Seeing what we want to see

Here’s a short fable I’ve written for our dark times.

Photo: ginger on Pixabay

There was once a magnificent herd of deer living in a forest.  Hunters came after them and those who didn’t die were blinded in one eye.  Eventually the alpha stag lost an eye and then it became a badge of honour when other deer also lost their sight.

As the hunters started to cut down the trees, the situation became more threatening.  The stag leader said he preferred having only one eye, as restricted vision meant there was less cause to be frightened.  The deer who had become blind agreed – if they couldn’t see the danger, it wasn’t there.

More trees were felled and more deer died or were blinded, until the warnings from those who still had two eyes were ignored by the others as being fanciful and alarmist.  The watchful deer became such a nuisance with their constant alerts that the herd shunned them, as they only wanted to graze in peace, not be constantly harried about by anxiety and fear.   Thus it seemed reasonable to them that the sentinels should become blind too, as it would benefit the herd if everyone was the same.  Everyone would feel safer if no-one could perceive any threats in the undergrowth.

Meanwhile the forest got smaller and smaller until the hunters had killed all the deer – except for one or two of those who had kept their eyes open, and had escaped to tell this sorry tale.

Fresh water - a luxury we can no longer afford to waste?

“Water, water everywhere but not a drop to drink.”

2050 –  the year by which many areas of England could run out of water.

The Background

The Environment Agency has just published a report[1] (May 2018) entitled The State of the Environment, and though it has attracted some media attention, it is so engrained in us to think of the UK as a wet country that the warnings will receive little in the way of public attention.  But the facts are startling.  Already London is one of 9 cities worldwide[2] most likely to run out of drinking water, while the South East of England is most likely to see significant deficits in water supply as it has only the same rainfall as Melbourne, Australia.  Abstraction of water in the UK is currently running at unsustainable levels in 25% of groundwaters and 20% of rivers. And all this in spite of the fact that on average rainfall has increased during recent winters, even if summer rainfall has decreased slightly.

“Extractions already exceed recharge during normal precipitation,” states the report, adding that in 2016 unsustainable extraction meant between 6% and 15% of rivers did not achieve a good ecological status or potential.   This is the freshwater equivalent of Earth Overshoot Day  – the date each year by which our consumption for the whole year already exceeds nature’s capacity to regenerate resources for the year, meaning we are living on resources ‘borrowed’ from the future.  NASA warns[3] that water shortages are likely to be the key environmental challenge of this century, with 19 hotspots round the world where water depletion has already been dramatic.  The United Nations has declared that water scarcity already affects more than 40% of the world.

It is estimated that 3 billion litres of water – enough to meet the needs of 20 million people – are lost each day in the UK from leaks.  However leakage is currently one-third less than it was 30 years ago and water authorities are now expected by the government to reduce leakage by an average of 15% by 2025[4].  The government also aims to increase woodland in England, aiming for 12% tree cover by 2060 by planting 180,000 hectares before the end of 2042, to compensate for the fact that we have the least tree cover of any country in Europe.

The facts and the stats

Of the water taken from fresh water sources in the UK, only 55% is for public use while 36% is used for electricity supply and other industries.  This statistic should prompt us to consider everything we buy or use in terms of how much water is required to create it, in order to save this precious resource wherever we can.  Anything that is produced by industry – and that includes the food and farming industries – uses huge amounts of water.  A cotton tee-shirt requires 1800 litres of water to grow the cotton.  One kilo of beef uses 15415 litres.  One kilo of chocolate consumes 17196 litres.  So whether we are eating bananas (just 790 litres per kilo) or cheese, buying prescription drugs, smart phones or a new car, unbelievably vast amounts of water are required to grow, process or produce them.

The production of bottled water requires 6 times as much water to produce it as is in the bottle!  It currently costs less than £1/year for one person to drink 8 glasses of tap water a day, compared to £500 for the same amount of bottled water.

