WHAT
MORE CAN WE DO?
A Letter In Answer To A Cynic…
By Kerry Martin
25 January, 2007
Countercurrents.org
My
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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