Thoughts on the environment first published in Silver Wheel Magazine Lughnasa 1989

 Now part of a forthcoming book, Green Living, Sacred Life by Susan M Phillips and Tye Jamie Coxston

Our beautiful mother earth is sick, maybe dying. What are we doing about it? The rainforests in South America and South Africa are still being cut down and cleared in spite of what we know it will do to this planet. We ‘civilized’ beings sit comfortably in judgement, watching television programs about it behind our hardwood doors, in houses kept clean with bleaches and detergents that are destroying the green and pleasant land in which we live. We keep ourselves warm by burning fossil fuels and export, free of charge, the acid rain we produce to other countries. What charitable creatures we are!

We breed animals just to eat them. How civilised! The methane and carbon dioxide they produce in their often brief, hopefully well cared for lives, we kindly donate to the upper atmosphere to join the other ‘greenhouse gases’ already up there. 

When we want to discuss the problem of pollution, how do we travel? How else but by car so that we can share our noxious emissions with as many people as possible.

All in all our modern society is pretty generous. When the occasional global disaster occurs, like a famine in Africa or a flood in Bangladesh, we send money to feed the victims we can watch dying on our little TV screens. It is easier than addressing the question of why, and leaves others the question of how to cope. After all, nature always balances itself in the end – doesn’t it?