Garden: A plot of ground... where flowers, shrubs, vegetables, fruits, or herbs are cultivated; a fertile and delightful spot or region-Dictionary.com.
Imagine! A fertile and delightful region! Wouldn't you like to live in such a place? Or at least visit one? Tourists and vacationers pay untold billions of dollars every month to do just that. Land prices shoot through the roof when "developers" find such places. We flock to these havens in droves, take pictures to show our loved ones, run around spending money we often don't have, idolize these spots in our minds, create a personal, loving relationship with them; and then, more often than not, as countless others follow suit, we humans destroy those cherished gardens. Delightful and fertile regions have become synonymous with doomed places, as anyone over 20 has surely witnessed at least once in their life.
Doom and destruction are what we have been bringing large scale to that largest garden around, the only known garden in the universe--Planet Earth--ever since we dropped or slithered from the tree tops, at an ever accelerating and now furious pace. Someone not long ago asked Jane Goodall why she thought that chimps were not as advanced as humans. Her answer, paraphrased: Actually, they're considerably more advanced, if you look at how they relate to their environment without destroying it.
Indeed. Chimps live their lives and leave no trace behind. Their environment gets passed on to their progeny in the same healthy condition that it was untold generations before themselves, and as it might be passed on for generations to come--assuming we humans don't get involved.
Bring humans on stage and what do you get? Self-multiplying bipedal wrecking machines, diligently working to fry the planet, dam rivers, destroy lakes, pollute oceans, mutilate coastlines, decimate forests, eliminate fisheries, erode and poison farmlands, build vast waste dumps, deplete resources of every description, inject chemicals into the air, do what we can to wreck our own bodies, scam one another ad infinitum, numb our brains and senses, and, as if that's not enough, do our damndest to make our progeny even dumber-as if to assure that they'll be even more incapable of saving the planet than we are.
Is there anything more we could possibly do to destroy rather than nurture the garden that has brought us into being? Ah, yes. I forgot war. We love to kill each other, don't we? The more insane among us now desperately seek to bomb Iran. Wouldn't that be fun?
Truly, we are living in a madhouse of our own creation, a full-blown insane asylum, a loony bin of global proportions. We are ravishing the earth, sucking its resources dry, destroying the very support systems that all life on the planet depends on.
How dense can people be?
We turn to morons and treat them as leaders. We allow superstitious old men, vicious, cowardly, and ignorant fools, individuals with sickly ideas, and parties with mental vacuums where there should be grand visions, to direct, manipulate and monopolize our lives.
Please! Raise your hand if you actually enjoy this!
Well, I'm glad your hand is down. And though I'm not happy to see any hands raised, at least those few with hands still up constitute a minority and have even given themselves a name. Which I'm confident you've heard: Republicans (well, ok, I don't mean to heap praise on Democrats, but at least they don't generally boast about being stupid).
Anyone not in that minority has surely asked themselves: Is there really any hope? Can we possibly find a way to nurture and cultivate the Garden of Earth, rather than continuing to plunder and bulldoze it? Is it genetically programmed that our species must bring about its own destruction, along with that of tens or hundreds of thousands (millions?) of other species?
I don't know those answers and I don't see how anyone can know without making some major assumptions. But it is surely fair to say that optimism appears to be more and more synonymous with ignorance. How can anyone look around and be aware of what's going on and perceive so much as a ray of hope? It is difficult, at best.
Still, we appear programmed to hope. Programmed to attempt to go on, as if survival really is built into our genes. So go on we must, even if only to ultimately race headlong into the wall of extinction. It is a bona fide possibility, which no one with half a brain can any longer deny.
So what do we need to do to stop bulldozing the garden? I submit six principles that we need to incorporate into our psyches, and into the psyches of our species, in the shortest possible time. These principles need not be adopted by all, but they must somehow become the blueprint of cultural norms; those who cannot or will not abide by these principles must be taken to task, ostracized, and perhaps incarcerated, if that's what it takes to make our species pay attention and save our own habitat, the Garden of Earth.
I intend to elaborate on these points in succeeding articles, but for now I will attempt to paint the broader strokes in summary fashion. I doubt that I'm telling you anything new-I hope I'm not-but maybe by consolidating my own thinking it will be of some help for others to focus as well. Awareness is the first step to change, and I am happy to report that everywhere I go I do see evidence of this awareness-my rays of hope, if you will. The awakening I see appears to be a quiet one-what else can such a phenomenon be?-without headlines, without fanfare, without Time Magazine and Faux News; yet I believe the awakening is real, and the more I look, the more I see of it.
Geery lived off the grid for 15 years in an earth-sheltered, solar heated home, while his kids learned in school that solar energy isn't feasible. NAPTA hosts a page on Geery's foibles in education, and explains how he got his butt fired from a tenured teaching position. Here's a short clip of his most recent solar contraption; for more on that project, and Geery's contention that the Wright Brothers took a wrong turn, please visit his airship page (hyperblimp.com). Apparently, Geery is the only one in the world to respond to Osama bin Laden, call bullshit on him and George together, and expose them for the pansy ass rich kids that they are. Unfortunately, bin Laden has been too scared to write back and explain himsself; and George is still working hard to finish his goat book.
I am reading Robert Callum's new book "the Unnatural History of the Sea" now, and am writing a review of it for OpEd. He details how humans have treated their greatest source of sustainable food like it was both a garbage dump, and only good for a quick buck. As fish stocks declined, humans frantically increased their fishing to try to make up for it, with obvious results.
Money is at the heart of our mistreatment of the earth, and ignorance is money’s evil twin in the onslaught.
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John R Moffett (78 articles, 14 quicklinks, 2 diaries, 591 comments)
on Sunday, July 29, 2007 at 1:58:13 PM
Thanks, Daniel for including the "Population Bomb" as one of your "six principles" for saving the "Garden of Earth". Alas, I'm afraid that little or no attention is being given to this most critical of all factors that are quickly destroying our "garden" with increasing intensity. For example, I was really astonished and greatly disappointed that Al Gore completely bypassed population control in his online petition for combating global warming.
I have also noticed that I often get very hostile reactions from people when I bring up this subject during discussions involving the environment:( Somehow, burgeoning population is NOT a subject that people are ready to deal with - Malthus' compelling population theory is still being ridiculed - but Malthus will eventually be vindicated!
As a final note, the recent Canadian documentary film "Manufactured Landscapes" really brings home the environmental destruction taking place in contemporary China, fueled by the rapid industrialization in a country with over a billion people! I highly recommend seeing this film to get a feel for what is in store for all of us if we don't do something humane to control our numbers. If we don't do it, nature will do it for us with an immense catastrophe of unprecedented scope!! When are the world's political and religious leaders going to wake up and say what has to be said to educate the public?
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petefior (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 4 comments)
on Wednesday, August 1, 2007 at 5:11:15 PM