Where else can we save water?  By making things last longer, clothes being a prime example.  Proctor and Gamble[5] have found that washing in cooler  water (30-40 degrees) extends the life of one 3kg basket of clothes by 4 times, saving 230k of Co2 and 7000 litres of water.   WRAP state that extending the life of just one in 5 garments by 10% across the whole of Europe could save 3 million tonnes of Co2  a year (from creating new clothes).  That’s enough to power half a million homes for one year.  It would also save 150 million litres of water.  And it would divert 6.4 million tonnes of clothes from landfill.

The Aims

Are we really using too much water in our homes? In England the average consumption is 141 litres per person per day, and the aim is to get people to reduce it to 100.  Cape Town recently had to impose a water ration of 50 litres pp per day.  One resident stated that her family of four get by on 100 litres a day for the 4 of them.  

Where are the big savings to be made? In ablutions and laundry.  Over the last few years it has become the social norm to wash clothes every time you wear them and to shower at least once, possibly twice a day.  It’s also become a habit to leave the tap running while cleaning teeth, wasting  9 litres a minute.   How necessary really are these habits? 

The cry used to be, take a shower as it uses so much less water than a bath. Unfortunately, since most showers last anything from 10-30 minutes, this no longer achieves the desired result.  Limiting your shower to 4 minutes is an easy way to save water.  Try the stop/start method, only running the shower when you actually need to rinse off.  You save 8 litres for every minute you reduce your shower time.  If everyone in the UK would cut 1 minute from their shower we would save over 10,000 million litres of water a year![6]

Turning the tap off while cleaning teeth is an easy win as is washing dishes by hand (in a bowl, not under a running tap) rather than in a dishwasher.  It is so profligate to rinse dishes under running water.  Either don’t rinse, or rinse all the dishes together in a bowl.

A full load of washing at hot temperatures uses about 77 litres a time.  Often clothes do not need washing every time they are worn.  An airing on a hanger, maybe a press, is all that’s required. I put the machine on just once a week at 40 degrees.   For a family of 4 that would equate to 4 times a week -  not 7 or more.

I’ve been working on these things at home for several years now.  My average daily consumption (according to my water meter bill) has dropped from 100 litres to 70 litres, half the national average.  I only reckon to press the toilet flush once a day.  This is another easy save:  keep a bucket under the bath taps to collect the water that would otherwise be wasted until the hot comes through, and use that to flush the toilet.  The hand basin has a tap aerator so that you use less water than it appears from the flow. 

Water authorities on their websites and social media such as Twitter have water-saving gadgets to give away and lot of tips to save water, including saving washing-up water to water the garden.  It seems to me, these small saves are not important in terms of litres; they are important in creating a mind-set that water is a valuable resource which we should be treating with respect.  “Without further action, there is a 1 in 4 chance over the next 30 years that large numbers of households will have their water supply cut off for an extended period because of severe drought.”[7]

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[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/news/environment-agency-calls-for-action-on-water-efficiency

[2] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/amp/science-environment-44215418?__twitter_impression=true

[3] https://amp.theguardian.com/environment/2018/may/16/water-shortages-to-be-key-environmental-challenge-of-the-century-nasa-warns?__twitter_impression=true

[4] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/25-year-environment-plan/25-year-environment-plan-our-targets-at-a-glance

[5] https://www.edie.net/news/5/Colder-washes-can-quadruple-life-of-clothes--claims-P-G/?utm_source=dailynewsletter,%20edie%20daily%20newsletter&utm_medium=email,%20email&utm_content=news&utm_campaign=dailynewsletter,%20da0e171536-dailynewsletter

[6] Waterwise

[7] National Infrastructure Commission report “Preparing for a drier future”, released in April 2018. Quoted by ‘Utility Week’.

Listening

Maybe I only need to sit and listen,

my whole being focused on the silence

that orchestrates a blackbird’s song:

the silence that says more than all the notes.

maybe the time is right for listening

rather than speaking,

for holding close to the moment,

the moment of now.

Only in perfect stillness

beyond the blackbird’s call,

beyond the breath,

can we hear the earth breathing;

can hear how we should be, in the depths of our being.

Oh soul! Speak to me in this moment,

unite me with the eternal home,

the eternal oneness of the moment.

