Reflections on "The Earth Charter" created by Earth Charter Comission

"Affirm that with increased freedom, knowledge, and power comes increased responsibility to promote the common good." - Earth Charter

I think that every person has in inherit good. People know how to distinguish right from wrong. Politicians, scientists, farmers, and consumers must make smart decisions to promote the good. As technology advances scientists must realize that it is not always beneficial. Politicians in places of power must make wise decisions to serve all the people and not give into greed. If we want to be free we have to know our place. The decisions we make reflect who we are. If people abuse their freedom they trample on other people's freedom. When people take more than they need they are abusing their freedom.

Earth Charter

• "Secure Earth's bounty and beauty for future generations."
• "Prevent pollution of any part of the environment and allow no build-up of radioactive, toxic, or other hazardous substances."
• "Eliminate nuclear, biological, and toxic weapons and other weapons of mass destruction."

The Earth is a beautiful place with boundless life and seemingly endless seas. It home and we have to treat it like our family. Keeping pollution and waste to a minimum is necessary if we want our children to live happy healthy lives. We have to collectively protect the life here on Earth. Protecting all life means protecting ourselves too. The other day in class we talked about corals approaching extinction at the quickest rate. It is scary to thing the things at the base of the food web are threatened. We have to respect all life, and respecting all life means reducing our pollution.

Some pics I took:

"Promote a culture of tolerance, nonviolence, and peace." -Earth Charter

Being human means being spiritually intact. A culture lacking peace and tolerance loses it spirituality. Today people consume the culture instead of creating the culture. If we expect to live sustainably we have to promote strong relationships with the Earth. Its impossible to make wise decisions if there is no respect or tolerance for others. The only way to be progressive is to collaborate. The following is a quote from one of my favorite books Siddhartha by Herman Hesse: "It is not for me to judge another man's life. I must judge, I must choose, I must spurn, purely for myself. For myself, alone." Tolerance can only come if people are happy with their own lives. We only know what we personally experience. If you haven't lived someone else's life then you can't tell them what is right for them. Many things in today's culture are about dominance. You can't be happy if you are busy trying to dominate and control people. Happy people are accepting, nonviolent, and peaceful. We need to adopt universal morals and teach our children peace. People have to find love to have peace.

"Where there is life there is love."- Mahatma Gandhi

Thoughts on David W. Orr's excerpt from "Earth in MInd- Love it or Lose it: the coming biophilia revolution"

Page 210-211 of colloquium reader
"A sane civilization that loved more fully and intelligently would have more parks and fewer shopping malls; more small farms and fewer agri-businesses; more prosperous small towns and smaller cities; more solar collectors and fewer strip mines; more bicycle trails and fewer freeways; more trains and fewer cars; more celebration and less hungry; more property owners and fewer millionaires and billionaires; more readers and fewer television watchers; more shopkeepers and fewer multinational corporations; more teachers and fewer lawyers; more wilderness and fewer landfills; more wild animals and fewer pets."

This pretty much sums up how I feel about our modern world. There are a lot of evil things today. We have the power to create an incredibly loving community, but we choose to divide ourselves. We reward competition and we live life with the business as usual attitude. I always feel like I'm trying to stay afloat. Its not a very good feeling to know the thing I love so much is corrupted and polluted. I have always dreamed of a simpler world with no cars, planes, trains, automobiles, corporations, currency, power plants, law books, landfills, zoos, and cities. I dream of a place where we can carry on as a human race. A place where you wake up and eat straight from the trees and the rivers. Music, love, and nature are the only things that save my soul from drowning in this world of insanity.

Page 188 & 192 of colloquium reader
"I think it is evident that tribal cultures possessed an ecological innocence of sorts because they did not have the possibilities or the knowledge given to us." "Is mass biophobia a kind of collective madness? In time I think we will come to know that it is."

