With the world’s human population now at seven billion and growing, and the demand for technology and modern conveniences increasing, we can’t control all our negative impacts. But we have to find better ways to live within the limits nature and its cycles impose.
We are playing Russian roulette with features of the planet’s atmosphere that will profoundly impact generations to come. How long are we willing to gamble?
We have much to learn by studying nature and taking the time to tease out its secrets.
From year to year, environmental changes are incremental and often barely register in our lives, but from evolutionary or geological perspectives, what is happening is explosive change.
Just as fossil fuels from conventional sources are finite and are becoming depleted, those from difficult sources will also run out. If we put all our energy and resources into continued fossil fuel extraction, we will have lost an opportunity to have invested in renewable energy.
Every breath is a sacrament, an affirmation of our connection with all other living things, a renewal of our link with our ancestors and a contribution to generations yet to come. Our breath is a part of life’s breath, the ocean of air that envelopes the earth.
Our choices at all levels-individual, community, corporate and government-affect nature. And they affect us.
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?
Love is the force that makes us fully human.