Let me learn how to live in the now, the very now,

that I may live in the silence between thoughts,

the silence between notes, the music of life itself.

The Tyranny of Plastic

‘Protecting the Environment’, like ‘Climate-change’, is one of those heart-sink phrases that paralyse us with the sheer enormity of the task to be tackled. It seems there is little that we, as individuals, can do in the face of seismic change: the global decimation, pollution and destruction of natural resources everywhere.

We laughed when the bee said to the farmer, ‘I’m too 
small  to help you grow crops’, but we can all do our bit.

But to bracket all climate change-contributory factors as projects too big for any of us to tackle is not merely defeatist but untrue.  Each and every one of us can change our way of life, our consumer choices to a greater or less extent.  No-one is asked to wear sackcloth and eat grass! But if we all change our choices by whatever degree feels possible, not only would it have an accumulative effect but it would change the mind-set of populations across the globe.

This has been true throughout history when enough people lived their beliefs.  It used to be unthinkable that women would be given the vote or that apartheid would be abolished, to name just two examples.  The pioneers were derided, tortured and outlawed, but gradually the mind-set changed. The same is slowly happening now with climate change and the degradation of the planet.  So every tiny thing we can do to halt this, we should do, as its example and ethos will not be wasted.

Buy and use less plastic

 

One of the simplest changes we can make is to buy and use less plastic!  We’ve spent the last 200 years digging oil out of the ground and now it is lying all around us, in one form or another.  Like the genie, it cannot be put back into the lamp.  We have grown so used to every little thing being made of plastic, that we no longer see it is for what it is – rubbish (with a very short lifespan) that is going to clog landfill sites, poison the rivers, pollute the oceans and never decompose.

There is nothing so insidious as the item that makes life easier.  Takeaway food and drink and convenience snacks (all in throwaway plastic containers), cling wrap, disposable diapers – all make life so much easier for people who don’t think beyond the immediate gratification.  But let’s not forget that almost everything that is made of plastic is designed to make money for business, it is not there to help the poor or improve quality of life for us or the planet.  Even oranges have been sold ready-peeled in a sealed pack which – unlike orange peel – will never ever decompose.  Because we all want life to be easy, especially if we have enough money to pay for it, we do not stop to think of the harm we are doing by encouraging this cycle of supply and demand.  

 Only 5% of plastic is effectively recycled

Only 5% of plastic is effectively recycled. The rest lies around on our roads and motorways, on the coast where the tide has ejected it and everywhere, including the ocean, where it can harm or kill wildlife.  One recent statistic says that the amount of plastic in the oceans will be greater than the amount of fish, by weight, around 2050.

There are alternatives available

 

This mess has been caused by each and every one of us.  We may be recycling where we can, but the only long-term solution is to buy less plastic.  There are alternatives available – hemp products, seaweed and mushroom packaging are beginning to be available, for instance.  But we will drown in a sea of plastic – on land or water – if we do not stop buying it now.  A recent article in The Guardian states that plastic production is set to quadruple by 2050, with 8 million tonnes of plastic leaking into the ocean every year.

So make one resolution this month

 

So make one resolution this month. It may be to stop buying takeaway coffee (unless you take your own container); or stop buying drinks with plastic straws; or stop buying snacks or soft drinks and then binning the wrapper or bottle.  Whatever it is, take this one step.  It will lead to other steps; your mind-set will change and your example will spread.

Many years ago, author Vladimir Bukovsky, a Russian dissenter, said “… power rests on nothing other than a people’s consent to submit to tyranny, and each person who refuses to submit to tyranny, reduces it – even if only by one 250-millionth.”

We are now tyrannised by plastic and by the big business that sees only the profit involved. But we are also being tyrannised by our own inertia and selfish desire for an easy life.  So do your bit to reduce that tyranny – even if it is only by one seven-billionth!

PS – I’ve just bought a bamboo toothbrush…

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http://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/jan/19/more-plastic-than-fish-in-the-sea-by-2050-warns-ellen-macarthur

http://voices.nationalgeographic.com/2016/04/04/pesky-plastic-the-true-harm-of-microplastics-in-the-oceans/

Money is your god, isn't it?

