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Deadly Sins Taking Toll on the Earth
Pat LaMarche, Bangor Daily News (Maine)
… If we take stock of the other six deadly sins, we will see that we are killing our planet – and ourselves – with an assortment of sinful behaviors.
Here, you’ll see what I mean:
Envy: That’s when you want something that your neighbor has – like natural resources. You might want to take the day off from work and grab a couple of history books. Cortez and the Incas are a good place to start. You can’t desire another peoples’ or place’s natural resources without plundering an awful lot of Mother Nature. Mankind has been doing it for centuries.
Greed: Mountaintop removal has to be the most flagrant example of unbridled greed since we stole this country from the Natives. Just ask the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers: “Since mountaintop removal coal mining began in 1970, an estimated 1.5 million acres of hardwood forest have been lost, over 470 mountaintops have been blasted, and 1,200 miles of Appalachian streams have been buried.”
Lust: Dictionary.com defines this as a “desire to gratify.” This sin is hurting our planet in a very basic human sense. You can see in a mirror that our need for self-gratification is killing us. WebMD says that our insatiable desire for food and drink will kill more of us this year than our lust for cigarettes and is far more deadly than our desire for sexual gratification. If you thought this was gluttony, I disagree. When it comes to gluttony: our desire for food is dwarfed by other self-indulgences.
Gluttony: No matter what it is, we just can’t get enough of it. Take televisions for example. According to USA Today the average U.S. household has more TVs than people. And in addition to plastics and other nonbiodegradable components, discarded cathode ray tubes and other heavy metal components are calamitously contaminating our planet.
Pride: Have you got the nicest lawn on the street? The New Jersey state Web site has great information on chemical fertilizers and pesticides and their very short journey to your water glass. Take a look and see what our pretty lawns are costing us. Seriously, if the chemicals on your lawn require a sign warning pets and pregnant woman to stay away, your pride is killing our planet.
Now for the most deadly sin:
Wrath: Hunter Lovins once asked, “Did we put our kids in 0.5 mile-per-gallon tanks and 17 feet-per-gallon aircraft carriers because we failed to put them in 32 mpg cars?”
(22 April 2009)
Also at Common Dreams.
From Studying Chimps, a Theory on Cooking
Claudia Dreifus, New York Times
Richard Wrangham, a primatologist and anthropologist, has spent four decades observing wild chimpanzees in Africa to see what their behavior might tell us about prehistoric humans. Dr. Wrangham, 60, was born in Britain and since 1989 has been at Harvard, where he is a professor of biological anthropology. His book, “Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human,” will be published in late May.
… Q: In your new book, you suggest that cooking was what facilitated our evolution from ape to human. Until now scientists have theorized that tool making and meat eating set the conditions for the ascent of man. Why do you argue that cooking was the main factor?
A. All that you mention were drivers of the evolution of our species. However, our large brain and the shape of our bodies are the product of a rich diet that was only available to us after we began cooking our foods. It was cooking that provided our bodies with more energy than we’d previously obtained as foraging animals eating raw food.
I have followed wild chimpanzees and studied what, and how, they eat. Modern chimps are likely to take the same kinds of foods as our early ancestors. In the wild, they’ll be lucky to find a fruit as delicious as a raspberry. More often they locate a patch of fruits as dry and strong-tasting as rose hips, which they’ll masticate for a full hour. Chimps spend most of their day finding and chewing extremely fibrous foods.
(20 April 2009)
How we humans ascended the ladder of energy intensity: Cooking, Gardening, Farming, Fossil Fuels … -BA
10 Big, Really Hard Things We Can Do to Save the Planet
WorldChanging
… screw the little things. Here are 10 big, difficult, world-changing concepts we can get behind.
1. ELIMINATE NUCLEAR WEAPONS
Czech crowds cheered for U.S. President Barack Obama’s recent announcement that America must lead the charge to eliminate nuclear weapons worldwide. But no matter which nation or alliance takes the helm, reducing the threat of weapons of mass destruction is a critical part of sustainability. Simply put, nuclear weapons have no place in a bright green future.
Problems This Helps Solve: Nuclear warheads are like the anti-resilience. They don’t make us safer; they actually make us brittle. And pouring enormous amounts of money and natural resources into mutually-assured destruction seems like an outdated model for peacekeeping on a finite planet.
… 2. STABILIZE THE BOTTOM BILLION
… 3. CREATE A GLOBALLY TRANSPARENT SOCIETY
… 4. BE PREPARED, GLOBALLY
… 5. EMPOWER WOMEN
… 6. ENABLE A FUTURE FORWARD DIET
… 7. DOCUMENT ALL LIFE
… 8. NEGOTIATE AN EFFECTIVE CLIMATE TREATY
… 9. BUILD BRIGHT GREEN CITIES
… 10. BUILD NO NEW HIGHWAYS
(22 April 2009)
