I am proud of many of our accomplishments as human beings
We are smart….at least, we are clever. And if we are clever, then we should always remember that we cannot tame nature. And if we abuse it, and manipulate it, and modify it, so as to fit our liking, for our pleasures, or even our needs, then we must realize that it could violently, or deceptively slowly, transition into something we did not expect, and hurt us, individually, or as a society.

Nature is not our friend. It is our home. And a living, breathing thing. And it will bite back.

Respect your Home. Your electricity comes from somewhere and has a cost. Use it mindfully. Your gasoline comes from somewhere and burning it has a cost. Use it mindfully. Your food comes from somewhere, and it has a cost, especially the animals, because their lives have been sacrificed. Choose your diet while respecting them and their environment.

How would you rate your lifestyle on its respect of your Home? On a scale of 1-10. Ten being perfect, an exact equilibrium of give and take between you and the environment.

You know that a 10 rating for humanity is probably impossible. And probably impossible for you, too.

But shrugging off responsibility as caretaker of our Home, because we can’t achieve a perfect relationship is careless. And in the end, it will leave us alone, like a single person who wants the perfect partner, and so he dies malnourished and alone. Just as we will if we don’t face the consequence of our relationship with our Home.

Disrespecting our relationship occurs when we do not strictly recycle our plastics and by overfishing our oceans, which throws our water ecosystem, and therefore the world’s ecosystem out of equilibrium.

We ignore our relationship with our Home by eating animals raised in factories with giant cesspools, whose heavy antibiotic regiments leak into our environment and create drug-resistant super bacteria, and whose fertilizers run off and cause algal blooms to neutralize life around our river and ocean coastlines.

Our technology can help us. It may give us meat raised in labs, and a solar powergrid powering our homes and vertical urban farms that don’t need food raised on factory farms, trucked across the country on highways filled with a steady stream of greenhouse gas-producing tractor trailers.

Can we cut back our consumption and make mindful choices in our diet while we improve our technology to replace our current inefficiencies? I think we can. Because, really, we have no choice, in order to maintain life as we know it in our Home, for our children, and for their children.