A well-written excerpt by Gregg Easterbrook for further reflection

Last night in my graduation ritual/ceremony of my Alternative Approaches to Health Care course, I brought a rock from Hawaii to put on the table. This rock for me represents my forever connection to HI and to the learning, growth, and shift in consciousness/perspective that happened there. Ever since I went to Hawaii, many parts of myself clicked together. It was like everything I knew solidified there. I saw the world more clearly and wholly, and I promised myself I would never let that knowledge go unforgotten or left behind. So I brought my rock to share with the class, to tell them that what the rock represented was what truly pushed me to join the Holistic Health Studies program and begin my new journey living my own life.

What I wanted to share today is a seemingly gloomy passage that my professor from my Ecology and Health clas shared which I think explains quite strongly and creatively the current world of environmental challenges we humans face. This passage serves not to be gloomy but calls to my attention, again, that we as a collective species must wake up and figure out if we really want to be here or not.

Gregg Easterbrook writes:

In the aftermath of events like the Exxon Valdez oil spill, every reference to the environment is prefaced with the adjective "fragile". Nothing could be further from the truth.

The environment is damned near indestructible. It has survived ice ages, bombardments of cosmic radiation, fluctuations of the sun, reversals of the seasons caused by shifts in the planetary axis, collisions of comets and meteors bearing far more force than man's doomsday arsenals and the lightless "nuclear winters" that followed these impacts. Thought mischievous, human assaults are pinpricks compared with the forces of magnitude nature is accustomed to resisting.

One aspect of the environment is genuinely delicate, though. Namely, the set of conditions favorable to human beings. ...

Nature doesn't care if the globe is populated with trilobites or thunder lizards or people or six-eyed telepathic slugs. What nature cares about it that the ecosystem live. Should man sour the environmental conditions now slanted in our favor, creatures will rise up in our stead that thrive on murky greenhouse air, or dine on compounds human metabolisms find toxic.

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Pretty powerful writing, and true dat Gregg! haha...sorry (trying to lighten the mood).

It is estimated that we lose about 135 species a day. That is 6 species killed off in an hour.

Every 29 minutes a whale is harvested somewhere.

For every hamburger you eat, 67 square feet of rainforest was cleared to make space for the cow.

While with the power of mass communication and technology, these facts are more well-known than before, we ignore it because life as we see it is too stressful to focus on something like saving the planet. BUT I think it is necessary to remind ourselves of the damage we continue to do to our planet and to one another, and I think it is important to remember that once an animal goes extinct that is it. Its done.

Now, I don't mean to be gloomy about this all. According to my professor of Ecology and Health there are two do-nothing traps out there:

1) Technological Optimism (believing humans will always come up with the technology to right the wrongs)
2) Gloom and doom perspective (immobilizes people who are feeling too overwhelmed, leaving them in a state of inaction)

By sharing this information I don't mean to make anybody feel guilty about the life they lead, but to make people think about the life they lead and ask: do you cherish your life? What could be changed in the world for you to appreciate life more? Can we as individuals care about our lives enough to have empathy and care about the lives of other people and creatures as well?

This is the question I ponder a lot. I am still searching for an answer that can be more easily understood and accepted among people.

For more environmental notes, (and less dramatic and reflective ones and more what you can do to help notes)-- I typically post to my Go Green Machine blog. This post however I felt immediately fell under the umbrella of my program, so I wanted to include it in here.