Who owns the world?

Again, its been a long time since my last blog entry here, but I hope to start updating it more often now as I have been studying a lot of issues about the state of the planet that I'd like to share. One common view I often meet is that the moment you start caring about the environment and how we manage our planets resources, you are either a "doomer" or an "environmentalist" or just "annoying". Basically if you start questioning the status quo, then you are an outsider and trouble maker in many peoples view. And indeed, if you look into the views of many environmentalists they are basically questioning how we manage resources, and since the current civilization is built on exploitation of these resources for the free markets, banks and money - anyone that opposes this view is basically a dissident.

The brilliantly reflected Noam Chomsky recently had a talk at The University of Massachusetts with the title "Who owns the world?" - Indeed, who does own it? The people born into it? No not really, its really owned by a select elite and inherited through birth right. Much like kings of feudal times, your rights to the worlds resources is based on who your parents are. This is basically evolution taken to another level, the species who was able to get enough for themselves survived, the ones that didn't would die out. Well, our brains also have evolved ideas like "empathy" and "compassion" and "care for others" as well as the idea of socialism and sharing. The western free market world has evolved into that doesn't really care much for ideas around socialism, and often compares them to communism run by brutal and mad state leaders - quite possibly rightfully so due to our past experience. It was under our belief that if we give the people full freedom through democracy and free markets - the best solutions would come to the people.

You cant argue that as a peaceful society, democracy generally has better track record than many other government forms. But the planet we live on wouldn't really agree. With freedom comes great responsibility into making wise choices about how we govern our resources. And to be frank, since the dawn of industrialism, we haven't been been very nice to our planet. The ever increasing focus on profits and short term thinking is basically wreaking havoc to the composition of our biosphere, seas, freshwater and serious resource depletion. At the current pace of mismanagement its looking rather bleak for the coming generation. I believe we owe them better - and seriously need to teach our children a better way than what we have been doing for the past 100 years.

I leave you this time with a link to the Noam Chomsky talk, a person who's views will certainly try to shake you out of your shell a bit - as we all need to start facing the realities (and stop watching silly reality shows which is so far from reality as it could be).