Single Use Seas

My thoughts on a plastic free world

[gazrhind]

Have you ever wondered why a tree is shaped the way it is?

Perhaps not.

Perhaps you have wondered why so many things in nature are shaped like a tree?

River basins, lightning, fan corrals, the burrows of social insects. Even the way mould spreads across a damp wall, ever reaching, ever dividing, branch like. Similar to how a great oak searches for the sunlight in a dense forest.

With internal structures perhaps offering the most obvious likenesses, the analogy is more than skin deep. Anatomy such as blood vessels and bronchioles, the central nervous system or the capillaries of a kidney, major truncations dividing again and again in to infinitesimally smaller and smaller branches. A pattern repeatedly shown in nature.

But I wonder if this shape is actually more profound than simply that which we can see in our three dimensional world.

The tree of life, the very thing that most embodies this phenomenon is a four dimensional tree.

Evolution tracks the division of speciation through time. Earths family tree began with a single acorn - LUCA, Our last universal common ancestor gave rise to the entire canopy of organisms that we see today. In other words, nature doesn’t just look like a tree, it’s literally branching off from one.

Our three dimensional limits mean that we cannot experience this tree directly, in fact we are only conscious of it from two dimensional book illustrations. Regardless of this, the likeness does not escape us.

It’s almost like the three dimensional trees that we see in nature, are just off-shoots from a much larger, mostly hidden higher dimensional tree.

Further intricacies emerge when we take this concept further.

Think about your development from embryo to adult. You started as one cell before dividing again and again to form the multicellular creature that you are today. This development plotted through a four dimensional chart would indeed look tree shaped.

Such revelations offer unique perspectives on things.

Can we begin to infer more about the universe based on a shape that we keep seeing? Are we in fact observing the form of the universe?

Does a tree represent a ripple in the multidimensional pond so to speak. An imprint in the mud, replications of a more fundamental master-cast at work. Could the tree of life in turn be an off-shoot of a fifth dimensional tree?

What happen to the macro, is also true of the micro.

Our lives are playing out through an ever increasing tree of choice. Every time you make the slightest decision, you opt to follow a new branch in your life. You don’t experience the branches unchosen, but that doesn’t mean they are not there.

When a leaf cutter ant embarks on a journey up a fig, they remain oblivious to the branches they choose not to follow. They simply follow one road that leads to the leaves at the top. The same ant could climb the same tree twenty times, and each time follow a different branch, but to the ant, there is only one route to the leaves. To us from our vantage point can clearly see multiple branches that exist simultaneously, a foresight simply not gifted to the ant.

This is a little like ourselves on our journey through life. We are not gifted with a higher dimensional vantage point, we cannot see our choices not taken, but if we could, our lives would not look linear, but tree shaped instead.

What I am describing is of course the multiverse. Alternative realities occupying and overlapping in the same plot of spacetime continuum.

In such a scenario, choice would indeed be an elusion as we make every choice all at the same time, we simply experience one.

It would mean that the future, as defined by every possibility that could exist, already does exist. Like the ant on the fig, we are simply navigating a predefined tree.

So coming back to my opening question.

Have you ever wondered why a tree is shaped like it is?

My emphatic answer is this, a tree is shaped like it is, because everything in this universe is tree shaped if you look at it from the right vantage point.

A tree is simply a three dimensional replication of the universe that spawned it. A footprint in the sand if you will.

You are too when viewed in four dimensions. Both your biological development and the life that you follow plot a tree shape with time.

And if three dimensional trees are simply off-shoots from four dimensional trees, it’s likely true for the fifth dimension and so on, constantly re-occurring like the Mandelbrot set.

Anyway, just a thought.

[health-sustainability]

There is no meaning to life other than that which we bring for ourselves

Life can sometimes feel meaningless, because for all intents and purposes - it is meaningless.

Depression is often borne out of the mentality that there should always be some form of tangible meaning to the things that life throws at us, but thats not how life works. 

The very act of looking for meaning, is by definition a meaningless pursuit - Which is exactly why we feel this way when this mentality becomes fixed.

In fact I’d go as far as saying that life doesn’t even matter. 

There have been trillions of lives spent on this planet, most of which were highly uneventful and by most accounts forgetful. 

But that is aside from those lives actually experiencing happiness (or at-least feeling content). 

Nothing really matters, the very notion is a human construct. A phycological mechanism that evolved to help us to better understand the ancestral environment to which our minds have adapted - its not a real thing in the material sense of the word. 

The human dimension is largely immaterial. It’s true that we interact with the physical world but we don’t experience it directly, we experience only a perception of it. A perception that is tainted by our ever changing beliefs, emotions and feelings. 

If I have a traumatic experience during an event, ill regurgitate that trauma when I remember it. This will then shape my desire to experience it again - I may even develop anxiety about future events and try to avoid them. 

