The Good News and The Bad News

The good news is that we are becoming aware that Mother Earth’s warning light has come on.  We keep hearing that things are amiss – whether it be pollution, disease epidemics, political unrest (see the pages of your daily newspaper).  This has spurned conservation efforts from every corner of humanity and as a result positive things are happening everywhere and we are even beginning to grasp that there may be limits to the Mother Earth’s gifts.

The bad news is that in spite of our best intentions, we are not "helping to save the planet."  It's not that we aren’t recycling and conserving enough – it’s that there is getting to be so many of us that there is just not enough in the gift bag for everyone to get a full serving.  Reducing environmental impact is great, but what is truly needed is for us to produce and dispose of less – in fact the same quantities that can be sustained.

At some point in time there must surely be a population-resource recovering.  An interesting consideration in this regard is the possibility that our well-intentioned efforts to slow down our impact on ecosystems could be inadvertently hindering earth’s ability to replenish itself.   “An ecosystem might actually have more of a chance to become healthy and whole again after a quick collapse that leaves some niches intact than a slow, deliberate, and efficient destruction of the whole” (­Cradle to Cradle).

We see plenty of eco-friendly testimonials in just about every advertisement we come across.  Green has become a marketing buzz word second only to the "S" word but truly green or not a more descriptive term might be "less bad."  Today's rhetoric is so filled with euphemisms that often our only hope for comprehension lies in reading between the lines.  We have already altered the natural stability of our planet's resources – Let's be clear and call a spade a spade.