LAST OF THE BLUE PLANET SPECIAL
The waste disposal dilemma has reached a global scale that
threatens the life of every creature on Earth. Therefore,
six basic reforms must be put into daily practice very soon
if we humans are to have any chance of surviving our own
tyranny of greed and violence.
1. Safely recycle 100% of all waste and garbage produced by
human beings around the World. Throw nothing away, because
there is no "away". Everything on Earth stays here forever
in whatever form, but it can be safely reprocessed.
2. Reduce the human population by assuring to each and every
woman the legally protected right to decide if and when to
birth her children, and providing a family planning clinic in
every neighborhood in every town, city and nation. Very few
women want 14 children, more want none at all, but the vast
majority want no more than 1, 2 or 3. Wherever women have
that freedom the numbers peacefully decline.
3. Create a "green" economy that uses only clean alternative
fuels like solar, wind, natural gas and bicycle power.
4. Devolve the resulting smaller population from city centers
to continental networks of small, modern, ecotech villages
that each grow their own food, build their own houses, sew
their own clothes, treat their own illnesses, plan their own
families, home school their own children, while they freely
trade and cooperate to help each other carefully surround
themselves with a healthy global wilderness of forests,
lakes, rivers and ocean.
5. Within the context of such green communities, encourage
and support creative education in the arts and sciences for
all citizens.
6. These continental networks should all be self-governed
according to the general principles of the U.S. Constitution
and the United Nations Charter, each community free to
interpret the laws according to the needs of their own people,
but always for mutual aid with harm to none.
But we the people have our fears and desires, appetites and
ambitions, and every day over seven billion of us dump and
spew thousands of tons of trash, sludge and toxic fumes out
into this planetary biosphere that is the living Earth -- and
nearly everyone expects all human waste material to be neatly
absorbed and rendered harmless by the natural processes of
soil, water and air, like they have for millions of years.
But over the past 245 years since the beginning of industrial
production for our growing population, the Earth has become
so saturated with ever-growing tons of everyone's trash,
the big-city outskirts are now peppered with mountains of
"landfill", while the oceans are turning into an acidic slurry
of throwaway plastic bags and packaging so not enough water
can evaporate to form rain clouds, causing the rapid spread of
drought and wildfires we see on very continent.
So, how much more rubbish and sludge can the Earth tolerate
before everyone is sick and dying of diseases caused by our
own pollution? None. Cancer, autism, and organ failure are
spreading in every nation around the World; but of course,
neither corporate CEOs nor federal bureaucrats will admit it.
Instead, they try to reassure us they have everything under
safe control, and most of us willingly suspend our disbelief,
trying to hold onto our dreams of a bright new future, but
as our population grows, global toxicity grows with it.
So, what could we do today to save ourselves? Close down
the coal-fired power plants? Shut down the oil wells, tear
down the oil refineries, unrig the oil tankers? Ground all
the jet planes, stop driving cars, trucks and trains? Stop
manufacturing anything made of plastic? Stop producing
patent medicines, deodorants and junk food? Stop having
random sex and unplanned pregnancies? Not likely.
So every day it's more people and more toxic garbage, until
this entire planet is so polluted, nothing can live on it. But
never mind all that. You just go right on imagining a great
future of technology and progress, onward, upward and
outward to the stars( ! )
The reality is: nations conquer and are conquered, empires
rise and fall, civilizations grow and decline, species evolve
and go extinct, suns burn bright and fade out, universes
explode and disperse, because "all things are in a process
of coming into existence, growing and flourishing , then
decining and going out of existence." Thus, life on Earth,
having risen to grow and flourish for some millions of years,
now overpopulates and pollutes itself toward a toxic collapse
and global ecocide. The sad paradox of humanity is that our
scientific discoveries and technical genius give us the ability
to conserve and nourish this living planetary biosphere and a
stable civilization thousands of years into the future, but our
individual fear of death and appetite for personal wealth and
power drive us to trash and destroy it.
John Talbot Ross
( Send comments to me at j7t14r@gmail.com )
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