There's a phrase which states we are the sum product of our upbringing. I'm not sure if I agree with the narrowness of that statement but I do believe we as individuals only see the world through the eyes we have learned over the years.
Let me explain; I grew up in a rural society. I lived in a small village which relied on the local farms for the bulk of our produce and when the very bad winters snowed us in for weeks on end, we relied on the local farmer to bring in milk and other dairy produce (plus whatever meat he had killed and butchered) on a trailer behind his Ferguson tractor. Vegetables became limited to whatever could be lifted from the frozen ground or collected from barn storage. It was an almost hand to mouth existence and the harshness of those times only changed when the village became swallowed up by the spread of the local town and a supermarket appeared. No-one was wealthy and few had many possessions but by working with the land in our gardens and in our communities, we had a good existence.
It was the era of Make Do and Mend and toys as well as clothes were repaired, remodelled and rotated.
No, we didn't have kiwi fruit or melons and we didn't have many of the imported green vegetables we can get today in our supermarkets, but we ate well and we respected the land which gave us that food.
What I'm trying to get to is, because we lived so close to the earth on which we stand each day and understood that without it we wouldn't survive, we held it in high respect. We also regarded those that tended the land with a higher level of respect than say a politician who sat in an office somewhere signing off bits of paper and dictating what the country should do next.
When at university I studied the science of ecology so again was surrounded by those who understood the earth and all its vagaries, so once again, I was cocooned in the belief everyone thought the same as us.
It wasn't until I got a lot older I realised people who had grown up in town environments and had only known the streets where they lived, the factories which surrounded them and the continual noises which came from heavy industry, that they would have a very different experience of the earth on which they stood. Unless they had someone in the family who still had an allotment, they didn't have the same connection to where their food came from and didn't grasp the link between mud and the soil in which the plants grew and animals grazed. As far as they were concerned they got food off the market each week and moaned when what they wanted wasn't there.
So what am I trying to say here?
Our views will be as varied as our upbringings and the environment in which that upbringing happened. Our internal values and morals will have been shaped by those experiences and we will have developed a language, a code of usage which would reflect that. Trying to marry all these expressions of desire, worry and need is a difficult one and is sparking off bitter debate in numerous areas.
How do we marry these opposing stances and find a middle a through?
For me, the fundamental question is, how do we create a situation where everyone is aware of the very stuff we stand on, the soil, and that it is the underpinning of everything on this planet?
Ironically, unless we have this there will be no debate on higher issues such as race, sexuality and gender. We won't be fighting over the bits of the planet so as to call it part of one country or another. There won't be race eradications, murders, theft or any other crime because once we lose the soil, the animals and plants become extinct and with it the food we eat.
As more soil dies we either rely on manufactured substances to sustain us made from the detritus left behind from dwindling sources or we kill the planet all together and become as Mars has done, a mere reflection of its once rich and possibly diverse surface, alive with water and an atmosphere.
But then, does that matter? After all it won't effect those who are alive right now will it?
No, they can forget this pendulum which is swinging, buy their new phone, new car, the new set of collectable plastic toys for their children. Not concern themselves with the mileage on that packet of six apples or how many hormones and antibiotics have been injected into the cheap imported meat they are buying or the herbicides and pesticides which have been sprayed onto their vegetables and fruit to make them grow.
No.
They can continue cementing over the gardens in readiness for parking their car, covering the back in decking or slabs or AstroTurf so as to reduce the mess, or make for a place to sit in around a wood burning pit and have friends round for a BBQ and drinks or children to celebrate a birthday.
All very lord-able but without awareness (or is it deafness), they are reducing the natural world further with every brick that's laid, with every concrete pouring tamped down.
I was delighted to see a growing interest in growing your own and the resurgence in allotments. People are discovering the taste one gets from growing and picking your own,and how it is far superior to that which is picked weeks before its maturity and held in nitrogen bubbles as it is whisked thousands of miles by air from Chile or Egypt or Canada or wherever trade deals have been made. Some seeds of realisation are growing in other industries too and the recognition consuming and throwing away to get the next latest and greatest, is unsustainable. I noticed even the fashion industry is recognising this and has started to think along more sustainable fashion trends.
Apps such as 'Vinted' have sprung up and a new form of Make Do and Mend is beginning. This time it seems to be more, 'Take and Remake'.
I like this approach. It doesn't beat the consumers with the stick it offers 'on trend' carrots and for me that is the way to go. Mobile phone manufacturers are being told to update their products for longer and white goods are being produced so they can be serviced, something which has been a long time coming.
So when will the 'on trend' carrot reach the soil itself?
When will we realise the tiger cannot be saved if we are busy wrecking the very land on which is survives? That the polar bear will go hungry until it adapts to the new way of fishing as it loses the ice sheets? That countries which are letting their farmers and miners run riot on virginal territory and are now killing the indigenous populations so as to get unfettered access?
We are indeed the sum product of the experiences in our lifetime and we can only observe and comment on what is happening from that world view.
Mine is one of closeness to the earth and the ecology of it, so my eye is biased in that direction.
I am not a stick wielder, an ecowarrior who wants to take down the consumer world, I prefer the carrot approach because I find the way to get people to work with you is to get them 'seeing' the situation from a different perspective or at least acknowledging the potential in that view.