PG #34: One foot in front of the other

I’m writing this days after the UN reports that 1 million species are at risk of extinction, and that CO2 levels at the Mauna Loa observatory have reached 415ppm for the first time in history. I’m also writing this hours after the Australian public has voted in a federal election, and our re-elected prime minister is a man who once waved a lump of coal around in parliament with the joy of a schoolyard bully.

As I write this, it seems we face another three years of cruelty towards people living in poverty, another three years of dismantling our social security system, another three years of pandering to white nationalists and racists, another three years of regression and inaction on climate, and another three years of cynical economic models that ignore the societal costs of inaction on all these issues.

But however we might feel about this particular election outcome, the challenges we face today are the same that we faced yesterday.

It seems to me the only solution to this crisis is transformative change – to overhaul the global economy to prioritise wellbeing and environmental sustainability rather than the pursuit of profit. We can no longer support a business-as-usual that perpetuates inequality and injustice. We can no longer support a business-as-usual that leads to ecological degradation and global warming. We must fight even harder than before for fairness, equity and sustainability.

And as I write this, I don’t yet have a clear way through this mess, other than to acknowledge that as designers we have agency, and we need to work together, to choose how to put that agency to use.