Brent Barrett’s Home Planet: Time to break out of the Consumer Story and begin our Citizen Story

Many of us are enjoying good times, but look a bit deeper and we see a planetary system stretched to breaking. Photo / Levente Gyori

OPINION

Polycrisis. A new word for a challenging future. Before looking locally, it’s a word best surveyed at the global scale.

On the one hand, many of us are enjoying good times, unlimited entertainment, cheap goods and easy mobility. But look a bit deeper and we see a planetary system stretched to breaking.

It’s a system inflated by a past century of cheap and easy fossil energy that fuelled massive economic growth, soil erosion, energy extraction, biodiversity loss and rapid evolution of tech and society.

Now we’re in the century feeling the consequence of runaway global warming, with impacts ranging from mental health to supercharged storms and disruption of global trade and food systems we’re dependent on. It’s no wonder many people are focusing on more local resilience as we look to the future.

While the polycrisis sharpens, we have the opportunity to evolve our relationship with political power. At risk of turning this into a book review, I found Jon Alexander’s new book Citizens a compelling read. The author describes democracy evolving through three stages, and sees big opportunities for a more resourceful and resilient future.

The first stage was the Subject Story. In it, the way to a better society was to faithfully follow instructions, while an empowered few made decisions. The goal was to be a good subject, even if that meant a short hard life of underclass hardship.

The Subject Story dominated well into the 1900s, when it was overtaken by the Consumer Story. In that story, the idea was to create a better society by using choice like consumers do. There were fixed options, for example less fuel tax or more fuel tax, and a wide group of people made the choices.

Alexander’s focus is a new third stage, the Citizen Story, offering big opportunities for a resourceful and resilient future. In this story there’s even more choice, and everyone is involved in creating new options and actions.

It’s about being empowered for citizenship, in an action verb sense. About helping communities make the big calls needed in times of crisis, whether that be a local cyclone recovery or solving the full polycrisis.

This isn’t about being a citizen as defined by a birthplace or a passport. It’s about being human and strongly involved in shaping society and the world around you.

As active citizens connect, we build resilience and a refreshed political system focused on empowering everyone. Alexander offers great examples of the Citizen Story in action. It makes for an inspiring read.

Locally we’re ripe for opportunity. We need to transform our city to be future-ready, make the transition to cleaner energy sources, build more resilient food systems, and restore and reconnect with nature.

At this general election, we’ll be offered radically differing views of our shared future. Views and ideas to be debated and decided. This makes 2023 the perfect time for each of us to break out of the Consumer Story and begin our Citizen Story, remembering that it’s about so much more than voting.

It’s about practical local action for people and the planet. About shaping and advocating new ideas for our city’s, nation’s and planet’s future. About deciding together how we locally work our way through the climate, soil, water, food, nature, mental health, polarisation and inequality polycrisis we find ourselves in.

Thanks for reading. Please step into the Citizen Story, today. It’s our best shot at transforming the polycrisis into a thriving future.

• Brent Barrett is an environmental advocate, Green city councillor and scientist. The views expressed here are his own. Home Planet is now on pause for the election campaign, returning in late October.