What does make the difference?*

You may have seen the video on YouTube of a speech given by a 12 year old girl at the Rio Conference in 1982. Severn Suzuki is now 28, and this is what she said recently:

“I had a little bit of an epiphany when I watched Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth and it wasn’t necessarily because of the content - I thought the movie was great.

But right at the end, when you’re all  fired up and you’re going to stand up and join the army to  fight climate change, these little suggestions come onto the screen when the credits are rolling and they’re so small.

So why are we doing all this? ("Towards a Circular Economy")*

People have been going on about ‘taking care of
 the planet’ since long before we’d heard of ‘global warming’: before climate change became something we paid attention to.

It has to do with circles and straight lines. In the Lion King they talk about the ‘circle of life’. For hundreds of thousands of years we lived our lives a little more ‘in tune’ with nature. When we built a fire there was enough woodland to ensure that there were always more trees by the time we needed more wood. There were plenty of trees and plants to be able to absorb the gases we produced when
we burnt them. When we caught fish to eat, we left enough ‘tiddlers’ to make sure there were plenty to eat next time. And when we threw stuff away, the eco-system, all the bugs and bacteria, and the plants, knew how to break it down so it became part of the earth again...

And then we got smart.