Karen Eberhardt-Shelton: It’s not easy but we must speak up for a change

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.

What’s it to be – trashed or mended?

OUR combined choices of some of the electoral candidates may change a few things for the better, but overall, nothing of significance will alter.

Just wait and see. Dirty, wasteful, illogical, etc. enterprises happen here and there (incinerators, houses built on green fields), and so do good ones (though nothing springs to mind at the moment).

But as I write, a steady stream of new babies is popping out, traffic is zooming around everywhere, litter continues dropping, badgers are fighting for their right to life, school curriculum remains blasé about the future, a variety of bird species are heading north to escape effects on their environments caused by humans, liver disease is reaching out for the obese, and the whole of England’s internet system is panting in its frenzy to keep up with demand.

In his new book, Revolution, Russell Brand credits Joseph Campbell with saying that: “All the problems we’re experiencing – economic disparity, ecological meltdown, crime, alienation, atomisation, war, starvation – are the result of us having no communal myth.

“A story that unites us, defines us in relationships with ourselves, other people and nature.” Brand states that “systemic change on a global scale is what’s required. . .There is no logic in adhering to an unfair, destructive system. . .the only Revolution that can really change the world is the one in our own consciousness.” How do we convert that consciousness, bring about more rational approaches to local and distant issues? A radical reform in education.

Is it happening? The current system wouldn’t dare touch it.

Brand then goes on to share the outlook of someone named Brad Werner. “The capitalist system is so rapacious in its consumption of Earth’s resources, and the measures that have thus far been imposed so ineffectual, that the only hope we have of saving the planet is for action to come from outside the system.” Or some remedy infiltrates the system and brings about a cure. Waste, growth, expansion, excess, pollution, and severance from nature are so extreme, they’re undermining the ecological systems we depend on. entirely for our every breath, a clean pair of knickers, a dry night in bed, and our next slice of toast. Power and most politicians everywhere are like slugs devouring the green Earth. Fiddling about with NHS issues, free education, cheaper public transport, more local jobs, higher wages in attempts to achieve better results is all to the good, but it’s peanuts compared with the trickle-down effects resulting from what’s happening globally.

Every single councillor with a couple hours to spare should have felt obliged to watch the Jeremy Irons film Trashed on the eve of 7 May, and join in the questions and answers afterwards. (Quite a few of them didn’t even bother to respond to the invitation.) Every student old enough to think should have to see that film and realise their obligation to become a generation of intrepid planet saviours, or this awesome Earth will succumb to our desecrating and coarse behaviour.