The Last Tree

Only after the last tree has been cut down
Only after the last river has been poisoned
Only after the last fish has been caught
Only then will you find that money cannot be eaten
--Cree Native American prophecy

Earth is in crisis. You might not know it from watching the evening news or glancing at the front page of the paper. But when you dig a little deeper, it becomes very obvious, very quickly.

Consider this: more than 80% of Earth's natural forests have been destroyed (in America, over 95% of the original forests are gone); fifty years ago, rain forest covered 14% of Earth's surface, but today it covers only 6%--sixty acres are lost every minute; since 1950, over 90% of the world's large fish have been taken from the ocean; "one in four mammals, one in eight birds, one third of all amphibians and 70 percent of the world's assessed plants now appear on the Red List of endangered plants and animals."

The life system of planet earth is dying. We are dependent on that life system for our existence. If it dies, we die.

The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, "the most comprehensive survey ever into the state of the planet," states that, "human actions are depleting Earth's natural capital, putting such strain on the environment that the ability of the planet's ecosystems to sustain future generations can no longer be taken for granted."

So why is all this happening?

Well, it's me. And it's you. And it's everyone we know. It's virtually all humans, all over the planet, but especially those of us living in the industrialized world. Our way of life is based on intensive consumption of the resources of the planet and creates an enormous amount of pollution and waste.

We have all grown up with the mindset that Earth's resources are limitless and that Earth is indestructible. Our consumption decisions are usually guided only by our desire for comfort and pleasure, without thought to the environmental impacts.

But our actions do have impacts. The things we buy use resources and create pollution during their production, and they create pollution after we throw them away. The energy that powers our homes, cars and electronics comes from fossil fuels, mainly oil and coal, which cause environmental damage during their extraction from the earth and which cause pollution and global warming when we convert them into usable energy. There is, in fact, an environmental cost to almost everything we do.

This does not mean that we have to reduce our 'carbon footprint' to zero. The only way to do that would be to retreat to the forest and use rocks and sticks to hunt and farm. We're not going to do that. But there is a lot of middle ground between going back to the Stone Age and giving no thought to our consumption of the world. We can all do a lot in our daily lives to reduce our impact on the planet.

And that's what this blog will be about. I hope to share some ideas and information about reducing our impact. There really is a lot that we can do. We just have to take one step at a time. We just have to commit to doing something--even if it's something small--rather than doing nothing. And we need to do it now, so that our children and grandchildren don't have to realize that prophecy about the last tree, so that we can leave them a world that we're not ashamed of.