When it comes to the direction our lives in this society are going to take, future or past may be the question.
The past, with roots extending back to the Industrial Revolution, is represented by a paradigm (a model, approach or underlying assumption) in which man and technology subjugate nature. Natural resources are used up and mountains of waste disposed of without regard to consequences, while assembly-line principles of “efficiency” are applied to food production, human health, and life in its many forms.
The future involves a paradigm shift. The change in approach is one of sustainability in order to maintain the health of our planet and the health of the life on it. In other words, we have to break with the past in which we collectively created our current problems if we are to survive well into the future. This is true forward thinking, born of practical necessity.
The battle lines are drawn. On one side we have the “organically connected” future oriented, who are striving to change conditions and work in harmony with nature rather than against it. On the other side are the past-oriented organically disconnected. They seek to ignore or minimize evident problems and persist with the same unworkable theories that landed most of our food and the majority of the population on chemical “life support.” Their effort is not only to maintain the dominance of industrial methods and activities but also to counter or slow real efforts at sustainability.
Of course, this is a generality and things are rarely all black or white. But you can simply determine if the individuals or companies in question derive a major part of their income from the past or the future paradigm. In a very real sense, PR efforts at greenwashing notwithstanding, “You’re either with us or against us.”
What about the present? Consumers are increasingly turning to organic and natural products and natural healthcare practitioners, but the question is whether the “wellness market” will develop into more than a niche and become the consumer majority of tomorrow. We think so, but in order to get there it’s going to take an insistence on our parts not to slip or be pushed back into the past—plus a lot of education and communication so that more of our fellows organically connect the dots.
Publisher
loading...
loading...
