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“A
human being experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something
separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This
delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and
to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task is to free ourselves from
this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living
creatures and the whole of nature and its beauty.”
Albert
Einstein
The Great
Barrier Reef, off the coast of Queensland, Australia, is the world’s largest
coral reef system composed of over 2,900 individual reefs and 900 islands stretching
for 1,429 miles covering an area of 214,000 square miles. Since 1985 the Great
Barrier Reef has lost more than half of its corals, two-thirds of that since
1998. The death of the reefs around the world has several causes—coral mining,
pollution, overfishing, blast fishing, the digging of canals for access to islands
and bays, and warming water due to climate change. (Wikipedia) Please notice
that all these causes are manmade.
We live
on a rock in the middle of space. That rock has finite resources, but we
continue to live as though it does not. Instead of putting our considerable
genius into inventing new ways of living so that we don’t continue to pollute
our habitat—our only habitat—we go along as though it has nothing to do with
us, and that we are powerless. Elon Musk’s solution is to go to the moon or
perhaps Mars and start over, and I wish him well, but that will not be a
solution for the mass of humanity. The earth is attempting to thin our numbers
with pandemics, fires, and floods, but that is slow, and we fight back with
vaccines, better building materials, and higher walls.
The one
thing we have not tried, and the only thing that has the possibility of solving
the problem is human cooperation. It is the joining together of all people to
do what needs to be done to solve the problems of climate change and pollution.
A friend told me in conversation over the weekend that the municipality where
she lives will not fix a leaking sewage problem in her neighborhood. That system
runs through her yard. She said, “I don’t plant a garden because I would be
afraid to eat anything that grew in that soil.” They don't want to raise taxes to pay for such a project.
We
fight taxes as though they are a penalty on us brought by a greedy government—the
richest of us pay the least and feel it is their right to do so. But we are the
ones who lose—our water, our air, our lives are affected. As Einstein said, it is
delusional to think that we are separate and therefore should not be expected to
change our behavior or our mindset. Walk outside and open your eyes. Really see
the beauty and lush diversity that surrounds you. Take stock of just how much
you love it. Do we really want to relocate to Mars? If not, then we must
change. It’s as simple as that.
In
the Spirit,
Jane
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