The perception that is influencing my decision isn’t real, just like the event isn’t yet real. Our perceptions can infer things, indeed this is their very reason for being, but they are not necessarily right. On the contrary, the event could play out completely diffidently and I may be limiting my opportunities in life.   

In short, our world is one of our own making, influenced through countess experiences and constructed though the resulting decisions. 

In adopting this paradigm, we may loose a sense of tangibility but we gain a sense of control. 

If the lens from which we view our world, is our world, then changing the lens, changes our world. Its all about choice. 

If there is no given meaning to life, then we are free to appoint meaning to the things that matter to us.

A meaningful life is therefore one spent making choices inline with the things you deem to be important and not inline with the unconscious perceptions that can sow the seeds of a meaningless mindset.

The sense of happiness comes from the fact that you are living a life aligned to your real values not the values that life has instilled upon you.

Let me sum up;

When you follow your own values you extract your own meaning from an otherwise meaningless existence. 

When you follow only your unconscious knee-jerk reactions, you assume no control and are left completely at the mercy of the void. 

If you can’t see meaning in anything, its because you haven’t yet appointed any. You are simply dodging the shit life throws at you. 

Stop dodging shit, stop giving a shit - do what makes you happy. 

[health-sustainability]

How the ideology of Health-Sustainability works

When we follow principles that govern the simultaneous development of both our health and our sustainability, we adopt practices that more greatly benefit both areas of concern. 

This is because the relationship between the two is synergistic, each set of values serve to motivate to the other.

Our rational for becoming more sustainable harks from a deeply ethical standpoint, but suffers from its perceived altruism. It’s all too often derailed by more egocentric (emotional) needs.

Conversely our rational for becoming more healthy, fitter or athletic is typically very egocentric in nature, but it can lack deeper ethics. 

When we align these values they compliment one another. 

Our fitness goals can become the egocentric need to remain sustainable and being sustainable can offer the ethical rational required to support often wavering and superficial fitness goals. 

In short, It gives us a strong belief system that offers direct payoff in the form of and physical upgrades.

Whats more, a consistent devotion to meaningful causes has a knock on effect to our mental health and happiness.

We can find fulfilment for living a good life.

Health-sustainability however is about more than just lifestyle. As an ethic it works to expand one’s circle of concern to include the things that one should be concerned about. 

It then works to expand one’s circle of influence to mirror one’s concern. 

In short, it encourages a more responsible individual and by extension a more responsible society. 

At its most basic level however it is easy to adopt, fun and fulfilling. I’d encourage a step by step approach, and never to work to absolutes. 

A step in the right direction no matter how small is infinitely better than not trying at all. In fact, if everybody in the world took just one step, the prognosis of this planet would look much brighter indeed. 

[health-sustainability]

Introducing Health-Sustainability

Health-sustainability is a term that I have coined to describe the lifestyle choices that I have come to live by.

It is an ideology that combines the higher values of a physical fitness regime, dietary health, mental wellbeing and the overall health of the planet.

I consider it to be the guiding principles for happiness and wanted to share it with the world through this blog so that it might help others find happiness too.

I fully believe that not only can health-sustainability improve the lives of individuals, it can also help encourage a more responsible society because the two are inextricably linked. 

Your health and your children’s health is shackled to the environment in a multitude of ways. 

Make no mistake, being environmentally friendly does not simply mean being charitable to other living things, It means taking care of one’s own interests - it is as selfish as it comes!

This realisation is an important motivational factor. It’s what’s required to drive us to become more sustainable in our day-to-day living. Only by each individual doing more can we solve the problems that society faces -  and by association, that which each individual faces.

Health-sustainability is an ethic that centres itself on this realisation, but also rewards the individual by giving direct payoffs in the form of mental and physical upgrades. 

These payoffs further encourage the ethic because they give the individual direct and measurable benefit - something that is often hard to see with sustainable practices alone.

The hopeful outcome is a society made of healthier, happier people that possess the tools to make it through these next, very difficult generations.

Such an outcome should surely be on most people agenda. 

So if you’ve struggled with mental health, care about your wellbeing and the wellbeing of the planet, check out my blog for regular updates about how to achieve a life lived by these values.  

Most importantly, a life lived in happiness. 

Welcome to the new phenomenon called health-sustainability.

[gazrhind]

The disturbing inevitability of the human shimmer - Part 2

Please get yourself up to speed by reading part 1 first

There is an uncanny resemblance between VanderMeer’s shimmer and the advancements of human progress.

Think of how a cityscape expands it’s limits. Hectare after hectare of ‘pristine wilderness’ slowly becoming enveloped by a haze of dust and light. Few things that enter return unchanged. 

