Take a look at your hands. Ten fingers attached to two palms…each with unique functions, capable of moving individually or in concert with each other. Think of each of us as the fingers and our Earth as the palms.
Now consider our independence…our individual liberty…our inalienable right to advance our own interests. How we express our liberty through individual choices shape the life we live, the careers we have, and the families we form. But are we actually independent?
Most of us don’t produce our food, or build our homes, or provide the protection that secures ourselves and our loved ones. All of us relied on others to provide the education and skill development necessary to succeed in the vocations of our choice. Still others provided the roads, highways, bridges, water systems, electric grid systems, and communications systems necessary to function in a modern society. In fact, as individuals we contribute very little to the components that provide for our living conditions. Yet we still reserve upon ourselves the right to advance our own self-interest, even to the detriment of the people and resources we rely on to live.
We have one planet that produces and replenishes a finite amount of resources. All of us rely on these resources to provide the living conditions we enjoy. Under our current economy, we access these finite resources based on the amount of money we possess. For those few people who possess enormous amounts of money, control over the lion’s share of our global resources are in their hands. They alone retain the right to exhaust these resources or utilize them in a sustainable way. We are experiencing their decision playing out in the Climate change debate.
The question for the rest of us is simple: If global temperatures rise as predicted, unabated by fossil fuel utilization, can life as we know it exist for long? Globally confirmed scientific observations say no. Yet the reason scientific evidence is not determining our only rational choice is because fortunes built on the use of fossil fuels are being deployed to raise doubt about climate change. This illuminates the danger of self-interest. Does it make sense to define individual liberty within the context of self-interest when our preservation relies on advancing our common interest? The answer is obvious when you look at your hands again. Can the fingers survive without the palms?