Living with Care on our planet

Well everyone’s greedy, aren’t they? I certainly like to guzzle my delicious fish until I’m really full, that’s for sure. And I’ll bet you like to fill up on all your favourite foods and drinks if you can get them. And lions, when they’ve made a kill, will eat until they can eat no more.

So is human greed different?

Yes!

I’ve shown you how humans can own things and store them. But greed is all about having more. Having enough is never enough. You can be greedy with food but you can’t keep on eating for ever. You’d burst! But if you have (or can borrow) enough of those tokens you call money, you can keep on buying (owning) and storing toys, TVs, clothes, shoes, cars, houses for ever (well, until the money runs out). Nobody needs to own six cars, an SUV, a power boat, three houses and a light airplane. You can only do so many things at once! But lots of people do have small mountains (stores) of possessions which they own (private property—it’s mine, all mine, so get your hands off!) because they happen to have lots of money. Why do people want to have so much?

Greed is a big player, but so is the idea that by buying things and so owning them, you somehow get to be happy. Do you think that having every thing you want would make you happy? I doubt it. Look at us penguins: we’re happy and we own nothing at all. Anyway, that’s your problem!

Because some people are very greedy, they even fight other people to grab what they have too.This is how some wars happen. They are about owning and controlling land, sea, minerals (like oil) and fresh water (for drinking and farming). Other wars start because one lot of powerful people hates another lot because they speak a different language, have a different religion or a different skin colour. Wars are bad news for everything and everybody except the industry that makes guns, bombs and other things for killing lots of people.

We other animals own nothing and so we don’t damage anything. The strong human desire

   to own,
       to buy more and more,
            to over-consume and even
                 to fight wars to get more,
                    is sucking our
                        poor
                          planet
                                dry
                                   as you will see...

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What do you do when your money runs out? Stop buying stuff? Or borrow money from your parents or friends? If you borrow, you can have what you want right now, but you have something new: debt. You owe somebody else money. Maybe that’s okay for you – so you borrow some more. And more. Until one day, nobody will lend you any more money until you repay what you owe them. Then you have to save or find jobs to do for money so you can pay back what you owe.

Exactly the same thing happens for adults. Companies rather like people to get into debt, usually by using credit cards. ‘Credit’ really means money you are allowed to borrow before someone says ‘stop and repay’. This locks people into an endless treadmill of buying stuff they probably don’t need and then having to work extra hard to pay back what they owe so they can then buy more stuff they don’t need and… Get the idea? On top of this money people borrow, the lenders charge them interest. That means if you borrow $1000, you might end up paying back $1,100 a few months later. So having your $1000 video camera instantly through credit means that you really pay $1,100. So the company that made the camera is happy: they sold it to you right away instead of when you could afford it. The credit card company is happy: you just paid it $100. But are you happy?

The debt business gets bigger and nastier when whole governments and countries are involved. Many of the poorest countries in the world owe huge amounts of money to the richest ones. This means that almost all the money the poor country earns from selling its products to others (exports) goes just to pay the interest on the debt. No money is left over to pay for schools or hospitals and all the other things people in rich countries expect to have. Of course rich countries do try to help by sending money and other things to help. This is called ‘development aid’. Unfortunately, bad people may steal some of this. This is called corruption. So little of the money gets through to help those who are really desperate. Aid money that does get through may be used for things that are useless for the poor people. And worse is that much more money flows out of poor countries to pay the costs (‘service’) of their debts than comes in as aid. The result is that the poorest people in the poorest countries get even poorer. Many die of disease or hunger, especially kids. I think that’s terrible!

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These days, rich and powerful people who want to fight wars don’t do the fighting. They pay others to do it for them. This means they don’t get hurt or killed – unless they happen to lose the war. The people who actually do the fighting are usually poor and, very sadly, they are often just young kids who are forced into fighting. It’s a horrible business, made more so because modern weapons are incredibly good at killing and hurting people. A few other animals fight and may kill each other in ones and twos, but humans are in a class of their own when it comes to killing each other. People killed tens of millions – yes, tens of millions – of other people in the 20th century alone. And few people even think about the death and destruction of other animals that happens during human wars; nor the terrible damage to the land, forests, sea and air from pollution caused by the fighting. And here’s a thought: almost none of this destruction would be possible without oil. Almost all modern military forces depend totally on oil to power ships, planes and land vehicles and, indirectly, the explosives which make weapons so deadly. It’s all very sad – for the millions of humans who suffer war through no fault of their own as well as for all the other animals and plants on Earth. It all started with fists… then bows and arrows and spears… then gunpowder… Now you have nuclear missiles and clever new weapons called drones which mean military people can destroy enemies a long way off without any risk to themselves.

