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| Dec 03, 2008 11:58 am |
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Finding out how to live SUSTAINABLY |
John Stephen Veitch
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Let us talk about business, manufacturing, retailing, farming, professional and personal services; about the people who work in them, people like you and me. You CHOOSE how you live your life, and run your business. Like your mother said, "You make your bed and you have to lie in it."
We do need to have successful businesses and we do need to strive to live satisfying and fruitful lives. But we don't have destroy our local environment doing that, and we can be a living example that humanity need not destroy the Earth, if we choose. Probably that won't stop "them". Each of us can only do what "I" can do. That has to be enough. We fully expect that every man should do his duty.
The way we've all been trained, we assume that "growth" is desirable and should be planned for. We're even building bigger houses for the fatter people we expect to be in the future. Two car and three car garages are normal in newer houses. Even our television screens get bigger and bigger every year.
Any fool can work out that human bodies have a "best size" for health and for efficiency and for long life. Most of us (including me, but not Tim) are bigger than that "best size". And since we are not fools, we know that we need to exercise more and to be discriminating about what we eat. A waist larger than 100cm is TOO LARGE.
The human body has a best size. I'm picking that lots of other things have potential to get too big, and out of proportion to the "best size". Shopping mall's for instance. Farms? Parking Lot's? Coal Mines?
Humanity has been sent a signal, some of us haven't read it yet. Our present lifestyle is unsustainable. It's not the lifestyle of African's, or Indian's or even of most Chinese that's unsustainable, it's western lifestyles that are the problem. For two reasons: One, that other people seek quite rightly to have the best possible lifestyle, like our's, and in a JUST world, that should be their birth right. Two, "one" isn't possible, the environment of the earth won't permit such overuse. Sustainability is what GREEN issues are about, and environment doesn't give a tinkers dam about your politics, call yourself capitalist, socialist, communist, nationalist or pigheaded and stubborn if choose. If you, and your family and me and my family don't find ways to LIVE SUCCESSFULLY without "growth" we pass on a poisoned future to our grandchildren.
How do we live without "growth"? Well that's something we are soon going to discover. But it can be done, human beings did it for a few thousand years, long ago. It's about changing our KNOWLEDGE and shifting our EXPECTATIONS. This issue is right at the heart of what it means to be a modern human being. We have to discover a "best size" for how we live and conduct ourselves. What that means exactly, I can't say, but always bigger next year has a sure and certain result; environmental destruction and early deaths.
John Stephen Veitch
Open Future Limited - http://www.openfuture.biz/
Innovation Network - http://veech-network.ryze.com/
Building an Open Future - http://openfuture-network.ryze.com/Private Reply to John Stephen Veitch (new win) |
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