“Hope for the earth lies not with leaders but in your own heart and soul. If you decide to save the earth, it will be saved. Each person can be as powerful as the most powerful person who ever lived- and that is you, if you love this planet.”
Dr. Helen Caldicott
Dear Friends,
Humanity appears to be passing through an unprecedented crisis involving not only the environment but also social, economic and monetary crisis. Mother Earth seems to be telling us: Enough! I cannot continue taking abuse any more if I have to fulfill my promise to continue providing a home and school for future generations of living beings. Like many parents and grand-parents, I imagine myself struggling to answer my grand-daughter’s silent query: Dada, what did you do to prevent the imminent holocaust, while there was still time and despite repeated warnings?
Climate change effects are descending on us rapidly and forcefully. Many of us have commented it is too late for us to do anything much to survive the holocaust. Some leaders of nations and corporate houses have denied the severity of the looming reaction of the Earth while others have denied any responsibility of our way of life, an unloving way, as a contributing factor to the crisis. The deniers retort: It is nature and hence let nature handle it while we continue business as usual.
We, the beings making up humanity are responsible for the mess we have made on Earth and hence we will have to clean up the mess. The good news is that we are capable of clean up. Hence we should convince ourselves we are approaching the best-of-times upon our planet, the end of the worst-times.
Technology can help but first humanity has got to get together since we are all aboard the space-ship Earth, with very few lifeboats. Global warming can be resolved but human warmth and friendliness is an absolute prerequisite.
During the coming years, with shortage of food and water, with polluted lands, seas and air, with ‘natural’ calamities increasing in frequency and force, social unrest may drive us to panic, making us behave like crazed wild beings. In the worst case scenario, we cannot be certain that we will not use all the weapons at our disposal in a desperate although vain attempt to defend ourselves.
Shifting our concern temporarily from global warming to global arming, none of us can deny that weapons of mass destruction have been created by man for the massive destruction of fellow men with unavoidable collateral destruction of the habitat. While on the surface, weapons of mass destruction have been assembled for defense, such defense is possible only as long as these weapons are not deployed. Eh? We cannot indefinitely depend on bluff to safeguard humanity. The perceived reassurance of anti-missile systems makes a nuclear war seem winnable. We are balanced on a knife-edge.
Getting the peoples of all the nations together and agreeing on a non-use of nuclear arms is our First Test. If we can get together with joy, there is a good chance of passing our First Test. Global Arming, similar to Global Warming and other global blights, is one of the symptoms of our failure to derive joy in our everyday life. And this failure is due to us forgetting our essential constitution: a joy-filled heart fashioned in the image of the heart of our Creator.
This book is an exploration of the link between securing joy and securing safety. With the experience of passing our First Test we will be in a better condition to resolve our Second Test which is Global Warming.
But won’t the leaders of nations and directors of arms factories merely laugh at us, as they always have? Perhaps not this time. This time we will not be wasting our time on trying to convince others that trying to defend ourselves through the use of nuclear arms is not really defense but offensive. We have to convince ourselves and then realize our inherent power to effect change. Then and only then our pledge will carry weight.
Do down-load the book and the supporting presentation and lets commence our voyage. There are no passengers on this voyage. We are all intrepid seafarers on an epic adventure. We may experience bouts of sea-sickness during the inevitable storms encountered during our voyage but we will deliver our precious cargo.
