How often do you think people realize that their computers, televisions, cars, and cellphones come from raw earth materials? Better yet, every time they fill up their gas tanks, or every time they eat a hamburger…
Alongside the detriment to the planet, we are also detrimenting ourselves in the long run, and communities such as the indigenous peoples in the Amazon, immediately. We are taking their homes away and completely destroying their lands. Cutting down the trees, flooding the valleys, polluting the soils… We have several different ways we like to destroy the rainforest.
If we think about it, though, how are we valuing these forest lands? The forests are naturally highly valuable, not in contributing to the preoccupation, but in contributing to human life on this planet. For example, there is high value in its carbon sink, in its biodiversity reservoir, it’s valuable in it’s ability to take in carbon and produce oxygen and purify the air, or the value in it’s ability to regulate weather. These things are invisible to accountants but vital to humans; little can they see, however, that in the long run it will save a lot of money keeping the forests as they are, as opposed to having to suck what we once had from the rainforests out of the atmosphere.
We must wake up and realize the real value in the Earth. We have the technological ability to save the Earth, but our global consciousness is still too far behind. We must rise into a higher way of thinking and connecting with our planet before it’s too late.
The indigenous people look at the world in this way, imagine what the world would be like if we all viewed it through these same eyes and with this same type of heart:
“The way we see the world shapes the way we treat it. If a mountain is a deity, not a pile of ore; if a river is one of the veins of the land, not potential irrigation water; if a forest is a sacred grove, not timber; if other species are biological kin, not resources; or if the planet is our mother, not an opportunity – then we will treat each other with greater respect.”
