Care and the Environment: A Proposition for Further Personal Growth
We know that we are supposed to do what is good for the environment. We know that the time we live in requires a great change in what we consider to be normal lives. We have inherited living habits and basic expectations about what we should have in our lives from the grand developments of the last one or two hundred years.
These developments made our lives much easier and more comfortable (in some respects) but they also pulled from the Earth and pulled more than we could initially see. We now see that we have pulled more, and polluted more, than we should have and that our great systems need to innovate further if we are going to continue on in anything similar to the world we live in now.
In the meantime, we know that we have to change. Our systems may have to change, and in order for that to happen we need to change.
So far, there is not much new in what you are reading. However, there are many options in how we view this demand to change.
1) We can take the view, that many of us here today are taking, that we have to change in order to ’save the world’ (the world as we know it).
2) We can take the view that we need to change because it is our personal responsibility to not live beyond our means and since we are currently living far beyond our means we need to change.
3) We can take the view that this life of ours is more than a physical experience, more than a brief human lifetime, and this challenge is a challenge we are facing for the purpose of spiritual development. It is this option I am going to elaborate on.
