Two stories, one goal; to save our civilization from ourselves.
An Inconvenient Truth, the documentary that won an Academy Award for the Best Documentary Feature, demonstrating that global warming is real, potentially catastrophic and is human caused, from an engineer’s angle.
And another style of story telling by writing about the future, Avatar, an epic fiction film featuring the destructiveness of our civilisation when we combine our primitive intelligence with our ignorant and plundering nature.
As our population grows and the need to specialize in narrow focussed tasks to survive, and more efficient use of technology for leverage increases, mistakes we make is multiplied tremendously. In pursuit of material gain, our minds and the system that supports its enlightenment has not been capable of catching up with the technological leverage built up over generations.
The combination of extreme technological leverage with the shortcomings of ignorant minds (learning from scratch upon every life cycle) can spell disaster, in capital letters, for our species. Awesome technology X primitive minds = destruction. That’s one of nature’s amazing control methods, for the prime species of “animal” living on mother earth.
There are already many in amongst our society, whose lives are in an alternate reality right from birth, not linked to a sustainable environment, not aware of how the food they eat end up on their table, ignorant of the big picture, perhaps not having the opportunity to learn about it. These individuals would grow to make decisions, some small but some large, which can irreversibly damage to the environment that they are holding temporarily, before they pass it to future generations. There are lots of reasons they give, in the name of survival, winning the competition and even job creation!
On the other hand, a silent but growing group of people with the wisdom, the makers of An Inconvenient Truth and Avatar, the green movements, the permaculture folks, in my mind, are the colonel and generals of Mother Nature’s army.
It is a time to get together to educate the masses, turn back the toxic tide.
Mother Nature's, weapons, its tool and laws of existence are in amongst us, some invisible (down to cellular organisms that generate nutrition in the soil or in our guts!) and some permeating all of life (like the rules and laws of nature), waiting to be harnessed. It’s the typical good versus evil, but this evil is invisible, it exists in amongst us in varying degrees.
As a captain, an avid gardener who seeks the wisdom of how Mother Nature works knows that there are millions of dormant army right in their own backyard, waiting to be mobilized. The right combination of sunlight, water and plants put those humble soldiers to work immediately, producing organic fruits and herbs more nutritious than mass produced ones. The “returns” from embarking from this activity, for those with the wisdom, is more predictable than the stock market and mutual funds, which is akin to gambling and is rigged and manipulated by anyway. In the process of raising a healthy backyard, the person learns life’s little precious values such as persistence, hard work, smart work, time consciousness, reflection and most importantly, understanding nature, the very place that we live in, in it’s purest form
The more we understand and gain wisdom, the more we can reverse the effects of our environmental declines, starting from our own backyard. It’s the backyard revolution, of sorts. There is a higher calling and wisdom to be learnt, but the backyard is just a small way to start to tweak the mind to look at things differently, to re-examine our paradigm on life, or what's left of it.
Only when the majority of our civilization are reaching or attained sustainable green nirvana, then can we pause and rest. In my mind, there are 4 categories of people in our civilization, in different stages of the development of that wisdom, starting from the lowest scums of the supremely selfish (destroyers), followed by ignorants, followed by green wannabees and then the true sustainable greens.
On one side of the divide, we have people who abuse themselves & others, enjoy at other people’s expense, focussing one up-ping each other in material largesse and specialists who are ignorant of the big picture. On the other hand, there are people who love the planet they live in, attempt to understand its natural laws and rules, uses knowledge to make life more sustainable & harmonious with mother earth, teaches and bring others on the journey of learning, takes interest in the field of new knowledge and discovery but not at the expense of our environment.
Let us take some time to think about our world, gain more wisdom, practice it and preach it far and wide. Take part in this epic battle, to fight for our own survival, against ourselves.
KK Ong
