It's been a while since my last instalment, it generated a good month long debate on Flickr (http://www.flickr.com). But as much as I love debating photography, it means nothing to anyone but photographers! It also keeps me from doing what I love, taking photographs...
This time, I have to raise a bone of contention and one that affects us all. Through studying Earth and Environmental Science over the past four years, I have drawn a few conclusions, ones which have been clouded by our ongoing struggle for wealth, and ones that I would like to bring to the world's attention:
It is true that throughout our modern bureaucratic world, too much faith is put into paper trails and meetings, money, meetings, budgets, meetings, business and meetings. If we spent less time talking about how we can move forward and more time
actually moving forward the world would be an easier place to abide.
Unfortunately we take the same approach to all issues that face us including major environmental ones. Such issues do not wait for us to make a decision and continue evolving without our intervention.
24 hours a day, 365 days a year we are destroying the habitats of some of natures most incredible and yet fragile creatures, their ecosystems, homes, food and breeding grounds taken or cut off from them through deforestation, surface mining & building, leaving their species' survival hanging by a thread then hunting & poaching until there are not enough individuals left to guarantee their kind's survival. Although worldwide, our social environmental consciousness is being raised, we pay too much attention to the Global Warming issue over which, despite copious amounts of propaganda, I believe we have little or no influence and control over (perhaps a later issue on which I shall blog), taking our eyes off of where we can really make a difference.
Physical commodities used in everyday products like fossil fuels, packaging, computers, pencils and even additives in foodstuffs are full of materials exploited from the physical earth on which we stand. The environments that nursed and raised us from our primordial being to our current homosapien form, the Earth that survived long before us, we tear to shreds for money. We are slowly but surely destroying the precious, delicate environments around us for petty financial gain. Even farming for our foods releases masses of chemical nutrients into water systems causing widespread fish kills through excess plant growth!
What has financial gain brought us? Nice houses, nice cars, watches and exotic foods, overcomplicated lives, stress and has even poisoned our perception of beauty and nature. Maybe we can look to some of our more "primitive" cultures and yet find wisdom, from the groups of people who live off nothing but the land, only taking what they need to survive and forsaking the need for money, taxes, deadlines and the unnatural amount of stress we, and the environment undergo with it.
There's no doubt that money is the root of all evil and it would be hypocritical of me to say I do not desire it and the things it can buy me. But I do not and will not forget that it is possible to survive without it and will forever do my best to support preservation of ecosystems even through such simple things as recycling what we have already taken from our mother Earth, a service that our local councils have, under much criticism, strived to provide.
Never forget, humans are not the bigger picture, but we have the ability to both destroy and to save it.