The Personal is Planetary
As a young boy growing up in Northern California, I was blessed with the opportunity to hike and camp in the woodlands of the Sierra Nevada and coastal ranges and to roam the rugged coastal cliffs and beaches. One of the highlights of every winter was when my father would take me to cliffs to watch the salmon returning to the river of their birth.
The rains would come, and the rivers would start to swell, and the salmon would gather off the coast. Standing on the cliffs, we could watch them swirl the water, silver in the reflected sun. They were coming back to renew the cycle of life. That they returned each year was miraculous and exciting. When the rains finally broke through the sandy mouth of the river, they would stir and leap into the silt brown waters to finish their journey. It never failed to make my heart race. It is a great sadness that my children and grandchildren will never see that sight.
The river has been altered from its former path. It has been widened and made shallow. Its banks have been dozed into levees to withstand an imagined flood. It is filled with grasses and algae—dank and unwholesome. The fish have been killed. Most of those coastal rivers are dead now. All the government studies in the world will not bring them back.
The Cost of Progress
It has become all too common to say that the despoiling of our environment is the price of progress. If this is so, we need to ask what this supposed progress has brought us. If we are healthier, then why do we need ever-increasing numbers of hospitals and more drugs to function? If we are happier, why do more and more people complain of stress, and why are an escalating number of children prescribed with antidepressants?
Human history presents a sad portrait of our collective behaviour. For every simple act of kindness, beneficial discovery, or creation of beauty, the scale is tipped dramatically by acts of brutality and stupidity on a massive scale. The qualities of violence, greed, and selfishness are dominant in the grand scale of human affairs and lie in sharp contrast to the guidance of the saints and sages we claim to admire the most. There is a deep disconnection between our stated humanity and our collective action.
Attempting to understand and explain this gap between our higher ideals and our most repellent actions has been the driving force behind religion, philosophy, and psychology. The troubling nature of our collective madness has never been this close to a critical breakdown. This collapse is not simply the result of new technologies of violence, escalating pollution, or increasingly sophisticated methods of political and economic suppression. The crisis we face is the suicidal destruction of the planet we inhabit. We are burning down the house and have no place to move.
Being The Future
The scope of this disastrous situation and the speed of its development create a special urgency to face the consequences of our actions and to alter the behaviour that created them. We cannot solve the problems of unwise political, economic, and technological decisions with the same mind-set and through the same institutions that created them in the first place. A different way of thinking is required, thinking that may lead us to truths that are not only inconvenient but also exceedingly uncomfortable. The good news is that the challenge we face could provide us all with an astounding opportunity to transform human life on the planet in a beautiful way.
What You Can Do
The first step is to model a healthy future in our daily life. The healthy future reflects our daily choices in the food we eat, our respect of the natural environment, and awareness of the impact of our participation in the consumer driven culture we live in. Small changes add up. None of this needs hinder our ability to speak out or demonstrate against injustice we see or address the issues of the day. The personal acts of kindness to all life, both human and non-human affirm the depth of our commitment.
In good health
