When Tom Friedman – famous tout-er of globalization – uses his columns to challenge the growth paradigm, you know the world is changing. He quotes here two long time prophets (back a few years ago they called them Cassandras) of coming climate change, Joe Romm and Paul Gilding) and asserts that 2008 will be seen at the beginning of the “Great Disruption” when “Mother Nature and Father Greed have hit the wall at once”. When digging in to the update of YOUR MONEY OR YOUR LIFE a year ago, I was amazed at how much we already were “on the money” about the links between eonomic growth and ecological decline. Reporters now ask meif I’m watching the “great disruption” with a bit of an “I told you so” smirk. Not at all. We had hoped to turn the tide, of course. Short of that, we’d hoped to assure that as many people as possible were prepared with savings. Now that the unraveling is going on, though, my real hope is that every one of us retools our lives, the way Gilding says we will do collectively, to be more resource efficient. An ever higher joy to stuff ratio.
How are the changes your are being “forced” to make making life more interesting or richer? Let us know. Write a comment. Email us. Sign up for the newsletter.