Om
I've been meaning to post about oil..
by , 07-16-2011 at 10:46 AM (1881 Views)
That is, gasoline.. I don't have a car, and 90% of the time I walk or ride a bike.. and almost every time I do it strikes me how many people are driving cars, and how much fuel it is using.
It doesn't strike me because it's something I would naturally think about a lot, but because it is very striking. What's the necessity for driving all over the place? It's my firm belief that an impressive majority of the actual driving people do is mostly unnecessary. And if anyone can claim it is a necessity, at the very most they can argue it is a new necessity, at the max - a hundred years or so we've had cars.
Can I mention a couple statistics - and God knows we've all seen them.. but it's probably quite accurate to say that the average American uses over 8 liters of gasoline a day, while the world-wide average is more like 1.4 liters a day.
Other percentages are not necessary to mention, about how much in percentage of the world's resources are used by our country (alone). I won't mention them not because they aren't true, but because they won't convince. When people hear them, they dismiss them, as if on a slightly deeper level, they cannot believe they are true at all. Thus, their overall effect is virtually nothing - and statistics that are absolutely alarming and should induce great change instead have almost no effect. It almost seems as if people are awake living in a daydream.
So this isn't a moralizaing speech. You know what you're doing. You're hogging the resources of the world. You're being a bit of a bully, and you are seriously nearing the point of over-taxing the world, the planet, MOTHER EARTH. You say in your defense, "What can people do to destroy or weaken a planet?" Well you must know this is your enemy - this thought, it may be alone your only enemy. You have aleady weakened it, and you have the capability to destroy it. This should be an absolute fact in your consciousness. We nearly destroyed it with nuclear war in the Cuban missile crisis and cold war. And how long ago was that? In geological terms, less than a thousandth of a blink of an eye.
An individual human - on earth - would never be able to destroy it. Of course. Earth is massive enough to sustain that forever. But the numbers of humans on Earth are growing exponentially. We've cut down 50% of natural forests. This is a huge number. What humans can do in larger numbers is hard to guess, but we shouldn't unerestimate it. Look at people walking across a large bridge. One can walk across with absolute ease, but an army stomping across it can shake it enough that it will snap and break.
It seems as if the country, or the body of the country, is living in a hypnotized daze, and doesn't react to the imminent danger of collapse.
We need to WAKE UP,
We need to ACT,
We need to CHANGE.
It seems so difficult to think of this, but we are responsible for a very bad economic debt. Sure it was there before, but we have all contributed, and the only possible way out is for us all to accept responsibility for it. It's gotten to be an almost insurmountable difficulty, too much for anyone to be responsible for. But it's something we can overcome, we just have to recognize that it's there, and act to change it. We have tools we couldn't have even known about in the past, of communication mainly - and we are better educated as a population than at any time in the past; so there is no reason why we should not be able to solve, together, the problem of an econmic debt.
What can we do?
All I will say is use less. It will help.
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[edited 7/20 10.43 PM]
What we vitally must do is not accumulate any debt, ourselves; pay our debts off; live good lives and accumulate wealth - there is no reason against accumulating wealth; helping others and doing so is the best you can do, whether it's material wealth, intellectual wealth, or spiritual wealth. They are good things. But don't do so that you injure the planet or any other living beings as you live your life. Try to calculate, what's the least harm you can do to other living beings throughout your life.
This means follow your heart and live your life the way you want to, but try to be as kind to Mother Earth as you possibly can be, while you live your life. It cannot hurt, and in every way it helps.
Therefore, drive as little as possible, buy a bicycle! and use it! Walk... do little things. They add up. Furthermore, buy as few consummable, plastic items that will be thrown away as possible. Avoid wasting as much as you can, again, the little things you do add up and it does matter when you do something which benefits earth - or anyone.
Don't get your happiness from things outside you, simply know happiness from inside your heart; then you will want for nothing, and need nothing, and feel love in all of your life. Reach into yourself and reach out to others, and you will be surprised by the result.
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