Smallsteps and I watched A Life on Our Planet by David Attenborough, and I found it really good. It was released in 2020 when David was a young 93 years of age (he is 100 now), and had footage of him back in the 1950s, when he first started travelling the world as a nature journalist. It isn't a usual documentary in the sense he told the story of how much nature and wilderness has changed in his lifetime, where we are headed, and what we might do to reverse the inevitable if we stay on the same course we have been.
It scared Smallsteps.
While they talk about the environment at school and she has an understanding of what is going on, I think this was the first time she got a sense of what kind of problem it really is and how it is going to affect us all. For her, the world is a massive place and when she sees images of elephants and giraffes or sprawling forests, it looks like there is a lot of it. But as we know, relative to what there was and what we need, these are just small pockets that are quickly shrinking.
There were a lot of poignant things Attenborough said throughout the film that should make the audience think about what we are actually doing here, but when it came to the solutions to the problems, one quote stood out.
"A species can only thrive when everything else around it thrives, too. We can solve the problems we now face by embracing this reality. If we take care of nature, nature will take care of us."
As far as we are concerned, this is true for us too and we are not thriving because in order to survive, we have been destroying our environment. Due to our intelligence we believe we are outside of the system, but the fact is, we are just another species that is within nature. Yet, this quote stood out to me for a more localised reason where the same conditions are required within a species also. And again, we are failing.
We are failing for the same reasons that we are destroying the environment, because we have removed ourselves from the equation and instead put all of the emphasis on the concepts of money, wealth, and control. The environment is being destroyed for profit, nothing else. And society is being destroyed for the same reason. In the name of profit, we are destroying the very conditions we need to live, to survive, and to thrive as a species.
It comes down to greed.
If we were truly selfish and wanted the best for ourselves, we would have to create conditions where others thrive also, because that is what would create the best conditions for us to thrive as individuals. But our greed, our hunger, is insatiable and we will eat until there is nothing left, even if it leaves us starving. This is the paradigm of the current economy, which is designed to continually consolidate wealth and control until one holds it all. It is an engine of homogeneity, monopolisation, and destruction. It is the antithesis of the conditions required for a species to thrive and the way we go about destroys the conditions for all other species.
As I have long said since I was at least 12 years of age, what we spend our money on is the wrong things. It has pissed me off for years that people say that "it is too expensive" to do what is right for the environment, because too expensive doesn't exist in an economy. There is no such thing, because an economy just tracks resource flows and changing directions just shifts the flow of money. Yes, across industries jobs can be lost, but in new environmentally sustainable industries jobs would also be created.
The problem that we have been conditioned to believe is it is too expensive, because we expect consumers to make a choice for something that will not be the cheapest way for a company to produce. It is far cheaper right now for a company to create what harms the environment, than what helps it. But this should not be the case. There should be incentive to create what helps and disincentive to create what doesn't.
For instance, a car should be made to last and people incentivised to keep it as long as possible, rather than keep replacing it. Same for phones and all consumer products. But when it comes to developing and implementing clean tech for improving the environment, there should be rapid growth. We can make do in the areas that aren't important like entertainment and transport, and double-down on what is, like rewilding nature, improving farming yields, generating clean energy.
The economy keeps on ticking.
The economy doesn't care about what we are doing or where we are spending, but we have been conditioned to believe that nothing can be done because it is too expensive. Governments can't spend on healthcare, education, or better environmental practices, because they have to spend on war and service debts. We have been conditioned to believe that we can't afford what makes life better, but we can spend endlessly on what makes it categorically worse.
Thriving is a term that no longer applies to our species.
Thriving isn't just about population growth in numbers, it has to include wellbeing. Chickens are thriving in numbers and have reached around 35 billion alive, with 50 billion consumed each year. But, that doesn't mean they are flourishing as a species, does it? They couldn't do the same in the wild either. There are also about 1.6 billion cows and 1.4 billion sheep. Are they all thriving?
Are we cattle?
With all of our intelligence, we have little wisdom in how we behave, nor in what we believe about ourselves. We are not a successful species because we aren't getting better given the resources we have available. Our brain has let us take control of our own evolution, but we have got to a point we are devolving, because we have got so clever, we can detach our activity from the physical world and act upon conceptual beliefs alone. We can design our behaviours around the idea of monetary wealth and the conceptual derivatives it affords, totally detached in our minds from the very things we need to survive to the point that we will make them so toxic, we cannot sustain our own existence.
Saving the environment from the consumer level is too expensive, because the companies are not interested in saving the environment, they are only interested in maximising profit. I count our wellbeing as a key factor for environmental change, because in order to have a truly high level of wellbeing, we have to have a healthy environment, a nature that thrives.
Just like any of the other species.
It isn't hard to do, but we have been brainwashed to believe it is impossible, by those maximising their profits doing what is rapidly making our environment unliveable.
"Anything that we can't do forever is by definition, unsustainable."
_Sir David Attenborough
Taraz
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The quote reminded me something someone told me the first week we got the olive grove in Portugal: "If you take care and give love to your olive trees, they will bring you all the love back"
I can't wait to drive back there in a couple of weeks to harvest this season olives 🙂
If we applied the same mentality to our communities, it would be the same.
Yep, being fattened up and led to slaughter.
Definitely how it seems these days. Humanity is doomed?
I am not a pessimist, but...we need to take our foot off the accelerator for sure.
I think being around the right people helps us recognise things about ourselves that we might never notice on our own. I have cut such people out of my life.
You have cut out the people that help you? Or the ones that don't? :D
If we do look at the economy, then I don't think we would be able to live. Because we will say its life expensive, (which it is and has been) For all I know, I don't think the economy is going to be good again, since my childhood days i have seen things increase in price and never decreasing, let's say its a gift, from the government.
Increase in price isn't the issue. It is a lack of doing the right things with our resources that is causing the pain.
Your post is truly wonderful. As an ordinary person, I believe that if every single one of us becomes conscious and aware, only then is it possible to save our nature and planet. What more can I say, right?
Do you think you are making a difference now?
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STOPWhat is happening with the rain forests is really concerning. I don't know how we are going to recover from that if they keep doing what they are doing. I'd love to get more than ten years out of a car these days, but that seems to be about the limit anymore. Of course you have people who get a new one every two or three, but I seem to not be able to make it longer than ten. Which ticks me off.