Thursday, October 15, 2009

When is Enough Plenty?

So what is climate change about? I'm taking this opportunity on Blog Action Day to join up with more than 13,000 other keypad-enabled folks all over the globe to pitch in my 2 centavos. We're ramping up to the UN Climate Change Conference in December, in Copenhagen, where the international community will agree on some essentials, if things go well.

Getting the arms around this issue (and I don't mean the military ones) involves quantified information as well as a means of calculating carbon footprint, which is the crux of this whole issue. Having done that, the strategy involves solving the problem by changing lifestyles and behavior.

But what does this mean, really, to humanity on this earth? To me, sitting here in the USA which is famously a first-world power with incredible global reach and also historically the biggest producer of CO2 and pollution on earth by far, it means asking the question, "When is enough plenty?"

We just hoover it in and spit it out. More, more more. UBS, AIG, Goldman. While planetary life dies from this. The greed of it is rapacious and unending, the piles of money and stuff that matters to no one at the end of a lifetime yet leaves a legacy of waste. We've lost the quality of immersion in life, the ability to honor the simple and sacred, for the sake of speed and superficiality. Where is the real? I think it will find us in a way that we don't want.

Unless we change the climate of our minds.