Spell it out

Hello mel­low, fa­mil­iar moon, you con­stant, calm­ing bal­loon of mys­ter­ies that through­out human ex­is­tence has drawn eyes up­wards to re­mind us how small and dim we are. Sorry to tell you this, though, but it seems you may be next on the hit list.

The dire par­a­digm of in­sa­tiable Earth­ling eco­nomic growth/profit is (you can prob­a­bly see well enough from what is, er, was a safe dis­tance) wholly at odds with eco­log­i­cal in­tegrity.

As for we Earth­lings, I think the light is fi­nally com­ing on. There is a con­ta­gious sense among the crowd that some­thing is going weirdly wrong. De­spite in­sa­tiable, ha­bit­ual con­sumerism a seam of aware­ness, of cul­pa­bil­ity, now casts doubt.

How on Earth can we keep grow­ing? We can’t, nat­u­rally, so we look to the heav­ens. Every­thing has a price and if there is profit to be had then we can blind-eye the neg­a­tives. Well, dear moon, you are fair game as you are about 400,000km away. But hang on a minute.... there may be lots of handy ti­ta­nium up there, I hear you say, but prob­a­bly no lithium which is des­per­ately needed to power up every­thing from elec­tric cars to lap­tops and mo­bile phones. How will we cope? Well there is al­ways Mars, that mus­tard globe in the night sky.

Here in our beau­ti­ful Pri­o­rat I worry so much that I am get­ting it wrong. Wood­burn­ers? Wrong? Solar pan­els and state of the art lithium bat­ter­ies? Wrong? Wood burn­ers and the whole car­bon cycle is a mas­sive de­bate. A min­ing boom in an arid Andes re­gion of Ar­gentina, Chile, and Bo­livia, home to half the world’s re­serves of rare lithium, is im­pact­ing eco-sys­tems. So will some­one please tell me what is right? Step one has to be to mod­er­ate every­thing I do. Less not more has to be the hard an­swer. And we need to keep plant­ing trees and seeds, pro­tect­ing the soil, valu­ing and nur­tur­ing na­ture.

While arms traders and shrewd in­vestors rub their hands over an­other grue­some war, there is talk of sus­tain­ing growth a bit longer by some de­struc­tive, noisy, pol­lut­ing min­ing for lithium and other re­sources at the bot­tom of the sea. How low can we go? Nope. I am not going to stand for that and will .... what? Write an ar­ti­cle? Go out and protest? Yes. Sign me up. Con­stant growth has to be chal­lenged. Noth­ing that is un­sus­tain­able can be al­lowed.

Mean­while, I am be­gin­ning to wade through the new Cata­lan Strat­egy for Adapt­ing to Cli­mate Change Hori­zon 2030, just ap­proved by the Cata­lan Gov­ern­ment. I am, amid the sci­en­tific den­sity, look­ing for hope as those with knowl­edge, power and sense de­fine how this forested, coastal, moun­tain­ous, pre­cious coun­try can adapt and re­duce vul­ner­a­bil­ity. Key, though, Gen­er­al­i­tat, is in­cor­po­rat­ing the peo­ple; in­spir­ing, en­sur­ing acute at­ten­tion and im­me­di­ate pos­i­tive ac­tion. This is our home. What can we do now as in­di­vid­u­als and com­mu­ni­ties? Spell it out. Make us part of the an­swer not just the cause.