The former media mogul Ted Turner challenged us in 1992 with this statement: "If we don’t make the right choices after we have all the information, then we don’t deserve to live.”

Well, we have more than enough information. Oil and gas, the stored sun’s energy, which took hundreds of millions of years to incubate, gone forever within this century. We are, in fact, approaching PEAK EVERYTHING.

Our planet will be around for millions of years, what gives us the right to dig out the last of the none-renewable resources and destroy the environment in the process? And now, nations are posturing to exploit the Arctic resources, just because they’re there?

The oceans, where life began, are fished out and used as convenient sewers, and ocean bottoms are scraped clean of all living things, with no thought given to future generations. This is just a fraction of what is ailing our world.

The never-ending pro-and-con arguments about global warming or climate change, whether men-or-sun-made, or even true, must look really ridiculous, when intelligently viewed from a cosmic-time perspective, and the future.

Eliminating needless competition and none-life-producing jobs and businesses, without anybody suffering, could cut resource and electricity demand and greenhouse gases drastically, and nature will take care of itself. We need a co-operative-participatory-shared-leisure society, where everybody’s NEEDS are supplied, as our planet requires for its health and survival privileged-educated-understanding and caring inhabitants.

How did it ever come about, that the farmers, workers and educators etc, who, nobody could live without, have to go begging for a living wage, while the financial and related paper shuffling institutions, who produce little of real value to society, are laughing all the way to the bank? Money is a debt token, a demand for goods and services, which, of course, costs resources and generates pollution. How, then, can someone in good conscience demand more than a fair share from our dwindling resources?

Perhaps any person who wants to be a leader in academia, business or politics should live and lead by example, with a new Global Ethic -- “Do not expect others to live with less than what you’re living with.”

Our planet is but a speck in the cosmos, but it’s unique, and perhaps the only planet in our galaxy that harbours life, as we know it. I refrain from saying ‘intelligent life’, because the wanton destruction of our beautiful world, through stupidity, greed and senseless wars, and letting over 26 000 children die of starvation every day, is a crime that must reverberate throughout the universe.

Instead of getting distressed over a puck or a ball from thousands of miles away, or whether Dumbledore is gay, we ought to get excited about the source of life, the big ball we’re living on!

Gunther Ostermann
Kelowna, BC. Canada (via email)