I hadn’t considered this before, that when someone decides to have a child the knock-on effect for the eco-system is not just providing them with enough of the basic needs to survive, but when they finally reach adulthood somewhere to live as well. In the not so distant past this would not have been an issue, they would have stayed at home as part of the extended family. But ever since the Industrial Revolution the number of births has been driven by business to grow exponentially and to meet that demand new houses have been built. Which has meant taking away land from our eco-system, that unique organism which provides us with enough air/ water/ food/ heat/ and shelter to exist. In the last hundred years this suicidal and selfish path by the wealthy minority has seen 100% more land taken and is set to double again in the next fifty. In my lifetime alone villages have become towns and towns expanded to become endless suburbs. Simultaneously modern agriculture has destroyed a similar amount of our natural habitat. It doesn’t take much thought to wonder how long we have left continuing like this.
Explaining this to someone who is considering having a child isn’t easy. For a start they are relatively young, they haven’t lived long enough to register just how fast we are consuming the planet. They are also at that age which doesn’t want to think too much about the long-term future. But their parents and grandparents can, if they weren’t already so brainwashed into believing that family and continuing its bloodline was more important than anything else. Incredibly ironic too, when you consider that 99.9% of everyone on the planet’s DNA is identical, even male from female.
This realisation came to me while watching videos made by HAPPEN FILMS, a New Zealand/ Australian production company who aim to inspire change, share wisdom and contribute to a shift towards an ecological culture by making (free to watch) documentaries about eco-projects and individuals acting responsibly towards the planet. I can definitely recommend watching them, there’s nothing like this happening in the UK (where choosing not to have children and eating vegan is still a thing to keep quiet about). But deep down something didn’t feel right about them. Which led me to thinking about what we mean when we use the term sustainable. Rudolf Steiner, who was the first person I came across using it in this context, describes sustainable as bringing nothing in and taking nothing out. By which he literally meant living totally self-sufficiently, using only what was available on the land around the home and making sure it was replaced, foraging basically. Which still makes total sense and is totally possible. However the people in these videos, who use the term a lot, are not doing anything of the kind. The eco–homes they are building on untouched natural habitats and the eco-communities and recycling projects, are all helping destroy our eco-system. It doesn’t matter if most of the materials they use are recycled and they rewild (more on that in a moment) the rest, the fact that they are encroaching onto the surrounding natural landscape means they are taking away the eco-systems of other species.
Which brings me on to that other buzzword everyone seems to be using at the moment, rewilding. As in taking the land back to an arbitrary point in history, to restore the biodiversity. Apart from the obvious, how would we know what it was like then to do this, they are also failing to take into account that Nature doesn’t stand still. It is a constantly evolving organism that is desperately trying to adapt to every change it encounters. To try and put back land to another time would be like running Windows 95 on a new computer, totally incompatible. If these people really want to help the planet it isn’t complicated, all they need to do is live more frugally, become compassionate towards other species and stop having children. How many times do I have to repeat myself for it to make sense?
(photo is the city of Tokyo)
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How to live off-grid 