A deafening silence on the blog about questions and sharing of sustainability actions from you, the readers. I did get a comment from my best friend who responded to my recommendation to watch ‘Finding Harmony – The King’s Vision’: “I watched the video, Finding Harmony. I thought it was well done and on point. It seems like it should be so easy to move in that direction. I want to live in a space like that, the rest of the world be damned. If they want dis-ease, imbalance and disharmony, well that’s a choice. But I’m not living there” LDC. That’s it. Simply and plainly stated; living sustainably and in harmony with the natural world and each other is a simple choice. You can continue with the conditioning of six millennia, or you can make a choice to live sustainably and with ‘inner harmony’ regardless of the chaos around you.
Stop trying to change the world and change yourself as best you can. The change is imminent. Stop waiting for permission, or worse, for ‘them’ – whomever they are in your life – to make the decisions for you. Don’t concern yourself about ‘their’ judgments and insults: “The lowly changemakers did not know it was impossible, but they did it anyway” RRJ. Many other quotes have the same flavor. You change people by living as best as you can within yourself and where you are. No fanfares, no medals or best seller books. Just a quiet yet dynamic influence on people around you. Some may scoff, forget about them. There are untold numbers watching you and realizing deep within their psyches, you live the way they want to live.
“Be someone that spreads joy… It’s OK to forgive people, and still deny them access to you” R.H. Sin. “Only if you are possible, everything will be possible” Santosh Kalwar.
From an astronaut’s observations: “After spending 178 days aboard the International Space Station, astronaut Ron Garan returned to Earth carrying something far heavier than space equipment or mission data. He returned with a transformed understanding of humanity itself.
From orbit, Earth doesn’t look like a collection of countries, borders, or competing interests. It appears as a single, radiant blue sphere suspended in darkness. No lines divide continents. No flags mark territory. From 250 miles above the surface, every human conflict suddenly looks small — and every human connection looks unavoidable.
Garan described watching lightning storms crackle across entire continents, auroras ripple like living curtains over the poles, and city lights glow softly against the planet’s night side. What struck him most wasn’t Earth’s power — it was its fragility. The atmosphere protecting all life appeared as a paper-thin blue halo, barely visible, yet responsible for everything that breathes, grows, and survives. That view triggered what astronauts call the “overview effect” — a profound cognitive shift reported by many who see Earth from space. It’s the sudden realization that humanity shares a single, closed system. No backups. No escape route. No second home.
Garan began questioning humanity’s priorities. On Earth, economic growth is often treated as the ultimate goal. From space, that hierarchy collapses. He argues that the correct order should be planet first, society second, economy last — because without a healthy planet, neither society nor economy can exist.
He often compares Earth to a spacecraft. A ship carrying billions of crew members, all dependent on the same life-support systems. And yet, many behave as passengers rather than caretakers, assuming someone else is responsible for keeping things running.
From orbit, pollution has no nationality. Climate systems ignore borders. Environmental damage in one region ripples across the entire globe. The divisions we defend so fiercely on the ground simply don’t exist from above. Garan’s message isn’t abstract or idealistic. It’s practical. If humanity continues to treat Earth as an unlimited resource rather than a shared system, the consequences will be universal. Seeing Earth from space didn’t make him feel small. It made him feel accountable.
Because when you truly understand that we’re all riding the same fragile spacecraft through the universe, the idea of “us versus them” quietly disappears — replaced by a single, unavoidable truth: There is only us” From TechVerse FB Page.
One of my favorite Environmental Philosopher’s, Aldo Leopold: “One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen. An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise.
The government tells us we need flood control and comes to straighten the creek in our pasture. The engineer on the job tells us the creek is now able to carry off more flood water, but in the process, we lost our old willows where the cows switched flies in the noon shade, and where the owl hooted on a winter night. We lost the little marshy spot where our fringed gentians bloomed.
Some engineers are beginning to have a feeling in their bones that the meanderings of a creek not only improve the landscape but are a necessary part of the hydrologic functioning. The ecologist sees clearly that for similar reasons we can get along with less channel improvement on Round River.”
“Whether we and our politicians know it or not, Nature is party to all our deals and decisions, and she has more votes, a longer memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do… We must understand that each and every one of us is a cog or a wheel in the ecosystem of Leopold’s parlance, and that like it or not, you need me, and I need you; every gorgeous, goddamn one of you, to continue to engender the ethics of agrarianism throughout the world, to save our food systems, our farmers, our civilizations, and ultimately ourselves. It’s the biggest no-brainer in the history of mankind” Nick Offerman, Where the Deer and the Antelope Play: The Pastoral Observations of One Ignorant American Who Loves to Walk Outside.
“It’s wild to me how often we act like policy happens in a vacuum. Like we can destroy wetlands, poison soil, warm oceans, cut forests, subsidize extraction, and then sit around a polished table pretending the only stakeholders are donors and voters.
But the air keeps receipts. The soil keeps receipts. The water keeps receipts. We negotiate trade deals like rivers don’t flood. We write zoning laws and remove protections like ecosystems won’t collapse. We argue about short term profits like drought doesn’t remember. Nature doesn’t care about party lines. She cares about balance. And every decision we make, what we spray, what we protect, what we subsidize, what we ignore, gets tallied in real time.
You can’t filibuster a wildfire. You can’t spin doctor a failing crop. You can’t “both sides” a collapsing fishery. This isn’t crunchy. It’s practical. Healthy soil grows food. Clean water keeps kids out of hospitals. Stable climates make economies possible.
We are not outside the system. We are inside it. Completely dependent on it. Nature is in the room whether we invite her or not.
And she always gets the last word” Paul Avellino.
For most of his life, comedian and social critic, George Carlin, had lots to say about the greed and hubris of modern living: “The core of his philosophy was rooted in the idea that if you are a person of even moderate intelligence, you are eventually going to run into a wall of frustration. He saw a massive disconnect between what society claims to value and how it actually functions on a day-to-day basis. While the world around us is filled with high-tech gadgets and an endless supply of niche consumer goods, the most basic human needs of the people standing right next to us often go completely ignored. He left us with a massive collection of warnings wrapped in punchlines, basically telling us that the ship was sinking but the view from the deck was spectacular. He didn’t want to change the world; he just wanted to make sure we knew exactly why it was breaking… Everyone is offended by something but nobody is responsible for anything” George Carlin.
“What is needed is a profound shift in the way we regard the earth, not as a resource to be exploited but as a living, breathing partner in our journey” Terence McKenna.
“People are so brainwashed into the Left/Right nonsense that when someone speaks truth that doesn’t align lockstep with their ‘Side,’ they assume that the person is on the opposite ‘Side.’ This is the level of consciousness we are dealing with” Matthew Loop. The hierarchical powers-that-be have us so busy fighting over our perceived beliefs, which ‘they’ imposed upon us, that we have stopping thinking rationally about things that matter. Since 2022, AI dominated stocks have given us the mirage of massive economic growth despite what we experience daily (more about this next week). And that is the tip of the iceberg of a recently arrived and soon to be an AI dominated world where our humanity is stripped away from us.
If I sound irritated, I am. I have been talking about sustainability this for more than 35 years. Yet, all I still see is collective humanity accepting and complying with changes they were never asked about, and like a mass of Lemmings, running for the technical and soulless abyss. In a true sustainable world, the new human will be a Universal Human, a human with an allegiance to life in all its forms. Is anyone actually listening to voices of caution and the need for transformation thinking? Am I talking into the void; just blowing in the wind? I certainly feel that way.
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