People are in a real fix when it comes to weapons. If one group of people makes better weapons, it gives them power over others who just want to live in peace. It means that they can invade and conquer the peaceful people and destroy them. So even when people want peace, they have to spend lots of money on keeping armies and updating weapons so that others can’t take advantage of them being weak and invade them. This has meant a race to get more and better arms. Rich countries can afford to do this and have huge industries which make guns, bombs, missiles, tanks, warships and aircraft. Poor countries struggle to keep up. Selling arms (the word ‘arms’ is a polite way of talking about machines for killing people) is now a huge business which helps make the rich countries even richer and the poor ones even poorer. Oh dear. All in all, it’s much easier being a simple animal with only a beak (like me), teeth or claws for weapons

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It’s not quite true to say that other animals don’t damage anything. Sometimes, insects called locusts grow in vast swarms, eating every green plant in their path. This spells disaster for other animals, humans and the plants themselves. But nature soon restores the balance. Some of the insects get eaten by predators of course, but the real crunch comes when the locusts have eaten all the plants. They simply die of hunger. Their numbers crash and they disappear for a few years. You might think that’s cruel but that’s how nature works to regulate life that gets out of hand. Humans, though, are so clever that they can stop nature working against them and do a great deal of damage as a result. At least, they’ve stopped nature so far, but what of the future? Unlike humans, locusts only destroy green plants over small parts of the planet and then die. By contrast, humans are damaging or destroying almost all natural environments on our planet. But why? That’s what this guide is all about!

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Or your planet?

That’s someone else’s problem, isn’t it?
All humans — yes, adults too — are a little like that. They think they’re very clever — and they are in many ways. But they’re not quite clever enough. A really clever animal would not trash its only home while pretending that everything was just fine.

Here’s a quick look at what’s wrong.

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‘Throwing away’ poisonous exhaust fumes from factories, cars, ships and planes is trashing the planet. This sort of human waste is far worse and more dangerous than all the huge mountains of garbage people produce. It’s changing the whole planet’s climate.

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Governments always call the industry which makes machines for killing people the ‘defence industry’. This is what people call a euphemism: an okay-sounding word or phrase which covers up something unpleasant. This industry — the war industry — is unbelievably huge. The USA, the world’s most powerful country, spent $598 billion in 2015. Yes, that’s right: $598,000,000,000!! Divided up, that’s almost $80 for every human on the planet! Other countries spend smaller but still enormous amounts — often more than they can afford for fear of being left behind in the arms race.

Countries around the world spent nearly $1,676 billion on weapons and other military expenditures in 2015. That’s an average of over $220 for every person on the planet
Source

If just some of the money spent in one year on the war industry went into helping poor countries and their people out of debt, the misery of poor people — disease and poverty — could be solved. Every child could go to school and everyone could have enough to eat, medical help when they need it and a place to live. I think it’s very very sad that this never happens. So the number of people who survive on less than $1 per day goes up (over 1,000,000,000), the poor get poorer and die of disease or hunger and thousands of people get killed in wars. Why? Why can’t humans just learn to get along?

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Locked into the work treadmill

Prisoners used to know all about treadmills. They were big wheels, like old-fashioned water wheels, powered by the weight of prisoners endlessly walking forward and, of course, getting nowhere. The turning wheel held several prisoners, all treading forward for hours on end. It was used to power other machines.

But really it was a form of punishment.

Some say that kids like you are really just being ‘trained’ to fit into the new-style treadmill of work. Got to work hard in school and get good grades so you can get a good job so you can buy everything you want… and if you don’t get a ‘proper’ job, you’re a ‘failure’ and your status is low.

What things do I really need? Of course, you need to work to earn money to buy clothes, food and all the other things you want. I guess the question is:
will you work to just get what you need — or what you want?

