Everyone on earth should work together in a last chance to combat the biggest impacts of climate change while it still can. In any case, all politicians, ministers, top managers of large companies and leaders of large interest groups should. What certainly should not happen is to wage war. Destruction and all the human suffering do not serve any worthy purpose anyway. But the war that the Russian regime is waging against Ukraine is also diverting attention away from those in power who are supposed to be concerned with the climate. The only positive thing that may result from the war and the sanctions is that in Western and Central Europe and perhaps North America, we are finally going to really work on alternative, more sustainable forms of generating energy. But why didn’t that work before this war, before this loss of lifes and the destruction of homes, hospitals, factories and entire cities?
And what are the richest people (men) on earth doing? The ten who together have enough money to eradicate poverty, or to solve the CO2 problem? Do they ever think about how they got that money, and that it probably wasn’t obtained by fair means?
In ‘Old News‘, Medeia mentions that this year it is commemorated that fifty years ago the controversial Limits to Growth: the report of the Club of Rome was published. Since then we have known that ’the trees don’t grow to the sky’ and that there is a maximum of what we can use in terms of raw materials and energy if we do not want to exhaust the earth. At some point in their lives, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Bernard Arnault, Bill Gates, Larry Page, Mark Zuckerberg, Sergey Brin, Steve Ballmer, Larry Ellison and Warren Buffett must have heard of this report. What drives them?
Do they have a philosophy of life, do they adhere to a religion, or do they only want to collect money? (And if so, why on earth would they want that, if they don’t use it to solve problems with it? After your first million or billion, the need for ever more is really gone, I would think.)
Would Musk really think that life on Mars is an alternative to life on Earth? If you’re looking around in the Northern Hemisphere right now, where spring is coming and so many trees and plants are blooming, you can’t imagine that anyone really does think they don’t need the earth.
The earth is our home, our source of food and drinking water, and we don’t find that in any other place. So we will have to be careful with Mother Earth, regardless of our religion or philosophy. Indigenous peoples and nature religions can be a source of inspiration for other earthlings. Not only them, but also everyone who has to do with gardening or deals with herbs in another way and the theatre makers can guide others to make something beautiful out of living on earth. At the very least, go outside for a full moon walk and feel what nature means to you, what the energy of the moon is, and what you can hear and smell. This call is not only directed towards the richest people on earth, but also to those in power in the Netherlands: the ministers, the politicians and manufacturers and bankers, those who somehow pull the strings that make the economy run the way it does, and through whom laws are made and enforced.
