Meditation on the State of the Earth

As I enter my 66th year on Earth, I often find it hard to feel optimistic about my life’s future prospects.

Next week, our country celebrates its 248th anniversary. For all our great accomplishments, we have also had far too many failures. It is no exaggeration to say that our democracy is in peril, but even more worrying is the state of our natural world.

We say we love nature, but not if it gets in the way. If we want big houses, shopping centres or industrial sites, we don’t hesitate to send in the bulldozers.

We don’t hesitate to cut down and burn forests for a variety of reasons, including cheap hamburgers. According to a recent editorial in the New York Times, about 17 percent of the Amazon has disappeared, and three-quarters of what remains is weakened by drought. As trees disappear, dryness increases. Unless levels of deforestation are significantly reduced, more than half of the Amazon could turn into savanna within a few decades.

By some estimates, 70 percent of deforested land in the Amazon has been converted to pasture for cattle grazing and ranching, one of many reasons why we should eat less meat, especially beef.

The human population has exploded from 2.9 billion when I was born to 8.1 billion today. We can’t all eat beef all the time.

I grew up on a farm in Southwest Virginia and at one time my family raised cattle. The cattle were grass-fed. At the time, Confined Animal Feed Operations (CAFOs) were in their infancy and were foreign to me.

We are kind to animals and couldn’t bring ourselves to eat the meat, so we traded with a neighboring farmer.I stopped eating beef 25 years ago because I saw how miserable life had become for most cows under the CAFO industrial model.

The greatest threat to life is greed. Corporations exploit human desires for their own profit, manipulating us through advertising to buy things we don’t need, and literally manipulating our food and tobacco to make them addictive.

We are the country most plagued by obesity and drug addiction on earth.

Politicians take money from these corporations and make huge profits (think Big Oil) yet continue to cut taxes, while we pay an ever-increasing price for their greed.

How can we stop this madness? By educating ourselves, by learning the facts; by being informed voters, by rejecting unhealthy and unnecessary products; by voting with every dollar we spend.

We have the power to change ourselves. I once heard a speaker say that a man who has two coats is stealing one from his brother. We all have too much in this country. We have so much, and we degrade the natural world without thinking.

So I urge you to think carefully and deliberately about your daily lives and the choices you make: the future of all life depends on each of us doing more to know and protect the natural world that sustains us.