John Seed and the Council of All Beings Part III
(Page 8 of 10)
May/June 1989
By Pat Stone
I often get the feeling that everyone's given updecided that it's simply too hard to change our lifestyles-so we've all made a suicide pact with each other. We have agreed that we're just going to go out in a few generations' time and said, "Let's not tell the children."
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Maybe I'm exaggerating; the earth may be far more resilient than we can imagine. Maybe someday we'll look back at the present time and say, "Wow, that was really close!" Then again, maybe the earth will no longer be capable of supporting complex beings such as mammals, but the grasses and insects will survive and continue to evolve. Or it may be that the destruction will pass a point of no return and the planet will decompose back to its constituent elements; if you strip a certain amount of bark off a tree, it doesn't become a barkless tree, it dies.
Now, I don't blame the humans for this. Everything dies. If we're the cancer cells killing the earth, so be it. You can't blame the disease-we're not unnatural, we're just another part of the planet. So this incredible guilt we sometimes feel is unwarranted and unuseful.
However, the earth could die in another two or three generations, or it could last until the sun goes nova about 4,000 million years from now. If I have a choice, I prefer its enduring the 4,000 million years.
And I know we could help it last that long-if the good will was there. If we could let go of the ideas-religious, national and other-that separate us and could develop an overriding concern to continue to evolve, we have the technology to create the most incredible life, one where human beings would be in harmony with everything.
MOTHER: What would such a lifestyle be like, and how could we achieve it?
Seed: For a start, it would involve a progressive decrease in population until further notice. We'd lower the birthrate, and since this would result in a lot fewer younger people, we could spend much more time looking after all the older ones.
We'd also confine all future development to areas already developed by humans. More than that, we'd start using the Bradley method to bring the wild places back. This is a technique of nature restoration developed by two sisters in Australia. You don't have to plant anything. Instead, you find your strongest point of natural growth and protect it. Remove all of the exotics and such threats as fire, goats and weeds.
So we'd slowly move back out from the most vigorous natural places, working toward a situation where 99% of the land would be turned back into wilderness. The whole world would be a national park spinning through space, and there'd be small enclaves of human beings whose satisfactions came not from materialism but from the love of nature and spirit. We have the technology, genetic engineering included, and the earth has so much generosity that we could create a beautiful, beautiful life.
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