Our climate urgently needs help.
A seemingly endless variety of adaptation policies have been espoused, but all with some deviations, aim at the maintenance of contemporary life.
The way we have lived for the past two centuries, and in particularly the last one hundred years, has seen our excessive demands on the natural world trigger changes in the world’s climate.
Conversations about sustainability are misleading and largely fatuous as they make no genuine allowance for the environment, considering it to be little more than an extension of our economy.
Naturally, the economy is simply a sub-set of the natural world.
Earth’s human population now exceeds seven billion and the consumptive demand is such that the planet’s finite resources and natural sinks are being taxed alarmingly.
Our present way of living is simply worsening the difficulties and we urgently need top-down changes to encourage us to consume less, use less energy and slow the depletion of the world’s resources.
Courageous legislation is needed to make us all poorer and so structurally unable to consume at our present alarming rate and to do that we all need to be working a Four-Hour Day, no overtime and no double shifts.
Such a top-down instigated chance will force upon us the “five-minute life” – that means that most everything that is important in our day-to-day lives is with a five minute walking or cycling radius.
And so to be poorer, at least in the traditionally understood financial sense, we need to be working a four-hour day.
Our communities, however, would not be poorer for as we were able to spend more time in them working to make them friendlier, more resilient and so more able to endure and adapt to the certain changes they will encounter as climate change begins to bit.
What follows are the contents of a poster about the four-hour day prepared for the 2012 Climate Adaptation Conference staged in June by the Australia's National Climate Change Adaptation Research Facility (NCCARF).
 |
| The Four-Hour Work Day poster as displayed at the annual National Climate Change Adaptation Research Facility. |
The size of the graphic makes it rather difficult, probably impossible
to read the small print, words, and so here they are:
People are social animals who need a friendly affiliation
with their fellows, and beyond that, they equally need a sense of purpose to
feel fulfilled.
Aligned with our fellows and having that sense of purpose,
whatever that might be, we are fundamentally psychologically intact and so
alive with contentment.
That purpose, however, has been derailed in the past few
centuries and the broad human insistence of growth and so the subsequent
consumption has seen us plunder the earth’s finite resources, leaving us with a
world limping toward catastrophic difficulties.
Work, in its modern understanding, has made a minority of
the seven billion people on earth rich beyond imagination, but left the
majority poor, equally beyond imagination, and critically created a world with
severe difficulties.
Most people in the developed world are simply too rich and
consume too much, use too much energy and subsequently create waste at a tempo
faster than the absorption rates of the world’s natural sinks. The natural
world and its species, from microscopic to mammoth, including us, is collapsing
into a distressing dystopia.
In addressing that emerging dystopia, our aim should be at
least two-fold – that is make the wealthy less so and the poor among us more
comfortable, but in concert with that strengthening neighbourhoods, communities,
towns, societies and society broadly.
A Four-Hour Work Day would allow for
the maintenance of businesses, to some degree, and then allow people time
people to bond within their respective neighbourhoods to make them stronger and
so more resilient, ensuring they can endure and successfully absorb the
physical and social shocks of a decidedly different future.
A four-hour work day is precisely that; no overtime and no
double shifts, demanding that our journey to work be within the five-minute
life, meaning that most all matters important on a day-to-day basis (shopping,
work, leisure, basic government service and community activities) are within an
energy-conserving five minute walk or cycling radius.
Being effectively financially poorer and yet incredibly
time-rich, people will be able to invest that “new” time into getting to know
their neighbours, building stronger neighbourhoods, enriching them through
simply being there more often and so building in a new level of resilience.
A time-rich population would allow individuals to lead a
more considered life and subsequently play a vital and critical role in
building democracy. More than 2000 years ago Aristotle noted that leisure was a
necessary condition in the politics of a good society – the Four-Hour
Work Day would allow that leisure.
A natural consequence of the four-hour day would be a
significant drop in the financial wealth, equating with a marked fall in our
consumptive habits which would be, by default, a natural climate adaption
strategy.
Happiness or contentment is presently measured by the
accumulation of ego-boosting goods, when endless psychological research
illustrates, clearly, that the much sought happiness arrives once people are
free of the resource/consumption/growth
driven philosophy that permeates society.
The switch to
a Four-Hour Work Day demands top-down legislative change,
combined with a broad and sweeping educative program aimed at helping people
understand that happiness and contentment is not to be found in adherence to
corporate ideals; ideals that have proliferated the world’s communities and are
contrary to climate adaptation needs; rather the sought status of happiness and
contentment comes from creating a strong, resilient and flexible neighbourhood,
community and society.
More information about the Four-Hour Work Day can be
found at http://fewerhours.blogspot.com.au/,
or by contacting the author, Robert Mclean, via email at: robed@sheppnews.com.au.