Our boundaries leave only that which we can control. Grand, majestic forests that once rivalled for our dominance left decimated in our wake. Only subordinate species may survive, tolerated for their adornment in parks, kerb sides and along the great arteries that feed our cancerous growth. 

Even rock, ancient in its makeup becomes fragmented, reconstituted and made a new. Great structures rise from its remains like fungus on a corpse, harrowing and subjugating the surrounding landscape.  

Animals that have existed for too long within the shimmer see their DNA refracted beyond recognition. Domestication is evolution through human selection. What it lacks in creativity, it makes up for in repugnance and cruelty.

The once proud and powerful ruminants of the grassland now stunted and zombified, unable or unwilling to break free of their meagre enclosures. Even the mighty wolf is reduced to an obedient wretch. 

Sentient creatures looking on would surely wince in horror at the grotesque mutations we call pets.

Are we the proverbial alien in Vandameers lighthouse? 

Does the southern reach trilogy provide for us a mirror, a way for us confront the horror that we inflict upon the world? A horror once again masked by the subversive ignorance we call ‘common sense’.

I’ve begun to wonder about the role of choice in all of this. Can we truly define our future or is time cast with weighted die.

Its considered a mathematical certainty that the universe will end when it reaches its thermal maximum. A state of equilibrium that will see the universe slowly torn apart, divided in to its smallest parts and spread evenly across the void.

Its now thought that ordered and complex systems like life may exist because they actually increase the net disorder of the universe. Systems of dissipation, better at capturing energy than inanimate things. 

The human shimmer may simply be a hungrier and more efficient system, better at absorbing the limited resources of this planet, favoured by the die over its ancestral forbear and therefore just in its parricide. 

From this point of view the many crimes of humanity would seem only to be the inevitable result of an indifferent universe playing out. Atrocities like climate change, plastic pollution and nuclear war being almost predetermined, fatalistic or even the way things are meant to be. 

A point of view that many would consider to be a convenient truth.

But if our actions are unavoidable, then so too is the sequence to which we are are only a part. 

We may yet have our chance to experience the horror that the southern reach trilogy instils upon its readers. A shimmer within a shimmer is once again due, but this time we may not have the insiders perspective - in fact it may not conform to our sense of reality at all. 

The signs of this shimmer may have already begun. There is a science even beyond that of phycology and its lighthouse moment might be the point at which it finds its autonomy.

Technology, is the birth of inorganic evolution, and its growth will be exponentially faster than ours.

The technological shimmer will not debate its actions or become conflicted by moral fibre. It will be driven by a motive far beyond our comprehension and deliver complexity to which our bodies would not hold.

Resources held by its forbear will be stripped, reconstituted and made a new. All at the bidding of a ever restless universe trying to find stillness. 

“It's not like us... it's unlike us. I don't know what it wants, or if it wants, but it'll grow until it encompasses everything. Our bodies and our minds will be fragmented into their smallest parts until not one part remains... Annihilation”

[gazrhind]

Homo Prudentior - The human coming

The recent news stories about English and Scottish football fans trashing London following the UEFA Euro 2020 cup final do not make for a good read. And I cant help worry that the behaviour highlights some disturbing character flaws that we as a species really need to get a handle on. 

Why is it that one relatively meaningless game should invoke more passion than the lasting environmental damage caused by its aftermath? 

The cup final showed that we commonly put social identity before all else, including ironically our future. ‘The world can go to hell as long as we win and if we don’t, we’ll take the world down with us.’ 

Tribalistic behaviour like this is evidently a survival mechanism, and its probably the reason we don’t share the world with other species of hominid. But just because a trait was effective in the ancestral environment, doesn't mean it’s effective today, on the contrary its likely to be leading us to our demise. 

Imagine if climate change invoked the same emotional response as a football. 

Try and visualise for a moment some pink faced, beer bellied skin head, tearing his shirt open to reveal a tattoo of the ice caps. It sounds ridiculous, but the fact that is sounds ridiculous points to our ineffective programming. 

We should care infinitely more about the ice caps than we do football because the icecaps melting represents a real threat to our survival. 

It’s interesting that scientists have chosen to use the football pitch as the unit of measure to describe the daily loss of the amazon rainforest. It’s like they felt they needed to put it in terms that the average person could understand. 

Incidentally, if you are Jair Bolsonaro (or a Brazilian who voted for him), a football cup final is apparently more important than the entire amazon basin. His political party has ensured through deforestation that the ‘lungs of the earth’ and one of our last great hopes for survival have become a net contributor to climate change. Not many people caught this piece of news because frustratingly it didn’t make the headlines. It came out during the euros and so was practically ignored. 

I’m surprised the report didn’t say something like; 

“We have reached the point of no return and we now have 30 years to live but threat not, Italy are European champions.”  