We have to go back to the nomadic ways of weaving through the damage we have created. We have to go back to our roots if we want this planet to support the human race. We can't replace the natural REAL world with our INVENTED technologies. Everything we know can be linked to the creation of a language. Language is the liquid we're all dissolved in. Perhaps people should stop talking and take it easy for a while. People need to stop talking, stop trying to dominate, and listen to what nature is trying to tell us. We live a life so distanced from nature that we have cut ourselves off. Without a sense of biophilia we create a biophobia. There are so many people drowning in a world cut off from love and emotion.



Page 198 of colloquium reader
"We are now engaged in a great global debate about what it means to live sustainably on the Earth."

I chose this quote because I feel like there is nothing to argue about. We all know in our hearts what it takes to be "sustainable". We have to live alongside nature. That is sustainability. Taking only what you need is sustainability. If we try to argue that anything else is sustainable then we are lying to ourselves.

Field Trip Reflection

ECHO

So echo was definitely my favorite field trip. I really believe in what they are doing. Echo is trying to help feed the 870 million hungry people on our planet. They are developing sustainable farming techniques and teaching them to the public. I would love to volunteer or work at this place. I enjoyed the humor of our tour guide. He kept the tour interesting with the facts and the random jokes thrown in( when he ate the uncooked Chaya leaf). I had never seen an avocado as big as the one at echo. One thing that really sparked my interest at echo was the aquaponic system. Growing fish in a small space and circulating the nutrients to a hydroponic garden is a fantastic idea. What a great use of such a small space! And the pump was powered by solar panels which made it WAY better. I will probably take ideas from echo whenever I get my own place to live and grow my own garden. I think we could really change the world by using echo's farming techniques all around the world. We don't need industrialized food where chickens and cows are raised inhumanely. We can feed ourselves by creating our own local gardens and communities. Companies like Mansanto must stop ruling the food industry. Save your seeds!
I didn't even know places like echo existed until we went on our field trip.
There is nothing better than eating the fruit of your own crop. Crops that weren't shipped half way across the world and ripened with ethylene gas.

Thoughts on Jane Goodall's excerpt in the colloquium reader

Page 179-183 of colloquium reader
"But the natural world has another value that cannot be expressed in materialistic terms." "Unfortunately in our materialistic world, where all that counts is the bottom line, human values of love and compassion are too often suppressed." "One half a million dollars to save a bug when millions of humans are homeless and hungry. We should be ashamed!"

People are always giving the earth a value. What upsets me so much about this is that we are materialistic. It's not the money that feeds the poor. Its not money that saves the bugs. It takes human collaboration to do these things. Arguing over where our money is spent just seems ignorant in my eyes. Why aren't we coming together to feed the poor and conserve nature? Greed for money has gotten so bad that we've created a world of classes. There will always be the wealthy and the poor. I think we as a species are failing to realize and address the true causes of poverty and habitat destruction. It seems like people lost all compassion for the things that actually matter.

Page 180 of colloquium reader
"It is these experiences that fill my heart and mind with peace---being, even for a short time, part of the forest, connected once more with the mystery, feeding my soul."

The forest always brings me peace. I love to get out in the woods to escape from everything that stresses me out. I have so many day to day worries that even just a short walk in the woods can ease my mind. Walking in the woods can teach people things about life that just can't be taught any other way. Nature lets you slow down and realize what is important in life. Nature is definitely my soul food. The woods bring peace to my spirit.

These are photos from some of the hikes I've been on:

Estero Florida

 

Smoky Mountains

 

 Lake Wales Florida Arbuckle Tract

Andros Island Bahamas

 

 

Page 174-175 of colloquium reader

"Yet for the most part, the work of the botanists and horticulturalists who battle to save unique plant species from extinction, and to restore habitats, goes unnoticed." "They travel to remote places, searching for rare species, collecting seeds, dangling from ropes to hand-pollinate the last individuals of an endangered plant that has taken refuge in the most inaccessible and inhospitable terrain."

