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.

The election result OVER the past week, leafing through various papers (including this one) showing facts and figures on voting outcomes throughout the country almost convinceconvinced me there’s been a silent and invisible infiltration of mind-benders from outer space.

Or is there some form of nationalistic drug that guided an unanticipated number of voters toward the Conservative right; or maybe a logic-suppressing virus that compels voters to turn their backs on reality and reason and go for the competitor most adept at public speaking and making pledges aimed at mock prosperity and perpetual growth?

Focus primarily on the NHS; that’ll get you up the ladder. Sound clever, get your punctuation right, pat the heads of cheer leaders, cuddle up with the big wigs in the corporate stronghold, and by god, that’s how you get your box ticked.

How could Stroud lose to a Tory? Was it his big grin? Is there the scent of money in the air?

Will we be better off with an incinerator, an on-going culling of depressed badgers, a renewal of treating foxes like vermin who deserve to die for our pleasure?

Is it to do with the beguiling appeal of more growth, raping the groaning ecosystem, more housing estates, more jobs, more of us –-- and less of everything else?

As though all this exuberant appreciation for bigger, better and biased is going to produce impressive ongoing results future generations of both humans and animals will benefit from and be proud of?

Well, get back to me in 25 years and let me know how it all turns out.

I have daily conversations with various components of the natural world and every one of them expresses disbelief over how homo sapiens home sapiens, their not-so-distant relatives, are handling our mutually awesome earthly domain.

Bees, hedgehogs and badgers in particular are appalled by the scant mention of climate change, perpetual encroachment of their native habitats, death of their kin, increasing levels of pollution and all those stupid plans to keep clawing further innocent natural resources out of the earth’s skin.

We shake our heads and moan together –: what’s wrong with those idiots?

Why don’t they get their act together and realise they have a “duty of care” to divert more of their misdirected focus away from their well-being alone, their counterfeit concentration on ever-increasing exploitation of the fundamentals that provide for the well-being of the totality, to actually putting limits and boundaries in place –-- a kind of loud and clear statement from the law makers and rule enforcers that it would be much better to wholistically holistically endure than capitulate to greed and ignorance?

Voters indicate they don’t really care about this kind of stuff.

They seem content to carry on in that self-referencing human bubble of: “What’s best for me? Forget about them.”

Higher wages, lower school fees, cheaper transport, go kill the Arctic for oil... the usual ‘ol' reductionist thinking.

I’m off now to have a chat with that fox who knocked on my back door this morning. (He never would have voted Tory!) He wants to know if I have any hope, or whether we’re probably all doomed... . . .meanwhile, do I have a spare bone?