When is money just money and when is it a god?


On social media recently a man's post went viral because he had expended a few bucks, a few litres of petrol and a little time in buying two live turtles from a food market where they were on sale for soup-making, and had driven them to the sea, releasing them back to the wild.  So everyone's a winner, right?  The fisherman who caught the turtles was paid by the market stall, who then got paid by the buyer, who felt fulfilled because he had saved the turtles from certain death.  The turtles won out too.

The reality of the turtle story is that not everyone is a winner.  Only two turtles were saved out of the thousands caught each year, to say nothing of all the illegal by-catch in fishing worldwide, the illegal trawling, dragnets and other harm to marine life.  And why does this animal life - on the land, in the sea or in the air - have to suffer?  To feed mankind is only a small part of the answer.  But the real answer is to make money for big businesses and corporations.  This is where money is god!  Where nothing on this planet, no life form from humans down to the tiniest plankton or seed, is safe from the money-grabbing tentacles of those who do not see beyond the need to become rich.

Love of money leads to climate change

 
Why is a love of money connected to climate change?  Because of greed.  Yes, the world population needs houses and jobs and food and heating.  But the desecration going on throughout the world, especially in the areas of sacred wilderness, has nothing to do with feeding the starving millions, the dispossessed, the poverty-stricken, but has everything to do with feeding the greed and consumerism of rich countries and their rich inhabitants, nearly all of them in the western world.

For those of us who aren’t short of a pound or two it is easy to throw last year’s carpet or sofa on the scrapheap, to throw out three-quarters of the Christmas turkey because we’re bored with it, to leave the lights and heating on day and night.  “We can afford it, so why not?” The why not is because someone somewhere across the earth is paying for such profligacy.  Do you ever ask yourself why are things so cheap? Why a new tee shirt is only £1 or why a chicken for roasting is only £2, or kilo of shrimps is only £2.50?  It is not – emphatically not – because the retailer has foregone his profit. It is because someone at the very bottom of the supply chain has had to pay the price.  It may be the chickens reared in soul-searingly atrocious conditions; it may be the child slaves forced to peel shrimp, or the wage-slaves forced to make clothes under barbaric conditions.  Whoever it is has suffered because of the  avarice amongst suppliers whose only god is money.  We strengthen that every time we opt for the cheapest we can buy.

Of course there are millions of people who can’t afford anything better than the very cheapest, whether it’s food or clothes, and this plea is not aimed at them.  It is aimed at those who can afford to pay the premium that ensures people, animals and the environment do not suffer because money is their god. It is the comfortably off who have caused climate change, not the poor.

The interconnection of all life

Dr Jane Goodall – as have many scientists and philosophers before her – has emphasised the interconnectedness of all life, and that is what we fail to appreciate when we are wasteful and extravagant.  The unused food you discard, the new dress you chucked without ever wearing, the mobile phone you just put in the trash, does not cost you – your wallet soon tops up again – but it costs the environment, the natural world, whether it’s the seals killed to protect the salmon farms, the oceanic inhabitants polluted by chemicals or plastic debris, or the forests razed to grow palm oil.  And it is so easy to agree with the cry of, “But the economy must grow! We must provide more jobs.”  Mammon speaking here!

No-one wants to sacrifice one iota of their comfortable lifestyles, their ability to have (a euphemism for ‘waste) everything they set their minds on.  Climate change is the result.  Climate change is here to stay.  We’re not here to stay unless we stop worshipping money and all it brings us; and start considering a more frugal, conservative lifestyle that extends some hope of life and quality of existence to the rest of the planet’s occupants.


Everything you demand helps to degrade the planetary existence

Do you want an airport close by or one with an extra runway to make travelling simpler? That is your god.  Do you want more roads across the countryside to make your journey easier. That is your god.  Do you want everything plastic-based, including toilet wipes, to be  one-use only so that, on discard, it can sit in landfill or in the oceans for hundreds of years? That is your god.  Your god is money.  Think about it.


