The world doesn’t belong to us, we belong to it. Always have, always will. We belong to the world. We belong to the community of life on this planet—it doesn’t belong to us. We got confused about that, now it’s time to set the record straight. – Daniel Quinn
Happy Earth Day, Feliz Día de la Tierra.
I read somewhere once, that trying to conserve and protect our natural resources is like bailing water out of a boat with a hole in it, hopelessly filling with water. The end result in both cases, drowning. I don’t like drowning and I liked the metaphor even less, which was particularly odd considering my unending love for metaphors. In a weird coincidence I constantly find myself bailing out boats now a days, but it’s never been hopeless, or even bleak. The truth is bailing isn’t a permanent solution in either case, we bail in hopes of returning to shore to make a necessary repair. We conserve and protect in hopes of replanting forests, repopulating the ocean, repurposing our waste, resetting our mindset. The boat like the earth keeps us alive, except if we lose the earth, we don’t have a life raft.
Some of the people who understand the challenges we face as stewards of the Earth the best are tragically some of the most negative people about the future of our planet, I get that we fucked up, I see it every day. I get that what we have before us is bigger than reusable bags and turning off the water when we brush our teeth. I’ve learned about peak oil, climate change, microbeads in our oceans, endangered and extinct species. I’ve seen forests chopped and burned, marshes paved, beaches with more Styrofoam then shells. There’s droughts, flooding, severe weather, hot summers, cold winters, shrinking ice caps, growing landfills. It’s really fucking hard to talk about, it’s stressful, and scary. It’s downright depressing, enough to make a person hopeless. Enough to make a person motivated. Downright ready to fight.
In a world of flight or fight, technology is supporting the latter and the generation to which I belong is the most educated yet. And we are willing to fight, we’ve fought and we continue to fight for equality, a higher standard of living, healthcare, immigration reform. We can see things that are broken and together we can fix them. And on the issue of our beautiful mother earth, the home we as humanity have so unfortunately taken for granted. We treated our home as a resource, when we should have known better. We pulled up the planks from our boat to make a table. We have realized it, we are going green, we are starting to change, starting to think differently, we are doing a little. It’s time to start doing a lot, and I believe that I am not the only one who realizes it, in fact I know I am not.
Maybe our boat is sinking and maybe we never thought it could, but we’ve realized it. I think we can save it, but we need to start making some real improvements. We need to act on climate and we need to do it before we start swimming.
And maybe making a poster in an eighteen student school and having an open discussion in rural Panama isn’t the most effective way to attack this issue, but behavior change needs to start somewhere and my students have found pride in the beauty of nature and most have a desire to keep it beautiful and that’s more than some gente from the states can say. And if I can change their minds, there is hope. We can save ourselves, we can save the earth.
If the world is saved, it will not be saved by old minds with new programs but by new minds with no programs at all. - Daniel Quinn (The man knows his shit, I highly recommend you read Ishmael, and then every other book he’s written).
Also, Panama is great, its hot and sweaty, lots of adventures, challenges and successes, and challenges, lots of challenges. Blah blah. Send Tums and money.
Thank you all for all of your support, seriously I am so humbled to know so many care so much about me. Must of done something right.