If we continue to act like our ancestral forbears, then we are screwed. But as far as the earth is concerned its just another day at the office. 

We are simply the next failed species destined for the fossil record. The planet has seen this millions of times before. A species rises to prominence through adaptation, them change nullifies the adaptation leaving it vulnerable. If anything it is the way of nature, other organisms will thrive in the gaping hole we will leave behind.

And what of climate change? The earth has warmed and cooled countless times in geological history, it matters not. We however will not be here to care. 

If any part of us survives, it will be though biological evolution. In other words our species will bottleneck through a few individuals that possess new adaptations. Adaptations that allow its inheritors to maintain the conditions to which it is adapted. In short, it would live in harmony with its environment. But this will not be us, it will be something else. 

Our evolutionary successor may still bear tribal instincts, but it would consider the entire earth as its tribe. It would defend its home with the same vigour as as some drunk england fan smashing a drinks table over an Italians head. 

We compliment ourselves with the name Homo Sapien, but sapien means wise!?! 

I’ve gone to the liberty of naming our successor - Homo Prudentior meaning wiser. 

But we need not yet surrender the earth. There is hope. 

We need only look past our primeval urges and adopt higher values. 

We have a one rather undervalued trait that has been the key to our success all along. Before us, adaption could only occur through biological evolution. We however possess the cognitive ability to adapt through intuition. In a cold environment, we wear clothes, if it gets hot, we take the clothes off. In short, we can choose the best course of action for the given change in circumstances. 

Other animals cant do this, they are stuck with what god gave them and that is that. Its the reason we have outcompeted everything on this planet. It has served us extremely well so far and can do so again. 

Instead of looking impulsively for identity through difference, we can instead choose to elevate our circle of concern to encompass globe matters. With a little knowledge and effort we can become just as passionate about the world as we are our favourite football team, and in doing so ensure our survival. 

Let me reflect on this one more time. It is in our power to evolve. It is in our power to survive. It is in our power to become our own successor. 

We can choose to be Homo Prudentior, the human coming. 

Not an easy task? It is when motivations are right. 

Imagine if you tallied up all the cost from just one football final. 

All the ticket sales, football shirts, food, accommodation, travel and beer. Its estimated that the 2016 euro cup final generated in the sum of 1.22 billion for the french economy alone, not withstanding the rest of Europe. 

Now imagine if these billions were instead put towards initiatives designed to reduce climate change. We could reverse our problems in just a few years. 

Furthermore, imagine turning every social post about the same football game in to a post about environmental awareness. Every, racists chant. Every ‘come on England’ every selfy at the stadium becomes a highly informative article about our impending doom. 

Now we don’t just have the means to fix our problems, we might actually care enough to do it. 

This is all from just one football game, scale up as large as you like. 

The point is that we can do it, we just need to redirect our tribalistic passions back towards matters of real survival. This may take some conscious effort but I don’t see that we have a choice. 

We cannot trust ourselves to simply be anymore, we must consciously become. Human beings are destroying this planet, its salvation lies with the human coming. 

For this reason I am not Welsh and I choose not to be English, I don’t identify as British and I refuse to be called a homo sapen. 

I am Nature, and this planet it is the only team I am willing to support.

[gazrhind]

The disturbing inevitability of the human shimmer - Part 1

One of my favourite book titles is the Southern Reach Trilogy written by Jeff VanderMeer and popularised by the 2018 film Annihilation.

As a fiction reader I’m hard to please, but VanderMeer managed to find just the right mix of horror and intrigue to keep me reading and I haven’t stopped thinking about it since.

For those that haven’t read the book, it describes what appears to be an alien ‘cancerous growth’ termed the ‘shimmer’ that is slowly spreading across ‘pristine wilderness’ incorporating everything it consumes. Many have ventured in to the shimmer but few have made it out and strange, horrifying things occur to those that experience it.

The southern reach is a secret government facility stationed at its boarder tasked with understanding its origin as well as how to slow its advancement. They know very little about it, other than that it started with a mysterious event at a costal lighthouse and that it will soon incorporate nearby towns and cities.

The story follows the protagonist and her team as they venture inside the shimmer with the view of reaching the lighthouse. Many horrendous things happen to them as they venture onward.

VanderMeer once stated that the storyline was conceived from a nightmare he recalled. For me this goes a long way to explaining how he manages to instil that sense of irrational fear one experiences when the conscious mind is disconnected.

Nightmare aside however, the more I think about the Southern Reach Trilogy, the more it speaks to reality. I’m not sure if the book was ever meant to parallel the modern world, but if it was, it represents a masterpiece with a much more profound message at its core.

At one point, the film offers an explanation for the creepy happenings;

Josie Radek: At first I thought the radio waves were blocked by the shimmer and that's why no one inside could communicate with base or GPS but the light waves aren't blocked, they're refracted and...

