Discuss: Altar Call for True Believers

Something is happening that is horrendous. Human beings appear to be perpetrating the horror. Why not do things differently? Who knows, perhaps necessary change toward sustainability is in the offing.

With the blessings of many super-rich benefactors and the adamant advocacy of many too many obscenely-enriched minions (as well as the silent, condoning consent of an acquiescent majority of the human community), would it be the most colossal crime in human history if a tiny minority of wealthy and powerful people in a single generation acted arrogantly, foolishly, greedily in patently unsustainable ways and, by so doing, precipitated the ruin of Earth as a fit place for habitation by the children and life as we know it?

Can responsible people with a respect for moral authority and intellectual honesty as well as a positive regard for future human wellbeing and environmental health justify the determination to continue doing things in patently unsustainable ways?

It seems somehow not quite right to suggest that the colossal global ecological challenges presenting themselves to the human family in our time are “signs and symptoms” of the Earth somehow dying naturally.  Please consider that Earth’s body and its environs are now besieged and threatened with ruin by distinctly human-driven, too big to fail or succeed overproduction corporations; by conspicuous per-capita overconsumption and excessive hoarding of limited resources among a tiny minority of humanity; and by the gigantic scale and skyrocketing growth of absolute global human population numbers among the great majority of the human community.  If human beings were to adopt sustanability as a “living standard” in its production, consumption and propagation acitivities worldwide, there would not be an immediately evident and readily identifiable threat to the integrity of our planetary home; to life as we know it; or to the future of the children.

Please consider that contributors to this blog are pointing us toward the distinctly unwelcome news of potentially profound implications that are derived directly from the growth-induced, patently unsustainable ‘trajectory’ on which the human community finds itself now.  The nature of the human-driven predicament looming before humanity is becoming harder for incorrigibly avaricious denialists to ignore and much more difficult for their bought-and-paid-for ideologues (in and out of politics) and absurdly enriched minions in the mass media to deny.  An adequate understanding of what could somehow be a real, clear and present danger to human wellbeing and environmental health appears, finally, to be overcoming the delusional activities of the malignantly narcissistic, pathologically arrogant, intellectually dishonest, morally depraved and wantonly greedy among us who have consolidated a lion’s share of the world’s wealth as well as the power great wealth purchases and wields. Let’s us hold onto an abiding faith and “hope beyond hopelessness” that the window of opportunity for making necessary changes remains open to us and that behavior change toward sustainable lifestyles can be achieved in a timely fashion….. if we choose to move forward in a new direction, with different values.

Perhaps we can agree that the business-as-usual activities which have been adamantly advocated and relentlessly pursued during the past 8 long, dark years need not continue.

So,I started out an hour ago to find some more recent words from Janisse.She came twice to my “town"of Decatur which is swallowed up within the megalopolis of Atlanta to read her own words and let me see the reality of her eyes and family.It led to an hour reading this wide-ranging,wonderful yet troubling string of screeds and insights.
Some no doubt will think it fitting that this had ended as the ship of state upon which I ride shifted it’s course,I will appreciate that yet try to keep it going because it seems a necessary dialogue;perhaps more so as more come aboard the ship of environmentalism.
Like Janisse I am of the South from many generations,raised in a fundamentalist home with the ghosts of insanity and violence ever present.Here in the South the raw and close presence of the arrogance,denial and stupidity of our ancestors is evidenced by the ruins within which we live;I hope to fashion from these relics a vision which can avert or mitigate the damages to my children’s world.
There’s some words from an old man
who led me to Earl’s ledge
thirty feet of emptiness below
and just his voice behind
as I reached out in the dark

He said just keep moving
an inch a minute is just fine
be like the water moving
certain of your line
and looking back you’ll laugh
and see it was all mighty fine.

The family of humanity is presented with a colossal problem, second in magnitude only to climate change as a threat to human wellbeing and environmental health. Currently, corporate entities are perversely regarded under law as having individual rights like those that citizens of a country possess. A patina of corporate ‘citizenship’ masks corrupt kinds of illegitimate, immoral and fraudulent activities that are promulgated mainly by arrogant, dishonest, greedy and psychologically disordered individuals within huge international financial and production enterprises. These corporate entities are so gigantic that no nation-state on Earth can any longer reasonably and sensibly contain and regulate them.

Which major corporation, multinational conglomerate or industry “owns” your country’s governance mechanisms…democratic principles and practices notwithstanding.

Let’s examine a forced choice situation: protect the unbridled growth of the global economy or preserve Earth’s ecology.

Either grow the global political economy in a soon to become patently unsustainable way as we doing now and raise the probable risk of irreversibly dissipating Earth’s finite resource base and degrading its frangible ecosystems or modify the global economy to one that functions in a sustainable steady state and raise the prospect of saving the Earth as a fit place for the children and coming generations to inhabit.

Many thanks to all for your consideration.

If Janisse Ray isn’t the Second Coming, she’s close enough in my book. To read, and even better, to meet this woman, is to come away enlivened. I love the fact that a cracker from Georgia is willing to call down the choir and bring us all a little closer to accountability and sustainability. Hell, someone has to do it. The scary thing is, no one knows if it’s “better to consume some resources in the service of a larger battle,” because we don’t know how many battles we get before the war is lost, over. I wish words or deeds alone could open our hearts to love the land and ourselves as we should. But it seems sometimes that it’s only great loss that can crack the facade of our comfort. Those losses are stacking up while I write these words, in ways we can’t begin to imagine. Like Janisse, I wouldn’t mind us erring on the side of caution and care. There’s no such thing as caring too much, not now with time running out.

Regardless of any local reforms anyone may pursue, if humanity continues dumping its garbage, sludge and junk in the ocean and spewing tons of smoke and fumes into the atmosphere and refusing to plant several million trees on the 5 continents, the biosphere will collapse and life on Earth will go extinct. Do you understand this?