Time to act to save the Earth
The year 2020 is the point of no return, according to Native elders. We have already reached 1.3 degrees of separation from 19th-century norms. We have to change course, especially in the energy sector. Species we barely knew existed will disappear from the face of the Earth and others, like whale sharks, orangutans, the old man of the forest, elephants, rhinos, tigers and thousands more, are challenged as never before. Biodiversity is ultimately the largest long-term issue on the planet. If an elephant can walk around a lapwing plover nest and not crush its eggs, can our species not do the same?
One of the greatest tests of the next year is whether the greatest massacre of our time, that of the African elephant for mere trinkets of ivory, can be stopped. If we lose it, we will fail ecologically, morally, spiritually and karmically. A giant will have been eliminated off the face of the Earth and the stage set for our unraveling. There are biological ballasts on terrestrial Earth. The elephant is the greatest one.
We are cannibalizing existence and trying to find life on other planets. In fact, nothing will move in the forests and oceans of the world by 2050. The fanatical obsession with growth on Wall Street is causing the die-off of the rainforests. Kelp beds hundreds of miles long are dying off the barrier reef of Australia, and they do not seem to be recuperating. The oceans are showing marked levels of temperature rise, and the algae blooms off the Florida coast indicate severe stress and pollution.
The business model of the world, the mad, rampant and intolerably toxic indulgence our species has imposed on the life support system, is drilling a hole in the future of this generation and draining it of blood. I do not like to gamble. Wall Street is about gambling and speculating. Coal and fossil fuels are slowly dying a disreputable death. Fossil fuels will make all life on Earth a fossil.
If there are candidates who deny climate change, do not vote for them. We have upset the telluric powers, the climate cycle, and want to try and download the human brain onto a computer while Bayer (whose Roundup is destroying monarch butterfly habitat everywhere) and Monsanto want to merge into a Godzilla mega-corporation. Guess where the cancer rates come from? Pesticides.
Those shareholders who have children will be found in contempt of the laws of nature and nature’s God, as is printed in the Declaration of Independence, the exact laws Native American elders were warning us not to forget. We cannot separate our minds from the birds and the bees. The answer comes not just from science, but as a researcher in Africa told me, poetry, a reconfiguration in the human heart, an emotional and existential connection to life. Scientists cannot reproduce an amoeba, let alone an elephant whose ancestors have evolved over 20 million generations.
Even the best schools will not help us out of the largest threat humanity has ever faced, a future without happy, viable, healthy kids, watching video monitors of what once was an Earth with fantabulous whales, lions, tigers, frogs and snow.
Business leaders take note. It is not about maximum profits anymore. It is about honoring the Earth. If nothing moves on Earth anymore, there will be no reason to get out of bed. It is time for a French Revolution in human consciousness and the human heart.