Re: [pf] State of The World's Grasslands (Freshwater Systems last month)

by Betsy Barnum

10 December 2000 00:55 UTC

David MacClement wrote:

> BONN, Germany, Dec. 11, 2000 - As negotiators convene in Bonn to implement
> the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification, a report released
> today by the World Resources Institute (WRI) warns that the world's
> grasslands have declined in their extent and condition, as well as their
> ability to support human, plant, and animal life.

I feel increasingly that we are on the verge of a "cascade" of system failures
on planet Earth. These voices, WRI, Worldwatch, WWF, Greenpeace, etc., are
still "voices crying in the wilderness," trying to get someone to listen, while
politicians and business leaders fail to reach agreements about global warming,
and the media ignore their monumental irresponsibility and focus instead on
stock market growth. But I predict it will not be long--not more than a few
more years--before the assault on Earth's beauty and ability to support life
will no longer be able to be ignored or denied.

And in confronting these thoughts, it seems to me that, just as voluntary
simplicity is a necessary component of any sustainable future that could
possibly be, it is also, in a different way, an essential component of an
"end-times" life, if this is perhaps the beginning of the last century of the
Earth community that has been co-evolving and developing over the past four and
a half billion years. How to live with that possibility? How to continue to get
up and work for the Earth and a positive future that may never be, how to not
let oneself be engulfed in pain and rage, in despair and emptiness?

It is done, I believe, by the practice of mindfulness, which is at the center
of simplicity, in my view--by the cultivated ability to immerse oneself
sensorially and emotionally in nature, in relationships and in the intense
beauty and aliveness and joy of one's surroundings each moment. And it is done
by the practice of simplicity itself, of reducing one's ecological impact and
living with integrity for whatever time is left, whether it will help lead to a
sustainable future, or whether it is already too late for that and will only be
a part of how the Earth's co-evolutionary life comes to an end, or at least to
an extremely devolved condition that can only be viewed as a colossal tragedy.

My cogitations on a winter evening after reading yet another report of the
desperate condition of another Earth ecosystem.

Betsy

--
Betsy Barnum
bbarnum@wavetech.net
http://www.geocities.com/RainForest/1624

**************************************
The key political values that emerge from the Constitution are frozen in the
ice of eighteenth-century elitism. We allow the privileged to rest comfortably
in a set of social relations that call exploitation freedom and the empowerment
of the rich democracy.

--Jerry Fresia, Toward An American Revolution