‘In the beginning was the Word.’ With this Biblical clarity, René J Cappon started his modest but seminal textbook for journalists, The Word: An Associated Press Guide to Good News Writing. It quoted the first line of the Gospel of Saint John and stuck with me as a subliminal prompt to write clearly and think of words as a living tool. Sacred. Generative. Collaborative.
As an ontological enquiry, the quote echoed back to an ecumenical childhood sampling Devonport’s church hall holiday programmes, accidentally arriving as a cadet news journalist at the New Zealand Herald at 18 and coming, provisionally, to a sense that our words create our future and we had better be careful about what we speak into existence amongst ourselves.
The stasis of the last year has left the whole planet awash in chaos. Obscene wealth and insane industrial/military hegemonies obscured the wholesale appropriation and overwriting of familiar words from which we have, for centuries, collectively shaped our moral and social world.
Until now, we have had no words to describe a more habitable future. Even the words of power that we trusted have seemed stomped into the ground or to be shuttling round like a no-rules shapeshifting shell-game. Try talking about God without banging into the pejorative ‘fundamentalist’ label.
“In our increasingly dystopian world, who wouldn’t want to at least be open to a utopian antidote?” Guardian columnist Jonathan Watts said, after The Global Justice Report was published this month with a sweeping vision for rebuilding a prosperous, equitable world within safe planetary boundaries.
“Imagine a future in which everyone enjoys high levels of wellbeing; where 90 percent of the world’s population doubles their income but works half the hours we work today. A world in which the bottom half of humanity sees its share of global wealth rise from just two percent today to 30 percent; a world where we consume enough, but nobody over-consumes.
“And imagine achieving this on a planet that can comfortably sustain human life without its climate breaking down,” he said.
Thomas Piketty, author of the seminal 2013 treatise Capital in the Twenty-First Century and one of the coordinators of the report, says the ambition of the mega-rich has become unrealistic and undesirable. “People realise this is simply not working.
“If the billionaires and the centimillionaires of the world were conducting our economy, investing the money in a way that brings us to a fantastic future with planetary habitability, rising wages and better housing conditions and health conditions for all, then everybody would be happy to give them the keys. But that’s not what we see.”
“Their new dream is to cover the entire planet with datacentres. This is their economic project for the world. But everybody can see that this is just going to increase the material footprint of our economy, that this will make global warming even worse.”
The report fills a hole that has existed since the inception of the global climate science infrastructure in the 1990s. One of the architects of that system, British chemist Robert Watson, a former chair of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, says that if he could go back in time and change anything, it would be to add more social scientists.
Initially, he says, the “pure scientists” from the fields of physics and chemistry naively believed the data alone would be enough to persuade governments to act, but they later came to wish they had taken more account of social dynamics, economics, politics and psychology.
The Global Justice Report does not make the same mistake, reeling out a whole, elegant lexicon for the discourse to radically overwrite the ‘bleak techno-authoritarian futures’ we’ve been sold.
So welcome to the concepts of: ‘sufficiency’, ‘planetary habitability’, ‘the material impact of economic activity’, ‘techno-extractive vision (courtesy of the US president)’, ‘social dynamics’, ‘economics’, ‘transactional cynicism’, ‘classless ecology’, ‘structural sectorial transformation,’ the majority mandating ‘global justice’, ‘convergence’ between nations, ‘deep decarbonisation’, ‘shared prosperity on a finite planet’, and ‘social mobilisations’.
The distinguished panel of contributors concluded that a global transformation that reconciles planetary habitability and high standards of wellbeing for all is possible.
Financing and politically sustaining decarbonisation and sufficiency will require a drastic reduction in inequality of income, wealth and power, between countries and within them. This reduction of global inequality is a necessary condition for shared prosperity on a finite planet.
A habitable, equal and prosperous 21st Century is materially possible. The carbon budget allows it and history offers precedents at comparable scales: universal suffrage, the universalisation of healthcare and education, the halving of working hours and the sharp compression of inequality over the 20th century.
Technical impossibility is not what is standing in the way, but rather the absence of a shared vision of social progress, at once concrete and radical, the report concluded.
How can we have been made so one-dimensional? Now we can see the choices and put our Word to either Star Trek or Star Wars. Our choice.
• Liz Waters
© Waiheke Gulf News Ltd 2025
