by Christyl Rivers

Created on: September 23, 2011

If we value life on earth, and most of us do, it is up to us to learn to  conserve effectively. Good news, nature knows how to teach us that. Look deeply into nature, said Einstein, and you will understand everything better.

We have learned to be wasteful. It is estimated if we would just turn off the lights, walk more, power down and quit buying so much life burdening junk, we could actually create RICHER lives, not austerity, scarcity, and gloomy doom.

Pundits on both sides of energy issues often miss the point. Nature offers abundance.  Do we appreciate that, or take it for granted? Our need to belong to one another, and to the earth is often over looked. People crave and need connection, they crave and need to be appreciated. It is not sacrifice to protect something you need, but self preservation.

In times of near hysteria about global warming, there is no doubt that no matter what your personal views are,you want to have clean and abundant air, water, soil, and food. Your energy choices and consumption should always factor in two basic questions. Ask, do I really need this (often disposable) item that connects my life to all life on earth, and Is there a way to live and work that reflects that you are an organism dependent upon all other organisms?

Most animals and plants co evolved toward a balance that keeps an immense amount of bio diversity interacting within an environment.  What makes it sustainable, is that no one organism, or system, overtakes another.  What makes an environment unsustainable, is when one organism, (usually the human beings), take more resources from a location then can be reproduced, or, they add more concentration of waste.

Trash is something invented by human beings that threatens many eco-systems. Plastic waste patches, in the ocean, for example, swirl thousands of miles of floating plastic waste where naturally occurring organisms, marine life and birds, ingest it, or are choked out by it. Another example is over clearing of forests for arable farm land. When more is taken than can be replaced in a timely manner, erosion, run off waste water, lost vegetation, disappearing species, and drought, and fire, is often the result. Plants and animals in an area which depended on forest disappear.

Rapa Nui, or Easter Island, is a textbook example of unsustainable forestry. The people cleared more and more trees to construct the immense Maoi, or giant Iconic, statues of Heads that stare out to sea. Their population

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