Pebbles under the Mattress

Have you ever experienced sleeping on an unfamiliar bed where you tossed and turned all night? You just could not get comfortable in any position to let your mind and body relax enough to drift off into Dreamland.

The following morning does not improve the situation because you did not sleep well and now you are facing the day ahead of you, tired, foggy and irritable. It was as if you slept on a bed filled with pebbles under the mattress; where you could find comfort in one part of your body, but felt pressure and discomfort in another area...so you toss and you turn...all night. Perhaps you tell yourself that you just need to get back home to your own bed where you know you can secure familiarity and obtain a good-nights rest. What then, is the solution of discomfort if it is your very own bed causing the lack of rest?

 Most humans walking around today are irritable, tired and frustrated because they cannot achieve a good-nights rest in their very own bed. The reason: they have pebbles under their mattress. The majority have no clue as to how these hard stones got there in the first place. These pebbles formed when mankind's logic and global stewardship was tossed to the wind for the sake of  control, security and domination. Each time mankind created, designed and manufactured an industry which supported his need for comfort, we inadvertently slipped another pebble under our mattress.

There is an interesting group of humans on Earth; we are called " The Environmentalists, The Tree-Huggers,The Flower Children, and The Green-People, who share a connection to Mother Earth which is quite opposite to the typical human being. This connection is shared with other various cultures called the Native American Indians and the Aboriginal People. Humans who instinctively act as stewards of the planet and co-exist with Mother Earth responsibly. We do not need a wake up call;we do not need to be educated that it is our responsibility to respectfully protect, sustain and nurture our planet, our home, our bed.

It is a powerful, innate acknowledgement that our very survival as a species is dependant upon the symbiotic relationship with the planet. We do not balk at the various names we are referred to, for most of us will also gladly acknowledge that we do feel alien living here with the others. We are the Tree-Huggers because without trees, we would not survive without an exact ratio of oxygen in our atmosphere.
We are called the Flower Children because children are innocent and teachable.

Mankind must adopt a spirit of global ethics that would sustain the planet for future generations.What we should be acting upon is not so much our various identities and differences, but rather we should focus on our dependence upon science and technology to solve world disasters that Mankind himself brought upon the earth.
 " The phrase 'conquest of nature' is certainly one of the most objectionable and misleading expressions of Western languages. It reflects the illusion that all natural forces can be entirely controlled, and it expresses the criminal conceit that nature is to be considered primarily as a source of raw materials
and energy for human purposes."
A God Within by René Dubos

"The single most important issue the world faces today is the need to develop an ethic of planetary stewardship, underpinned by a reverence for the beauty and complexity of our "water planet" and its diversity of life forms. Without this ethic, the forces behind our industrial consumer societies are pushing global resource consumption to higher and higher levels, eroding the essential life support systems of the planet."

- Jon Nevill

The planet desperately needs humans to explore new ideas and technology towards a sustainable retreat which involves explicit acknowledgement of their moral responsibility to protect other life forms, whether or not they are useful to us or not.
We must actively reduce human populations over time; we need to achieve 'consensus-based political decision-making frameworks' which can make hard decisions to achieve long-term goals, and

financial arrangements which can maintain a relatively healthy economy in the face of declining population and declining use of the world's resources.

What is the specific risk of choosing to not adapt to a sustainable way of life? Go ask the multitude of Flower Children who are working the BP oil spill disaster at the Gulf of Mexico coastlines this week. My point is simply to recognize that it is science and technology that must find a way to 'plug the hole'. We must change the way we live with Mother  Earth.

~Peace