Self-help and self-improvement books love to have their readers make lists.
You may have seem them; your top ten greatest achievements, 12 things that make you grateful for your life, 3 things you can do now to take control of your anger.
Compiling them can be fun and they often do help to put things into perspective and that's why I would like to invite you to trying one out.
Get a piece of paper or open a new document on you PC and write down you ten greatest achievements.
They can be from any aspect of your work, home or leisure life and span your personal history time.
Done that? Good.
Now have a real hard look at them and ask "how many of these did I achieve completely on my own?" Really? If you listed winning a golf competition, where did the clubs and balls come from? Who designed and set up the course? Who tended it? Who regulated the other players and collated their scores? Where did that nice trophy that now adorns your sideboard come from? If you listed gaining a promotion at work, how was that possible without other people being around for you to be promoted over? The truth is we are dependent upon each other.
Always have been always will be.
Over the course of our history we have tended to choose sub-groups which we prefer to be dependent upon; family, friends, communities, countries.
But as we developed our economic system we have become more and more dependent upon people that we can less easily identify and who might be far away.
Today, a large proportion of our daily life is dependent on the efforts of people far from our own family or community.
This has generally not been seen as "a bad thing.
" The essence of free trade is that it leaves both parties better off.
After all, if one party has better use of the goods themselves, why would they trade them? Free trade has a long history in our species, going back at least 10,000 years when we started farming.
International trade probably goes back at least 3,500 years and in the past few decades has grown rapidly but still accounts for less than a fifth of economic activity.
Trade has improved the lot of the people on the planet in innumerable ways.
The range of foods available to most is no longer at the whims of geography or season.
Our clothes are not simply made from materials available locally.
The transfer of experience and gathering of economies of scale has made a wider and wider range of goods available and not just in the developed world.
Go into any shopping mall pretty much anywhere in the world (and they pop up in the developing world with surprising or depressing frequency depending on your point of view) and you will find a similar range of goods, a similar range of brands.
Quite what has led us to this situation is a complex thing to unravel, but I believe the role of money has had a huge amount of influence.
With the money system, we seem to have perfected a communication tool that pours admiration onto individuals.
The more of it we are able to amass, the more powerful we become and the more respect we seem to achieve.
There are lots of ways to gather money, of course, but the most effective and most plentiful is through commerce.
Just look at the billionaires list.
See any football stars? Any musicians? Nope, the most sure fire way to capture a lot of money is through commerce.
But here is the rub.
Apart from money, the only other thing that touches all of us is the planets eco-system.
And somehow, through some accidents of history, the two of them have never been connected except in a one-directional, exploitative way.
The consequence of this is now beginning to be understood.
By ignoring the cost of the damage inflicted on the atmosphere of using fossil fuels we have put in train the biggest challenge to the laws of physics since King Canute ordered the tides to recede.
By valuing a forest only for the lumber it can give us rather than its ability to sustain a multitude of life forms, store carbon and regulate water supplies, we are destroying the world's forests at a frightening rate.
Almost half of the planet's original forest has been destroyed, mostly during the last three decades.
As a species, we are not only interdependent upon each other; we are also interdependent on our planet's ability to support us.
The challenges that face us now in slowing and stopping species loss and in finding real solutions to climate change are unique in their reach and impact.
We need to find a way to connect our money system to our eco-system so that we reward activity that nourishes and replenishes the latter rather than destroy it.
We need to find a way to live with the planet rather than on it because that would truly be our greatest achievement.
You may have seem them; your top ten greatest achievements, 12 things that make you grateful for your life, 3 things you can do now to take control of your anger.
Compiling them can be fun and they often do help to put things into perspective and that's why I would like to invite you to trying one out.
Get a piece of paper or open a new document on you PC and write down you ten greatest achievements.
They can be from any aspect of your work, home or leisure life and span your personal history time.
Done that? Good.
Now have a real hard look at them and ask "how many of these did I achieve completely on my own?" Really? If you listed winning a golf competition, where did the clubs and balls come from? Who designed and set up the course? Who tended it? Who regulated the other players and collated their scores? Where did that nice trophy that now adorns your sideboard come from? If you listed gaining a promotion at work, how was that possible without other people being around for you to be promoted over? The truth is we are dependent upon each other.
Always have been always will be.
Over the course of our history we have tended to choose sub-groups which we prefer to be dependent upon; family, friends, communities, countries.
But as we developed our economic system we have become more and more dependent upon people that we can less easily identify and who might be far away.
Today, a large proportion of our daily life is dependent on the efforts of people far from our own family or community.
This has generally not been seen as "a bad thing.
" The essence of free trade is that it leaves both parties better off.
After all, if one party has better use of the goods themselves, why would they trade them? Free trade has a long history in our species, going back at least 10,000 years when we started farming.
International trade probably goes back at least 3,500 years and in the past few decades has grown rapidly but still accounts for less than a fifth of economic activity.
Trade has improved the lot of the people on the planet in innumerable ways.
The range of foods available to most is no longer at the whims of geography or season.
Our clothes are not simply made from materials available locally.
The transfer of experience and gathering of economies of scale has made a wider and wider range of goods available and not just in the developed world.
Go into any shopping mall pretty much anywhere in the world (and they pop up in the developing world with surprising or depressing frequency depending on your point of view) and you will find a similar range of goods, a similar range of brands.
Quite what has led us to this situation is a complex thing to unravel, but I believe the role of money has had a huge amount of influence.
With the money system, we seem to have perfected a communication tool that pours admiration onto individuals.
The more of it we are able to amass, the more powerful we become and the more respect we seem to achieve.
There are lots of ways to gather money, of course, but the most effective and most plentiful is through commerce.
Just look at the billionaires list.
See any football stars? Any musicians? Nope, the most sure fire way to capture a lot of money is through commerce.
But here is the rub.
Apart from money, the only other thing that touches all of us is the planets eco-system.
And somehow, through some accidents of history, the two of them have never been connected except in a one-directional, exploitative way.
The consequence of this is now beginning to be understood.
By ignoring the cost of the damage inflicted on the atmosphere of using fossil fuels we have put in train the biggest challenge to the laws of physics since King Canute ordered the tides to recede.
By valuing a forest only for the lumber it can give us rather than its ability to sustain a multitude of life forms, store carbon and regulate water supplies, we are destroying the world's forests at a frightening rate.
Almost half of the planet's original forest has been destroyed, mostly during the last three decades.
As a species, we are not only interdependent upon each other; we are also interdependent on our planet's ability to support us.
The challenges that face us now in slowing and stopping species loss and in finding real solutions to climate change are unique in their reach and impact.
We need to find a way to connect our money system to our eco-system so that we reward activity that nourishes and replenishes the latter rather than destroy it.
We need to find a way to live with the planet rather than on it because that would truly be our greatest achievement.
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