We need to have a conversation. We can’t go on like this. Something has to give... etc.

Sound familiar?

It is a human trait to hide from the truth when a relationship ends. Yet, we are distracted by loyalties that are past their use-by date.

Why else do we prioritize our day-to-day relationships over our relationship with the earth; if the end of this life-sustaining relationship we all share means the end of all other kinds of relationships?

Why do people continue to ignore it?

The love for your children is the same love for the earth – whether we want to recognize this or not, it is a reality. Forget this love, and you can forget your children’s futures. We both ignore the truth and simultaneously keep voting for the same political structures that led to the resource wars (of which Iraq is so widely accepted as being (oil). Unsustainable and unconscious voting means we are at war with nature. This means we are at war with ourselves. Since we ‘are’ inseparable from the earth’s ecology that sustains us and inseparable from the planet itself, we are nature.

Love of the Superficial
We have killed our relationship with the earth and diverted that attention to a superficial love of material objects, love of money, the things that bring us temporary pleasure over the things that can bring us permanent peace. We are so attached to these things we would instead take the side of the superficial, the artificial. The appeal? It provides the foundation for the fear that we are being forced to have some of these items pried from our fingers to help others and even realize it is to help ourselves.

Let’s face it, some of us are more stubborn, self-serving and inwards looking than others. We are like children who won’t let go of something we are not supposed to play with.

Population Control – Bernie’s Wrong Approach
This inward-looking behaviour is widespread, even among those willing to deliver the message. Bernie Saunders recently mentioned population control due to human overpopulation and overconsumption in such an inward-looking manner it may finish his run for the Presidency. He missed the opportunity to describe how many resources less poor countries actually use, such as the United States:

“The United States, with less than 5 % of the global population, uses about a quarter of the world’s fossil fuel resources—burning up nearly 25 % of the coal, 26 % of the oil, and 27 % of the world’s natural gas.” – The State of Consumption Today – World Watch.

His mention of limiting ‘brown babies’ will boost the speed at which the already irrational knee-jerk reaction to the words ‘population control’ will explode – exponentially, destroying both his chances and the chances of intelligent debate on our pathological level of self-entitlement.

Nationalist Fear Rules the Day – and May Well End It.
Yet, the dominant nationalist sentiments that currently prevail and arm themselves, even in space, will keep winning through the ‘hate’ response to the collective fear over what is happening to this planet.

Yet, to note what is happening to the planet is not passive observation. We are doing it, and what we are doing can be stopped. One way or another, it will be destroyed.

The hate for people who say we can’t have certain things to save the planet will continue. Just as it appears inevitable that these same people will cling ever more tightly to the outdated concepts and political systems.

At the same time, what else can the rest of us do but try? We have to help people to stop reacting emotionally to the ideas of what are really tiny sacrifices and invite them to intelligently – consider the facts.

This means we have to agree on one thing, as difficult as it currently is to imagine. We have to stop voting for a system that depends on infinite resources from a finite planet. Even many Green Parties worldwide are dependent on these same unsustainable Capitalist economic policies.

Votes on Policies Not Politicians?
We need to consider a new kind of democracy, starting with a resource-based economy, where we vote for policy, not (paid) politicians. This begins with a tiny personal realization about our oneness with nature. You aren’t afraid to say you love your children, so why can’t we say we love the earth? Anything less than this willingness is where ignorance meets diabolical stubbornness, which may prove there was never any love or connection to the reality we were all born into in the first place.

To stop the madness, we have to stop the turmoil within. This is an eschatological question, a time of our self-judgment as a species. Not God’s judgment, but the critical existential question; if we can’t wake up and save ourselves by loving the earth, what are we all doing here?