A global citizenship call for Lent?

Garton Ash provides us with a dystopian view of the future that has some cogency, I reckon. And I still feel that the final remarks have not been laid to rest ever since I first heard this call in the mid 1970's it has persisted. The time surely has come to listen to it and take action as a matter of Christian urgency in the face of global change.

global markets are now more than ever constantly out of equilibrium - and teetering on the edge of a larger disequilibrium. Again and again, it has needed the visible hands of political, fiscal and legal correction to complement the invisible hand of the market. The bigger it gets, the harder it can fall. ... Increasingly, the world's capital is like oil in the hold of one giant tanker, with ever fewer internal bulkheads to stop it swilling around. ...if a lot of middle-class people begin to feel they are personally losing out to the same process of globalisation that is making those few fund managers stinking rich, while at the same time outsourcing their own middle-class jobs to India, then you may have a backlash ...In just a few decades, we would use up the fossil fuels that took some 400 million years to accrete - and change the earth's climate as a result. Sustainability may be a grey and boring word, but it is the biggest single challenge to global capitalism today. However ingenious modern capitalists are at finding alternative technologies - and they will be very ingenious - somewhere down the line this is going to mean richer consumers settling for less rather than more. ... The genius of contemporary capitalism is not simply that it gives consumers what they want but that it makes them want what it has to give. It's that core logic of ever-expanding desires that is unsustainable on a global scale. But are we prepared to abandon it? We may be happy to insulate our lofts, recycle our newspapers and cycle to work, but are we ready to settle for less so others can have more? Am I? Are you?

We need a new monastic movement, not necessarily committed to celibacy (though there is a case for it in the article, by implication, made more explicit in one of the early comments) but to simpler living and smaller footprints. Because we live so interconnectedly this is something we need to discover increasingly how to do together in such a way as the systems of supply begin to change for good. Does your Lent-keeping have elements of exploration of more sustainable living? If not, why not?

Relatedly, World Changing had this post, in which this is sharpened up into something like figures.

If we're going to have a bright green future -- if we want to avoid living out the rest of our lives in one long emergency, a kind of constant Katrina -- we need to reinvent our lives now, immediately, on a radical scale. British researchers found that in order to reach sustainable prosperity, Londoners would have to shrink their ecological impacts 80% in the next four decades. For affluent Americans, the number may be more like 90%. And the more we learn about the extent of the damage we're causing the planet, the shorter our timeframes for change become. I suspect that we need to be thinking more along the lines of cutting our impact in half in the next ten years.

Which sounds a tall order especially as we know that there will be huge numbers of people who won't do this voluntarily unless they really have been dragged kicking and screaming to the edge of the precipice. Some good stuff in this article. Mostly familiar if you've read Lovins et al on 'Natural Capitalism' but worth reading as a quick summary in context.