What worries me is this: we won't starve to death, rationing out the last meagre crumbs, we will kill each other fighting over them.
Waste and War are careless lovers, exquisitely dressed, well fed, happily watching the fireworks as the bonfire fades to embers.
©2005 Mark Shepherd
this first appeared on www.mundopax.org.uk August 2002
According to figures published by the World Wildlife Fund, we have destroyed a third of the natural world in the last 30 years. In five decades it will all be gone. Within the next fifty years, carrying on as we are, we would need to colonise two earth-sized planets in order to survive.
A few days before writing this, while sitting in traffic, I looked in the mirror and saw a car full of people in their late teens and early twenties, eating chips from the wrapper.
Stopped at the next lights, I saw them wind down the windows and drop the wrappers onto the road, in the middle of the city, as though it was the most natural thing to do. Of course, sitting in a car, throwing diesel fumes into the air, I was in no position to criticise - what upset me was that people only recently come from an education system which makes more and more effort to emphasise the responsibility we have for our own surroundings, our environment, seemed uncaring or oblivious to the effect they were having.
Let he/she who is not guilty cast the first stone. Better still, let he/she who is not guilty make no effort to put things right. The rest of us on the other hand.......
In my minds eye, I, the hero galloping to the rescue of the planet, got out of my car, ignoring the stares and the car horns blaring, walked back to the car behind, and fixing them all with my steely gaze, picked up the wrappers, and stuffed them back through the open windows of the car - the occupants unable to meet my eye, looking down shamefacedly at the floor.
Back in the real world, I drove off - that sort of idiocy is probably best left for other idiots. But using the bike two or three times a week, picking up litter in the park and dropping it in a nearby bin, taking that extra few seconds to separate the recyclables at home - these are pretty easy, and don't involve confrontation and stupidity in heavy traffic! Imagine the difference if 6 billion people did a little bit of the same every day, and let's not kid ourselves - the so-called 'developed' nations are the worst offenders by a long, long way.
So what has this to do with peace? It's very simple, really. Wars are fought primarily over two things, religion and resources. I'm not particularly worried that the human race will run out of resources. Considering what I have said above, this may come as a surprise.