Friends, if you care about the Earth – or even if you don't care one bit for this beautiful Earth, but you do care about yourself – you’d do well to read this article by Bill McKibben. In it he explains
It probably means taking a tea-break to read this, because there’s five pages of it.
I’ve read it all through, carefully.
It confirms what I concluded a while ago – that commercial and political interest will destroy this Earth, and the spreading slime-mould of Mammon will choke the life out of us – unless we, the people, personally and individually change.
We have to stop. We have to make a change. We have to learn to live simply, buy locally, give up jetting around the world in aeroplanes just to sit in the sun there instead of here or admire the architecture in a foreign city. We have to return to an altogether more primitive lifestyle. We have to learn to be – can you believe this? – unselfish.
There is no-one else to do it, no-one to blame and no-one to help. It’s us or nobody; our choices, our path, our call.
As Stephen Gaskin said:
You are this season’s people.
There are no other people this season.
If you blow it, it’s blown.
The future is simple, vegan, local, and wind/solar-powered. There is no other future. The road we’re on runs out into a quicksand.
The only hope left to us is if we, the people, are willing individually and personally to accept the sacrifice of change, and encourage each other by travelling together for the sake of hope and life.
I know how weak-willed I am, how lacking in determination, how self-indulgent and undisciplined. I know that by myself I cannot walk the way of life - I've tried for so long and have a string of failure extending behind me trailing back decades.
You my friends, and most of all, you my family - we really need to do this now. To give up the fuel-guzzling, water-wasting, packaging-hungry, unnecessarily international habits into which we've slid, and do this seriously now. Please will you walk with me.
And whoever will or will not, I ask you God my Father, for the sake of all that you blessed and called good, please will you give me the grace to take this path anyway, for the love of the green and growing things, and the miracle of life that you made.
If we don't do this, by the time the Wretched Wretch leaves college, there'll be nothing left to look at but a war in a dust-bowl.
Please.
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Went with the display board I posted as yesterday's item given away.