Homework for Humanity

Hey, folks! I’m running behind, and it’s a holiday weekend, and you got a bonus post last week. (Is that enough excuses?) But I do have something vital to share with you today; this brand new, just released documentary, titled END GAME. It has up-to-the-minute science, the very latest research, and actual, undisputed numbers.

I’ll warn you that one part made me sob, while others made me gasp aloud. I took notes on a legal pad and wound up with 9 pages! But it’s not a piece without hope. It also gives advice on how to combat what’s happening.

Here are a few of the quick items discussed in this excellent, fast-moving piece.

• It took the human population 200,000 years to reach its first 1 billion people.

• The most recent 1 billion people arrived during the last 12 years.

• Every 5 days there are 1 million more people on the planet.

• 45% of global surface land area is used for livestock systems. That’s animals and the food to feed them. Almost half our land.

• A recent study of 12- to 14-year-old US children who died of other causes, showed that 65% of them already had cholesterol plaque lining their coronary arteries. At 12!

• In the last 40 years more than half of all wildlife on planet earth has been wiped out. More than half the wild animals and birds, gone!

There’s a lot more to this excellent piece, and every human living on the planet should watch it. It covers multiple human-caused threats to our environment on land, air and in the oceans, and it cover multiple causes of these issues, with deep insights into the harm our diets are doing and what we can do about this on multiple fronts.

We can’t fight an enemy we can’t see. And so we can’t look away. We have to face what’s in front of us, and then immediately shift our focus to the solutions. Don’t learn it, then wallow in it and become despondent. Let it instead fuel you to make powerful changes. The sooner we begin stepping into the answers, the sooner we can begin to turn it around.

The new reality, the survival of this planet and maybe of our species, depends on everyone recognizing the truth and deciding to do something about it.

I believe this documentary will help us do that.

This sort of information should not ruin the holidays for you. If anything, take it as motivation to make it the best holiday season ever while life on earth is still so very good compared to what it will be soon.

In 22 years the oceans will be empty. That’s not very long.

It might also inspire us to think harder about our purchases this holiday season.

Are we supporting the world’s richest oligarchs with our buying power? Billionaires are responsible for myriad times more planetary harm than ordinary people. Are we buying cheap plastic junk, destined for a landfill?

Why not think about better gifts for the adults in our lives? Living plants or trees they can plant in the spring, big batches of healthy cookies or brownies, handmade items like blankets, scarves, hats, mittens. A reader made me a gorgeous apron and pot holders a decade ago and I still cherish them and use them. One of my besties made me a beautiful lacy doily one year, and an apron another, and another pal makes jewelry for our gift-exchange most years.

It’s so much more precious to have a meaningful gift. Whenever I use or wear those handmade gifts, I smile and think about those friends.

Last year I found a photo of me at 8 or 9 years old, and got it restored. I made several prints, bought some pretty frames, and gave one to each of my daughters. That was a meaningful gift. Another year I got them each a copy of a small book about the prosecution of my 8th great grandmother for witchcraft in 1694 in Stamford, not Salem.

(Fun side note: Elisabeth Clawson was dunked and she floated, proving her a witch. But authorities ended the witch craze when their own highborn wives started being accused, and the timing saved Grandma Liz’s life. She was released and lived into her 80s.)

I believe all hope is not lost. I am convinced we can still turn things around. We can save our planet, and maybe, if we’re lucky, our species, as well. But what we can’t save is our consumption-driven way of life. We must change the input to change the output.

Hope is powerful. But the facts must be known so that hope isn’t brainless, mindless, uninformed, whistling past the graveyard type hope, but real, fully informed, active hope, where we don’t just wish for the best, but begin to create it.

---

So many holiday romances, I might have to start my own version of the Hallmark Channel®!