-century civilization is facing challenges that have no precedent. Rising to any one of these challenges would be taxing, but we have gotten ourselves into a situation where we have to effectively respond to each of them at the same time, given their mutual interdependence. And food security depends in reaching all four goals.                                from Plan B 4.0, Lester Brown

Let it be recorded that this year our first real rain, with thunder and lightening, and significant downpour, occurred on this date. A typical time for the rains to start. Now the trees and other plants will respond with flowers and fruit, and new growth everywhere.

What will happen with our unfinished house?There is still some plastering to do on the outside of the building, and the floor must be cemented and glazed, after which it needs to dry for three or four days. We’ve moved back to my son’s house – about 1000 feet away - for the week, to keep my daughter company, and it’s just as well. We don’t know yet but the straw hut may leak with this kind of rain.

Have you read Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization, by Lester Brown? Published in 2009, while I was walking from New Orleans to the Canadian border along US Route 11 (“For All the Grandchildren”), Plan B first summarizes the major catastrophes threatened by climate change and continued population growth. Food, says Lester Brown, is the weak point that may very well bring down our civilization. In the second part of the book, Brown offers the major solutions that could mitigate the devastation that looms over humanity.

When I read Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet, by Mark Lynas, in the Fall of 2008, I absorbed the predictions of major and worldwide devastation due to climate change. I found these forecasts frightening. I worried especially about my own grandchildren and then all the little ones of the world, the anawim, including the poverty-ridden peoples who would be affected the most and the soonest by rising sea-levels, droughts, forest fires, desertification, and food shortages. My outrage at the indifference and greed - that were, and still are, keeping world leaders from enacting the changes required to allay climate change and its consequences - led me to take the 1,100 mile walk.

I needed such a walking meditation, an action that allowed me to calm my own anxieties while communicating with people along the way, sharing the message, a wake-up call that may have been a tiny part of the shift in consciousness among Americans who now rate climate change as a major concern.

Now, four years later, I read Lester Brown’s account of the situation described by …  - same scientific data, same predictions – and realize that many of the events they forecast have already come to pass, such as the melting of the Greenland ice sheet and the increase in forest fires in the US Southwest. However, Climate Change conferences come and go and still the world refuses to mobilize to the degree that’s necessary to avert catastrophe. It seems ever more likely that immense suffering, especially for the anawim, lies in the close future.

But I am no longer overly anxious.

The effects of my walking meditation linger on. Guy and I have come to a place where we can do our small part: lower our carbon footprint, plant trees in a sensitive area, grow our own food, join others in experiments with solar cooking, building with earth (bio-construction), and other alternative tools and technologies. Permaculture and agroforestry hold promise for the recovery of soils, water, and habitat and the sequestering of carbon.