The Future is Not Binary Between Hell and Eden but a Bush of Outcomes from our Choices

Bob Mcdonald’s book gives us a blueprint for weaning ourselves off fossil fuels and use sunshine etc now rather than buried sunshine for our energy needs (video here).

In a podcast discussion of Adam Welz’s book (The End of Eden: Wild Nature in the Age of Climate Breakdown) he notes the very serious problem of climate breakdown.

“The effects of cumulative landscape change, ecological damage and greenhouse gas emissions is affecting all ecosystems everywhere not just far away Arctic polar bears, Antarctic penguins, forests and jungles but in our local  urban parks (with new insects, fungi and plant diseases).

We have to deal with our civilisation’s impact on our planet in a meaningful way.  Its complicated and we must change huge numbers of things about the way we live on Earth with our fellow passengers – other people, animals, plants and even the landscape, and water bodies and of course the thin blue band of our atmosphere.

The faster we deal with them the fewer the bad effects we are going to see – its not an either / or of having hope. How bad it gets depends on how we quickly and meaningfully we act to respond to the issues around climate breakdown.”

Earth will keep on keeping on with or without us so its not about helping it but helping ourselves by changing how we live that will provide hope for all the us on our little pale blue dot! We can’t COP out of decisive positive action if we are to keep our Earth on our side for survival.

 

See also the design inspired by David Suzuki and Chief Seattle here.

A modern paraphrasing of a famous Chief Seattle quote:  ‘What befalls the Earth befalls all of us on the Earth. This we know: The Earth does not belong to people, people belong to the Earth. All things are connected like the blood that unites us all. People did not wave the web of life, we are merely a strand in it. What people do to the web, we do to ourselves.’