The majority view is that we need politicians to start pushing environmentally friendly policies and big business to start relinquishing the control they have over society. We campaign hard and make impressive documentaries, but I think that real world experience over the past two decades or so has shown that this approach is simply not working.

Personally, I think the primary reason for this is that we are essentially asking our politicians and big business leaders to commit career suicide – something that people simply don’t do willingly. Because it requires certain short term sacrifices, making environmentally friendly policy shifts gets politicians in trouble with the electorate (especially in the current economic environment). Politicians doing this will risk their careers even if as much as 40% of the electorate fully understands the necessity of such a move. Similarly, making environmentally and socially conscious decisions at the expense of profits gets big business leaders into trouble with shareholders.

It is hard to estimate the percentage of people in the world that would be willing to forego a little consumption/profit to ensure a sustainable future, but I think this is probably still significantly less than 10%. Now this 10% can campaign and complain all they want, but in a democracy, nothing meaningful will happen (as is graphically being illustrated on the AGW front) before they increase their numbers to 40-50%.

For these reasons, I choose to pursue a different path: personal lifestyle change. Even though the concerned 10% is virtually completely powerless to effect real political change, they can make a big impact on the world by changing their consumption patterns. If 10% of people choose to willingly decrease their carbon and ecological footprints (which is very easy), look after their health (which is very easy), act financially responsibly (which is very easy) and start talking to their friends about the reasons they are now in perfect health, financially secure and happy to be part of the solution rather than the problem (which is very easy), the positive effect on our world can be enormous.

Even though this route is also littered with challenges, I honestly think it has a much greater chance of success than our repeated failed attempts to affect government policy and change big business. But the fundamental reason I advocate this goes even deeper: the fact that we desperately need to take back our personal liberty and our responsibility for shaping our own lives. Our degree of dependence and attachment to big government and big business is extremely worrying. I can go on about this for hours, but the crux of the matter is that retaking personal responsibility by choosing to exert your own will to build for yourself a happy, healthy, wealthy and sustainable life is an essential exercise in retaking personal liberty and absolutely vital to the sustainable wellness of our society.

Moreover, corporate power derives from legalistic jiggery-pokery applied over the last few decades, progressively giving them more of a say in the way that ‘civilised’ society is run (a case that The Corporation makes well). The latest example is the US Supreme Court decision in 2010 to allow corporations to spend as much money as they want telling voters who to vote for.

I think I’m also somewhere in the “middle” of the two worldviews you discussed. I am not a rabid socialist nor am I a rabid capitalist. There are aspects to both systems that I think could be employed for the betterment of many people and that simultaneously aren’t self-contradictory.

Building on that statement, I think there is a balance between localism and federalism. Especially in the context of climate change, there is the ability of local peoples to build resilience based on their specific know-how and changing conditions. That said, locals cannot put together the same resources in the same manner as a larger government. Thus, the federalist approach can also build resilience to climate change. I see elements of both as being available and critical to the development of that resilience. Among other considerations, it is when advocates of either push us toward only one solution that conditions become unbalanced and resilience is challenged.

The moment that the consumer base wakes up and starts building happy, healthy, wealthy and sustainable lives for themselves, corporate power will start rapidly declining.