Empire

The human empire has one special weapon, the intellect; we have the ability to review the situation and design our own life style. We had to discover how exploiting resources always ends in tears. Now that that particular penny has dropped we don’t do ‘exploitation’ and hopefully we can move on to build respect. So far we’ve crapped in our own nest and that needs to be reversed. Our attitude needs to shift from the grab-what-you-can, bargain basement mentality to respect. Up to now most ventures didn’t operate on respecting the resource. In the grabbing came the damage. But the element of delusion was always strong, that we were making progress, and now that bubble has burst. The exploited-world is blowing up in our face.
If we are going to change, surely any change must include respecting each other more (as well as respecting the rights of non humans). Once that ‘attitude’ is set in place the really interesting work of redesigning our world can start - designing a more sustainable way of feeding, sheltering and warming ourselves without rape, pillage, exploitation or empire-building.