How do we put power back into our hands?
There are movements at hand that can lead us this way. For example, Transition Town, which arose in England in response to Peak Oil, is a movement in which we can individually become empowered within our community. How? By building local economies and utilizing local resources for food, clothing and shelter. The larger promise of such a movement is in the building of a sense of belonging to a community with the full knowledge that what you are doing is affecting the lives of those you can at least make eye contact with.
These movements are further embedded with helping to rekindle a healthy planet that can support future generations. For example, closely related to Transition Town is Permaculture Gardening and Farming in which the process of Nature is mimicked in working the land for food, clothing and other necessities. In this case, variety is the key to a healthy environment and farming systems. This process is much different than the standardization thrust of most corporations of this day and age. Standardization is seen in all walks of life today, from education to manufacturing to the goals of genetic engineering of the foods you eat. Yet, as many ecologists realize, a forest that has only one type of tree, or animal, is not going to survive. Extinction is on the horizon for these forests. It is the same for us. In a forest, if a tree in a standardized forest caught an invasive disease, the entire forest would be destroyed. With a variety, there is less chance that the entire forest would go the way of the dinosaur for while some would die, others would live and recreate.
In other words, the assembly line actions initiated by Henry Ford are simply not healthy for our planet. A rich variety in our world is what is needed. Likewise, we do not need, nor should we want, standardized kids taught in standardized classrooms. If we continue in this standardization vein, our kids will become robots while we continue to create an environment on land, in the sea and in the air which will lead to extinctions throughout the planet. Indeed, these extinctions are occurring as I write.
Another driver in this mix is our being short sighted. We want what we want when we want it, which is now. Our ancient fore-parents did not think in this way. Indeed, many of the Native American tribes would identify the impact of a decision to the 7th generation. Today, we are more likely to think about our profits in relationship to the quarter we are in.
The impact of our short -- sightedness is given in the following excerpt from a Public Broadcasting site (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/library/03/2/l_032_04.html)
The background level of extinction known from the fossil record is about one species per million species per year, or between 10 and 100 species per year (counting all organisms such as insects, bacteria , and fungi , not just the large vertebrates we are most familiar with). In contrast, estimates based on the rate at which the area of tropical forests is being reduced, and their large numbers of specialized species, are that we may now be losing 27,000 species per year to extinction from those habitats alone.
Obviously we have to think short-term to get to long --term interests. However, the short-term is created by giving thought for the long-term impact.
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