Crew Consciousness
“There are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew” – Marshall McLuhan
In my prior column, I wrote about R. Buckminster’s forecast from the late 1960s that. in several decades, humanity would reach a fork in the road, utopia or oblivion. In the two years that it took to research and write “This Spaceship Earth” with my co-author Tim Rumage, it became clear to me that humanity has now reached that fork in the road. In fact, we have, unknowingly already started to wander down the road to oblivion.
As a futurist, it became clear to me that it would be a professional dereliction of duty if I did not speak about Climate Change. I will continue to give the speeches I give regarding the general future in the Shift Age, the future of healthcare, education and branding. Now however, I am going to speak as much as possible about This Spaceship Earth and the need to create crew consciousness. It has become clear to me that a sense of urgency is needed.
In doing the research on the book, what became very clear is that Climate Change is occurring at a faster rate than most prior predictions. The forecasts from the 1990s about what planetary warming, ice melt, the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere and sea level rise that was to be in 2040 is happening now! What was thought to be a linear progression or arithmetic is now being seen as geometric. Hopefully humanity can wake up in the next decade so it doesn’t become exponential.
The way to think about what is going on is simple. The state of the atmosphere as it is today last occurred 800,000 years ago. Modern Humanity has only been around for 200,000 years. So there is nothing in our DNA, let alone our experience or problem solving playbook, to deal with an, for our species, unprecedented event. That is why we need a new consciousness to deal with Climate Change. A new consciousness leads to new thinking, which leads to new actions.
What does crew consciousness mean? It means starting from a crew mindset as you live your life. How can I live and what actions can I take as a crew member of This Spaceship Earth [TSE]? Have a self-definition of being a crew member first and you will both think differently and then act differently. If you would think nothing of getting in an SUV by yourself to drive 10 miles so you can walk 10 miles for breast cancer, and then drive back, as a crew member you would find 2-3 other people to go on the walk with you and together take the vehicle that has the highest mpg. Why is this a good example? Air pollution kills more people than all the cancers combined. A person dies every 4 seconds from complications due to air pollution. So work on the cause as you walk for the cure.
If you want to act as crew, please go here to find some easy ways to do so. If you want something a bit more in depth but a single action that can both make a difference and ingrain crew thinking into your daily life, please read “The 2% Solution”
There are 7.4 billion people on Earth. Of that, I would guess that 7.3 billion are acting as unaware passengers on Cruise ship Earth. Most of those 7.3 are ignorant as to how their actions, taken together, are bringing about unprecedented catastrophes. The 100 million crew members [a pure guesstimate] are not a cohesive, collective group, but many small groups, entities and individuals, largely acting independently. If they can come together as crew members of TSE, they will become more of a collective force for the change needed.
I have co-founded a global non-profit that was launched in late April. The moonshot goal is to recruit 1 billion crew members as soon as possible. We have loosely defined ‘acting as crew’ here. If you already are acting in these ways, write us here so we can add a digit to the crew counter. Then you can go to here to buy stuff that will show the world you are crew
The name of this new non-profit is This Spaceship Earth.org. The goal is to create crew consciousness on TSE. If you want to help us, or want to become crew, please know that all donations are tax deductible. With every $5 donated we are giving a free eBook away. So a donation of $100 will provide you with a promo code for 20 eBook downloads, 1 for yourself and then post the code on your Facebook page for the remaining 19 free downloads, or share with friends, family, clients and employees. We will forgo any royalties on these eBook downloads as we want to accelerate the spread of crew consciousness in the world. Now!
