Meltdown, Part One

A banker colleague tells me banks are going broke because there was too much money floating around. Apparently new middle classes in China and India are great savers and all these savings had to go somewhere. They went via the United States to dubious borrowers at sub-prime rates. The lenders would then package these and onsell them in the money market version of musical chairs on steroids.

So extra money flowing from the East causes a financial tsunami that sinks banks from Manhattan to Iceland. Massive bailouts are hurriedly assembled, stock exchanges are battered and Google shows 449,000 hits for ‘market meltdown'.

Is the chaos over, or has it just begun?

reasons behind reasons

The middle classes in China and India are developing through growing global demand for low cost goods and services. More consumers are consuming more things at an accelerating rate.

This rapidly increasing consumption is also throwing more carbon emissions into the atmosphere, causing climate change. We could dismiss the financial tsunami and global warming as unrelated outcomes, or we could consider the implications of Chaos Theory, the Gaia Hypothesis, quantum mechanics and ancient Eastern philosophies.

Fritjov Capra is a research physicist who believes that the latest advances in his discipline are closer to the holistic nature of Eastern religions than the reductionist school of Descartes that says everything should be studied in parts to understand the whole.

In 'The Tao of Physics' (first published in 1975), Capra demonstrates how physics and metaphysics are coming together. Subsequent research in quantum mechanics showing that an experiment and its measuring apparatus are inextricably entangled, support the holistic view.

Chemist James Lovelock formulated the Gaia Hypotheses after work with NASA to predict the likelihood of life on Mars. The hypothesis describes earth as a single self-regulating mechanism devoted to preserving life in its myriad forms. In the 30 years since, his ideas have moved from radical to mainstream and in 2006 he wrote 'The Revenge of Gaia,' saying that mankind has weakened the earth's capacity to sustain life in all its forms and so the earth is fighting back. We have become a cancer on the planet.

So is it chemotherapy, radical surgery, or death?

reacting to feedback

If we listen to Gaia (the name comes from the Greek Earth Goddess), the financial meltdown is a harbinger of environmental meltdown. It is also a warning and a self-correcting mechanism.

If we slide into a global recession, less commodities will be mined, less products made and consumed, less carbon emitted. Gaia will have a breathing space whilst our best and brightest figure out our carbon-free future.

But if we continue to treat symptoms rather than causes, to disguise the pimple rather than change our eating habits, we will fly in the face of Mother Earth, ignoring her desperate warnings.

We live in an unsustainable world. The vast majority of global politicians belong to the quick-fix school. Let's bail out a bank today, an insurance company tomorrow, don't worry voter, we know what we're doing, for the next couple of years at least.

There have been half a dozen great extinctions since the earth began - and the earth has carried on. Let us learn from pre-history.

fate & destiny

Almost 24 years ago I broke my neck in a car accident in the Namib Desert. I became a quadriplegic - no more running on beaches, hiking in mountains. That is my fate. My destiny is how I reacted. For a year after I left hospital, anger, fear and hurt manifested themselves in drink and drugs.

Then I cleaned up my act and reconstructed my life. In some ways it is more restricted than it was, in many other ways far richer.

Our fate is global warming. Our destiny, after initial disbelief, dismissal, anger and hurt, is how we deal with it.

We have the power and imagination. We have the warning signs. We need to deeply understand the effect of those butterfly wings. Then Meltdown Part One will not have a sequel.

"An holistic organisation consists of parts, but it is more than the sum of its parts, and if these parts are taken to pieces the organism is destroyed and cannot be reconstituted by again putting together the severed parts... A whole, which is more than the sum of its parts, has something internal, some inwardness of structure and function, some specific inner relations, some internality of character or nature, which constitutes that more."

-- Jan Christiaan Smuts "Holism & Evolution" MacMillan, London (1926)

*Mike Freedman is founder of Freedthinkers, a strategic development think tank and branding organisation which has offices in Johannesburg and Cape Town and has as its brand promise "Extraordinary Thinking Experiences". Email him at mike@freedthinkers.com