Today, because of the economic system that dominates our planet, we seem to stumble from one disaster to another, from one crisis to the next. Our lords and masters' only concern is maintaining their power, their corporate buddies only concern is the next end of year balance sheet, all else is pushed aside. The planet and all its life forms, including us, are sacrificed to these ends. With this sort of prevailing thought, where does that leave our kids and grand kids? Are we prepared to allow this to continue, knowing that we are on a road to total destruction, that could be avoided, how long will we sit and watch vandals destroy our home?
Our long term plan is like our short term plan, only longer.
Humanity should think about developing a plan longer than
the next election cycle. We don't need 5 year plans, we need 5,000
year plans. Preferably two of them.
A solid 10,000 year
plan would go a long way toward figuring out where we want to go with
this petri dish known as Earth. I love the idea of thinking ahead 7
generations, but how about extending that to 500? Supposedly we are
the smartest creatures on Earth (and the known Universe according to
some), so we should be able to get our big brains together and do
this thing.
In order to reduce the chance of repeating the
thousands of years of blind bumbling that we have been experiencing
so far, we should come up with an overall plan for humans (and
everything else) on our shared petri-planet home. Surely, considering
the importance of my proposal, we can get some consensus towards a
set of common goals and outcomes.
Like survival at first,
looking at our increasingly grim short term prospects.
Then we can proceed from there and start planning for things like
ridding the environment of human-created radiation produced during
our misguided experiment with nuclear energy. That alone is a project
that will take thousands of years. We should have one of those
already, shouldn't we?
Next in The Big Plan we can look
out over the next few hundred years. Where do we see ourselves as a
species? What do we want to achieve in this time? I for one would
like to see something more substantial than the planet's first
trillionare.
A lot can happen in one year, let alone a
hundred or a thousand. We should have a plan to help direct where we
are going. Many of us can imagine a better world, and if we can
imagine it, we can achieve it. We can put it in the plan.
As an ex-teacher I know the importance and the challenges of
planning. It will take a different way of thinking to extend our
imaginations past the next election, or our own brief existence. But
we do care about our kids, don't we? And their kids? And theirs? And
so on all the way up the line?
We have already had many
thousands of years to get this thing right, and it feels like we
aren't quite there yet. Let's get The Big Plan started.
How do you see humanity developing over 10,000 years? The glorious
possibilities are endless.
Of course if we are to embark on that 10,000 year plan, the first step must be to completely get rid of capitalism, in all its destructive and ugly forms.
Visit ann arky's home at
www.radicalglasgow.me.uk