Cracked Pot Meditations – Conservation

Meditation for January 22^nd

Conservation

This is our world. We have come out of the caves and down from the trees to create civilization. Some of us have realized that what we have been doing has been hurting our world. We hear her cries as we pollute her oceans and rivers, we hear her moans of agony as we shave acres of trees away, we listen to her weeping as we kill off her animals, and we are starting to see how our way of life is beginning to threaten our own ecology.

We can’t fix it. We try to reintroduce wolves back into their old natural habitat and wonder why it isn’t working, and we forget that we are now part of the ecology, and we, and our farms and cities, can’t get along with wolves. It is beyond our capabilities to heal the Earth. Now, countries that used to be poor have started catching up with the luxuries and energy-wasting we use. Instead of millions of lightbulbs being turned on, it’s now billions. Instead of just a few million people doomscrolling on Instagram, now it’s billions.

Let me repeat: we can’t fix it. We can’t make it go back to where it used to be because most humans are selfish pieces of shit that won’t change anything that might inconvenience them to help make the world a better place. Worst of all, these people keep having babies. Recycling doesn’t require much energy on our part, and it is an out-of-sight, out-of-mind situation; most of what we recycle can’t be recycled.

Want to save the world? Stop having babies. Your genetics are not any less selfish and parasitic than others, so why do you want to make matters worse by having a shitting, energy-dependent, worthless baby? It isn’t that we are overpopulated; we actually aren’t. We have plenty of land and resources to have lots of babies, but we don’t share; only a few gatekeep the few resources by charging money for them. Not having babies will scare the companies by lessening their financial forecasts.

Let’s scare the billionaires by taking away future customers.

Prayer

Mother Earth,

let us die off,

from your hand or our own,

I know it’s like watching a junky that won’t clean up,

watching us use the earth,

But maybe it’s time for a mass extinction.

Captain Planet and your Saints, the Planeteers,

Give me the strength,

to not have any babies,

so that I may do the only humble thing,

What can humans do to save their dying planet?

And let us never find a way to Mars.

Amen.

Craft

Using a piece of recycled paper and a pencil made of tires, write down things that you usually throw away and write down the ones that you could reuse, haven’t been recycling, or find a different product with less or no packaging.

Feel that goodness in your chest as you write these items down? That is the feeling of doing nothing with purpose. You are about to leave no dent on what your species is doing to the earth, but writing lists and recycling let you have a Bernie sticker on your Subaru, which you drive all over town.

Stick the list on your energy-sucking refrigerator, look at it every day, and boast to yourself about how much you are doing for Earth.

Bonus Craft

Introduce a dangerous animal near your home – preferably near schools.

Goal

Now that you realize that there is no home for the world, be her sheriff. Carry a water bottle and use it to point at the person as you berate them for raping Mother Earth. If you see someone littering, not recycling, throwing compost in the waste, throwing waste into the compost, driving unnecessarily, driving at all, wearing clothes that require a factory, eating food that creates obnoxious amounts of methane, living really far away from work and/or social life so to expand energy getting to and from there, living far away from the city center so making land developers feel okay with taking down another hundred acres of forest to make another shitty new construction neighborhood named after the trees that were knocked down and any other earth damaging behaviors you see, use the water bottle and spray them.

You alone can change the world by being unfriendly.