I watched part of “The 11th Hour” a while back, but I never made it even half way through. They were going on and on about issues with the environment and the LAST thing I wanted to hear about were more environmental problems.
This time I waited and about half way they transition from individual problems to a more general point of view and then on to discuss solutions. This part of the movie I found somewhere between quite good and absolutely excellent!
Here are a few quotes I found interesting enough to jot down:
Thom Hartmann:
The problem is not a problem of technology.
The problem is not a problem of too much carbon dioxide.
The problem is not a problem of global warming.
The problem is not a problem of waste.
All of those things are symptoms of the problem.
The problem is the way we are thinking.
The problem is fundamentally a cultural problem.
It’s at the level of our culture that this illness is happening.
William McDonough:
We’re at a point in this world, with 6.4 billion of us, that we have to imagine what it’d be like to redesign design itself and see design as the first signal of human intention…
…and realize that we need new intentions for our future, where materials are seen as things that are highly valuable and need to go in closed cycles, what we call “cradle to cradle” instead of “cradle to grave”.
And that energy needs to come from renewable sources, principally the sun and that water needs to be clean and healthy as it comes in and out of a system…
And that we have to treat each other with justice and fairness.
So the design itself changes from mass prduction of things that are essentially destructive to mass utilization of things that are inherently assets instead of liabilities.
Kenny Ausubel:
With existing technologies that we basically already have on the shelf, or things we know we can develop in a rapid period of time, we could literally reduce the human footprint on planet Earth by 90 percent...
Stephen Schneider:
The direction to go is to decouple from our dependency on oil. efficient transportation, better insulated houses, and the development of renewable alternatives like solar, wind and biomass…
and getting those to become the major part of the market, using efficiency as the transition.
…
Now to me the value is the healing power that comes from understanding:
that it’s not just global warming.
It’s not just fossil fuel dependency.
It’s not just soil errosion.
It’s not just chemical contamination of our land and water.
It’s not just the population problem.And it’s not just all of those.
The deterioration of the environment of our planet is an outward mirror of an inner condition.
Like inside, like outside.
And that’s a part of the Great Work.
Here’s the video if you’d like to watch the whole thing. I strongly encourage that you do. And spread the word. It’s about awareness. We can’t find a solution when we don’t know there is a problem. We can’t become personally responsible when we are ignorant of what that responsibility is.
For me this is all just in time for the “New Year / Decade” and fodder for resolutions… I wish you all a bright and loving Holiday Season and may we all come together in this new decade to re-imagine our world and ourselves as something we treasure!
–Sue
About Sue Bell
Sue Bell is the CEO of Theme Zoom LLC, co-inventor and mastermind behind Theme Zoom's 'Krakken' Online Marketing Tool and Domain Web Studio. Her experience with web design and expertise with systems design facilitated the creation of a tool that makes the life of an online marketer easier by automating both the difficult and mundane aspects of Market Research, Keyword Research, Website Site Structural Design, Implementation and Ranking.
