We’re in a giant car heading towards a brick wall and everyone’s arguing over where they’re going to sit.
More than a billion people lack adequate access to clean water.
We must pay greater attention to keeping our bodies and minds healthy and able to heal. Yet we are making it difficult for our defences to work. We allow things to be sold that should not be called food. Many have no nutritive value and lead to obesity, salt imbalance, and allergies.
The human brain now holds the key to our future. We have to recall the image of the planet from outer space: a single entity in which air, water, and continents are interconnected. That is our home.
Nature surrounds us, from parks and backyards to streets and alleyways. Next time you go out for a walk, tread gently and remember that we are both inhabitants and stewards of nature in our neighbourhoods.
Environmentali sm is really about seeing our place in world in a way that humans have always known up until very recently – that we are part of nature-utterly dependent on the natural world for our well being and survival.
Protecting the biosphere should be our highest priority or else we sicken and die.
So now the challenge is to imagine a different world where our wealth is in human relations and the things we do together, and we learn to live in balance with the rest of nature.
Other things, like capitalism, free enterprise, the economy, currency, the market, are not forces of nature, we invented them. They are not immutable and we can change them.
If we continue to set human borders and the economy as our highest priorities, we will never come to grips with the destructiveness of our activities and institutions.
Even meeting Kyoto targets barely makes a dent in what we have to achieve.
If Canada, one of the richest nations in the world, can’t meet Kyoto targets, why should China or India give any considerations for meeting the targets?
Our beliefs, our values shape the way we look out at the world and the way we treat it. If we believe that we were here, placed here by God, that this – all of this creation is for us, it’s for us to go and occupy, dominate and exploit, then we will proceed to do that.
Love is the force that makes us fully human.
Human beings are often at their best when responding to immediate crises – car accidents, house fires, hurricanes. We are less effective in the face of enormous but slow-moving crises such as the loss of biodiversity or climate change...
Less than 10% of the fuel energy burned in automobiles is translated into forward motion of the vehicle and even then most of this energy is needed to move the vehicle itself, which typically weighs 20 times more than its passengers.
Think about a seed. Once it lands, it’s stuck. It can’t move to find better soil, moisture or sunlight. It’s able to create every part of itself to grow and reproduce with the help of air, water and sun.
Aboriginal people are key because they have a different sense of where we belong and how we interact with nature.
There are some things in the world we can’t change...
Over and over, we hear politicians say they can’t spend our tax dollars on environmental protection when the economy is so fragile.