Image: Image from MacMillan New Zealand World Atlas, p. 48
People in the industrialised world often don’t understand why climate change might be of any concern. Too often they frame their viewpoint in terms of how it affects their wage packet, or maintaining their daily lifestyle; that is understandable. It’s the only reality they might know.
But people on the other side of our planet have a very different understanding of reality. This is something we would like to share with you. Climate change is real, our weather patterns have changed; sea levels are creeping up, sometimes substantially. The salt affects what will grow in our already-poor soil; and may well kill the food crops that are already producing fruit. Now you might not care: you just go to the supermarket and shop … we often have no shops. Even if there is a small store the food has to come from very far away, adding further to greenhouse gas emissions. It doesn’t work.
The consumer world’s activities may well cause us to lose our homelands and the burial grounds of our ancestors. Please wake up. Thanks. 🙂
The image is from page 48 of MacMillan New Zealand World Atlas, Millennium Edition. With thanks 🙂
I used think a lot about what can be done to make people wake up, especially in the “industrialized” part of the world. I tend to think that the “system”, the consumerism is created so well that it guaranties they don’t wake up. They live in a permanent brain-washing. I have seen a statistic about the mobile phone penetration by countries. Even in Brazil, which is not a rich country it’s over 85% if I’m correct. This generation get up, spend their day and go to bed with their mobile devices in their hands. I can see it everywhere, all the time. Last time I was waiting on the airport, I counted the people having no tablet or mobile phone in their hands. I saw only one, a man in his 60’s drawing something on a piece of paper.
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Now, what has this to be done with climate change? These people simply locked into a different reality. Their world is what they can see on their device. And people physically loosing their land to grow crops are not shown on those devices. This is the current face of consumerism.
Thanks Janos, interesting. This evening I was thinking about consumerism too. The word itself must mean something like to eat, to devour, to destroy, to use up …
Then I thought about how the consumers are consuming the world, devouring the environment, using up resources … and for what? Buy something, use it a short while and buy the next thing.
Your point about keeping the mindless locked up in their phones, tablets and computers really is the ultimate form of mind control; no freedom of thought whatsoever (Pavlov’s dog experiment?). To my mind these users are fixed in a pattern of whenever their device bleeps at them they are duty-bound to answer it. I’ve never experienced it, but have seen movies or shows where a newly dating couple are in a restaurant ~ each with two phones on the table … some date I imagine? Add to that the GPS function and every user is neatly and willingly micro-chipped. Hahaha Big Brother is with you always. No wonder the environment is in a mess!!! 🙂