It is said that every system is perfectly designed to achieve the results it gets.
If so, then our current system seems perfectly designed to push us beyond planetary boundaries in a variety of Earth systems, while creating widespread and worsening inequality.
This presents a massive threat to the well-being of current and future generations.
For the past few weeks, I have been exploring the underlying core values that drive many of our systems, institutions and choices.
When I look at the state of the world today, and in particular our relationship with nature and with each other, it is clear we are being driven by a set of core values that are not fit for purpose in the 21st century.
And I have suggested a set of core values that are compatible with ensuring a healthy, just and sustainable future for all, while protecting and restoring the planet’s vital systems.
All well and good, but how do we bring about these massive and rapid value shifts? How do we, as the late Will Steffen put it, reach social tipping points before we reach ecological ones?
One thing for sure, there isn’t an app for that! But I do have some thoughts.
I spent a chunk of my time in the early 1980s in the fight against the tobacco industry. The social tipping point for smoking came when smoking came to be seen as an abuse of the rights of non-smokers. So using rights-based arguments could be powerful.
There have been calls for the recognition of the right to a healthy environment. Indeed, B.C.’s own David Boyd, as UN Special Rapporteur on human rights and the environment, championed this through the UN, with the General Assembly recognizing in 2022 that a clean, healthy and sustainable environment is a human right.
Then there are the rights of future generations to a healthy environment. Several court cases around the world have successfully argued that case with respect to government failures to slow or stop greenhouse gas emissions, while the Welsh National Assembly passed a Wellbeing of Future Generations Act and created a commissioner to oversee it.
Beyond that, we need to consider the right of nature and of other species to exist. A number of countries around the world have recognized land and water systems as persons (for example, the Whanganui River and Te Urewera in Aotearoa New Zealand). After all, if corporations can be considered persons, why not the much more obviously alive ecosystems?
Related to all this is the need to expand the powerful set of values concerning social justice to include inter-generational, inter-communal and inter-species justice.
The 1987 Brundtland report on sustainable development stated we should “meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”
But when we deplete a resource, poison an ecosystem or create long-term change in vital Earth systems, we are acting in an unjust manner towards other people and places, future generations and other species.
But core value change cannot be imposed from above — it has to come from the grassroots. Earth For All, about which I wrote a series of columns between October 2022 and September 2023, was clear on what is needed: “Fresh conversations in every home, every school, every university, every city, every parliament. What is the future we want? How can our operating system get us there?”
And, I would add, what we value and what our values should be.
Because the root of this series of columns on values was my homily at the First Unitarian Church, I want to end with specific reference to the role of faith communities.
After all, faith communities are all about values, about our relationship with “creation,” however that is understood, and about community, the very things I have been writing about.
They can play an important role in initiating and leading explorations and discussions about the new ethical frameworks for society that reflect the constellation of values — human solidarity, quality of life, and ecological sensibility, as The Great Transition Initiative puts it — that we need.
Such work is essential if we are to achieve the great turnaround in societal values we need, locally and globally.
Dr. Trevor Hancock is a retired professor and senior scholar at the University of Victoria’s School of Public Health and Social Policy.
