I can hear the monotonous drone of heavy machinery just down the road at our neighbour's place. It is being used to load the logging trucks that have been continually hauling away the trees that were cut down last winter, much of the land near the top of Green Mountain clear-cut. When the contractor has been led to believe he is managing the forests properly by the legal practising standards at hand, it was a hopeless conversation of trying to convince him otherwise. I long to hear the birds in the morning, not the motors of destruction.
For those of you that have been reading my recent blogs regarding David Suzuki's, The Legacy, you might be interested to know that the readership has steadily declined since my first entry and this both saddens and frightens me. This could be telling me that they aren't overly unconcerned about the dilemma we are currently facing - does someone have to break into their house with a loaded gun before they pay attention to the threat against their life. I look at the world as being our home and the threat of losing our lives in numbers not heard of before is just as real.
David Suzuki still see hope for our species and the planet but I'm having a difficult time comprehending his optimism. He states: "What kind of world would we like to have in a generation?
"How about one in which the air is clean and children no longer have epidemic levels of asthma? I can imagine a world that is covered in forests that can be logged forever because it is being done properly according to principles of ecosystem based management in which nature and ecology set the rules.
I can imagine a future in which cities are exquisitely adapted to climate, the surrounding landscape and wildlife, and the natural rhythms of the season, in which every building captures all the sunlight and water falling from the heavens, where food is grown on rooftops, where roads are permeable and allow water to percolate back into the the earth instead of running through gutters and sewers, where a yard becomes a natural landscape and not a monoculture of grass, and where butterflies flit through gardens in every schoolyard. I can picture a city where cars are rarely needed because all of the action and fun are going on in the streets of the neighbourhoods where we live, work and play."
I too have had this very vision but as he goes on to say, "Everyone I've discussed it with is in agreement, that would be wonderful. Economists tell us that we can't realign our economic system to incorporate the kinds of values that people like me hold, that "it's not realistic" to look to a radically different future, that the economy is the bottom line to which everyone and everything must capitulate."
Mr. Suzuki goes on to say, "I will die before my grandchildren become mature adults and have their own children, but I am filled with hope to imagine their future rich in opportunity, beauty, wonder, and companionship with the rest of Creation. All it takes is the imagination to dream it and the will to make the dream reality.
And therein lies the problem I believe, only a handful of people are visionaries and have the aptitudes to develop their dreams - most of the masses are sheep with no imagination - only mindless followers in a mindless world.
And that concludes this series on David Suzuki's, The Legacy - cheers, eh!
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