Essay on a whim?

People’s lack of responsibility in the face of global issues is distressing. The fact that one can throw their empty bottle of antifreeze out their window onto the street without feelings of guilt or regret makes me nervous. People may think that as long as no one’s there to stop them then it’s ok, but when every member of population are multiplying these actions, it becomes an exponential problem.

I want to live in a city where I don’t see twenty discarded coffee cups on my way home. I want to live where people are accountable for their actions. Where they care enough to carry their garbage to waste stations where they sort it into recyclable, compostable, and waste.  People need to be educated from the start of grade 1 that it’s important to do the right thing by the Earth. Teach them how to recycle, how to compost. Have a compost bin at each school where all the lunch waste gets put into a bin where it composts and is turned into fertilizer for the school’s community garden. We should give kids the opportunity to grow their own food, to familiarize them with the ways of nature, of sustaining one’s self. We must catch the children before they are consumed by consumerism, media and materials, and they stop caring for the Earth that grew them.

  I was raised on the wonders of this planet, with a love for all that grows and the intricacies of the interactions between plant and creature, decomposers and carnivores; Air water earth and fire feed this planet with everything it needs. But people today are too distracted by daily life, the perceived necessity of this wasteful society. There is no reason for this unsustainable existence. It’s just evolved this way, but that’s not to say it can’t keep evolving. Everything that lives is becoming better with each generation, and we as a society can evolve similarly. With increased knowledge and technologies, we can improve our waste management systems, our electric and water and food systems. The way we are headed as populations grow exponentially is unsustainable. We can’t keep pumping mass amounts of resources and energies into these huge masses of civilization we call cities. Globalization has greatly increased the necessity for fossil fuels in the transport of goods from across the world and back.

Why? Capitalism has created a twisted logic for its actions, with money being the main driver. Meanwhile we are depleting our resources, ripping up the Earth to search for oil to feed our machines, we are leaching all the nutrients from the soil and leaching toxic chemicals into groundwater,  decreasing the necessary biodiversity the earth has been slowly building for billions of years, thanks to massive mono-culture crops to feed the billions. Decreasing the crops’ ability to fight disease through variability, we've put our food at risk of mass destruction through bacterial or fungal warfare. So we instead we treat the symptoms, spraying the fields with mass amounts of chemical pesticides and herbicides, pumping our food with foreign molecules which will hurt us and everything it touches. But it’s justified through the search for the profit, pumping out mass quantities for the most money, throwing quality out the window.

I am not of the Apollonian way of mind, where one can be all mighty; all must be controlled, scientific, and specific. No I am Dionysian, I believe in the strength of many, biodiversity is the best defense against rampant destruction. The earth moves, always changing based on the multitude of changing factors, changing environment. We vie for control, trying to keep things static in an ever shifting world. We grasp to this way of life with everything we've got. When some natural power wipes out a crop, instead of planting something else that may fare better or plant a wider variety of crops so not everything would succumb, we try harder, use more chemicals, and grind the Earth into bending to our will. It’s not healthy. The more we bend her, the more tension she gains, the sooner she will snap back into place, the greater the damage that will occur when she rips free from our grasp, refusing to be tamed by our misguided aim to abuse her for a profit.