Are We There Yet?

Do we have a grand plan for taking care of this planet or are we just stumbling along trying to make the best of the situation?

Planned communities are pretty popular here in the U.S. for those people who don’t want to take a lot of responsibility for their living environment. They hire homeowners associations to decide on and enforce whatever rules that every inhabitant is forced to live by.

Would this concept work if it were applied to the entire planet?

Perhaps it is something we need to look into. This free-form self-managed method of caring for our environment has left us with many areas of the earth decimated through the free-reign plundering of natural resources. We have created groups and devised plans to clean up afterwards but why don’t we have oversight groups with well thought out usage plans whose permission would have to be attained before the plunder takes place? I know there aren’t any places remaining that this plan could be experimented with but if we began to turn our attention to that line of thinking it would lead to a more conservation conscious public outlook.

We could possibly even learn (retrain ourselves) to put the long-term health of the environment as a high priority right up there with profit making. It just doesn’t seem right that the few people who lay waste to the landscape in search of resources for the implied purpose of benefiting so many should not add the cost of cleanup to the cost of extraction without leaving a mess for someone else to deal with. We all participate in the destruction of our plant and the depletion of its resources every time we participate in wasteful fuel consumption, purchase plastic products, or throw away any still-useable item. Understanding that we must participate in this wantonness in order to survive, why can’t we also understand that our lifestyles can be scaled back to be less resource-wasteful. It can be done, it is practiced every day. The road block to this is of course convincing yourself that you can live just as comfortably with less. Denying the chance to prove it to yourself is putting the responsibility onto someone else.

Just as with homeowners associations we have put the responsibility onto someone else. Only, in the case of the environment, the responsibility is overwhelming and cannot be accomplished by just a handful of groups. Especially since it seems we are at odds about the importance of such groups.

Just because we have organizations such as the Environmental Protection Agency or a Department of Conservation or the World Wildlife Fund or a Center for Environmental Law doesn’t mean our responsibility ends with them. We can still do little things to make their jobs easier. And in doing so provide benefits to all of us.

We can do things like pick up trash that some unthinking or uncaring slob has thrown to the ground. We can stop the use of animal parts as jewelry or decoration. We can grow our own food, give away items that are no longer useful to us but may benefit someone else instead of tossing it into the landfill or having sit around collecting dust. This “out of sight out of mind” thinking needs to be put to rest. Just because we throw it away doesn’t mean we are no longer affected by it.

Plastic is killing off large numbers of wildlife and it seems we will never be rid of innovative plastic items that we just cannot live without. So at least we can be more responsible in its use and not just callously throw it on the trash heap. Help reduce the use of plastic if you can with more sustainable items such as reusable cloth or cotton shopping bags, ask fast food restaurants and coffee shops to use your reusable cups instead of their throw away cups, if they refuse then don’t patronize these establishments. Your body could probably use a break from these nutrient-deficient places anyway.

Some magazines are in the habit of including a lot of paper in the form of several subscription cards and other loose-leaf advertising, write to them and ask them to stop this practice. If they don’t want to listen to you then stop subscribing to the magazine.

The excess paper, in the form of advertising, that your credit card companies, cell phone service providers and other monthly billings include amount to a lot of excess useless paper that gets thrown in the trash or shredded. Take the time to ask them to stop this wasteful practice. If enough voices are heard they will have to listen.

We simply must understand the effect that each and every one of us has on our environment. It is a cop out to say ‘I am just one person and cannot possibly have any effect’. If this thinking were true then why is it that we have piles of trash? Each person throws trash out and it accumulates into huge mountains. So please don’t hide behind this lame excuse. Let’s each of us think about how we are part of the picture and each one of us please do something every day.

So, to answer the original question, No, we do not have a master plan. But, all of us collectively working as if there was a master plan to keep this planet healthy wouldn’t that in effect be a master plan? We can make a difference.