‘Needs’ and ‘wants’ are two very different things. Think about it and then take a peek below.

Of course I’m not suggesting that you should never have anything you want and that you only have one pair of shoes and eat potatoes and vegetables and nothing else! That’s the sort of thing a few very religious people do by choice and very poor people do because they don’t have the choice.

My message is that your real needs are few and don’t cost much at all.

Your wants are probably many and they,
in the end,
could...

...cost the Earth.

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Schools are to educate you. Right?

Well sort of. But what do people mean by ‘education’? Some would say schools serve several purposes such as:

• teaching you about things like science and language so you get educated
• getting you out of your parents’ hair at home
• keeping you out of mischief
• teaching you to behave in a responsible way and to co-operate with your friends and get along with people you might not like
• getting you to think for yourself and question everything
• making sure you learn to do what you’re told, get a job and become a good consumer
• learning reading, writing and arithmetic (math) – sometimes, as a joke, called “the Three Rs”
• teaching religion (or within a religious framework – ‘faith’ schools)
• If you’re at school, you probably have your own views on why you’re there.

Okay… so why do you think you’re at school?

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Who’s hot and who’s not? Why people are like chickens – Have you noticed how adults reckon each other up by what they do rather than what they are? If you meet someone new at a party, their first question will be about what your job is. If you don’t have a ‘proper’ job, they don’t think much of you. You end up having low status – as well as no money – if you have no job. So the better the job, the more money you have so the more status you have too. Status, or rank, is very important to many animals – especially people. Chickens have a ‘pecking order’ with a top-ranking bird who dominates the others. Lower status birds have to give way or they get pecked. It’s just the same with humans, both adults and kids. There’s always some poor kid who nobody likes at the bottom of the pecking order. And there’ll be some other top cat who everyone thinks is really cool, wants to copy and be friends with.

Who’s who in status in this picture?

In the grown-up world of business and jobs, people show their status by the clothes they wear at work. High status men wear grey suits and ties just about everywhere. (Why do people wear ties? What use are they? Suits at least have pockets and keep you warm.) Some really top status people wear crowns and very fancy clothes. A cockerel amongst his flock of hens is high status if he’s aggressive and has bright plumage – rather like people! Or they have special names to show how important they are like ‘Lord’ or ‘Mr President’. Or they may have servants and buy huge cars, mansions and expensive art works to show off their high status. Still other ‘big shots’ surround themselves with ‘toadies’ – lower status ‘yes men’ who ‘suck up’ to their boss, hoping that one day they’ll get to be Mr Big. There are much ruder names for toadies!

There are all kinds of other ways humans can tell each other’s status. More education = higher status for a start. Skin colour is important to some. In some groups of people, men have higher status than women automatically. Not surprisingly, many women don’t like this. Even in countries where women are supposed to be equal with men, almost all the top status, best paid and most powerful jobs (president, prime minister, heads of corporations) are taken by men. What do you think about that?

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Your real needs are very simple. Poor people have no choice but to live simply which is why they are mostly not guilty of messing up our planet. They won’t be reading this because they won’t have any way to get to use a computer. Because you’re reading this, chances are you and your family are not poor. It’s you who I’m asking to think carefully about the differences between needs and wants. It’s you who can do something to stop eating the future.

And as you know, the rest of us animals just take what we need and no more. Future-eaters? Not guilty! Not us other animals!

A TRASHY KIND OF LIFE

Some very poor people make a miserable living out of sifting through rubbish piles thrown away by richer people. They collect trash which they can sell for a few cents for recycling, or just re-use some of it for themselves and their families. Sometimes they may be so hungry they have to eat waste food. Not surprisingly, some of these people catch diseases and die.

Why do poor people suffer more?

If you’re looking at this page, you’re probably from a rich country. Your family may have one or more cars, perhaps you have holidays abroad, your house stays at a comfortable temperature automatically, your food comes (nicely packaged) from all over the world… and you depend for all this on fossil fuel if you think about it. And burning fossil fuels mean global warming. The poor who live in slums and shanty towns of big cities like São Paolo (Brazil), Nairobi (Kenya) or Dhaka (Bangladesh) have barely enough to eat, typically live in a one-room shack made out of scrap timber and corrugated iron sheet, have no water supply and no drainage (no bathroom and toilet). They use hardly any fossil fuel for they can’t afford cars, heating or air conditioning. There are a lot of poor people but it isn’t them who are causing global warming.

