As the world grapples with the full-blown threat of global recession, as China's gargantuan property market faces imminent collapse, when local worker shortages are being felt everywhere and in everything all at once, and the clear and present (and visible) danger of climate change resoundingly self-advocating in a northern hemisphere summer of dried up river beds and flooding clearing whole provinces in vulnerable nations, what can a return to those values that embody the virtues of 'holding on' and 'preserving' and 'conserving' look like in these times of rapid and vicious change?
Can we refuse to let in the immediately available and desperately needed labour of the third-world because we're worried about 'our' local workers who will have to 'compete' in a job market that is experiencing its bottom actually falling out in real-time?
Can we continue to allow the multi-national fossil fuel merchants of death to covet and exploit the vast planetary 'reserves' of raw materials whose ongoing use decrease our ability day-by-day to continue to live on this planet?
Can we continue to prop up neo-fascist movements, neo-apartheid regimes, genocidal maniacs (who became national leaders in a previous paroxysm of 'conservative' blood-letting), perpetual-growth evangelists, 'gig' and 'crypto' economy pseudo-intellectuals, and all the people around us who are apprehensive of 'change'?
There is no time but the present for a final, loud, expulsion of any last remnants of nostalgia we might have once had for the 'way things once were'. That's what's led us to where we are here and now and, therefore, cannot have been so 'good' anyway.
It's time to burn our bridges with the past and move forward to a renewable energy future focused only on social justice outcomes for the poorest of the poor first and foremost, and then, via late-stage capacity-building, work our way up to the most privileged amongst us.
There is no other way past this miasma of regret.
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