I know that sometimes my posts are heavy on criticism and scarce on solutions, so here are some thoughts on what can be done. I feel many of you are better than I am at suggesting daily activities / choices that help us move along our ecopaths. So, I will stay with big picture views in hopes of adding some balance to our discussions ; ) In my last post I said: "What would my life be like if I were to treat EVERYTHING as a precious gift from the earth? Or as something representing all the time and energy that goes into having it?" Making a shift to this view of the world would drastically change the way we live. I think, it would be a good step toward sustainability. This shift is not easy because our culture sees Nature as "resource." A forest is valuable as lumber or a place for recreation, but not for just being a forest, especially when no one goes there. This, of course, is because we value things with money. What would a new eco-nomic system be like where everything is valued for just being what it is, where all of the efforts and skills involved were represented in the "price"? Many of the things we take for granted in our daily lives would become extremely precious gifts. "Consuming" something would require some amount of apology or appreciation. More effort would be put into closing cycles and working with Nature. This point of view might be necessary to help us shift toward sustainability. I said before that I believe, "that we as individuals need to work toward the smallest 'footprint' we can manage while we work on reducing the population. . .and the sooner the better." These, I feel, are the two most urgent in order to achieve sustainability in any orderly way. As a generalization, the "over-developed" countries need to work on reducing the amount of stuff used; and the "under-developed" countries need to work on reducing the population. On a more personal level, I think we, as members of an over-developed society, can do many things toward reducing our footprints, as individuals and as a society. I said recently that, "we need to become better at changing, encouraging change, and finding ways to make change more enjoyable." Here are some others things I think we need people doing: creating diversity in solutions and approaches living examples finding alternatives making them work helping others adopt them adapting them to other areas and other cultures slowing down current practices helping find transitional strategies helping people make changes popularizing ideas introducing new vocabulary, ideas and ethics spotting areas for improvement lack of consistency educating self and others encouraging balance and open minded questioning encouraging solving problems not avoid them It is not an exhaustive list (other thoughts encouraged), but it shows that we can all be doing our part in helping move our society toward sustainability. We each have talents and interests that we can use and share. I think each person should spend some time thinking about what things they can do to help. Ultimately, it is not how sustainable we are individually, but how much we help others, especially future generations, live more sustainably that really matters. In this we will find further stepping stones for our own ecopaths. Eric:
