10. Nature and all her glory

I am up late, a bit tired, but pushing through readings and summaries for work on the group assignment. I have headphones in with some rather uplifting strains of Jordi Savall delivering Boccherini straight to my brain (currently listening to my fave track on this album: Boccherini: Quintet In D, Op. 31, G324, “La Musica Notturna Delle Strade Di Madrid” – 5. Passa Calle. Allegro Vivo P). Love. It.

Classical music works a treat by blocking out the TV in the other room without itself being too distracting, but between tracks, I can hear the blessed rain pounding on our tin roof. We have not heard that here for a long time.

Our not-so-traditional water tanks (read recovered and repurposed IBCs) are all full to the brim 🙂 Yay—4,000 litres of precious water for the soil garden.

But the rain reminds me of how much we need water: how our life literally depends on it. And we squander it and we pollute it and in so many ways we just don’t seem to be aware of it being finite (as with some many other parts of this system). I remember watching one of those BBC productions with Prof. Brian  Cox, not that long ago, where he was talking about our planet and he came to explaining about water. He was sitting in a rowboat, on a lake, with a bucket of water in front of him. He explained that all of the water in the bucket represented all water on Earth. He cupped his hands and dipped into the bucket and what was held in his hands, he suggested was the amount of available water. He then uncupped his hands and said that the thin film of water clinging to just one hand represented the amount of available fresh water. It was a very salient demonstration.

I went to find it online but couldn’t. In the searchI found some other great explanations about Earth’s water from:

• Woods Hole (see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OiVwfAPSEH8); and
• Earth Unplugged (see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jKOmNGEi0DY)

The other piece of information that made me sit up and think how much we truly take this planet and its resources for granted and how we need to be mindful of our consumption, was a magazine article featuring an Irishman called Mark Boyle who decided to live a year without money (see: http://www.trueactivist.com/the-man-who-lives-without-money/)

My favourite bit, I have to admit, is this:

“If we grew our own food, we wouldn’t waste a third of it today … If we made our own tables and chairs, we wouldn’t throw them out the moment we changed the interior décor. If we had to clean our own water, we probably wouldn’t shit in it”.

 

8. Powerful words from an amazing woman

I met, for the first time today, an amazing woman called Lynne Twist. She came to me via FaceBook in a post by Pachamama (see: http://www.pachamama.org/blog/getting-out-of-ecological-debt-lynne-twist-at-tedx-wall-street?utm_content=bufferbcdba&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer)

Lynne is co-founder of Pachamama and well known philanthropist. The following, from her website,  gives you some background on her:

For more than 40 years, Lynne Twist has been a recognized global visionary committed to alleviating poverty and hunger and supporting social justice and environmental sustainability.
From working with Mother Teresa in Calcutta to the refugee camps in Ethiopia and the threatened rainforests of the Amazon, Lynne’s on-the-ground work has brought her a deep understanding of the social tapestry of the world and the historical landscape of the times we are living in.
http://www.lynnetwist.com/about-lynne-twist/

The TedX Talk I watched featuring Lynne was inspirational. In it Lynne argues, that as a species, we are in deep ecological debt. As a whole, humanity uses 41% more resources than the Earth can regenerate. She says,

“We are living off an ecological credit card we can never pay back.”

According to Lynne the economy is a subset of the world’s ecology because everything that we sell within the economy comes from the Earth. Thus, the only way to fix the economy is to live within our ecological means.

Lynne states that it is our responsibility to reverse this trend and create a better world for everyone. (The above information was gleaned from the above Pachamama link.)

Watch this TedX Talk. It is well worth it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mn7s08wuCnY

Respect, Lynne Twist. Respect!

Oh, and now I have two more books to add to my(ever-growing) list:

• Lynne Twist: The Soul of Money: Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Life, W.W. Norton, 2003
• Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, University of Minnesota Press 1987 (<this is thanks to a short conversation with my sister-in-law about all things study and dreams of PhDs … apparently I have to also read a stack on Postmodern Theory … good grief … 😦 )