January 2013 Bengalaru
It’s time to stop the fretting about and bemoaning the loss of the environment.
It’s time to look at
the nuts and bolts of the issue.
It’s time to consider the hardcore tradeoffs that need to be made.
It’s time to present the loss, not as an inconvenience and looming threat to our constructs of steel
glass and concrete–shackles of our conscious that frame all tradeoffs in the private grievance of
loss.
It is time to look at collective losses–that are non-recoverable.
It is time to frame our
language and word choice to reflect that it is NON-RECOVERABLE.
The only time this is used
today is for a capital investment that went awry, bad; for those non-performing assets and their
cousin of nil’s. Even now you have the bail bondsman, the debt management groups and
financial institutions that preen and primp and shake and stir the seemingly non-recoverable
capital into the goose that laid the golden egg. Except for all practical purposes these geese
are in amusement parks going round and round the rifle raffle, where you knock one down and it
pops right back up again in another guise. Each of course appears the same or different
depending on where you stand and whether you came out a winner or a loser.
The point is that
in today’s nauseating & recoverable world, where we are forever optimist and the rose tinted
glasses dare not lose their luster–we are in effect doing a disservice to the environment. We
couch the problem in controllable nuggets of pain, that are comfortably swallowed up by the
masses. The hydro car, the sustainable approach, the unsustainable way, the green miles, the
carbon credits , the carbon market to trade credits. A pretentiously self-affirming and reassuring
way for us to all feel as though there is progress being made…But is human capacity for greater
comprehension, compassion and empathy not the required need of the hour? Given that free
choice is the conventional plan; assuming that we would not freely cause discomfort to our
lifestyle; does discomfort need to be imposed? Martial law. Abdication of rights for private capital
gain. Adjudicate over what constitutes consumption patterns and creature comforts.
Considering
that the earth’s Eco balance and systems have sustained a cool 300 years of
disruption, and century of intense torture and neglect, and this is one side of the equation.
What
could possibly be the other side of the equation? Some will have you believe the
hydro/non-CFCs gang will tip the equation sufficiently…is this not a tad naïve?
Healing is a
process and like any process many components are involved. Earth won’t recover overnight,
and in earth time that means perhaps a couple centuries.
God intervened once already to
provide light and recover the spirit of his son.
Later, God gave a message, promising salvation
to the dutiful.
Much earlier God selected shepherds to guide the gentiles in a book of Law.
In most cases God’s intervention has been harsh or hopeful.
Reinvigoration of spirit, faith, or
belief…but typically this is pushed to the brink: a vile and vulgar and chaotic human condition.
So do we want to wait for God? and mockingly be chided by the Great One…don’t you think Its
damn tired, fed up, exhausted with punishing the obstinate toddler yet again? If we wait, might
as well give up the half hearted efforts. Half confessional never worked: neither God nor his reps
could take them seriously. So why not then…? carry on with the way things are, guilt free and
wait for the intervention after the disaster. Could we not precede Him on just this one occasion?
Delight Him with prescient, higher consciousness, anticipating, not reacting. I don’t think God
ever wanted blind loyalty; obeyance to His laws certainly. But the subtlety of ethics and morals
and how Gods laws and our, very human craft of forging a society based on right and wrong and
good and evil…this subtle division He assumed we would find it…perhaps take a while, but 4?
5? millennia? An absurdly long nap, God must be muttering. To be given conscience, but still not
have consciousness….? They don’t deserve it, or clearly understand it, He sputters. Clearly, we
found it too challenging, to take Gods ethics and apply them to our morals: dilemmas,
quandaries, circumstances, lived life, our existential plight. For if we had we would not be trying
to blindly replicate his Laws here on Earth…this fundamentalist reading of God is blasphemy.
Why? Because it degrades the intention, the spirit in which His insight and guidance was given
to us…to all the religions of the world. And it lets us off cheaply, easily bought by the words of a
Great One, to pithily rationalize our existence on earth in His name! It is almost a cop out: to
exists on earth merely to reiterate the words of a grand master. God has been waiting on this
embryo to hatch for millennia. Instead we sit in abeyance and in comfort and in wonderment of
that embryonic fluid that cradles us so, comforts us in times of need, clears moral
ambiguities….and we think that’s all there is because the world is only as big as the shell.
● So where does this leave the environment? Unfortunately not in a good place. In a
binary world where spiritualism and materialism are antithetical to each other. The
environment is categorized under our material pursuits–for acquisition, to transform, or
to idle, recreate in.
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