Paul Gilding: Disruption and (Positive) Change

A Wild and Beautiful World

"We need regulation, we need policy, we need community pressure, we need expectations, we need movies, we need poetry...we need all these things that drive us to a certain behavior, because we have got a lot of good sides, and they're not brought out by our current society and our current economic model, they are repressed and destructed by it. There's a great academic story about a guy who went to look for evidence that we behave badly under pressure--the whole dog eat dog market view of the world, when things go bad we're going to be fighting for the food, fighting for shelter, and...all the apocalyptic movies, The Road, etc...and there's a side of us that can behave that way, but his view was that the academic evidence was not just not supportive, it was the opposite--that when we have a wildfire, when we have a flood, when we have a really intense threat to a community, the community comes together, and it comes together because it needs to in order to protect itself, and that's a natural tendency of humanity, not something that we need to be forced into."

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Paul Gilding is the author of The Great Disruption, and has been an activist for over 50 years: a student activist against Apartheid and for Aboriginal land rights, a union organizer, a disarmament organizer, a climate organizer, the Executive Director of Greenpeace International, and much more. In consulting and speeches, he’s also worked to persuade companies and corporate executives to respond appropriately to the climate crisis, and he’s a teacher and researcher at the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership.

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Links:

The Great Disruption

The Great Disruption Has Begun