Want to Fix the Climate? First, We Have to Change Everything

The Next System is a project that seeks to disrupt or replace our traditional institutions for creating progressive change.  Its backers include Greenpeace President Annie Leonard, clean energy champion Van Jones, United Steelworkers President Leo Gerard, climate activist (and Grist board member) Bill McKibben, and Zipcar co-founder Robin Chase, and hundreds of others.

What the Next System will actually achieve remains to be seen.  For now, there’s a website and a declaration.  Here’s an excerpt:

Today’s political economic system is not programmed to secure the wellbeing of people, place and planet.  Instead, its priorities are corporate profits, the growth of GDP, and the projection of national power.  If we are to address the manifold challenges we face in a serious way, we need to think through and then build a new political economy that takes us beyond the current system that is failing all around us.  However difficult the task, however long it may take, systemic problems require systemic solutions.

Helping head this off is the historian and political economist Gar Alperovitz, 78, former legislative aide to Sen. Gaylord Nelson, who helped spur Earth Day into reality in the late 1960s.   Alperovitz was around for that and also the halcyon era of the 1960s and ’70s when Congress was able to pass effective civil rights and environmental legislation.  More recently, he helped start the Democracy Collaborative, “a research center dedicated to the pursuit of democratic renewal, increased civic participation, and community revitalization.”

With the Next System, Alperovitz is hoping to shepherd discussions around what new systems and institutions can be created to help heal what political and corporate systems have desecrated.  He also seeks to elevate the new systems that are already in place but could use some scaling up.

Read more at Want to Fix the Climate?  First, We Have to Change Everything