Does It Come Down To People Vs the Natural World?

clear-cut-forests

Letter to a friend:

My region of the USA is starting to collapse in some places due to too many people using up too many resources. Eventually the overall economy will collapse since we will run out of fossil fuels and certain other critical resources. … My local water is garbage (fecal material, other potentially poisonous materials, and road chemicals for de-icing compensated by massive amounts of other chemicals, not good ones, to compensate and added by town) and I can’t even feed this water to my cats. I bathe in it, clean with it and cook in it, but that’s it.

And I’m fortunate since my plastic bottles for Poland Spring water for drinking for both my cats and me go to a Wheelabrator biomass plant. I do NOT pollute with my plastic or other garbage from my household on account. I do not have that travesty on my conscience.

Now I have gotten other issues. I’ve watched my region of town get built more and more for economic gain. Housing and business developments take over places that used to be forests, wetlands, meadows and other types of beauty. I have watched the numbers of other species decline in my neighborhood. I have heard of plans to take the three remaining properties in my part of town (now up for sale and for which one is a heritage apple farm with rare plant strains as old as 16-1700’s) to build huge housing developments).

I keep watching the natural world losses transpire year after year where I live and I grieve. I also am saddened that this whole trend is leading to my part of the world going the way of other collapsed regions of the world, as well as helping to lead into:

The Holocene extinction, otherwise referred to as the Sixth extinction or Anthropocene extinction, is the ongoing extinction event of species during the present Holocene epoch, mainly as a result of human activity. … The arrival of humans on different continents coincides with megafaunal extinction. – From Holocene extinction – Wikipedia
So I get worried since I see a dichotomy between serving humanity and the natural world. The two trends seem often diametrically opposed.

Now you are striving to be a good Christian and are a deacon in in your church. In addition, you know about what Jesus shares about helping the afflicted and harmed, such as in the Good Samaritan story and about the stoning of an adulterous woman, which he stopped. You, likewise, know the Golden Rule, which is to do unto others as you want to be treated, yourself.

So what would you do with me and my daughter if we lived in a collapsing region of the world? It doesn’t matter if it is collapsing from overpopulation of people, climate change, lack of water or insufficient jobs. What if we trekked to the USA and illegally got into the country while enduring rape along the way?

I can tell you that I would not let, if I could help it, her or me die in our journey. I would use every bit of my courage and internal other resources to make us succeed to get into circumstances that could support our lives.

When I think of this imaginary scenario as being true, I measure it against my wish to protect my region and other regions against the assault that too many people can bring, such as poor quality water and no more natural world present. I also picture that when, say in a hundred and fifty years from now, people are trying to eek out a living, something akin to mere survival, in many parts of the world devoid of many important resources needed for the way that life can go forward if we let too many people into any particular region not undergoing collapse.

What do I mean? Here, see for yourself from a person who developed the idea of ecological and carbon footprint:

Staving Off the Coming Global Collapse | The Tyee

‘Overshoot’ is when a species uses resources faster than can be replenished. We’re already there. And show no signs of changing.

By William E. Rees Yesterday | TheTyee.ca

William E. Rees is professor emeritus of human ecology and ecological economics at the University of British Columbia.

Staving Off the Coming Global Collapse! Ron Paul WARNING – YouTube

Jul 30, 2017 – Uploaded by Special Reports

Please Click Below to SUBSCRIBE for More “Special Reports” Videos https://goo.gl/eyhkOZ Thanks for …

Frankly I can’t wrap my mind around the choice. You want to take 18 million people starving, according to the current UN statistics, to death in your region? You want to take millions of climate change and war victims on top of the first group? You want to preserve the natural world and resources for your own group of people by keeping these others out by buildings walls between their impoverished and collapsing countries and ours? Do you want to protect the natural world by keeping them out? What’s a good answer here — one not conflicted? Is there any?

Look, I agree with you that we want no more terrorists in our country. I live around thirty miles from Boston and I walked due to my work a half mile away from where the MIT security guard was killed by the eldest Marathon Bomber. So it could have been me in his stead. I could have taken a bullet in the head.

Yet I blame no particular religion for this sort of madness. After all, look at Cardinal Law and pedophilia or the Las Vegas shooter. So let’s blame a poor mental health system, an inadequate health care and educational system, for this problem, which will not go away due to our wishful thinking.

Instead, we have to work to change the system so that these sorts of problems do not prominently arise again and again with which to begin. (My sister and her branch of my family live where the two tri-state shooters lived. We drove past where they killed people in malls in Maryland on the way to a concert and I found it very disturbing to see in person that which I saw in news reports concerning slaughtered innocent people.)

Then again, I hate that our country slaughters overseas and supports other countries that do this action, even to places that have Doctors Without Borders. How about this one?

We also have to have really good education and health care for the overpopulation issue and we need it worldwide in scale. We need it so we can try to delimit the coming collapse and we don’t have to keep taking more and more people into our regions so as to collapse them or build walls to keep starving desperate masses away from us since we do not want the ruination that their sheer numbers can bring, such as to my pathetic water supply and in terms of my local species’ loss.

All considered, we are going to have to find and fight for a new way forward. If not, our species and other ones are doomed in large measure in terms of going forward in times ahead. It’s this simple, but also complex as we have lots of work ahead to straighten out the mess.

stop-fighting

Sallu Dugman is a writer from MA, USA.

 

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