How we managed to save the climate - A message from my granddaughter

As many of you know, I have been inspired by a marvelous workshop on the "Climate Dilemma" in March this year, everyone locked down because of Corona, to read and write about eight perspectives on climate change. For all those interested, I have posted my findings from these perspectives here:

New Perspectives on Climate Change - The Answer to the Climate Crisis is Community - not CO2

My learnings from writing these articles have kept their inspiring and encouraging effect on me from this day forward. Ever since, when people ask me what to do about Climate Change, about what tiny and irrelevant impact they thought they had, about the hopeless- and pointlessness they assumed about their own climate efforts, and about the lack of a positive vision for a better life that could be achieved, I feel that I can give them an answer. In fact, it is not my answer. I received it from my grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-granddaughter.

She gave it to me during this workshop which inspired me to write about these eight perspectives. It happened within a breathtaking exercise that was called “The 7th generation”, a format developed by Joanna Macy. I was sitting across this young woman, who represented my daughter seven generations down, speaking to me from the year 2220. Apparently humankind had survived the climate crisis and found a sustainable way to inhabit planet earth, so I was eager to hear from her how we did it. But at first it was her who asked me some very touching questions:

1) “From what I read, and from what my parents and grandparents told me, your situation 200 years ago must have been really awkward. Apparently you knew everything back then, how you ruined the planet and destroyed the environment, and still for a very long time you did nothing about it. That seems so hard to believe, since you were so bright already back then and all the knowledge was available. Please explain to me, as it seems hard to comprehend: why did you not stop?”

I tried to explain it to her, and it made some sense what I said. But I was very ashamed of it nonetheless, for all the stupidity, blindness and inadequacy we displayed as human beings during my generation. So she kept asking.

2) “Sometimes when I go to get water or harvest some food, I think of the fact that I owe this to people like you and your other climate activist friends, who did not want to accept that destroying the planet was inevitable. What made you resist and take action? What were your first steps?”

I gave her an account of what I did, and how little I thought that I achieved. I told her about all the resistance we encountered and the frustration we felt, about the counter-effects we saw due to the climate tipping points we had already passed, and that often enough it felt like the sisyphus-myth of strenuously rolling up a stone but never being able to reach the top of the hill. So she went on to ask.

3) “Now I know that you did not keep it to those first steps, you went further and it took roots. In the end you succeeded, and it is only because of your work and the work of your friends that we still have a life today. I‘m sure your efforts to save the environment and to turn around the climate crisis were often hard and frustrating. How come that you kept going, and from which source did you take the power for your struggle?”

That was when I got really emotional, my eyes filling with tears. It was such a powerful moment, to sit in front of my own descendant whose life I had helped to save, who was thankful for my efforts to protect this planet. Instead of being completely upset with me and my generation for destroying the richness and beauty of nature and depriving future generations of it, she was simply grateful to me for helping to avoid that it got even worse than that.

And while I tend to feel completely insufficient, and so desperately irrelevant in my effort to make a difference to the global climate, in this very moment I knew that I was not. My work did have a purpose, and it did have an effect, and it mattered what I did.

So I tried to explain it to her, how we became more and more people in our movement who realized that we needed to change, and who took many different measures to start a new journey to a better life consistent with the planet. In the end it was taking action which saved us, I believe, and working on concrete and tangible steps together for the better life which we dreamed of. At some point, the climate deteriorated so much that we did not care about the climate so much anymore, but rather focused on life as such, and on the life which we wanted to live. It just became more substantial, and we rediscovered what actually counted, and that helped to carry us through.

After answering her questions, I was then given the chance to ask my daughter from 7 generations past me how things developed after the year 2020, and to seek some words of feedback and advice from her. This is what she said:

“Thank you, Tim. I really cannot say anything else but thank you for what you did. It seems that we have come a long way. If it weren’t for people like you, who did not wait for others to take action, but who just got to work, then I probably wouldn’t be here anymore to talk to you.

In order to tell you about what happened after 2020, most of my account is from my history books. But my grandparents (your grand-grand-grandson Leo, to be exact, who was born in 2124, and his wife Stephanie) told me stories about life when they were young, and things have already improved a lot since.

So in 2020, the people on the planet finally seemed to start realizing on a larger scale that they could not go on destroying the planet as they did. But at the time they still believed that it would be enough to just fix some of the symptoms, like emitting less carbon dioxide, and to keep the rest of their system as it was. And even that was still disputed then. Apparently it took many more weather disasters and another virus crisis for the momentum to really tip. From what I read, they say that 2028 was the year when things started to substantially change.

Luckily, a lot of pioneers had already prepared the roadmap to a sustainable life as we live it today. There were some countries who had created something like templates for where we needed to go. They were leading the way and setting the example. But it was only in 2028, when a combination of global draughts and floodings destroyed 45% of the entire crops on the planet and forced societies to slaughter 63% of global life stock, that the transformation gained enough traction to become irreversible.