Josie Radek: [takes her walkie talkie out of her bag and turns it on] It's the same with the radios. Signals aren't gone, they're scrambled. That leaf in your hand, do you know what you'd get if you sequenced it?

Lena: What?

Josie Radek: Human Hox genes.

Anya Thorensen: Hox? What does "Hox" mean?

Lena: They're the genes that define the body plan, the physical structure.

Josie Radek: And the plants have human body plan. Arms attached to shoulders, legs to hips.

Lena: It's literally not possible.

Josie Radek: It's literally what's happening. The Shimmer is a prism, but it refracts everything. Not just light and radio waves... animal DNA, plant DNA, all DNA.

Anya Thorensen: What you mean "all DNA"?

Dr Ventress: She's talking about our DNA. She's talking about us.

Josie Radek is suggesting that the shimmer is somehow scrambling the natural order of things. In a similar way to how a prism splits light in to its constituent wavelengths (colours), the shimmer is capable of refracting all things, including the molecular blueprints for life itself - DNA.

The horror comes from the feeling that one is loosing a sense of reality, but ironically, one must loose their sense of reality to find true reality.

Common sense has never been a useful tool for interpreting the universe. It has evolved from mechanisms designed to help us interpret our local surroundings and not the bigger picture. A gold fish may grow to understand the fish bowl to which they live, but this knowledge will never help them understand the room where fishbowl sits.

In many respects, common sense offers us a comfort zone, an augmented reality that shields us from the abstractions of truth and truth bears greater horror than fiction.

Let me speak a little about the ‘natural order of things’.

The word ‘order’ describes the arrangement of our universe and is characterised by fundamental laws that ‘uphold’ its integrity. This integrity however seems to be relatively unstable as there is a gradient towards disorder, a phenomenon described by the law of entropy.

The rise of entropy is signified by a rise in complexity as disordered structures are more complex than ordered ones (think of a broken cup verses a complete one).

Our sciences are the study of distinct grades in complexity and we use the word ‘evolution’ to describe the change.

Mathematics is our observation of fundamental law in its most basic form.

Physics represent the study of the first step in complexity - the emergence of a physical universe.

As physical structures condense in to energy and matter we get chemistry.

Chemistry has itself evolved from simple hydrogen atoms to complexity hydrocarbons.

Organic chemistry eventually pathed the way for biological evolution (Darwinism) to take hold.

At the pinnacle of biological evolution, you get phycological evolution (behavioural sciences).

Intelligent life currently sits at the apex of universal evolution (as far as we can tell)

The defining limits of our sciences however are more than just categorical. They highlight points in time where evolution found a way to reach new heights.

Every now and then, conditions will emerge that act like ‘entropic prisms’ that effectively refract the laws of nature in to new possibilities. This causes localised bursts in complexity that we observe as variation in the universe.

If biology is a refraction of the chemical laws, then the conditions on earth are synonymous with this prism concept.

To put it in VanderMeers language - life is a shimmer.

To an outside observer, the earth would seem as wondrous and at times as nightmarish as VanderMeer’s shimmer, a point lost to us because it is consistent with our common senses. In other words its not happening to us, its happening with us and therefore it doesn’t evoke fear.

Coincidently it is thought that colour is the planetary signature of life because it refracts light. Plants through photosynthesis, omit only the green part of the spectrum. Our blue sky is a product of the same process. Oxygen produced by plants refract photons in the atmosphere to create the blue Hume to which we are so familiar.

Our world is variable, highly complex and is stuck in evolutive overdrive, a stark contrast to the homogeny and relative regularity of deep space.

It begs one question however; What of the next entropic prism?

Is intelligence a refraction of biological law?

Are we the next shimmer?

To be continued.....

[gazrhind]

The lighthouse for lost souls sits upon the rock of sustainability

I have become an avid believer that the key to one’s happiness lies with the core values we so often suppress.

Diseases such as depression, anxiety and chronic sadness, all seem to stem from the ‘synthetic’ lifestyle that we put on ourselves, a lifestyle that lacks meaning.

Many of us struggle to see a clearly defined purpose and instead spend our time chasing relatively superficial goals.

The modern era has deviated far from our ancestral beginnings, which could explain why the path to a peaceful existence is so obscure. How can one be happy, when one doesn't really know what happiness is?

We instead live our lives like ‘hedonic junkies’, looking to fill the void with short term fixes and temporary ‘feel-goods’.

Cars, clothes, Netflix and social media might get us through life, but I worry they may also prevent us from confronting our demons.

We need our pain, it serves as an emotional lighthouse guiding us away from the reef of mental catastrophe. We ignore it at our peril.

