Elephants

Elephants

by Bradley Davidson

Have you ever driven down an open two lane road, through the mountains or open desert, reveling in your freedom and the unobstructed path? Eventually you head home, toward the big city. The roads get wider and more cars appear. You slow down following some fuming car or belching truck until you find yourself mired in gridlock, inching along to your destination. The magic of the free journey taken has disappeared and you are a bit annoyed. Maybe you thought about the pollution as your breathed fumes. Maybe you gazed at the clogged, concrete lined flood control channels you had much time to observe while sitting in traffic. You note how littered they are with plastics, shopping carts, bird and animal carcasses and other cast away items. Waterways that started as clear, cascading brooks, creeks and streams now collect our fallout. More should be done, you think, and carry on your way.

Well, much has been done. Laws and regulations attempt to keep our rivers and skies clean and protect wildlife. But there is an elephant in the room that no one talks about, a big gray behemoth that no one notices. And it’s made up of over 7 billion people. Indeed, there are just plain too many humans wandering about the surface of our globe.

Sure, you can fit us all in a space the size of Texas leaving plenty of openness. But how many folks can Earth support at a reasonable standard of living for all while leaving room for natural diversity to flourish? At this time we are using 150% of our planet’s renewable resources. So, the answer would seem, is less.

But we need to take a closer look at this elephant we have wandering around the room. We need to walk around it, check its feet, look under its trunk and stare it squarely in its eyes. Statistics help, but they tend to roll off our consciousness like water off a duck. The numbers boggle the mind. One billion in 1800. More than 7 billion today. The industrial and technological revolution helped this boost as we learned how to save more lives, live longer and consume more. But technologies, like atomic energy, are often misdirected and misused.

Solutions are just as unconceivable. We can’t just line up a surplus of us and eliminate ourselves. Yet we do with our wars, our actual competition for scarce resources. We can’t legislate human behavior in the making of babies, although some try. And at the moment we can’t send humanity into outer space to populate earth-like planets. Most of all, though, we can’t abandoned any of us already here. Few solutions are obvious.

It starts, however, with seeing the elephant. And when viewing an apparent apparition, a change of thinking helps. A paradigm shift is in order. A shift in thinking about the way we live and inhabit Mother Earth. Fifty percent of births in the U.S alone are unintended. There are ways to prevent this. And the idea of a successful economy requiring untamed growth needs to be reevaluated. Do we really need all our consumerism stuff to live while others strive to find clean water?

Changing this thinking, however, seems as impossible as sending people out to populate the galaxy. Yet we’ve thought differently before back in the time our ancestors respected and protected our planet and listened to the spirits of wildlife mentors learning to use what we need, replace what we can and nurture the earth for us and our children.

So let’s see the elephant, talk about the elephant and learn how to lead this elephant out the door.

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