Dream globally, live locally

Me and the Farm Manager were marvelling about the many happy news stories we've heard in these dark days of fear and panic.

The monarch butterflies are making a come-back. The FM speculates that could be because the shut-down of air travel made the air better for them. Could be, but I thought the fact there's been more milkweed in the fields was responsible. Of course, those factors could be related.

And apparently those coral reefs in the south pacific are making a come-back too. The FM figures that's because the cruise ships were grounded. She could be onto something there.

At any given moment, pre-Covid, there were hundreds of cruise ships out and about, from the high seas to the great rivers of Europe to the coast of Alaska. At any given moment, there's over half a million people living on those ships.

Celebration of gluttony is one of the features of holiday cruises. There's half a million packaged vacation consumers out on the high seas, spending every waking moment at the all you can eat buffet, at least when they're not at the all you can drink bar.

That's a lot of shit and piss that's gotta go somewhere. Have those people do their eating, drinking, shitting, and pissing at home for a year and a half... the coral reefs are back!

The technocrats and billionaires who meet regularly at COP shindigs or at Davos, are more the problem than the solution. They're wedded to an economic model of perpetual expansion of consumerism. We'll be in good shape so long as everybody keeps buying more and more shit.

No, we won't. And we don't need the permission of the billionaires and their host of lackeys to take a different tack.

Just slow down on the consumption. Let's see if we can make the economy shrink rather than grow. Less plastic in the oceans. Less garbage in the landfill. 

Let's make all you can eat and drink vacation packages as stigmatising as smoking in the grocery store.

Let's grow more of our food in our own gardens.

Let's see how well we can dine while eschewing anything that arrived via air cargo. I miss shrimp rings, but local smoked whitefish is pretty good too, and there's the feel-good factor of knowing there's no slave labour in the supply chain.

Buy less.

Live more.