Hi everyone!

I open up this newsletter with a lovely video, difficult to qualify… It is an animated video, which implies the need to stop the agricultural expansion due to consumption.

As the majority of the people who consume what is produced by the rural environment are from the urbanized world, these last do not even see the existence of the problem. And if you can not see the symptom, you cannot see the illness: the demographic explosion that is going on with our species. The combination of the demographic explosion and soil degradation leads to one only and logic conclusion: we are running out of food… Last week, the FAO launched a worldwide alert on behalf of soil degradation, precisely because of the what this issue implies.

Another sad consequence of the agricultural expansion is the extinction of thousands of species due to the transformation of environments generated by it.  Therefore, tight relations exist among all of this: Soil degradation, lack of resources for everything, loss of biodiversity… and all of those relations were ignores by our old mentally. Juan Carlos Chebez, in “Los que se van”, (Those who are gone), said:

“The only fact of not substantially altering the delicate web that joins together every living being should be enough, and which reminds us that each species occupies one peculiar ecological niche that, with its extinction, or well becomes vacant, or is occupied by other rare species. Thus, particular food chains are simplified or disappear, and if this were not enough, the sole right to coexist in planet Earth with animals and vegetables should stand as the principal argument to stop extinction by all means”

“What would be of man without animas?, well… he would die of a deep solitude of soul.” – Old Seattle Chief.

At the same time, I would like to add that the Ignorance within the majority of the people about the loss of biodiversity, according to Chebez, is divided into 3 topics:

• Conservatism and school – The lack of efficient species conservation plans and the non implementation of environmental issues in the school study programs in every school – shallow activities are carried out only in green banal anniversaries.
• The media – Well, more of the same…; the media manipulates the information according to commercial interests with the subtle purpose of gaining an intangible control over the masses.
• The dispersion of efforts and will – the social system in which we live in, where the information and the decision making travel within a hierarchical linear scale, produces the loss in the attachment of good will and invested efforts in a project or in taking action on behalf of the Earth. This loss unfolds as you go up in the hierarchical scale – by going inside darker levels of corruption, the manipulation of power and selfishness grows and the politicians ignore the real situation…

And we let this happen because the majority of us is stuck inside the numbed cycle, which is well explained bye Annie Leonard in “The story of stuff”. We go to work, to then go home, turn on the TV and listen it say to us how much we suck, and that we have to go out an buy stuff in order to be cool, and afterwards we go back to work in order to finish paying the stuff we bought.

Numb Cycle – The Story of Stuff

Anyway, for the various topis of this week, my friend Juano sent me an Ecology and Environmental forum, a space to talk about everything refered to taking care of the environment and ecological consciousness. I did not know it, and I am not accustomed to getting involved in these forums, but for those with expertise in this type of debate, I recommend you to check this site.

I have found a clear and short article on Responsible Consumption, being this the  willingness to become more demanding about the quality of the products we acquired in social and environmental terms. The article has a list of questions that you can ask yourself before aquireing something new. (only in spanish! sorry!)

Mafalda by Quino

Huge airport hug!,

Brian Longstaff.

Ps. I give you one last video about a sustainable dancefloor!. Very interesting concept.

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