Remember the film, The Devil wears Prada?  That wasn’t the story of a she-devil boss in her couture clothes.  It was the story of how greed (for promotion, for money, for the good life) leading to unethical behaviour, is the devil’s ploy.  It is not money that is the root of all evil, it is ‘the love of money that is the root of all evil’.  Thousands of people have woken up to this, and governments are just beginning to wake up to the need for a change in mind-set.  Now we need to convince the rest of the world.

 

Let out your inner Buddha!

I read this quotation recently and it made me stop and think:

"You don't have to become something, you are already a Buddha.  The yoga practices chip away unnecessary things hiding the Buddha within." ~ Swami Satchidananda

So much of our lives we are aiming for something, directing our actions at some target.  And when we stop aiming for material things such as security, a good job, a loving family, a nice home etc, often we start to dissect ourselves and look at ways to promote our mental or spiritual growth.  Perhaps the last thing we think to examine or improve is our emotional life, the way we react to life's problems, vexations and stressors.

When we do pause to explore how we can improve our thoughts and feelings, our aims tend to be inward:  'I should be less angry, more patient, more tolerant, more forgiving.  I shouldn't have said what I said...'  We start to focus on those elements of our personality that we think most need changing or discarding.  Unfortunately, since energy follows thought, (or for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction), the more we focus on our weaknesses and flaws, the more active they become until perhaps they take over our emotional life.  The harder we try to control our feelings, the more it seems that aggravating situations arise to disturb us and corrupt our good intentions.

This is the time to remember what the Swami said above.  We are already perfect in our deepest core, at our highest level.  In our innermost being we are already resonating in tune with the Divine.  Now we have to find ways to let that manifest.

We have to chip away at those accretions we have built up over a life time. Just as limpets cling to a rock or the hull of a boat, changing its shape, its dynamic, the way it reacts to the tides and currents, so do we have to dismantle all that's in us that hides the light.

We do this, as Dr Edward Bach - among others - has said, not by focusing on the fault or accretion but by developing the opposite emotion.  Much of the Dalai Lama's teaching is about the development and evolving of our sense of compassion: something else that we've always had deep within us but which has been smothered by the accretions of the years.

By 'accretions', I mean all those emotional millstones, neuroses, defences and reactions we've built into our psyche since childhood.  Not neccessarily the big abuses, but little things that we allow to build up - fear of being hurt, feeling rejected, unsuccessful, feeling a need to dominate, etc.  How often have we thought of someone, 'S/he'd be such a nice person if only s/he didn't have this hang-up; or this antagonism; or this aggression.'  We can see that accretion distorting and  mal-colouring their whole lives, although the person can't see it for themselves.  Is the same therefore true of ourselves as well?

We can't alter other people; we can only alter ourselves.  We each have to find our own way to do it, the way that makes sense to us.  The purpose - and beauty - of quotes is that one of them, somewhere and at some time,will strike such a chord in our heart that our soul leaps up to greet it.  And the resulting resonance raises our vibration enough for us to recognize that yes! now! at long last, we must work to reveal our inner Buddha.

"Think of yourself as a precious, breathtaking pearl - and 

this is your irritation phase."  ~ Astro Twins

And see the Twitter account @S_Satchidananda

Help is a simple thing

This poem was inspired by the work done by overseas charities for the disabled; and written in admiration of those who can prove, that with a tiny amount of help, they are not of small account.

 

SIMPLE THINGS

Such a simple scene:

an African village, chickens pecking in the dust.

An old man, shuffling along with a stick.

A small child, clutching his mother’s skirt,

his grandmother, slumped beside a fire.

All with one thing in common –

apart from being poor and black and of small account –

they are all blind without glasses.

Such a simple thing, a smile –  

big white teeth, big brown eyes.

It’s a wondrous sight, once a year,

when dozens and dozens queue in the sun

then grin in surprise at a sharp new world:

for the very first time, they have glasses.

Now the old man throws away his stick and his years –        

gets a job.

The old lady laughs in delight, cooks and cleans

so her daughter can work.

And the little boy can walk to school and read books.

Such a simple thing, glasses.