Telling It Like It Is – a Common Sense Commentary

 Part One

By Jim Bell

Introduction

I believe that when enough of us care about the well being of our descendents and their own, it will be easy to bring everything we do for work or play into life-support system harmony. I believe that doing this correctly is the best way to create a prosperous and completely life-support sustaining future.

Toward the above, I’m personally working on becoming more conscious by getting clearer about my own existence and the existence of others — and the existence of everything else including things like freedom, justice and our connection to our children and future generations. I have found that the more conscious I become, the greater is my desire to leave future generations a peaceful, prosperous and life-support sustaining future.

Given our time and place in history, I’m particularly focused on becoming more conscious about how our current life-support damaging economies and ways of life can be gracefully transformed into economies and ways of life that are prosperous, fun and, at the very least, life-support system benign, even better let’s strive make all human activities life-support system positive.

To share what I’ve discovered on my ongoing consciousness journey and how it can be applied wherever people live, I use the San Diego/Tijuana Region, where I live, as a Case Study. My goal is to use this region as an example of how regions around the world can become renewable energy, water and food self-sufficient in ways that are cost-effective and life-support-system-effective.

Obviously, depending on climate, on renewable energy resources available, and other particulars of their local environments, the ways to become renewable energy, water and food self-sufficient will differ from the systems designed for the San Diego/Tijuana Region, but the principles behind such designs can be applied worldwide.

My larger vision is that the economic benefits to the San Diego/Tijuana Region — or really any other region that seriously works toward becoming renewable energy, water and food self-sufficient — will be so positive economically, for public health and life-support system harmony that every region in the world will want to emulate it.

The region or regions that make it a priority to become renewable energy, water and food self-sufficient will take the lead in the development and refinement of a vital emerging industry: the industry of helping regions and countries around the world become renewably energy, water and food self-sufficient. Becoming renewably energy, water and food self-sufficient is foundational to bringing all human activity into life-support harmony.

Working for this to happen is the human family’s best chance to leave a peaceful and life-support sustaining future for our children and future generations. See the article below for more details about the human family’s present planetary situation and how to bring modern human life into life-support sustainability.

 Telling It Like It Is  – a Common Sense Commentary

We humans are something special and rare.

In spite of there being an estimated 5 million to 100 million species of life on our planet — our species is the only one that lives and makes a living in ways that hurt our local and global life-support systems.

Yet, even considering all the life-support system damage that human activities have done and are still doing, our species still has the capacity to bring all human activity into life-support harmony.

Ultimately, accomplishing life-support harmony is about consciousness. If enough of us become conscious enough, soon enough, it will be easy to develop jobs and business opportunities that are mutually beneficial and at least life-support system benign. I believe we can do better than benign. I believe that we can develop ways to live and make livings that contribute to human and life-support system health and their renewability.

In other words, the more conscious we become, the better the chance we will be able to pass the birthright of a peaceful and life-support sustaining world to our descendents.

Increasing consciousness will also open us to new potentials and possibilities on this planet and beyond.

Unfortunately, our pursuit of consciousness will be cut short if we continue to live and make livings in ways that hurt others and cause life-support system harm. The aftermath of the Gulf oil gusher and the ongoing radioactive rain from Fukushima Japan’s failed nuclear plant complex — are two recent examples of how economic gambling can hurt people and our common life-support system far beyond what the gamblers personally risk.

Added to this, the world’s human population continues to grow as does the average amount of life-support damage we cause per capita. If this continues, sooner or later, our planet’s life-support system will fail in some fundamental way. This will result in a human and life in general dieback. If serious enough, human extinction and even the extinction of life in general becomes possible.

Some people believe that such a failure has already begun. They offer as evidence that:

•  As of mid 2012, an estimated 15% or 1/6 of the world’s population (over one billion people) are malnourished or starving and that 70% of us (4.9 billion people) are unemployed or under-employed, have zero or next to zero health care, and are poorly nourished, clothed and housed.

•    Human activities are causing the extinction of an estimated 27,000 species of life each year. This rate is 100 to 1,000 times greater than the historic or normal rate of extinction over the 3.5 billion years there is fossil evidence for life existing. The current extinction rate is comparable to the rate of extinction 65 million years ago when the age of the dinosaurs came to an end. There are a number of theories as to the cause of the accelerated rate of extinctions 65 million years ago, but a consensus of extinction event scientists are leaning toward it being caused by the collision with an asteroid, perhaps 10 kilometers in diameter, that struck the Yucatan Peninsula 65 million years ago. The contemporary rate of species extinctions is caused primarily by past and ongoing human assaults on each other and on our planet’s life-support system. It seems that the human family has become its own asteroid.

There’s a belief that early humans were more conscious about nature and were more protective of the natural world of life than people today. Some peoples did understand this and lived and made livings in ways that made them prosperous and life-support sustaining. Unfortunately, most human activities have been life-support system damaging. This has been true for most of human history, but before the industrial revolution, human numbers were still relatively small as was the life-support damage per capita. Because of this, human caused life-support damage of the past could usually be healed by nature given enough time.

But with the industrial revolution, fuel was plentiful and its cost was low. With cheap energy to run powerful machines like bulldozers, the human family’s average negative impact on the beauty, majesty and productive potential of our planet’s life-support system has and is still growing exponentially.

Next came the chemical revolution. The solders in this ongoing revolution are chemists. Mostly over the last 80 years, chemists have created an estimated 80,000 to 150,000 chemicals. Many of them have been and are continuing to be released planet wide. As our knowledge grows, we see increasing evidence that the long term impact of such practices goes on and on in our food chain, in the water we drink, and the food we eat.

Additionally, many of these chemicals have never existed on our planet before human chemists invented them. The result is that our bodies and our planet’s life-support system are awash with chemicals that our bodies and life-support system have had zero experience in responding to or processing. We and our life-support system can be negatively affected by chemicals naturally found on earth when they are manufactured in vast amounts, then released into our common air, water and food. We are adding an estimated 1,000 new chemicals to our planet’s life-support system each year.

Now we are in the mist of the biological, biochemical and electronic revolutions and these new revolutions are turning out to be just as damaging and possibility more damaging to human and life-support system health than the revolutions discussed earlier.

Unfortunately, there are numerous additional negatives beyond what has been pointed out above. But even with all this given, the bottom line question for those who love their children and grandchildren and the beauty, majesty and sustainable productive potential of our planet’s life-support system is: What should we do to give our children and future generations their best chance to live in a prosperous, peaceful and life-support sustaining future?

 Part Two will continue this Commentary and will be published in the next day or so.