My post-election thoughts. (2020)
As our President-Elect would say? “Come on, Folks. Let’s get real.”
We are an animal species. And like all animals we eat and we shit.
Now, there are nearly 8 billion of us eating and shitting. And each of us has been eating exponentially more every year since we were born.
What have we been eating? Figuratively speaking, we have been eating the Earth, its soils, its plants, its forests, its fishes, its minerals, its coal, its oil, its gas.
And what have we been shitting? Again figuratively speaking, we have been shitting polluted air, polluted water, polluted soils, and eroded soil, dropping groundwater tables, toxic oceans, gigantic dumps of junk that we no longer want, and on and on.
It isn’t that we need all of this to survive and enjoy each other’s company. Our needs for enough food, enough shelter, enough sociability can be met just like other social animal’s needs were met until we humans destroyed their habitats.
Yet, because we think that our consciousness, our ability to talk, our ability to put our dreams into physical reality, and the stories we tell ourselves of being the peak of evolution, we act as if can eat whatever we want of the Earth. Furthermore, we have created the story of money to regulate and measure what we eat.
With climate change and global warming we have become aware that all is not well on Earth–we smell the shit. But as the Earth cries, we simply want to spray a deodorizer on the stink.
Come on, get real. We can’t begin to solve the problem until we recognize the problem’s real nature:
We are 8 billion animals that are eating the Earth and are 8 billion animals shitting on the Earth.
With the broadest common sense, we have to eat less and clean up the shit. Until we do, our old stories will follow us into unimaginable dystopias.