When we do align to the things that give us meaning, we find that quick fixes are no longer necessary. In fact, they become seen as a what they are, a distraction. life itself becomes the drug.

A drug that fulfils both the intellectual and the hedonistic cravings that the sprit seems to so profoundly need. One can find peace sitting in a quiet empty room because there is no goal to be chased. The goal is being lived.

The principles of a sustainable life helped me re-engage with my core values and as a consequence I found meaning.

It helped me see things in context. The cycle of living to work felt meaningless to me because in relation to climate change, it is!

Cars, money, TV and Facebook have no value in the vacuum of space. What’s the point of pushing on with fruitless pursuits when we face an existential crisis within the next few decades.

It’s akin to straightening deckchairs on the proverbial titanic.

Saving the planet offers meaning, because by definition there is no greater meaning.

We are unhappy, because we ignore the conscience telling us that our world should come first.

Sustainability therefore doesn't just secure our future, it secures our happiness. It allows us to align to that which matters and for that, both the inner world and the natural world benefit.

Many worry about what difference one person can make, but this misses the point. Worry instead about what difference you can make to yourself and by doing so, the planet will take care of itself.

[gazrhind]

Finding harmony with the planet, is indistinguishable from finding harmony with one’s self

Have you ever noticed that sustainable practices often overlap with a healthy lifestyle? I’ve come to realise that being ‘green’ has far wider implications than just the environment.

When you reduce single-use packaging, you are forced instead to buy fresh vegetables and wholesome foods. Fatty, salty or nutrient poor foods are typically excluded.

When you decide to drive less, you inadvertently choose to walk or cycle more. Our carbon footprint is never lower that when we are doing the most basal forms of exercise.

This interesting duality also seems to work in the other direction. I was tempted by the health benefits of veganism for years, but I only really committed when I learned about the environmental impact of the meat industry. In the end my excuses were simply broadsided by two highly consequential endpoints stemming from the same damn life choice.

But it’s about more than just physical health. In a previous post entitled, ‘Hurting the planet becomes an act of self harm for those with sustainable values’ I highlighted that the path to sustainable living helps one find greater meaning in life. The mental health connections are perhaps the most poignant of all.

You may find that you have to avoid the ‘convenient’, but in doing so you rediscover simple pleasures in life. I find there are few endeavours more rewarding than the art and therapy of cooking, it reminds me that the pursuit of happiness was never about convenience. Life is about richness, the more you put in, the more you get out. But I digress.

It appears that which pollutes the natural world also pollutes the inner world and I’ve begun to wonder why. What if they represent two halves of the same message? A message that only makes sense when read as a whole.

Charles Darwin coined the term ‘survival of the fittest’, which means only those adapted to their environment will pass their genetics to the next generation. It stands to reason that the ‘fittest’ are not only the healthiest, but also those that live in balance with the environment. An environment that their progeny will inherit.

The connection may simply point to our ‘natural being’ or a lifestyle that sits closer to the way we have evolved.

Modern society is a departure from our ancestral environment which explains why this lifestyle has become obscure, but the answer to modern problems could be to reconnect with the past.

The health of our bodies, our minds and the planet seem to suffer with every step of human progress. Is this not a dire warning? An obvious sign that we are ploughing on in the wrong direction.

Perhaps its time for a shift in thinking. Perhaps for a healthier, ‘fitter’ future we should embrace new ideals. Ideals that use natural indicators to formulate better trajectories.

When we combine the values of health and sustainability we find a way of life that promotes balance, harmony and wellbeing on a multidimensional front.

Personal wellbeing is often plagued with unrealistic or misguided goals. Likewise, being environmentally friendly can lack the ‘what’s in it for me’ factor.

Where there is overlap, there is complementation.

A healthy lifestyle could be guided by deeply held values pertaining to planetary health. Likewise, behaviours that save the planet becomes deeply rewarding when it maintains physical and mental health.

The two offer a synergy, where the sum of the whole is much greater than the sum of the constituent parts.

Why have separate values that divide your time, motivation and headspace. Look instead for a single, manageable focus that benefits from combined motivational forces.

Consider the new ideals of ‘Health-sustainability’.

Stay tuned for more on this in coming posts.

[gazrhind]

The sense of security we feel on Earth is an illusion

Interstellar is one of my favourite films and there is one quote that always reminds me of the fragility of the earth.

“This gets to me Cooper, this, this. Millimetres of aluminium then nothing.....Out there for a million miles, wont kill us in seconds.”

The character Rom is referring to the fact that he struggles with the thinness of the spaceships hull and the apparent lack of protection between himself and the infinity of space.

Rom is right to feel vulnerable, but my point is that the thing that he actually craves is an illusion.

The sense of security we feel on earth is to a large degree false.

