WHAT MORE CAN WE DO?
A Letter In Answer To A Cynic…By Kerry Martin
25 January, 2007
Countercurrents.orgMy soul LOVES being clothed in physical matter, and utterly enjoys being immersed in the wonders of Nature, and this soul has been mourning for thirty years over the devastation our species has ignorantly inflicted on our Living Earth, and this soul has long ago reduced her physical footprint to the smallest possible - by doing without.
Nevertheless, this soul still has to lift her spirits every morning that she wakes, & ask her sellf & her beloved Earth "What more can I DO?"
The reason I ask "What more can I DO?" is precisely because I don't want to wring my hands and fall in to despair, and I am NOT a "get the most I can for myself while I can still get it" type. I still have a naïve faith in human beings (I am a bit Anne Frank) and for me it won't be over until the very thin lady has dropped dead!
"Even if I knew I was going to die tomorrow, I would still plant my apple tree"... That's Martin Luther King I think. We must keep our spirits up somehow, for apathetic cynical fatalism could kill us all quicker than global heating!
Although many of us have been crying "Wake up!" since the seventies, the fact is, the majority of the affluent public are only just waking up to the problem now. The last six months has seen a massive shift in awareness. This means, after three decades of frustration, that SOON! we will be able to actually TRY DOING SOME THINGS.
Of course our efforts may not succeed. But unless we try doing some things, we will never know. Doing nothing at all to mitigate or adapt is a sure recipe for disaster.
When I say "What can I DO?" I suppose I have been grappling with how exactly to best get into politics as Al Gore recommends...
What can ordinary individuals do, apolitically, to put the maximum effective pressure upon all media, governments, industry and the "ignorant masses"... So that the radical actions we need to take in this "ten years" of grace, actually get taken.
Here are some ideas my family has come up with in the last three months…
Science has been so obsessed with proving that the crisis is coming, that it has neglected to explore the practical "What can we do?" question.
So here is one thing that we CAN all do immediately... DEMAND THAT FUNDS FOR RESEARCH, EDUCATION & PRACTICAL ACTION BE MASSIVELY INCREASED! Immediately.
And here is another VERY PRACTICAL IDEA… which would encourage current governments to actually DO this as soon as possible – not just vaguely promise us that they will do it one day if we vote for them. For example…
Why let our governments continue to spend vast sums of OUR MONEY on weapons research, and on keeping military machine & man-power idle when there is a war on with the weather?
Why allow governments to continue wasting money, time & resources planning & building bigger airports and more roads.
Let us begin to with-hold a significant proportion of our taxes from them until they agree to scrap those kind of idiotic and unsustainable plans and projects, and begin instead to (for example) massively subsidise public transport, solar panels, wood-not-concrete for building, etc. etc.
Why wait for a change of Government? A tax-boycott is an apolitical statement that can be made to any Government as it is today. It is an action that can start tomorrow, on a unilateral individual basis, but which is more effective and safer for the individual if it is collectively organised and managed…
Can we organise an organisation to ORGANISE THE OFFICIAL GLOBAL CITIZENS EARTH AID TAX BOYCOT…
Whereby concerned citizens still pay all the taxes due to their governments, but lodge them, or a proportion of them, into a legally established Climate Change Action Holding Fund – This stores the taxes, so that taxes can be seen to have been “paid” by the individual, but effectively with-holds finance from the governments until such time as the individual is satisfied that the government has taken the actions required.
At that point the individual instructs the Fund to pay the government.
The interest accrued on these held-back tax funds can go to support independent research and action with low-cost effective earth healing methods.
I read somewhere, someone calling for the "development of a technology to take CO2 out of the atmosphere and bury it"
This made me laugh! Don't we have that already? Isn't it called "A TREE"...
Preventing further forest/soil loss must be just as important as reducing emissions. Building soil and planting trees is a positive action. One thing that people can actually DO. Small scale and large scale. Rich or poor. There are simple techniques for reforesting even very desert places.
Why aren't governments talking about forests? How can we bring it to their attention? It's not just about emissions and power... Forests don’t just lock up carbon. Trees cool the Earth and keep the water cycle going, and hold the soil in place and provide homes for life… We need reforestation! Massive global revegetation projects. The US army should be planting food and fuel trees & shrubs for the people in Iraq if they want to make peace. Not fighting and bombing and killing them.
I hear that forests are dying from pests no longer held back by climate. It must be a priority to see that these areas are replanted with suitable species able to cope with the new conditions coming...
Scientists, and their financiers, no longer need to concentrate on proving that global heating exists. We need research to find the most effective simplest low-tech methods for mitigating and adapting to the changes.
Identifying and breeding fast-growing drought-resistant food-producing tree & shrub species… Learning how to propogate them prolifically, knowing where, when & how to plant and nurture them. That is the sort of thing we need to know.
And then DO!
The unemployed, and all idle military machines and manpower could be utilised for vast soil-building & reafforestation projects. They would be – if we demand this of our governments.
Not just governments. Multi-nationals can be put under a lot more pressure. Monsanto could do something USEFUL for us, help us with new varieties of shrubs and trees able to produce food under the new conditions... Most people can actually live without Coca-cola, so a boycott of Coca-cola the drink would make Coca-Cola the multi-national behave more sustainably with drinking water perhaps…
One idea to galvanise all of us, and to catalyse some of these mass actions would be the organising of EARTH AID DAY - an event like Live Aid only even bigger.
A multi-media, globally synchronised, celebrity-centred fund-raising, awareness-raising and actual action day devoted entirely to climate change positivity...
I know Bob Gledof said he didn't want to do another one, but hey Bob! Your planet needs you! Your species needs you! You have the expertise. I don't.
But I would certainly help you if you got it going.!
My E-mail is [email protected] if anyone would like to encourage me to take these ideas further. Thankyou.
Biographical Paragraph.I am 46 single female now living in Co.Kerry, Eire. I was born in Australia, reared in the S-E of England. My dad is a research biologist & naturalist now living back in Australia. I dropped out of the official study of Environmental Science in 1979 in order to live up a mountain & radically reduce my ecological footprint to as near zero as possible. This is actually great fun to do, & nowhere near as difficult or miserable as mollycoddled westerners think it is! I am back in the middle of a small town now – but without the consumer lifestyle - as I realised eventually that with galloping global heating, my solitary potato patch was doomed, & that the survival of all that I love is much more likely if I put my energy & talents into political activity at this time. I am very behind the times with technology as all this computer Internet mobile phone stuff arrived while I was up the mountain eating weeds – I am catching up with it fast. I don’t want to join any existing political party but desire deeply to somehow mobilise the whole human race to become confidently bold and radical in rising to meet this challenge. I am said to be “bi-polar”, am actually quite sane, not taking any pharmecutical medication and consequently have “delusions of grandeur” that I believe I can achieve with a lot of help from my friends. Eg. EARTH AID DAY - Bigger, better, bolder than Band Aid & actually works!
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