The Perfect Storm
Living within our means applies as much to keeping our finances in order as it does to living in harmony with our environment.
Jonathon Porritt’s latest reflection and call to action, “Living Within Our Means” talks about the link between ‘Debtonation Day’ (7th August 2007), when the banks stopped lending money to each other and ‘The Methane Timebomb’, an event that was observed a year later when methane (which is twenty times more powerful than CO2 as a greenhouse gas) was causing the waters around the polar circle to bubble.
Living within our means applies as much to keeping our finances in order as it does to living in harmony with our environment (or ’sustainable living’). The only difference is (as we have witnessed over the past few months) that when the money markets go pear shaped, £ billions suddenly appear from virtual government coffers to make good the losses and repair the damage done by the financial sector. The question remains, however, what rabbit the government will pull out of its hat when (and there is no ‘if’ here) the sea level rise necessitates mass population migration to habitable areas? How will it support or assist business-as-usual when the commerce infrastructure is submerged below ten feet of water? As has been pointed out in this column, and is repeated in Jonathan’s latest book, we are hearing a lot of words and good intentions from our political appointees but we are seeing little or no action.
We are left, therefore, with the same alternative; whilst a percentage of us will continue to lobby government in an ever more desperate attempt to displace our responsibility on to others, the rest of us will just have to get on with it. Why some of you continue to ignore this issue was explained, in part, at an Ashridge/InterfaceRAISE workshop I attended this week, entitled “Ordinary heroes wanted”. The same challenges that are facing society are, unsurprisingly, also facing business leaders; that struggle between planet and profit, coloured by the paradigm of the established business leaders who ascended to their positions of power and authority in a period of prosperity and relaxed business principles. The new generation of leaders are fully aware of the need to balance profit with planet and are taking their place in the hierarchy with a business model founded on sustainability; the current generation are not as bad as Fred Goodwin, but lack of engagement in the circumstances that affect the medium and long term future of your business is insupportable and inexcusable.
There is a perfect storm coming. It is shaping itself around our commercial as well as our environmental activity and inactivity. It will lead to a business world that no longer supports the outcomes of excess or negligence… and there will no longer be a Fred Goodwin payout in the pot.
And finally, if we don’t act now, today, reflect on this; Jonathon Porritt states in his book “Do we really want to be remembered as the generation that managed to rescue the global banking system even as we allowed the natural world to collapse around us?”. There is a real possibility, at the extreme end of the scale of inactivity and abdication of responsibility that there may actually not be anyone left to remember us… period.
It’s not called a perfect storm for nothing.
