The System is Failing the Planet: Time for Change Born of Solidarity and Justice

By Mike Hembury — SOAPBOX

There are moments in human history when a paradigm shift occurs, and ideas that have previously been unthinkable emerge into concrete form and simply blow away old models of thinking, along with outdated conceptions of what is possible and what we as a species are capable of achieving. Leonardo came up with his sketches for flying machines in the 16th century, but it took another three hundred years for humans to actually build such contraptions and take to the sky. The same applies of course to social systems. Feudalism, slavery, fascism, soviet stalinism, all have been blown apart by the forces of history, the necessities of economics and popular longing for justice and democracy.

And while we may struggle to achieve a better world, or social justice, or equality, or all of those things, the very least that we should be able to expect from our so-called leaders, the governmental satraps of global capitalism, is that they don’t kill us. Not in the here and now, and not in the future.

So what do we expect of world governments, when a planetary catastrophe of cataclysmic magnitude is hurtling towards us, when the global scientific consensus tells us that we are on a course that will wipe out the biosphere, render the planet…