Starting to pay back

1651:  

Once, when we were younger, when the world was less damaged, there was unexploited abundance everywhere. It seemed to be everlasting. Oceans were clean and teeming with fish. It was incomprehensible that whole river systems could ever die. Land was fertile. Our surroundings were attractive. It was unimaginable that the world could be turned into a slum. But over a relatively short period of time, with each person saving their own skin, it is becoming the worst of all possible worlds. And soon there will be nothing of worth to pass on.

The damage is done and we haven’t been able to stop ourselves from continually taking, and taking faster. Instead of learning from our mistakes the human race has lost its collective identity, and now it’s every man for himself. Everything is done to numb the individual’s feeling of unsafety even if it means increasing danger for others. We’ve refined cruelty, increased slavery, wrecked forests, polluted the air and land, and the main power brokers have shown little regard for those with less power. The human has become addicted to an increasingly unsustainable lifestyle. And now, there’s tangible proof of  the human influence of planetary systems – few people doubt that we are now in all sorts of trouble.

         

Why this has happened this way may be because it was the only way the big brain could reflect on the inherent dangers of big-brained-ness. We’ve been so keen to develop one system in ourselves, shall we say the speeding up process, that we’ve ignored the slowing down system, the sustainability factor. We don’t learn from theory but from consequences of practice. From a state of plenty we’ve built up a debt burden. Our collective debts won’t easily be paid back, but it isn’t impossible, surely, and in the attempt to rebalance our systems we will have learnt the most valuable lesson of all that will serve us well into the future and make our more sustainable evolution possible.

Debt mentality gave us the false impression of being richer than we were and, like any bubble, it had to burst. That realisation dawned on us slowly at first, then we caught up with reality and then it gathered speed as we took more and more for granted. Now, with less clean air, less fresh water, fewer trees and less bird song in the morning, we’re learning the big lesson about debt and damage.

It’s a bit like animal food itself or anything else we’re not entitled to - it kills the best in us.