Christmas and HOME
We think HOME and Christmas fit together.
We believe 2 statements of the film to be irrefutable, emotionally as well as concerning its message:
Statement 1: Never before anyone of us had so much influence as today.
Only in the last 50 years our CO2 emissions and environmental destruction have increased exponentially. We are the generation that has initiated that strange phenomenon, and in an exponential process each participant starts his own avalanche.
Corollaries
Formulation a: The responsibility of every member of the population has reached its absolute maximum.
Formulation b: No average human being of earlier generations ever had so much influence.
Historical background of that phenomenon is Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal and the mass market: Instead of in an authoritarian top down approach (like in state capitalism) a self-organized process has been set in motion. The driving agent is money. The amount of money a person can acquire depends on the type and quantity of his work. So, our work determines how much money we get and spend, i.e. pump through society.
Coupling: Presently there is a strong coupling between the money each of us pumps through society and our CO2 production. Today mass market means mass CO2 production.
Question: At what costs could we sufficiently decouple mass employment and mass CO2 production?
(*) The German EPA: In order to reduce by the year 2020 our annual CO2 production to 40% of our 1990 level each of us needs to pay one extra Euro per day
(www.acamedia.info/sciences/sciliterature/globalw/reference/index.htm#mueschen).
(*) IPCC: In order to keep the temperature rise below 2 degrees Celsius each of us needs to spend less than 3 $ per day.
(Table SPM.4: Estimated global macro-economic costs in 2030a) for least-cost trajectories towards different long-term stabilization levels, www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/wg3/ar4-wg3-spm.pdf).
Statement 2: The engine of life is linkage. Sharing is the main mechanism.
(a) Our exponential destruction of the world will end. Important question: What will be the final extent of the destruction.
(HOME: The riddle of the Easter Islands is not the huge statues. It is: Why didn't the inhabitants stop destroying their habitat and society earlier?)
(b) Love of and joy about the creation will probably replace money as the driving force of our self-organization. These properties governed some societies in the past, until they were eventually replaced by mass consumption (meaning: mass CO2 production)
Jochen and Marianne
December 2009
CD-Einlage:
Hansaviertel Berlin:
Eternit-Haus (Architekt: Paul Baumgarten)
Version: 16.1.2014
Address of this page
Home
Jochen Gruber