What is your most terrifying debt? “The mortgage on my house,” says one. “My overdraft,” answers another. “It’s our nation’s massive economic deficit,” intones the politician. But there’s a debt worse than any of these. The liability we should be most worried about is our ‘Reality Debt.’ This form of shortfall concerns our remarkable ability, throughout the majority of our systems and in our daily activities, to deny or ignore the unsustainability behind so much of what we do. This must surely be the worst of bad debts because it involves us in a trajectory that will almost certainly terminate our civilization as we currently understand it. We now have a sense of the gravity and urgency of our ecological and resource problems, and yet (as with debt generally) we still tend to push those concerns into the background. Who, or what, will bail us all out with the massive Reality Cheque we need (those trillions of realities we must now collectively reinvest in our individual minds and hearts, in our economics, industries, and politics) in order to stabilise and harmonise our ecologies, psychologies, societies? And when, eventually, nature sends her bailiffs in, what on earth will our grown-up children say to them?
© Mario Petrucci 2012