Still, living conditions kept deteriorating for a long while, because many of the climate tipping points had been passed by then. All the glaciers and ice fields were gone by 2070, the sea level had risen by 15 meters, 65% of global forests that existed in 2020 were destroyed, and weather conditions were more than harsh, to put it mildly. Millions of people died as a consequence of the degradation of the environment and a continuation of severe weather catastrophes.

But then “Drawdown”- the point when levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere started to steadily decline - was reached in 2063. By around 2070 humankind had reached some kind of equilibrium with the planet, where a vast array of technological solutions helped them to survive despite extreme weather conditions, and they could save the rest of nature that was still there. Or in fact it was nature that saved humanity, not the other way around. Nature proved to be so resilient and versatile in its reactions, that whenever there was a tiny space opening up for new and better adjusted life to appear, it did. After every catastrophe, regeneration took place at an unimaginable pace. So when humans finally understood that they should support nature do its course instead of trying to control it, once that happened, then things started to get better. It still took many years to regenerate the planet, and we are far from done; but living conditions are a lot better now, and we are on the right track. Humanity has learned its lessons, I would say.

So this is basically the most fundamental message I can convey to you. Life started to come back, and the climate began to stabilize at the very same moment when people understood that they were part of the planet, part of nature, and not on top of it. That they were on earth to guard, to groom and to sustain it, and not to dominate, to control and to exploit it. The term “planet friendly”, I understand, was coined already when you were around. But it took another 40 – 50 years for people to really deeply realize that they were connected with nature and with everyone else, so that there can be no value and no purpose in anything produced if it leaves the planet in a worse condition than without it. If anything we produce does not make the world better as a whole, then it has no value, regardless of the benefit it may bring to any specific individual or group.

So let me give you an idea of how we live today. Perhaps this can serve as some kind of vision for you and your friends, a positive ideal world that you want to create. Perhaps it can provide a source of confidence and energy whenever you get frustrated with your work. Perhaps it can help you to convince your fellow earth-inhabitants that changing their lifestyle can in fact lead them to a fantastic new life full of joy and fulfillment, that it is something they can look forward to. Perhaps it can stir the imagination of those who live with you in the year 2020 that fighting climate change does not mean going back to some place in the past, but instead it means building a brighter and more promising future.

So first of all we are still organized in a democratic way with a market economy as the fundamental principle of how we produce and distribute goods. But the role of the government has shifted tremendously. At some time our governments realized that in fact money was coming from them, or the people, whom the government represented. Money was not produced by companies or rich people and given to the governments, it was the other way around. Once this was established as common sense, governments could all of a sudden handle the pressure and the lobby groups and the vested interests better, because they knew that they did not depend on their money for creating wealth. It was the other way around.

This shift in paradigms helped governments to enforce regulations which made it a lot less attractive to destroy the planet, and it also made it less attractive to accumulate wealth. They raised taxes on resource consumption and on higher incomes. Digitization helped to enforce these taxes all along the supply chain also to international manufacturers, so that they soon became global standards. On the other hand governments reduced taxes on labor and they subsidized everything needed to fulfill basic needs like housing, food, or healthcare, as long as it was generated in a planet positive way.

In fact by 2048 all OECD countries had started to provide a Universal Basic Income, so that hoarding money and doing destructive things because you needed to “make money” really was not necessary anymore. On top of that they increased spending on the restoration of nature tremendously, and they restricted the ownership and use of land, housing and natural resources through a variety of instruments. Through all this, it just wasn`t that important any more, and it was a lot less desirable “to make money” or to become rich at the expense of our natural resources.

Parallelly almost all governments throughout the world officially abandoned the GDP as a general metric for measuring prosperity. They replaced it with a set of KPI based on the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Quantitative monetary growth from then on became an irrelevant indicator of macroeconomic success. This was an even more obvious step since many economic activities had already detached from the money cycle by then as a consequence of climate change and the repeated breakdown of global supply chains. Urban Farming saw a real revolution in those years as a decentralized and more resilient production of livelihoods for citizens, creating community and solidarity, at the same time removing carbon from the atmosphere. In fact those countries survived our ecological crises better who had had started early to promote decentralized and self-sustaining networks in cities and municipalities, producing and sharing their own food and electricity from regenerative sources.

Abandoning monetary growth as a target, which had been strongly feared by so many, in reality then turned out to be almost no problem. Governments provided loans with no or even negative interest rates, when they believed a project to create value to the common good, and they fueled the economy with government investments whenever it was needed. That was also how we succeeded to preserve and restore the last remainders of our original ecosystems like rainforests, wetlands, boreal forests, grasslands, marine ecosystems, and mountain wildernesses. Regeneration received far more funding. Resource extraction became far more expensive. That way we managed to substantially reduce energy consumption, and to build a 95% regenerative energy system for what we still needed successfully by 2056. Most of the energy in this system was produced in decentralized installations, but some larger solar power plants were also built in the desert countries, which then simultaneously desalinated water and provided livelihoods for areas which would have otherwise been completely uninhabitable by then.