 

It makes me sad to know that species are disappearing at such a quick rate. Things disappearing from the Earth faster than the natural extinction rate is a sad thing. I would love to be one of these biologists helping to study and conserve rare species. That would be my dream job. Knowing that I'm helping the planet to be a better place is a better reward than any paycheck. The feeling of making a difference is the best feeling in the world. Sometimes I go to the beach in my free-time to pick up the trash just so I don't feel like a complete loser. Still, I don't think this kind of thing will save the species forever. If we continue teaching our children to adapt to the modern way of life that has distanced itself from nature then we are raising a generation that has no emotional connection to the earth. There's already a lack of tree-huggers in the world and even less people that care enough to take action. We don't give these botanists enough respect. Too many people are caught up in their day-to-day lives to think about nature. The majority of the people I know barely even go outdoors. 

Thoughts on Rachel Carson's excerpt from "Silent Spring"

Page 154-155 of colloquium reader
"The chemicals to which life is asked to make its adjustment are no longer merely the calcium and silica and copper and all the rest of the minerals washed out of the rocks and carried in rivers to the sea; they are the synthetic creations of man's inventive mind, brewed in laboratories, and having no counterparts in nature."....."New chemicals come from our laboratories in an endless stream; almost five hundred annually find their way into actual use in the United States alone."

These are the reasons I don't think humans have a need for further research. We are trying to synthesize new compounds without knowing the long term effects they have on biological systems. This is the reason I think modern education is headed in the wrong direction. We push for new breakthroughs and new research like we're looking for some kind of hidden answers. My chemistry teacher was talking about his research the other day. He is trying to develop a liquid salt from lipid compounds. His purpose is to develop a compound that can be used in CO2 absorption, extraction of hydrophobic molecules, or used as a high temperature ionic liquid lubrication.We reward people that develop things like DDT and the atom bomb. Shouldn't society be rewarding the vegan ascetic that respects his environment? These are the reasons you will never see me working for a research company. We are doomed when we live a system that rewards this type of thing. More people need to take days off and spend time in nature, including myself. The answers to our problems don't lie in the laboratory. I'm afraid we will only realize this when we've polluted the Earth past its tipping point.

Page 156-157 of colloquium reader
"We are told that the enormous and expanding use of pesticides is necessary to maintain farm production. Yet is our real problem not one of overproduction"....."Under primitive agricultural conditions the farmer had few insect problems. These arose with the intensification of agriculture- the devotion of immense acreages to a single crop."

I'm going to beat this topic into the ground. We are doomed until mankind decides to resort to local and nomadic lifestyles which rely upon nothing more than the natural ecology. The spraying of poisons should be a sign something is not right. We should resort to things like the food forest at FGCU. Permaculture is the way to go.

Page 160 of colloquium reader
"It is also an era dominated by industry, in which the right to make a dollar at whatever cost is seldom challenged. When the public protests, confronted with some obvious evidence of damaging results of pesticide applications, it is fed little tranquilizing pills of half truth."

In today's world the money makes the decisions. We work our entire lives for a thing that has no real value. What's the point if we spend all our days fighting for a dollar and forgetting to live? People should become involved and voice what they want to be heard. But we aren't given a voice. The political system is broken. We elect someone to make decisions for us. When politicians make bad decisions for all of us we bear the consequences. The United States is becoming more and more regulated. If we keep passing laws at this rate we are headed down a path towards communism. The media only plays what they want us to hear. People vote based upon what they see on the T.V. And I don't know about you but I can make my own decisions. When are we going to start wising up, rising up, and uniting? If I can't breathe the air, drink the water, and fish the streams because of industry then life loses its meaning.

The people had no say in the spraying of dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane.



"photo-chicago-2800-devon-ave-weed-spraying-two-city-officials-watching-thats-likely-ddt-1952." Valhalla Movement. N.p., n.d. Web. 17 Mar. 2014.

 

 

Imperial valley California plane sprays DDT

"Plane Spraying Alfalfa Fields in Imperial Valley with Ddt." allposters.com. N.p., n.d. Web. 17 Mar. 2014.

Ford Trimotor plane spraying DDT to control the tussock moth & the spruce budworm

"Photos from the WFIWC Archives:Control Methods." WFIWC: Photos-Control Methods-5-Trimotor Trailing Spray. N.p., n.d. Web. 17 Mar. 2014.


