Global Climate Change and Integrity

This week I read the article, Wrong Kind of Green, by Johann Hari, published in The Nation.

Following my participation at the State of the World Forum, I am blessed to be now part of a global conversation about some of the most significant global issues, including the environment, the economy and global climate change. The cost for participation, if you could call it a cost, is the high volume of articles that now come onto my inbox.

This one deserves reading.

I was a big fan of author Michael Crichton, mostly because he took politically sensitive subjects, like global climate change, and went into them with an objectivist view, researching the field with a scientists eye, then writing a novel to reach the non science world. “State of Fear” was not only brilliant, it exposed the shadow side of the global climate change movement. The article referenced above also looks at the shadow side of global climate change.

There is a shadow to any light. In an integral world, we incorporate the shadow into our projects/work with consciousness, making room for it to be present, so that it doesn’t leak out in the dark crevasses. (See The Field Effect)

As Bucky Fuller said repeatedly, Integrity is the Essence. Our biggest challenge, in any organisation, is to BE the very model of who we say we are. While this sounds very simple in theory, in practice this is hard. Why? Because the very act of coming together and stating a purpose, and intention, and speaking out loud the values we want to live by invites the shadow. And it will arrive, stealing stealthily into our soft places, one small drop at a time. (See Little Atrocities) Like a master spell caster, we will find ourselves saying yes to some very small, and seemingly insignificant thing, knowing somewhere deep inside, that in the act of saying yes to this, we are betraying ourselves, our organisation, and our values. Exactly this shadow happens the moment a politician accepts any form of money/gift from a company for any reason, without full and total disclosure. Small and subtle it starts, like a very slow rot.

The rigor and discipline required to say no to the little atrocities takes a supremely awake, aware human. It is one of the very reasons I surround myself with people who I trust to speak to me with great candor, holding nothing back. They become my personal bullshit detectors. In my working life, this is often why I am paid. I am the client’s bullshit detector. This role is one of high value. Yet few organisations have the courage, because this demands they walk the highest road, always. I repeat, always! There are few companies that choose this path. The Green companies need to build this level of rigor into their very fabric, if they want to survive, for to not do so violates their very “greenness”.

We humans are so easily seduced by money, power, success, fame, fortune. This is the archetype of the prostitute. Up for sale, quibbling over price.

As I wrote in Little Atrocities what is required for us to lose our integrity is for temptation to be delivered over time. Drop by drop, little atrocity by little atrocity. As the author says, it has taken two decades for some of the big Green Environmental groups to be corrupted.

“So it has come to this. After decades of slowly creeping corporate corruption, some of the biggest environmental groups have remade themselves in the image of their corporate backers: they are putting profit before planet. They are supporting a system they know will lead to ecocide, because more revenue will run through their accounts, for a while, as the collapse occurs. At Copenhagen, their behavior was so shocking that Lumumba Di-Aping, the lead negotiator for the G-77 bloc of the world's rainforest-rich but cash-poor countries, compared them to the CIA at the height of the cold war, sabotaging whole nations.”

The creep of corruption is present in all organisations. It is the shadow. How does your organisation, small or large deal with it?

Do you have the courage to say no to the dark side, and yes to the light? For make no mistake, we are tested on this every day, personally, politically and organisationally.

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