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Can you want something if you don’t know it exists?

Clever people are always inventing new things, or new versions of old ones. This means stuff you already have quickly becomes obsolete even though it may be working perfectly well. So you feel pressure to go out and buy new. Sound familiar? Well that’s the basis of the fashion industry. Fashions change quickly to keep you buying new stuff. But there’s no money to be made out of a new style of shoe, cellphone or something if people don’t know they’re there to buy. So if you’ve made a new gadget you want to sell but nobody knows about it, what would you do?

You’ve probably seen and heard many thousands of ads demanding that you must buy this or that ‘new and improved’ food, drink, soap, DVD player, game… the list goes on and on. And (remember my point about needs and wants?) had you noticed that almost nothing that you need is advertised? Nobody advertises potatoes or water unless they’re processed in some way — like chips or cola. So the purpose of advertising is to make you want things you don’t need and didn’t know about until you first saw the ad. There’s another more sinister purpose too: to make you feel you’re missing out somehow if you don’t buy whatever it is. Suppose your friends have it and you don’t?

How un-cool can you get???

You have to keep up or, better still, be one step ahead with your buying.

It takes real courage to buck the trend and not buy things that everybody else has. It’s hard on kids with some money; really tough on poor kids who have none. It’s also tough on parents. They have to put up with — and pay for — more and more demands from their kids for the latest trendy gizmo, stylish trainer or playstation. Advertisers even target toddlers. The idea is to get young kids to want particular brands of soft drink and breakfast cereal and so on as soon as they can walk and talk. Then the kids use their ‘pester power’ (I’m sure you’ll know all about that!) to get the brand they know best; the one that all their friends have. The ads have worked.

Another favourite advertising ploy is to claim that a product is ‘time-saving’. People are always buying new time-saving things but seem to have less and less time… for themselves or for their kids. Why? Because they’re having to work harder and harder to earn enough money to buy more and more stuff!

Humans really seem to be locked into an endless treadmill of working harder to buy more to save time to work harder…

All this means more and more factories producing more and more stuff, most of which ends up thrown away within hours or days. Just look in your garbage to see how much. All this ‘future junk’ comes from the Earth: it’s one of the main reasons people are eating the future.

And it can’t go on. It is not sustainable. Something has to give. As I said earlier, many people know this but don’t feel they can do anything about it. But that just isn’t so. You, your friends and family have the power to help make changes for your — our — future. On the next page, I’m going to give you some ideas how you can do this.

This is what manufacturers want above all things: brand loyalty. That’s why ads keep repeating over and over again the brand name they want you to automatically think of when you are about to buy something. So if you’re in the store and want a can of soda, the advertisers know that you are most likely to pick up the brand of drink you are familiar with.

Don’t forget they also need big vehicles and trailers to tow them to the beach

Meaning that it causes a lot of unnecessary pollution and in many cases are just toys for ‘grown up’ boys.

These things are useful and needed. Many are fun to do and don’t cause pollution.

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Do you know what obsolete means? Making things obsolete is a clever way companies have of getting you to buy another newer type of something you already own. Here’s how it’s done… I guess you have a smartphone of some sort. As well as enabling you to keep in touch with your friends, it plays all your favourite music tracks and does a thousand and one other things! But within a few weeks or months of you buying your phone (or TV or computer or even car), you find that your model doesn’t exist any more. Another ‘newer’ one is now in the shops. And it does more things than your ‘old’ one did – as well as being a phone which also plays your favourite mp3s and YouTube videos . The point is it’s NEW and IMPROVED! So really you should throw away your old one and buy it, shouldn’t you? If you don’t, you’ll somehow be missing out. After all, your friends with plenty of money will already have it. Don’t be left behind! That is the message the ads push at you.