We have evolved to think of the earth as our universe. We tend to lack either the comprehension or the will to understand that existence is about so much more.

Even now, most of still us think Earth is pretty much ‘all there is to know’. Outer space is just the thing that exists ‘out there somewhere’ it doesn't have much to do with society and therefore it isn’t worth overthinking. We are safe here on earth so that’s the end of it!

But our sense of security, breeds a dangerous level of complacency.

Earth is not the universe, its just a spec of dust so small that is hardly even registers on a cosmological scale. The atmosphere on this spec is so thin that if the earth was an egg the shell would be thicker.

Our barrier to outer space is so fragile that it might as well be a few millimetres of aluminium.

The Earth is our spaceship, and nature our life support.

Rom’s venerability is how we should all feel when we think of climate change.

We are damaging the hull of our ship and if it breaks, there will be no society, not place to call home, no existence for us, just the coldness of empty space.

[gazrhind]

Welcome to evolution through human selection

So successful has our species become that we now compete with natural selection as the dominant force shaping nature.

We are in the age of human selection.

Human selection is terminology that I have coined to mean ‘societal choice’. We have the power to destroy this world, and we have the power to live in harmony with it. The choice is ours.

The question with Sapiens however, has always been motivation.

We tend not operate like the creator we were once subservient to. We do not contest natural beings through a survival of the fittest. We do not seek to create balanced eco-systems through generational trial and improvement. We are more insular that that.

We prefer to contest information, skills and resources that appear to forward human progress (to at least as far as the end of our noses) The ‘meme’ has replaced the gene as the most basal unit of selection.

In this new humanised eco-system, plastic has become a highly successful entity. We have selected its advantageous traits. It’s more durable and thus has ‘outcompeted’ wood, glass and metal for our choices. It is so successful that it has practically become the prodigal son.

Plastic has surpassed even that of its creators conquests. It has been found safe and well on the top of Mount Everest and at the bottom of the challenger deep.

In its genesis however we created a monster that not even we can kill.

Once its brought in to existence it’s free to live a long life upon this earth to do whatever damage it sees fit. Like nature before us, we have no control over our progeny.

By continuing to manufacture plastic, we are inadvertently choosing to replace the wildlife of this world with the synthetic. Plastic production is set to increase exponentially, which can only negatively impact biodiversity.

Instead of trying to manage plastic waste, we need to do the only thing that will actually work. We need to stop demanding it. To select nature, our planet and by extension humanity, we must ‘de-select’ plastic from our lives.

Human selection starts with the individual. We are all capable of making zero-plastic choices, its just a question of motivation.

How motivated do you feel about living in a world where a plastic bottle can outcompete an egret in its natural habitat?

Exercise your power to change the world - choose nature.

[gazrhind]

Paradise is right here right now

We have identified over 4000 exoplanets within our galaxy, but as far as we can tell none are as supportive of life as the one we are currently sitting on. Even if we found a strong candidate, it would seem so foreign to us that we would never likely consider living there. The pain for what we’d leaving behind would be too great.

Earth doesn’t just support life, its overflowing with it. Our world is alive with almost impossible diversity and we take for granted the beauty this bestows upon us.

People spend their entire lives dreaming of a place they call paradise. A place they think they will only see once they die. What a twisted paradigm this is.

Paradise is not some far-off tropical archipelago visited only by the rich. It’s not some prophesied Nirvana accessible only at the end of a life devoted to some out-of-date scripture.

Paradise is right here right now and it’s better than anything we are capable of imagining. We are all born in to heaven, we need only lift our gaze for long enough to see it.

For those that do however soon have their euphoria tempered by the realisation that we are destroying it. It’s like dying just to find you must spend the afterlife sitting under a toilet.

It’s time to wake up and treat this world with all the respect and wonder of a biblical psalm. If we don’t, many of us will have our enlightenment to a paradise lost.

[gazrhind]

Responsibility and the paralysis of blame

Often when I post pictures of plastic strewn across beaches I get comments to the tune of;

“They should do something” or “it shouldn’t be allowed”, “it needs to be controlled”, “they can’t get away with this” and “someone should be made accountable”.

These comments are all well intentioned but I’ve began to realise if there is a concerning undercurrent to some of its tone. There are a lot of words like ‘they’ and ‘it’ and ‘somebody’, and not enough ‘I’ or ‘we’ or ‘everybody’.

To appoint responsibility to someone or something else, is really an attempt to self absolve and could point to a more accurate diagnosis to the problem.

“It’s not my fault I buy plastic, they should stop selling it”

“They need to provide more plastic alternatives”

“They need to regulate or its a waste of time”

Who are these mystical ‘they’ anyway. The very word conjures up images of masked hero’s rushing in to save us in our darkest hour. Even the people appointing blame don’t really know who they are, they don’t really care, they just mean somebody else.