In 1958, The United States' National Malaria Eradication Program used an entirely new approach implementing DDT for spraying of mosquitoes.

"DDT spraying pictures." DDT spraying pictures. N.p., n.d. Web. 17 Mar. 2014.

Thoughts on Vandana Shiva's excerpt from "Tomorrows Biodiversity- What is Biodiversity and why is it important?"

Page 41 of colloquium reader
"Species now become extinct at the rate of 27,000 per year- 1000 times the natural rate- and human greed and desire for profit are the primary cause of most of these extinctions."

Honestly this just makes me want to cry. Is this what the future holds for us? I live in a time where we are seeing the effects the human race has on the ecology of our planet. We have become a global species. Science has allowed us to come up with these statistics. Because of science we know exactly what we are destroying. It's strange to think that science is also what led us to our current state. Industrialization, new technologies, increasing population, modern medicine, and agriculture have created this global economy which we rely upon. Humanity is sitting on a throne and treating the earth like a source of raw materials. Today in class my Organic Chemistry teacher said that nature was an endless source of materials. This upsets me. The earth is not here to do science experiments. I don't think humanity destined to create monocultures of species and eliminate everything else. We came from the fabric of a biodiverse world for a reason. When its gone, it's gone for good. I want to be on the right side of things when it goes down. And it's going down right now.

Here is a piece of a good song called "Never Retire" by Mike Love
"From the first moment I opened my eyes, I knew I had a destiny to realize. We are one people, one creature, one sky, and it is not our fate that we should be divided. And dead soon we all will be, if we can't figure out a way to live in peace and harmony. The path is for us to choose. We've got so much to gain. We got even more to lose. The world is changing everyone knows. Forests are dying while humanity grows."

Page 40 of colloquium reader
"For agribusiness, the biotechnology industry and the technicians who serve them, however, other species have value only as sources of raw material and profit, and can be manipulated and engineered regardless of their welfare. For instance, cows are just utters for the maximization of milk production using recombinant bovine growth hormones (rbgh). Sheep are 'mammalian bioreactors' for the production of pharmaceuticals in their mammary glands. Microbes and plants are sources of genes and provide substances which can be extracted, recombined with other organisms, patented, and bought and sold in global markets."

This is ironic because biotechnology is my major. I could never be one of these technicians serving a corporation. I really hate that we do this. We are selling our earth in global markets. Really we are just selling ourselves. I'm interested in the science, but I call this manipulation. The cows, sheep, and other organisms don't have a commercial value. Unfortunately, humans have stripped them of their "intrinsic worth" and "right to evolve freely on their own terms." Now the cows, sheep, and plants have a supply and demand.

Page 46-51of colloquium reader
"Global market integration converts millions of acres of forests and farms into industrial monocultures, displacing and destroying both biodiversity and the cultural diversity of local communities."....."The narrowing of the genetic base of agriculture leads to increased vulnerability of production and a threat to food security"....."The potato famine in Ireland in 1845-46 was caused by genetic uniformity which led to an epidemic of potato blight, caused by the fungus Phyto plithora infestans. The famine reduced Ireland's population from 8.2 million in 1841 to 6.2 million in 1851."..."A US department of Agriculture list of recommended fruits published in 1897 included more than 275 different varieties of apples. Today the apple varieties are sold at less than a dozen."....."Globally we now rely on just eight crops to provide 75 percent of the world's food."

A lot of these problems are linked to over-population. Our culture is dying in the mix of it all. Sustainability depends upon the diversity of living organisms as well as the diversity of cultures. A  dominator culture is replacing all of humanities old ideas, emotions, and traditions. We are creating a new culture that is distancing itself from the natural world. And we go about our days with a business as usual attitude. The answer is in small local communities that support themselves. Native Americans call other species their brothers and sisters. Today nature is seen as an other. It is something we are not a part of. I haven't seen enough trees today. I've been too busy doing school work.

