At long last (after losing two lawsuits to environmental experts), the US Federal Government has officially recognized that the polar bear's rapidly-shrinking population qualifies it as an endangered species. US Department of the Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne complained that he had no choice, the way the law was written (as though that were the problem). He also declared that his action didn't imply that the government was going to have to do anything to address our output of greenhouse gasses. He, like many others, seem to think that the the current condition of our climate is simply part of a natural cycle of warming (and cooling), and that the addition of millions of tons of pollutants into our atmosphere over the past two centuries is somehow irrelevant.
Even some who admit that human activity is having a negative impact on the earth's climate (even more severe and more lasting than in 1816, the "year without a summer", following the eruption of the Tambora volcano in Indonesia) still resist taking any practical action to curtail our carbon emissions on account of the economic impact. This is just one significant - but still small - example of a far more pervasive attitude among people who purport to be leaders of government and industry: the buck stops anywhere but here.
At first glance, it's hard to see a connection between the plight of the polar bear and the current housing crisis, but the causes (and the results) prove to be the same: unenlightened (and unethical) self-interest. We want cheap and readily available fossil fuels to maintain our lifestyle, but we don't want to have to pay for them. So, although we've been facing different aspects of this crisis in this country since the 1970's, we want to defer the consequences indefinitely. If it's not hitting our pocketbooks right now, then we don't want to know about it.
The housing market worked exactly the same way. Everyone wants a piece of the American Dream, and a healthy boost in equity at the same time, but we're happy to let the balloon payments hit us mañana. The mortgage institutions want to write the low interest, ticking time bomb loans, but they want to pass the risk on to anonymous investors. The bubble can burst in someone else's bathtub, Not In My Back Yard.
Whether it's governmental leaders more concerned with their own re-elections than the common good, or corporate leaders wanting to make sure that their positions are secure by providing a profit to investors at any cost, the bill gets passed on down the line until it lands in the laps of those least able to afford it. So long as we stay fixated on problem-solving (addressing each issue as though it's unique and has no relationship to the bigger picture), the juggernaut of self-destructive self-interest will continue to crush precisely those people whom the leadership has been elected or appointed to protect: not those who elected or appointed them, but those who depend on them for their subsistence.
We need to see the poor polar bear as emblematic of our own condition. If we don't raise our questioning to the second level - the level of our dysfunctional systems - we'll keep chasing our problems around from one arena to the next, as one of my clients says, "like herding cockroaches in the dark." Using our governmental and corporate systems to take care of the weakest members of our society cannot be seen as a burden, rather, it's a requirement for our own continued existence. Take, for example, the company whose bean-counter leaders are only concerned with making a profit for themselves and their investors, bleeding the company dry in the process. How can the corporation survive? Yet the leaders will certainly go on to their next positions, leaving bereft (as 'collateral damage') those who gave their energy to provide that profit.
Social economics controls a lot more than just dollars and cents. Social economics provides the superstructure of our human existence: I have been given and have acquired strengths, talents, knowledge, skills and experience not only for my own benefit, but also to benefit my fellow travelers on Spaceship Earth. And they, in turn, - no matter how worthless they may appear to me to be - have been given and have acquired the strengths, talents, knowledge, skills and experience that I require. Acknowledging that fact provides the only realistic basis for enlightened self interest: to become the optimal person I can be for the sake of others.
Now we need to face the fact that our whole cultural system is broken: not just our treatment of the planet, not just our collapsing economics. The unethical leaders, who sold us the bill of goods by trying to convince us that they can play whatever games they like and we never have to pay the bill, seal not only their own fates but our fates as well, who are left having to pick up the tab. We can either demand that the Endangered Species Act apply to ethical leadership, or we can watch the "Foreclosure" signs appearing, first on our country and then, inevitably, on our world.
H. Les Brown, MA, CFCC
ProActivation® Coaching
Website: http://www.ProActivation.com
E-Mail: info@ProActivation.com
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Copyright © 2008 H. Les Brown
