Is it just me, or is there really no hope for this world? This is a question that many of us have been asking ourselves more and more frequently over the past weeks and months, even years.
Today, more than ever, I’d lean towards ‘No, there is no hope’.
I watched a report about the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz on the news this morning and it got me thinking. Has anything really changed? Concentration camps still exist, whether in China where the Uighur are being ‘reprogrammed’ or in the USA where refugee children are treated worse than criminals, or many other places around the planet. And if we can’t even treat our fellow human beings decently, if we can’t accept other members of our own species as fellows, let alone love and cherish them, what hope is there for humans to love and cherish other species enough to want to save them if it’s not for our own profit? Little fluffy and cuddly animals are hard enough, so is there really any hope for fish, or insects, … certainly not plants. Who would even think twice before tarring over their drive, or digging up the wildlife habitat that’s their garden and replacing it with a lawn or a patio? Nothing wrong with that, right? And who in their right mind would contemplate stopping travelling or buying only locally grown food? I’m not even talking about promoting economic recession to stop climate change. But why shouldn’t I?
In this series of blog posts, I would like to explore a few of the issues that are so pressing to resolve in our world. I don’t promise any miracle solutions, though…