So people do it. They throw away perfectly good things so as to have the latest version. And, just in case the ads fail to make you want to ‘upgrade’, you’ll find that if you accidentally damage your gadget or whatever or a part of it goes wrong, you can’t get it fixed. Why? Because it’s obsolete. The company doesn’t make it any more and there are probably no spare parts for repairs. And if there are any spare parts, fixing it will cost you almost as much as buying new. So you buy new. Clever, isn’t it?

Of course none of this would matter so much if the bits and pieces which go into making smartphones, computers and stuff could be used again: recycled. Happily these days, many things are being recycled (like metal from cars) but there’s still a whole lot of unwanted rubbish – particularly plastic – dumped onto garbage tips to add to the mountains of trash. Humans are real experts in taking perfectly good stuff from the planet and quickly making it into trash!

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TYNKYNs, Things You Never Knew You Needed: What’s the point of so much stuff? Sea animals like me find some human inventions difficult to take. One of our real dislikes is powerboats and jetskis. Not only do they make a terrible noise above and below water, polluting the sea and the air, they kill and injure many sea creatures. The poor manatees (dugongs) in the seas around Florida often have terrible gashes on their bodies made by the propellors of powerboats. Okay, we can understand that people need boats for some things. But what about jetskis? Who needs them? Answer: nobody. They’re fun for the people that have them. But everyone and everything else has to suffer the noise, danger and pollution . Even innocent swimmers sometimes get killed or hurt by these silly playthings. And just listen to the noise they make above and below the waves (hold your breath and put your head underwater when one passes near!). What will people invent next for thrills? Oh yes, I know: space tourism.

You could have a go at making a list of all the things you know about which you can buy but which are of little or no use at all. Or you could try grading them on a chart like the one below where Red is Bad and Green is Good. You’ll have different ideas I’m sure!

On the green side, put things that are useful or really useful, a longer bar for a more useful thing. Do the same on the red side for things that are silly, stupid, useless, big polluters, pointless or dangerous (like jetskis). You’ll probably find that your friends have different ideas than you, but my guess is that you’ll all agree about some things.

If you’re at school, why not make this a class project? Ask your teacher. Fun to do and it should generate some good ideas and lively discussion!

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Everything humans make eventually becomes junk. Most of it is junk within hours of you buying it. Think of all the throwaway plastic bottles, paper cups and plates from that fast food meal you had last night. The cup might once have been part of a tree in which birds sang and under which bears roamed. Plastic is made using energy from oil. Sometime soon, the trees and the oil will run out unless people mend their ways. And plastic trash is fast becoming a serious pollution issue. Even big things like buildings, ships and bridges eventually become junk.

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How to stop eating the future

Only after the last tree has been cut down
Only after the last river has been poisoned
Only after the last fish has been caught
Only then will you find you cannot eat money
– Native American saying

The choice is yours. If you don’t care and just want to carry on buying, buying, buying… well, you won’t be reading this anyway.

But you are reading this, aren’t you!

That must mean you do care.

And I know you can make a difference. It won’t be obvious or fast but it will happen. It has to if our beautiful planet is to survive with all its wonderful life and variety. Ignoring the problems – generally called ‘business as usual’ – will mean a poor and dreary world with filthy air, rivers and sea, waste plastic everywhere, land covered by more roads, airports, bigger industrial farms and cities. And more wars.

And where will the wild creatures be? There won’t be any space left. Penguins, polar bears and many other creatures are already in trouble — as are around one billion people who barely have enough to eat. By consuming less, you can help to create a fairer sustainable world.

What do you think about eating the future? Have you any good ideas about what we can do to make things better? If you do, please write to me. As long as your message is sensible and friendly, I promise to reply.

If you’ve found my Eating the Future guide useful, please would you be kind enough to make a donation to help run my website. I know you kids don’t have credit cards or anything but perhaps you could persuade either your parents or your school to make a donation. It’s so easy and you can do it here.

Source: New Scientist, 17 March 2017

NASA scientists have found that tiny soot particles emitted by jet engines create condensation trails (contrails) which crisscross the skies where aircraft have been. They are an important cause of global warming: “Contrails, and the cirrus clouds that evolve from them, have a larger impact on Earth’s atmosphere than all the aviation-related carbon dioxide emissions since the first powered flight”. Source

Mining is taking something out and not replacing it

The robots are coming!

