The SNJ columnist Karen Eberhardt-Shelton was born in California but grew up in England.

She now lives in Stroud and is currently working on an education project called Learn, Think, Act and is hoping to develop an eco-community land trust.

Her thought-provoking columns will focus on how we all have to take responsibility for our actions and for our planet.

Global accountability

ONE thought often leads to another. (Just like one of those delicious little Sainsbury's flapjacks leads to two, I must be careful not to become a long-term flapjack addict.) I was moved by what The Times writer, Charles Clover had to say recently about litter and a “general decline in personal responsibility... a symptom of wider social decay,” and to improve the situation, “creating shared values through enlightened leadership.”

I was pushed further by images in a magazine revealing the alarming outcomes agribusiness in Paraguay is having on traditional communities. There’s a mother holding her baby girl with a deformed arm missing a hand due to exposure to all kinds of herbicides and agrochemicals. This country is allowing GM huge soya crops to inspire the economy and satisfy the world’s appetite for soy-fed cattle and biofuels.

I certainly don’t want to spend my wakeful hours filled with a sense of despondency and despair over the ruthless abuses humanity is imposing everywhere in the world, but for me, not addressing these issues or trying to avoid thinking about them is like trying to carry on playing Scrabble while the museum next door goes up in flames.

In every paper I read, every time I listen to the news and in each of the informative books I push my way through, there’s nearly always something shocking, disturbing and revealing about what has just happened or is in the process of crumbling that makes me feel unsettled and often infuriated: how can we carry on being so uninformed, indifferent, unaware? Or for those who do reach out to wider information, why is there so little action for change?

This is the response I received from Ed Miliband’s team regarding my concerns about education: “Labour has a better plan for our children’s future – to equip all children with the skills and knowledge they need to fulfil their potential and succeed in tomorrow’s economy.”

That’s it, ‘the economy’? One-dimensional thinking about as good as it gets! What IS the economy? What is it based on? Where is it heading? What gives it life in the first place? What about the economy of nature? And if climate change escalates to the point where we lose control over our cultural equilibrium, no bandage on Earth will protect the economy and the fiction so much of it represents.

I gritted my teeth over a petition emailed to me by Care2 Action Alerts. ‘Sign the petition for our demand for more affordable homes.” The good old reductionist approach in full sway. Ultimately, it’s not about more homes; concentrate on the big picture involving too many humans, dwindling resources, increasing toxins, pillaging the Earth to extract more fuel to keep it all going.

Education based on reality might well provide the remedy needed to cure our ‘sleeping sickness.’