It seems we have plenty of ‘somebodies’ willing to take the moral high ground, but nobody can find the ‘somebodies’ responsible for taking action. It appears the former may blame the latter until the day the cliff collapses.

Why do we struggle to realise that we are all responsible. Those that are fit to climb the moral high ground, are fit to roll their sleeves up. But perhaps more pertinently, we can’t actually solve our problems until we all act.

‘They’ can’t and won’t do anything, ‘we’ however can do anything we collectively choose.

Plastic packaging proliferates because of supply and demand. In other words supermarkets supply it, because we keep buying it. All we need do is reverse this cycle. The more we choose sustainable packaging, the more the supermarket will adapt to our demands. After-all they want to cater to our needs.

We have become plastic addicts. We may blame the plastic pushers for our addition, but handing them responsibility fro our wellbeing will only result in a deeper addiction. Like all addicts, the path to becoming clean starts by taking ownership of ones own health.

As hard as this may seem in the beginning, it can only get easier.

[gazrhind]

Hurting the planet becomes an act of self harm for those with sustainable values

Many people are hesitant to adopt sustainable living practices because of the belief that it could radically change to their current life choices.

Although this statement is often true, it slightly misses the point about sustainability. It needn’t be radical, but for those that get in to it, the drive for serious change comes from within.

It’s not about cutting the things that you need, its about cutting the excess. The hesitancy comes from a miss alignment of the two.

In a world that spoon feeds us convenience, we begin to place importance on the superficial, the time saving and the ‘easy’. But convenience is often the enemy of responsibility and can drive self-centricity.

“I buy plastic wrapped convenience food because I’m too busy to cook”

“I like single use water bottles because I don’t want to carry a reusable one”.

“A 4X4 is important for my self image”

Such superficial ‘need’ becomes so habitualised that change feels as radical as joining Greenpeace.

Until I began my own journey, I used to be like this. With my learning, I discovered that change isn’t as hard as it initially looks, on the contrary, it’s positively addictive.

Rome doesn't have to be built in a day so I learned to take small manageable steps.

With every step, I learn new things about myself. As I looked back, the excesses I left behind began to lose meaning. As I looked forward, I could see new things to care about, things of substance that bring real purpose and happiness. My very perception of need changed as I grew and eventually began to pull me forward.

Choices become less governed by ‘hedonism’ and more by balance and reason.

“Do I have time to cook or do I have time to sacrifice from my children’s future?”

“Do I need my water to come in plastic bottles, or do I need my water to be free from plastic particles?”

“Do I need others to perceive me as a successful person, or would I rather perceive myself as successfully changing humanity?”

In the left hand you hold the void of hedonistic goals that amount to nothing of real consequence.

In the right you hold the planet, nature, life and humanity, but perhaps most pertinently a meaningful existence for yourself - its really no contest.

Eventually you begin to realise that it was never really about the environment, it was always about you. Sustainability gives you far greater peace than a superficial life ever could. The environment is just a happy benefactor.

Pollution of the natural world becomes a pollution of the inner world, a betrayal of one’s values, self esteem and moral compass. When you align your wellbeing to the wellbeing of the planet, you become its protector by choice and a return to a wasteful life is not only meaningless, its an act of self harm.

[gazrhind]

The consumer has the power to change the world

One thing I have learned on my journey to becoming plastic free is that you don’t have to be an activist or a political campaigner to make a difference. On the contrary, we are actually far more powerful as individual consumers.

The choices we each make on a daily basis send ripples through society in ways that we simply don’t appreciate, and seldom use.

Those that attack their shopping basket are infinitely more influential than those that attack their supermarket for the simple reason that demand is the lifeblood of supply. Supermarkets can weather public opinion so long as sales are good.

So powerful are your choices, that one weekly shop no matter how mundane it may seem, has greater effect on society than a day spent beach cleaning.

Why? Because demand works to prevent pollution. Beach cleaning as honourable as it is, amounts to pollution management at best.

By leaving that plastic bottle on the shelf, you have done your bit to slow demand and a slower demand means less plastic is brought in to this world. If a plastic bottle doesn't get made, it doesn't need to be reused or recycled. It’s very absence IS the solution.

This ‘choice’ is relatively easy to make when compared to the hard frustrating work chosen by beach cleaners. Their payoffs are no where near as great. It’s a sad fact that the vast majority of marine plastic will never be collected. Of that which is, most will lack the quality to be recycled and will end up in landfill.

It’s a deeply dissatisfying truth that once plastic is brought in to the world, it will do its damage.

We congratulate the beach cleaner for trying to manage the crisis, even if their effect is minimal. So its high time we start congratulating our selves for actually preventing the plastic from getting to the beach.

Become an activist today - leave the bottle on the shelf.