To our leaders
As a leader at the very highest level, I can only assume that it is with a great pride and a sense of responsibility that you take on your duties to help and serve those who have elected you. With thoughts going to the current climate changes, I assume there is most likely a feeling of urgency to be able to achieve real change and to move our society towards true sustainability. After all – the climate change will affect you as leaders personally just as much as it will affect everyone else.
To be able to reach the highest level of leadership is never an individual achievement. It requires teamwork and dedication from many others. As such, the voice of a leader is seldom only his or her own, but instead that of honouring to team commitments.
In our lives, we need to make decisions and changes we fear – because they provide the only resolve to the problems we are faced with. As John F Kennedy said in his address at Rise University in 1962, “We choose to …. do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard”. The people of our world are speaking up – but many feel their voices are not being heard. The required change demands funding the world is unable to provide. We have reached far enough in our technological advancements to achieve the required changes, but our system of monetary trade prevents it from being realized. As worshipers of a monetary faith, we are blindly following its course into our own demise and threatening our very own existence.
Just as yourselves, I hear and read in the media of the stark warnings of our current environmental path from researchers, institutes, organisations, leaders, and environmentalists. I hear people wanting change to save our species. But I also hear despair and disbelief in our leader’s ability to actually do something that will redirect us from our current path.
As our leaders, you are facing the impossible task of changing the legislation affecting our environmental footprint without adding the cost of this change to your citizens. The corporate elite are no better off, as they must take an ethical responsibility whilst bearing their corporate and legal responsibility to the shareholders. It is an equation that will not hold for the environment.
Moving forward will undeniably demand creative thinking to find solutions that work. But more so, it will be important to look at what we can do, not only for ourselves within our own sovereign borders, but how we can provide help to others. The climate has no fixed borders. What is climate changing within one sovereign border will directly or indirectly affect the climate inside of all others.
