Are you personally or people who you know placing too many demands on our planet to provide relative extravagance and indulgences for us? After all, the world is expected to eventually be required to support quite a bit more than our already over 8 billion humans currently extant and THAT is already putting a strain on many of our basic and essential resources.
Further, it’s indirectly and directly creating climate change, promoting the 6th great extinction event, and creating literally mountains of garbage and permanent water pollution, along with deforestation, poisons in the air that were all forced to breathe like pm 2.5 that is like little minuscule fish hooks nicking our lungs and doing the same to tube walls and blood cells in our circulatory systems.
How about the land and waterways being polluted with forever chemicals and the GMO Monsanto-Bayer chemicals being positively correlated with seriously dangerous diseases, and microplastics even discovered in placentas and breast milk? And how about landmines and spent munitions littering landscapes across the world and creating widespread ruin, loss, torment, intended deaths even if children, intentional starvation and societal dysfunction?
Already we have ecological overshoot, conflict and collapse scenarios taking place in increasing parts of the world like the Horn of Africa. Put another way — would you personally try to trek to the USA with your family to live in motel room in Massachusetts where you each are fed three meals a day, have n/c public school for the children and basic healthcare available for all or would you prefer a steady diet of Haitian mud cookies and street gang thugs destroying your family’s lives as you live in a cramped and tiny slum-hovel shack?
Meanwhile,
Global human-made mass exceeds all living biomass.
The ramifications of this happening are clear. We are destroying our planet on which we depend for survival of everything alive and replacing it with dead junk that we can sell to make an economic profit for our individual selves.
In the end, we humans are just going to have to try harder to support the whole or largesse of us — to bring betterment to all rather than economically make out personally like bandits while we destroy the planet in the process.
One of my associates calls humankind the plague species. How far off is he all considering even if we do create so much that’s amazing like dance choreography, plays like the ones by Euripides’s, symphonies jotted into paper that people with orchestra instruments can coordinated with each other following the same gorgeous auditory timing and plan, philosophy.sculptures and paintings, skyscrapers, rockets to the moon, medicine, math, semiconductors, atomic force microscopy that blows my mind as I have a “thing” about metrology, the particle collider, symbolic logic, hermeneutics and its close companion-semiotics, linguistics and language; incredible acts of ethics, kindness and support etc., etc.
We have a long way to go, though, past our prior successes. We definitely need to try harder if the brunt, the majority of our kind and other life, can make it past this century. So we all have to be more mindful about the choices that we make. We must, therefore, apply the seventh generation principle.“
The Seventh Generation Principle is based on the Iroquois philosophy that the decisions we make today should result in a sustainable world seven generations into the future. It is said that a leader needs to make decisions that serve the needs of the unborn voices seven generations into the future and help people in the present live with the tensions and conflicts that sometimes arise when the needs of future generations are not considered in the present. Leaders in this framework are responsible for keeping future needs firmly in focus and allowing those needs to shape our choices in the present.
“The Seventh Generation Principle comes from the Iroquois Confederacy Constitution, written somewhere between 1142 to 1500 AD. The Iroquois Confederacy is considered the oldest participative democracy on Earth. It planted many of the seeds that led to the formation of the United States. (There’s a terrific PBS documentary on the Iroquois Great Law of Peace here.)
“Today the Seventh Generation Principle generally refers to decisions about our energy, water, and natural resources. Remembering this important tenet reminds us that our decisions must be sustainable for many generations to come. It also can be applied to relationships. Imagine what it would be like if every decision would result in sustainable relationships seven generations in the future!” – Dr. Kathy Allen, The Seventh Generation Principle
Sally Dugman lives in MA and is alarmed to watch the destruction of the natural world where she lives in the central part of her U.S. state.
