I had a conversation with a coworker the other day about where our world is headed. I’m stuck somewhere in the middle of “oh, it’ll be alright. We’ve made it this far.” and “The earth is going to implode. Soon.” and I don’t know what to do about it. The reason we’ve made it this far is the same reason the Earth is crumbling: industrialization. Global warming is real, deforestation is definitely happening, and wildlife, or at least its home, is rapidly depleting all while big business is booming. Why? Because money talks, and not much else matters in our society today.
So. What can we honestly do about it? In a perfect world, I would ride a bike or walk to work everyday. Living in Texas, however, that proves rather difficult. I would love to grow my own food in a garden, and only buy locally raised meat and so on.. But I just don’t have the finances for it after paying the rest of my monthly bills. (One day I will have my own greenhouse!) I want to decrease my carbon footprint, but cannot fathom the ways in which to do so that would actually cause a dent in the factories and businesses that depend on my money for revenue… I jokingly told this coworker that the only thing I could think of was to not have children. If I can guarantee that I lessen the amount of people there are to need these types of things, then I could help right? Then, since I want to be a mother, I could foster children… (Tangent alert: That’s a topic for another post entirely.)
I’m at a loss. Other than planting trees and trying to help as many living things as I know how, I just don’t see how as a society we can fix this. We don’t have to backtrack necessarily, but I do believe that we need to reform a lot of our culture’s structure. And to do that we’d need to convince the government and big business that this is the right thing to do. Their comforts and money mean more to them, however, so I doubt that we’ll be able to get them to see otherwise. I know, I’m cynical. Boo hoo.
The only thing that I can see really working, is if government ideals change with the course of generations. So in talking about these things now and getting younger generations upset about what the future of this planet looks like, I believe that we’re headed in the right direction.
Next step: research! I want to be as informed as possible in the hopes that I can enlighten the situation, and be able to crush even my own excuses.
As always, thank you for reading into my thoughts.
vanessasthoughtbubble 