Adapting to differences exceeds of imaginative capacities

Adapting to differences brought upon by our changing climate demand a lifestyle so different that understanding the resultant reality pretty much exceeds our imaginative capacities.

Public transit will play a
key role in adapting to
climate change.

The journey from here to there will be both troubling and tumultuous and adaptation is something we need to begin now and no matter what it is we do, it will not be enough.

The idea that we should work fewer hours is little more than a step in the appropriate direction, for alone it means little, but it simply a step and whatever the journey, it begins with the first step.

Working just Four-Hours a Day is as an idea totally inadequate as our response to dilemmas brought upon us by climate change need differences to our lifestyle that reach deeper our way of living that we can comprehend.

To have any serious impact on what is causing our climate to change we need to dethrone the economy, extract it from within our political lives and return it to being nothing more than a tool; a simple tool that is little more than a recording process and method of exchanging promises among people simply going about the normal business of living.

Once upon a time countries had a process in which all debts were cancelled and everyone reverted to a blank slate. I don’t claim to understand the dynamics of it and although it seems like a good idea it is absolutely certain that today the world’s rent-takers would corrupt the process.

Apologies for the digression, the Four-Hour Work Day, no overtime, no double time, would not apply to privately owned businesses with four or fewer employees, public institutions, such as hospitals, but would include our armed services.

How does it work? I don’t know, but I do know that if we are serious about adapting to climate change and its rather trying implications, we need to build resilience in our communities and resilience evolves from close-knit communities in which that have most everything needed to live contentedly within an easy walk or a short cycling distance.

Should we need to travel any further, our public transit system should be such that we can move easily and conveniently around our towns and cities. The car should be despatched to the rubbish, or at least recycled.

The Four-Hour Work Day is not the answer, but it is a conversation we should be having.

Mitt Romney's plan is a 'suicide note"

The idea of the Four-Hour Work Day would be an anathema to the like of US presidential candidate, Mitt Romney.

US presidential candidate,
Mitt Romney.

In fact such a thought would be abhorrent to most anyone indoctrinated by our growth-based economy and the developed world’s way of life.

The embrace of a Four-Hour Work Day demands a change in mindset that few of us can comprehend, not want to comprehend for the simple thought of the idea can illicit panic, an almost impulsive grab to hold onto what we have.

The world’s climate is, because of human intervention, bolting out of control – “bolting” may seem like an extreme claim until we consider the changes that now threaten humanity have occurred over about the last 200 years and the world itself is about 13 billion years old.

Without the warming we have caused, the world would have been slowly sliding into a rather cool stage, but the reverse is happening, the world is getting warmed and our weather quite different from the near ideal conditions humanity has enjoyed almost from when they first came down from the trees.

The trouble for humanity began, oddly when we came to understand how to cultivate and harvest food.

The resultant security of food stocks brought with it the exponential growth of human numbers and then we further entrenched our place on earth with the understanding of how we could exploit fossil fuels (ancient sunlight) enabling the supplementation of human energy.

With this seemingly free energy and a rich and a growing food supply, human numbers continued to burgeon, bringing bonuses for those who understood how to exploit that situation and so while the population grew “fatter”, so did their wallets.

The cacophony of claims and counter claims around the present US presidential campaign has a focus on the economy, jobs and energy, but appears to be saying little , or nothing, about how the US, and the world population, can prepare for a world which will be entirely different.

Pandering to populous views, Republican candidate, Mitt Romney, has promised energy independence for America by 2020.

His deluded comments what science is telling us, and have been for years, and in their story headed: “Mitt Romney's Disastrous EnergyPlan”, Rolling Stone magazine has described his plan as a “suicide note”.

The idea of a Four-Hour Work Day would rid us of the Romney suicide note and replace it with survivable, but different and difficult times; not resolving what’s ahead, but bringing-on circumstances which we might endure.

Life is fine just the way it is, but. . . . .!

I like life just the way it is.

Working fewer hours is integral
to responding to climate change.

Sadly, it is not likely to change, it is going to change!

The prognosis for humanity’s future is less than encouraging as circumstances prompted by our consumptive behaviours collide drawing us little by little and quicker and quicker toward the abyss.

Even if we stopped consuming, stopped burning fossil fuels and stopped living the wasteful life typical of the world’s developed countries right now, we are still committed to a global increase in temperatures of at least two degrees and to soar past carbon dioxide content in the earth’s atmosphere of 400 parts per million (ppm).

Not long ago it was considered that the point of no return was 350ppm and now we are at about 398ppm and rogue weather events all around the world suggest the 350ppm warning was timely.

The shift to a Four-Hour Work Day brings societal complications difficult to explain and necessitates change to our way of living that almost exceed, or do exceed, our understanding.

Those complications, it must be said, are miniscule compared to what is ahead is we do not step away from out consumptive behaviours.

The idea of working fewer hours is hugely inadequate in terms of responding to the implications settling upon earth because of our changing climate, but if nothing more, it is an acknowledgement that we must do something.

The implications of working fewer hours is simple – we will earn less money and so be able to consume less and subsequently use less of everything, especially energy, most of which is generated by burning fossil fuels.

A working day of just four hours contradicts everything the neo-liberals believe in and rather than having people working fewer hours, they would prefer to see work based on a 24-hour cycle, seven days a week.

Such a concept will unquestionable disrupt earth’s ecology and reduce our future to just decades rather than millennia.

We need to discuss working hours

The Spanish flag.

The idea of working just four-hours a day, no overtime, no double shifts, will not resolve employment questions, but certainly initiate a much needed discussion.

A story in the Melbourne Age headed: Generation Lost?, discusses what is happening in Europe, particularly Spain; a situation that has evolved for a complex set of reasons, but among them the fact that general intent has been about seeing society locked into a working week of about 35 hours.

We need to reimagine our society, rethink how it operates and reengineer it operate just as successfully, but obviously with different aims, and the ensure people life lives that are both contented and happy and free from the menace that the present addiction to the economic world brings.

A generation will never be lost if our society is structured differently and the emphasis is not on accumulation, rather the betterment of friends and neighbours.

The Four-Hour Work Day brings with it through what it is a marked jump in leisure time and although under the present paradigm that appears wasteful in the extreme, in a freshly engineered society that will allow for purposeful leisure time in which people could grow their own food, work and share their lives, and skills, with neighbours.

Workking fewer hours is just the first step

The Four-Hour Work Day is just the first step in preparing us to cope with unimaginable changes that will settle upon the world as our climate becomes increasingly variable.

Beyond significantly reducing our near obscene use of fossil fuel powered energy and enabling the abatement of climate change, the idea of the Four-Hour Work Day will help break the economic choke-hold corporations presently have on the world.

Working four-hours a day in the traditional sense, no overtime, no double shifts, except for privately owned businesses of four or less people, will change existing paradigms to the extent that communities will be re-invigorated and neighbourhoods will have new life breathed into them.

Our communities of the next generation will inevitably need resilience and as people will be able to spend more purposeful time in them and subsequently they will be able to “work” to help build that resilience in their neighbourhood.

Understanding and adapting to a shorter working day demands a whole new mindset; a mindset from which the unfolding calamities remove choice, leaving us no option but to move in that direction.

Led by the promise of a better life, a promise that for a minority of the world’s population  has been realised, but one which has brought with it an inequality that it obvious in every community, should you care to look around.

The difficulties of moving to the Four-Hour Work Day and manifest and frankly I have no clear answers, but I do have faith in the innovative and creative abilities of people.

The present state of our exhausted world and the exponential growth of our numbers leave us with no option but to at least begin the conversation about how we lead and live a life more in keeping with available resources.