Hi Barley and other green canaries, I agree with your assessment of
modern western society. I've heard our society and way of life
likened to an addiction. We need more and more, and are in denial
the whole time about the destructiveness of the activity. There is
only so much we can take, and the concept of sustainability really
comes into play, as you brought up. If we are doing something and it
upsets the ecological balance (either of the earth or in ourselves,
as ultimately, there is no difference) then it is going to lead to a
bad outcome in the end. Years ago I did a lot of research, after I'd
become ill…. I learned that in studies of wildlife in polluted areas,
even after the land was cleaned up, it took several more generations
before the species' health effects stopped getting worse with each
generation. So if we assume the same is true of us – we could stop
exposing ourselves, but it would still take a couple generations
before our kids and grandkids would reverse the systemic degeneration
which has become more common in recent decades. It's a scary
thought, but its all the more reason to start cleaning up as soon as
we can.

After I got sick around 11 years ago, I noticed what many other
people have noticed -- that people who are not sick with an
environmental-type problem, really don't want to hear about it! They
don't even (usually) want to know how to better take care of
themselves to prevent themselves from getting sick. Of course, there
have been notable exceptions, people I was able to help... But as a
general rule, people do not want to upset the worldview that tells
them they are not vulnerable to whatever it was that made ME sick. I
think it comes down to that -- there is a worldview which is part of
the western culture, a view of ourselves as masters over the world,
and we "create" our experience (in the lingo of pop psychology),
etc. It does not fit with that worldview that we are intimately tied
to nature and to ecology and that a little molecule of something
floating around in the air can trigger my nervous system into
disaster. We are supposed to be, here in the Western world, more
powerful than that.

Rich


--- In GreenCanary@yahoogroups.com, BarleySinger <BarleySinger@c...>
wrote:
> People do not want to know the truth. Most of the western world is
living
> in a dissociative dream, and they like it there, on their happy
little
> barge floating down "de-nile". ]