Reported today on The Guardian For the full article visit:
The age of the individual must end – our world depends on it
The costs of a culture focused on an illusory idea of personal autonomy are making us ill and heating our planet. But a new age may be dawning
Last month, as I travelled to see family for a very mild Christmas in the UK, I thought about the bushfires simultaneously raging across Australia. They are just one example from a long series of extreme weather events in 2019, including cyclones in India and Bangladesh that displaced more than three million people, Cyclone Idai, which killed more than 1,000 people in southern Africa, floods that displaced tens of thousands of people in Iran, and entire townships laid to waste by Hurricane Dorian in the Bahamas. The year ended with reports of record rates of Arctic ice melt that, through positive feedback effects, are likely to intensify climate heating and impact the future of humanity.
In the face of global catastrophe, it's hard not to feel daunted. What can I, an individual, do to address such a crisis? Understanding that my daily actions are partly responsible for climate change, I feel a gnawing sense of sense of individual guilt.
It's perhaps not surprising that I feel like this. I was a child of the 1980s and a teenager in the 90s: my formative years were during something like the most individualistic age in history. While I learned times tables at primary school, Margaret Thatcher was telling the nation there was no such thing as society. During my teenage years, product advertising and globalisation brought a new age of hyper-consumerism, as we were bombarded with education programmes to build self-esteem and TV shows such as Big Brother, The X Factor and The Apprentice, which all glorified self-aggrandisement in sub
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