This spot, in a State Forest Preserve in California, felt deeply spiritual. This place meets the forest with cliffs and ocean, and so the majesticness of it all was resplendent. The ions were swirling and I was deeply in awe. Brown Pelicans flew all around this area and the rocks were covered in their poop, which was a great way for mother nature to tell humans to keep off – stay away from this point. Most always, when there are no such protections from the state, or country, humans take, and take and take without consideration of the source, without consideration of the ramifications, without care for the future. This is the state of greed that is present in our world – a world full of consumer experiences and “must haves” that fill moments and experiences we take for granted.
Humans are living in a fantasy world, a world in which we continue to live life consuming and experiencing pleasures as they suits our desires. This could be as harmful as a taking a cruise ship vacation and as seemingly benign as eating a tunafish sandwich or sushi lunch with a boba smoothie slurped with a plastic straw. We know our climate is in trouble, yet we do not see how our each and individual actions contribute to the whole. Many say why should we suffer changes when big corporations do not change – they are to blame. We all are to blame – as we enable them to go on with our choices that support their efforts. We are feeding their growth with our individual actions. They only way to truly create change in the world is to make individual changes -that grow in to collective changes – and then impacts how the world lives around us.
I recently saw a documentary that blew my world wide open. This film gave evidence that there is no safety for dolphins in any food you consume from the ocean.
Dolphins and whales are being killed by shocking numbers for your can of tuna fish or sushi. There are no happy cows in meat industry and there are no happy fish in the fishing industry. Up until the moment I saw that film, I was a pescatarian. After watching the film I cried, not because of what I was losing in my diet, I cried because of the bleak future our world will have if everyone continues to live the fantasy of “everything is fine, I’m living my life the way I like it.” With this selfish way of life, we lose everything. We stand to lose the entire ecosystem of the ocean.
If the ocean ecosystem disappears,
then humans will disappear.
The ocean heals us,
so let’s give back and heal the ocean.
The only way to heal the ocean, is for humans to stay out of it.
Rewilding is the practice of keeping humans out of forests to allow nature to do what it does best, grow and flourish. As long as humans are partaking of the world in a consumer fashion that says, I did that, I saw that, I took from that, now I will sell it to you….then we will all lose. Don’t buy it, take a photo not a rock or shell, and leave only with a memory and knowing that you will be saving our planet. The same goes for the ocean.
We are all interconnected to the planet. It has been suggested and researched that the Ebola outbreaks in Africa are tied to the lack of the ecosystem in the nearby forests and ocean. Additionally, the birth of Sars-CoV-2 (Covid-19) has been linked to the lack of balance and respect for the forests adjacent to China’s marketplaces. Both zoonotic diseases (the rare cases where humans can catch from animals)- the animals were sick due to the imbalance of their living conditions.
We will continue to have pandemics,
until we all change the way we live.
May your heart shatter deeply,
so that change will blossom
to protect our earth.
