I have a problem with ownership.
It's a human construct.
It's a self interested mechanic that feeds our ego.
It's a self serving action that stinks of dopamine.
It's a smack that tingles, excites, wanes and leaves an itch...
...that needs a scratch...which in turn tingles, excites, wanes and leaves an itch...
round and around and around we go - hooked & addicted.
Humans build. We assemble parts to other parts.
Brick by brick we manufacture a wall to protect, erect a shelter, fashion a haven.
Nature grows.
Nature breeds.
Nature cultivates.
Nature sprouts.
There's a fundamental difference in what we do and what nature does.
We are getting ourselves tied up in knots as we accumulate stuff with no path to untie, return to its original state.
Nature's cyclical story is a tale told for billions of years.
The ground we walk upon is at the start, middle and will be at the end of our human story.
Perhaps the solutions to our woes are in the ground and not inside our heads?
Earth is our home.
Nature is the landlord.
Humans are the tenants.
Our agreement is a leasehold.
We are the occupiers.
Our damage deposit is up for review and we've f*cked it.
We're burning.
We're drowning.
We're dying.
We need to slow the f*ck down.
We need to take a look back at what we've done.
We need to pull our heads from our arses.
We need to think about our actions.
We need to stop taking a dump on our doorstep.
FACT CHECK
The hottest years on record (UK).
- 2022 (tied with 2015)
- 2021 (tied with 2018)
- 2019.
- 2018.
- 2017.
- 2015.
- 2014.
- 2010.
Expert POV
Stephanie Pappas (Scientific American) 9th Dec 2020
"Humanity has reached a new milestone in its dominance of the planet: human-made objects may now outweigh all of the living beings on Earth.
Roads, houses, shopping malls, fishing vessels, printer paper, coffee mugs, smartphones and all the other infrastructure of daily life now weigh in at approximately 1.1 trillion metric tons—equal to the combined dry weight of all plants, animals, fungi, bacteria, archaea and protists on the planet. The creation of this human-made mass has rapidly accelerated over the past 120 years: Artificial objects have gone from just 3 percent of the world’s biomass in 1900 to on par with it today. And the amount of new stuff being produced every week is equivalent to the average body weight of all 7.7 billion people.
The implications of these findings, published on Wednesday in Nature,are staggering. The world’s plastics alone now weigh twice as much as the planet’s marine and terrestrial animals. Buildings and infrastructure outweigh trees and shrubs. “We cannot hide behind the feeling that we’re just a small species, one out of many,” says study co-author Ron Milo, who researches plant and environmental sciences at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. These numbers should be a wake-up call, he adds. They tell us “something about the responsibility that we have, given that we have become a dominant force,” Milo says."
We're at a crossroads. Or perhaps we're not, perhaps we're passed that. I don't know. What I do know Is that we should do more than we are doing. I believe we need to think about growing and less about building, We need to look at the circularity of nature, and use those processes to grow our planet like we grow our businesses.
More on Earth again soon.
Paul
