Environmental Ethics: Message from the Future III

Tuesday, December 8, 2020

Message from the Future III

To the citizens in the world of the future:

I say this with great optimism; it’s currently 2020, and more many of us, now more than ever, are planning for your arrival. The year we assumed would welcome us with open arms has changed in ways we could have never imagined or adequately prepared for. Many of us have suffered losses of close family and friends that will forever be engrained in our hearts. Others have experienced frustration due to canceled ceremonies, celebrations, and annual traditions. The financial instability faced in 2020 has led to the uncertainty of the future for all industries. The sudden switch in our society has created a new reality that has pushed us to realize the importance of life and how we all must continue to adjust and keep fighting for it. Long-term planning or even thinking ahead at this time can seem like a luxury seeing as how we are engulfed in the Pandemic known as Coronavirus or COVID-19. Although we are dealing with a lethal virus spreading throughout the entire world, changing the dynamics of how we operated within our society, I believe we have witnessed some changes for the better good of humanity and your future generation to come.

During this time, we’ve dealt with poverty, injustice, climate disruption, and difficult government/ political matters including the measures they took to control the spread of the virus causing a slowdown of economic activities. That slowdown had a pretty notable effect on the environment, both positive and negative. One of the positive things that came from the end of 2020 was within the campaign of President-elect Biden campaign, he announced his plan of a $2 trillion climate plan that will aim to reach net-zero emissions, economy-wide, by the year 2050. His entire campaign connects the need to reduce pollution by reducing the negative health impacts from the coronavirus, especially respiratory symptoms. With great efforts such as these, the foundations of family, church, community, nation, and profession will continue to prosper and grow in this new era.

My final word to you all is this; if you look around and you cannot find change, of any kind, create one. The uncertainty of the future will always demand that we recognize opportunity within ourselves by utilizing the creativity and critical thinking skills that will ultimately solve some if not all of the new challenges will come or even the challenges that will continuously need to be worked at. “Life is a journey, not a destination” - Ralph Waldo. This basically means that there is no final point in life because there will always be room for growth and elevation. Everything we working towards now is for you and I hope that the future generation will not only be able to see and enjoy the harvest from the seeds being planted now but also continue the marathon. How you shape, create, and nurture the environment around you will determine reality for those after you.

“This is a past just as exotic as the future”

2 comments:

PhilDecember 11, 2020 at 1:44 PM
Kimani, can you send me your weekly points total please?
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First things first--a proper education

“The complexity of our present trouble suggests as never before that we need to change our present concept of education. Education is not properly an industry, and its proper use is not to serve industries, either by job-training or by industry-subsidized research. It's proper use is to enable citizens to live lives that are economically, politically, socially, and culturally responsible. This cannot be done by gathering or "accessing" what we now call "information" - which is to say facts without context and therefore without priority. A proper education enables young people to put their lives in order, which means knowing what things are more important than other things; it means putting first things first.” ― Wendell Berry

The college project

“The American college may be considered a continuation, at the human level, of the self-education process of the earth itself: universe education, earth education, and human education are stages of development in a single unbroken process...The entire college project can be seen as that of enabling the student to understand the immense story of the universe and the role of the student in creating the next phase of the story.” --Thomas Berry, “The American College in the Ecological Age,” in The Dream of the Earth

“Odd as I am sure it will appear to some, I can think of no better form of personal involvement in the cure of the environment than that of gardening. A person who is growing a garden, if he is growing it organically, is improving a piece of the world. He is producing something to eat, which makes him somewhat independent of the grocery business, but he is also enlarging, for himself, the meaning of food and the pleasure of eating.”
― Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays

“Nature shrinks as capital grows. The growth of the market cannot solve the very crisis it creates.”
― Vandana Shiva, Soil Not Oil: Environmental Justice in an Age of Climate Crisis

“Why should we tolerate a diet of weak poisons, a home in insipid surroundings, a circle of acquaintances who are not quite our enemies, the noise of motors with just enough relief to prevent insanity? Who would want to live in a world which is just not quite fatal?”
― Rachel Carson, Silent Spring

“How can we be so arrogant? The planet is, was, and always will be stronger than us. We can't destroy it; if we overstep the mark, the planet will simply erase us from its surface and carry on existing. Why don't they start talking about not letting the planet destroy us?”
― Paulo Coelho, The Winner Stands Alone

“When asked if I am pessimistic or optimistic about the future, my answer is always the same: if you look at the science about what is happening on earth and aren't pessimistic, you don't understand the data. But if you meet the people who are working to restore this earth and the lives of the poor, and you aren't optimistic, you haven't got a pulse.”
― Martin Keogh, Hope Beneath Our Feet: Restoring Our Place in the Natural World

“When the last tree is cut and the last fish killed, the last river poisoned, then you will see that you can't eat money.”
― John May, The Greenpeace Story

“We are being made aware that the organization of society on the principle of private profit, as well as public destruction, is leading both to the deformation of humanity by unregulated industrialism, and to the exhaustion of natural resources, and that a good deal of our material progress is a progress for which succeeding generations may have to pay dearly.”
― T.S. Eliot

“There is a tendency at every important but difficult crossroad to pretend that it's not really there.”
― Bill McKibben, The End of Nature

“We know, at least, that this decision (ending factory farming) will help prevent deforestation, curb global warming, reduce pollution, save oil reserves, lessen the burden on rural America, decrease human rights abuses, improve publish health, and help eliminate the most systematic animal abuse in history.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Eating Animals

“An attitude to life which seeks fulfilment in the
single-minded pursuit of wealth - in short, materialism - does not fit into this
world, because it contains within itself no limiting principle, while the
environment in which it is placed is strictly limited.”
― Ernst F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered

“One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.”
― Aldo Leopold

“Saving the world requires saving democracy. That requires well-informed citizens. Conservation, environment, poverty, community, education, family, health, economy- these combine to make one quest: liberty and justice for all. Whether one's special emphasis is global warming or child welfare, the cause is the same cause. And justice comes from the same place being human comes from: compassion.”
― Carl Safina, The View from Lazy Point: A Natural Year in an Unnatural World

“The re-establishment of an ecological balance depends on the ability of society to counteract the progressive materialization of values. The ecological balance cannot be re-established unless we recognize again that only persons have ends and only persons can work towards them.”
― Ivan Illich

	Michael Pollan (@michaelpollan) http://michaelpollan.com/
5/14/15, 10:57 AM All the lectures and talks from Edible Education 101 are now online. All told, a great introduction to food politics bit.ly/1Fausvx

Tuesday, December 8, 2020

Message from the Future III

2 comments:

Peripatetics