Thoughts on Jared Diamond's "Collapse: How societies Choose to Fail or Succeed- A Tale of Two Farms"

Page 23 of colloquium reader
"We differ from past societies in some respects that put us at lower risk than them; some of those respects mentioned often include our powerful technology, globalization, modern medicine, and greater knowledge of past societies and of distant modern societies. We also differ from past societies in some respects that put us at greater risk than them: mentioned in that connection are, again, our potent technology, globalization, the dependence of millions of us on modern medicine for our survival, and our much larger human population. Perhaps we can still learn from the past, but only if we think carefully about its lessons."

I like how Diamond lists our advantages and then bashes them and lists them as disadvantages. I've always wondered how we got to this point. It seems like our "potent technology" has spiraled out of control. I understand that our economy relies on globalization, but I don't see globalization as an advantage. We are killing the earth and shipping what it provides around in oil burning machines. I really believe people should rely on local resources to support their civilization. Modern medicine is an industry. Modern medicine could be an advantage. It definitely leads to a lower death rate. A lower death rate means an increasing population. So do the goods outweigh the bad? A global population of about 7 billion people. It sounds harsh, but maybe more people should be dying of natural causes. I'm very skeptical about modern medicine because I think it is poison. Humans are animals and we came into existence before modern medicine. We should only take things into our bodies that can be found naturally in other biological systems. The earth used to provide us with more than we could ever need. The answers are obvious but I don't think the average modern cares anymore. Perhaps they care, but there's no way to revert back to the local communities because technology has taken over. We are caught up in our day to day lives trying to fend for ourselves and make a living. There's too much competition and not enough collaboration. I certainly care and would love to live like the MacIvey's. I know there are plenty of others who feel the same way. There's no God's Earth left. Its all owned up and being managed poorly by big business and wealthy land owners. Sometimes I wonder if the only way to fix things is a collapse of modern society. It's a scary thing, but its something we must discuss as a global species.

Also, I saw this in the mail this week. More development

Page 34 of colloquium reader
"My view is that, if environmentalists aren't willing to engage with big business, which are among the most powerful forces in the modern world, it won't be possible to solve the world's environmental problems."

This is sad and only partially true. It's up to the environmentalists. Its up to the big business owners and everyone else as well. Yes, environmentalists should voice their opinions but that doesn't mean things will change. Big money always wins the battle.  We can't continue with our "business as usual" lifestyle. I might sound a little crazy to a lot of people when I say I believe in a revolution, but I don't care. The system we rely upon is clearly not working. The political process is broken in my opinion. People can become politically involved, but to be heard you've got to have capital. My view is that, there is no room to argue about our environment. There's no room to engage with big business. Big business and large corporations are responsible for much of the land abuse. Nature is in a panic and I feel it as well. I can see it and I can sense it. So environmentalists must speak out, but the world has got to listen and come together instead of seeking personal benefits.

Page 22-23 of colloquium reader
"When we deplete one resource (wood, oil, or ocean fish), can we count on being able to substitute some new resource (plastics, wind and solar energy, or farmed fish)?"

The answer is no. Ocean fish rely on wild food sources. Farmed fish rely upon what humans feed them. Why are we killing our wild earth and domesticating tiny subsets? Plastics are stacking up in landfills. Miles of plastics are creating floating islands in our oceans. Polychlorinated Biphenyls are accumulating in biological systems of fish and other sea life. Then they are passed down the food chain to us. PCB's are building up in us. We drink our water from plastic bottles! Solar energy is not nearly as efficient as burning fossil fuels. If we could power cars on sunlight alone then we'd be doing it. The top of a typical car has about 5 square meters of available surface area. If this entire surface is covered with 12% efficient solar panels (a typical efficiency for a silicon solar cell), and the sun strikes the panels with an intensity of 1200 watts/square meter (typical intensity of sunlight on Earth's surface) the solar panel can generate 720 watts of power. 720 watts converts to 0.97 horsepower, not nearly enough to power a car. I do like the idea of green energy. We should convert to strictly green energy. But how many of us are giving up our cars?