Big change coming

Transitioning from a world order that’s destroying the planet to one that preserves it will be difficult, if not tragic. Resistance to change is daunting. To create the current world order of corporate industrial marketing, 18th to 20th century entrepreneurial agents employed revolution, war, and imperialism to break the resistance of ruling kings and nobility, archaic empires and colonial rebels. Uneven industrial and imperial development produced two world wars to determine the global balance of power; and differences between Smithian and Marxian advocates of industrial production led to the Cold War. The current war on terror seeks to extinguish remaining patches of resistance.

As the current world order prospered, its science and technology raised Earth’s population from 1 billion to 7.7 billion, ravished the ecosystem and created global warming that poses an existential threat to life on the planet. For overviews of the science and early failed reform efforts, see Bill McKibben, The End of Nature; David Wallace-Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth; and Nathaniel Rich, Losing Earth.

Efforts to protect the environment through regulation provoked inevitable cultural resistance, so Donald Trump has blocked further efforts. His supporters seek American production free of restrictions, while his detractors seek to forge a sustainable world order. As philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel observed, tragedy is a struggle not between right and wrong, but between right and right. Yet the future is bringing massive cultural change, which will come either as constructive effort to avoid ecological collapse or as crushing dystopia … or both. DAVID SIXBEY Flippin