The best part, and that came as a surprise to most historians and social scientists, too, was the amount of solidarity and humanity which was displayed during the great ecological catastrophes between 2025 and 2075. It may have been due to the extreme sufferings during these times that brought out the best in us humans. Or it may have been the changes in our economic system that I described above which helped our mindsets to shift. Or it may have been just the Zeitgeist, the renewal in generations which helped the transformation from an age of competition and control towards an age of collaboration and trust. My personal belief is that it mainly came about because money just wasn`t so important anymore, so there was no point trying to get the best of the other one any longer. More for you was more for me - people knew they would benefit both the most if they worked together and shared. And it was also a lot more motivating and fun. We kept being competitive, but only as some kind of sports event or game, in order to test our skills, to gain respect and recognition, and to challenge each other.

This collaborative thinking was prompted further because all our inventions and resources needed to be shared in order to prevent the ecological collapse. From what I read this started with the second large virus pandemic in 2031, when people demanded that it was treated differently than the Corona virus had in 2020 and 2021: intellectual properties were released, global research cooperation was intensified, and media coverage about the important subjects was no longer hidden behind paywalls, since everybody knew that they were in this together.

The most fundamental and abrupt change, I think, was the agricultural transformation which we witnessed after the great catastrophes in 2028. Luckily there had been so much pioneer work beforehand, so the solutions were all tested and available by then. After we had to kill 63% of our livestock in 2028 since there was just no food or water any longer, we shifted to a largely plant based diet in a huge and unprecedented global wave of change. Technologically produced meat alternatives helped, but many were finally convinced and turned vegan, or almost vegan. That shift enabled us to survive although almost 30% of global agricultural land was destroyed by then. In addition, all of farming was converted to regenerative methods, many of them permaculture. This required a substantial number of additional workforce, but people were not the bottleneck at the time, food was. The first 3-8 years were hard, but then results began to really show. We did not only become a lot more productive then we were before, it was also truly amazing to see how the diversity of nature came back and reestablished its presence. Already by 2040 there was no lobbyist or farmer calling for a return to the industrial agricultural practices of the past. Even the fertilizer companies turned regenerative.

So what can I say, Tim, we had to learn it the hard way, I guess, but we did. CO2 density is now back below 450 ppm, and it is sinking by 3 – 10 ppm each year. It is hard work, and the weather conditions are still challenging, but we have adjusted the way our cities, farmlands, forests, and houses are built, so we are fine. Compared to the peak CO2, which was at 518 ppm in 2063, we have already made great progress.

When I compare our life now to the stories I read about your time, I find it really hard to believe that you put up with that for so long. I don`t even mean the destruction of the environment, when I say that, but everything else. You had all the resources, and you used them so inefficiently, and life must have felt so stressful then, how did you cope with all that?

Nowadays we have no pressure to work at all. We do, because we want to, and because we care. Many of us grow their own food, and nature is all around us. We have a lot of fun together, and we share what we have, because that is, what we are there for. We are just very connected. Some of us work for the high tech companies, some of us work for the municipalities and municipal supplies, and some of us work to teach or to take care of children, the sick or the old. Many of us do some kinds of arts and music. About 25% of us do nature work, both as experts and paid work and – in their own communities – as volunteers. We see life and nature as a gift that is given to us, so we try to give some of that back.

Luckily we have great technology available, and we are really thankful for much of what we inherited from your times. If it wasn’t for that, we would have to work much harder. But there is a great 3D-printer and plenty of energy and mobility available in each community, so there is no scarcity in the products we want - and in fact we don`t want that many, since there is almost no advertising any more. Everything is produced completely circular, of course, there is no waste. When a product breaks down, or we don`t like it any more, we return it to the “3RE”-center (Repair, Reuse, Recycle), and they make sure it will get back into the cycle.

Dear Tim, you asked me for advice. That is hard to give, since I know that you have to make your own experiences and cannot learn from the future. Or in fact, I heard that at your times there was a professor who claimed just that, that people should “learn from the future” by extending their awareness from their eyes, ears and minds to their hearts and on to their will, I believe Otto Scharmer was his name. Perhaps you should all try that.

I am convinced that all the work you are doing is important, it helps to prepare the ground. At some point humankind will be ready for the great shift. The earlier this shift comes, the better it will be, also for me, seven generations down the line. But you cannot force it. The climate crisis will give you the necessary push at some point in time.

You can call it preparation for the climate collapse or mitigation of it, your “to do`s” are the same: Create communities of practice and live as much as possible like you would, if it had already arrived: Regenerative, local, circular, self-sustaining, in solidarity, and with great love and joy for life. Even companies should do that: create value chains which are as local, regenerative, and as circular as possible – then they are the most resilient and the most planet-friendly.

Dear Tim – we both have to go back to our families now. It was great talking to you. Thanks again for every minute you are investing in your planet work. I owe you!