Comments tomatlee has made

Our governance system needs changing, too.

All the systems you mention DO need changing, David.  And I want to invite you to consider what's one step upstream: our society's decision-making system, where the rules of the game get made -- the governance system, notably our more or less democratic institutions.

I'm not talking about using the existing system to change the existing rules (e.g., lobbying Congress for a carbon tax).  I'm talking about changing the system itself, so that wiser decisions get made.

I discuss many innovations for that on the Co-Intelligence Institute website (especially "Using Citizen Deliberative Councils to Make Democracy More Potent and Awake") and the Innovations in Democracy Project site, as well as my book The Tao of Democracy: Using Co-Intelligence to Create a World that Works for All.  Many of the best of these innovations aren't just good ideas, but have actually been done and proven, here and there around the world.  I just pull them together into a bigger picture of possibility.

Since I'm interested not just in democracy, but in wise democracy -- and we've all seen landslide support for truly stupid initiatives or candidates (even occasionally when there isn't gross manipulation of the system) -- I'm interested in democratic approaches that can elicit the latent capacity for diverse ordinary people to come to decisions that are wiser than any of them could have made alone.  

When the environmental movement puts significant resources into campaigns to institutionalize that sort of democracy, then every law, policy and budget we want to propose would at last get a sensible hearing because we have changed the SYSTEM in which society's decisions get made.

Gore is doing a fabulous job putting climate change on the public agenda.  But we can't expect him to do everything.  It is up to us to put systems change on the agenda.  If we in the environmental movement -- including Grist, Worldchanging, WISER Earth, etc. -- were to put as much emphasis on change in the decision-making systems as we put into regime change, new laws, and changes in industry and lifestyle, our work would become progressively easier and easier.  

The challenge of climate change has inspired more of us to begin to think systemically about natural feedback loops and our economic and industrial systems.  I hope that the only reason we have so far neglected to think systemically about our democratic system is that most of us don't see how it could be improved to make it actually up to the task it faces.  In that hope, I offer the resources above.

For an example of the kind of on-the-ground initiative I'm talking about, see Healthy Democracy Oregon's Citizen Initiative Review.

The conscious evolution of social systems is underway. We can make it more conscious. co-intelligence.org