A better world is possible

I haven’t really changed since I was in the sixth form. I was an idealist then with a passion for justice. I still am. I didn’t know what to do or how. I’ve been finding out ever since. After working in businesses for a long time I am pragmatic and practical as well as idealistic. Satish Kumar says: 'It’s time to give idealism a chance.'

I know what it is like on the ground in a poor country. I worked in Jamaica for over five years and revisited several times recently.

I get angry. That is what drives me to write and campaign. I got angry after my I last visit to Jamaica. As a guest speaker at a conference, I was put up in an affluent fortress-style hotel beside the beautiful Caribbean. Inside it could have been anywhere in USA. A waiter said of his American customers: 'They are innocents'. Innocent and unaware we may be, but that does not mean we are not responsible. Back home, I published three articles about my visit and started a new book about the global system that bears down on counties like Jamaica. 

Now I am angry again. Over the past thirty years we have been subject to a giant con. The consumer society has made us no happier. It has made a growing elite of super rich, irresponsible power hungry people immensely richer at the expense of the vast majority and taken us all to the brink of disaster. Our governments were warned for years, but they did not listen.

Why are we, 6.7bn people, so quiescent? Why do we put up with it?  Why don’t we demand more than this? Why don’t we fully inform ourselves from intelligent sources and take action? Many of us in the North are comfortable, but we are exploited, brainwashed, misinformed and disempowered. It’s time to be idealists, not cynics, emancipate ourselves and create a peaceful revolution.

We face the biggest challenge in our history. Climate change is just one symptom of our failure to live in harmony with the earth and all life on it, including each other. These 5 big issues are inseparably linked:

• Climate change – possibly out of control and irreversible with only 75 months before we reach a tipping point
• Peak everything – not just Peak Oil
• We are destroying the ecosystem on which all life depends, poisoning the air all creatures breathe, the water of which life is made and the earth
• Poverty and economic injustice
• Violence, war, terrorism and the threat of nuclear annihilation

We need to transform the system, rather than trying to fix it. We need to change the whole system for the benefit all. We need far more representative and inclusive democracy from local to global levels. Above all we need the hope and inspiration of a great new endeavour combined with practical action. Most people know there is something deeply wrong, have a pretty good idea what it is and have had enough. They need to know that there are alternatives to an unsustainable, unjust system, fuelled by debt money and perverse taxation. Alternatives that focus on the well-being of all are offered in my new book, A Better World is Possible.

A Better World is Possible is a handbook for people who want to inform themselves and influence the outcome of UN Climate Summit COP 16 in Cancun, Mexico starting 29 November and the critically important decisions UK’s new Coalition Government and other governments are taking. It is available now to download as a free PDF at my website. Next year it will be published by O-Books. Key Campaigns for system change is at the end of the final chapter, and can be downloaded for free here.

I hope that you'll join me in creating a 'benign virus' with this information. Please spread the book around the world so that it reaches many thousands of people. That’s my dream! Use your blogs, networks, newsletters, websites, social networks, campaigning organisations you support or any which way to get the message out there.