Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: pollution

  • if I ruled the world

    If I ruled the world for one day: to do list

    1. make leafblowers illegal.

    These waste fossil fuel and create pollution & noise pollution. They’re useless and they encourage blame-shifting. Communities who can afford the use of leafblowers invariably need more physical activity. Raking leaves is peaceful and calming.

    2. all toilet paper to be made from post-consumer recycled paper.

    There aren’t enough trees left for us to be cutting them down to wipe our bums. Anyway it’s softer: it’s been pulped twice.

    3. refugees, asylum seekers, and migrants shall be placed in whichever country best suits their character and can benefit from their presence, as judged by a panel of Indigenous elders and trauma psychologists. First priority: safety and escape from crisis. Second priority: they can go anywhere they want so long as they demonstrate to the panel’s satisfaction that they can make a contribution whether social, culinary, cultural, artistic, educational, spiritual or economic. The only proviso is that after five years’ citizenship every new arrival is required to make a report of their commitment to the new country with examples of how they sustain their native culture and how they adopt the new, and how they struggle to make these two compatible. These testimonials are videoed and available in libraries and schools.

    I need a sabbatical. That was tiring.

  • suicide: it’s the silence

    Every time somebody private or prominent dies by their hand, there is a rush of resentment, frustration and grief. Responses like this one begin to appear, many of them driven by the feeling I remember… People who care about people point out that those among us who are most sensitive, empathic, engaged, and gifted, who do the most good to humanity, are exactly the ones who most suffer from sadness and grief at the cruel state of things, from informed fear about our future, sometimes from the tendencies to depression and psychological disorders that can make self-murder seem like a life-saving relief. I know these feelings from my own history. I remember the frigid isolation of knowing there was no one I could make myself known to, who would listen and not judge, not dismiss or undermine or cover over or muscle in on my fears. When is our tipping point? How many bears on the ice? How many island nations with intricate shell currencies and hand-carved feathered cultures nowhere replaceable? How many languages, how many artists? How many species of feathered companions improbable, exquisite, helpless and lost? How many species of humans do we hand over to this convention of closedness, given that we each represent a wild, fresh, unknown, exotic, unprecedented breed, a new world of thought and invention and insight, a whole world of humanity written in one daft pinhead. How much diversity are we prepared to throw under the wheels of industrialised life before we wake up and embrace each other? I look into the heart of me, my beloved, my closest friends. Any one of us could have been lost to our own isolated sadness and guttered hope. In my mind these thoughts gather, forming a single phrase: the silence is killing me. How much more vivid bold planet do we junk before we really wonder where we are going to live? How many more sweating, cursing, loving, ridiculous and delicate people do we sacrifice to depression, anxiety, exhaustion, loneliness and plain sadness before we are willing to talk about one another’s pain?