This worry is now made worse because robots and automation are replacing more and more jobs, formerly done by people. So more people are chasing fewer jobs

When I first wrote this guide (1999), there were just 6 billion of you.

This is not to say that all others systems for growing food are bad or wrong. There are several approaches which are sustainable one of which involves careful use of genetically modified crops.

The hydrogen could be made

• using the sun to break down water into its two elements — hydrogen and oxygen atoms (H2O)… totally renewable energy. But hydrogen is a light gas which needs to be stored at high pressures in strong containers. It can explode when mixed with air.
• from crop plants like sugar cane which, when fermented, make alcohol. This is a liquid biofuel, easy to store and safe, which can be easily used as a hydrogen source.

But biofuels come with big problems of their own.

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Sadly, the human world’s economy depends on people buying more and more. This is called ‘economic growth’ and is supposed to be good. In a sense it is because when economies grow, more people have jobs. Not having a job is a very miserable thing for most humans because no job means no money. No money means… well, you can work that out.

But economies don’t always grow. Sometimes they go bust and collapse. This happened famously in 1929 when all the world’s big economies — especially the USA — crashed and millions of people lost their jobs. It has happened several times since, most recently in 2008.

So how do you arrange for people to have jobs without destroying the planet? This is a very difficult question and nobody knows the answer. The best hope seems to be to encourage people to buy — to consume — things can be be recycled, which don’t harm the environment and which don’t need to be transported long distances. Buying stuff you want — food, clothes, whatever it might be — need not be damaging if what you buy is made in some way which can be done over and over again. ‘Sustainable’ is the word.

example is food. Growing food depends on soil, air, water and sunlight. There’s plenty of all of those in most places. So people can carry on growing lots of food for ever if they use sustainable farming methods (which they mostly aren’t!). Fishing should be sustainable too. Because people are greedy and have caught so many fish, there are hardly any left in many seas. No adult fish means no baby fish and no new fish. So fishing areas, like economies, collapse.

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The Recycled Orchestra: these amazing kids make music from trash. They live in a slum in Paraguay (South America) next to a huge garbage dump, the source of the trash they use to make musical instruments. As they learn to play their instruments, they join their own orchestra. They are so good that they now give concerts in many different countries. Click here for video

So could you make music from trash?

Go on. Be inventive. Have a go! Be inspired by these Paraguayan kids!

Be inspired by these kids in Paraguay

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Humans are trashing the planet. It doesn't have to be like that!

When it comes to using stuff taken from the planet, humans think in straight lines:

Start >> Grab >> Make >> Use >> Trash >> Finish

Grab is mining minerals and fossil fuels (oil, gas, coal), damaging soils (upon which you depend for growing your food, cutting down forests . These are resources. Make is producing stuff for people to buy: industry. Use is what people do with what they buy, like driving. Trash is what happens when the stuff is old, unwanted, broken, burned (as in fuels) or outdated. Result? Fewer resources, growing trash piles and pollution — especially plastic — which now affects the whole planet: seas, rivers, lands, air.

“Carbon pollution from the energy sector was 32.1 billion tonnes in 2016″

Every other system on our planet runs in circles — cycles. There’s no such thing as trash; no pollution. There’s no start and no finish. Everything is constantly being recycled — naturally. But you humans and your industries don’t fit in to the way the planet’s systems work. But you are learning and one of the increasing success stories is recycling.

Recycling: beginning to be success

More and more ‘trash’ gets re-used. Glass bottles, cans, cardboard and paper are the easy things. Less easy (but really important!) is plastic but much of that is, at last, beginning to be recycled. At last, trash is beginning to be seen as a useful resource which can be ‘mined’ for stuff which can be made into new products: a win-win if ever there was one.

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Compost is food for plants that looks a bit like soil. You can make it almost anywhere out of vegetable peelings and waste food. In my picture, I’ve just finished building a traditional compost heap held together by recycled timber. Every time I add more stuff, I cover the heap over with an old carpet. This helps it rot quickly. If it’s big enough, your heap will get very hot inside. Can you think why?
Did you know…

• you can even make compost indoors using a ‘wormery’ The worms eat all the decaying food and vegetable peelings and stuff and leave rich crumbly compost.
• compost heaps are a great place to look for different types of creepy-crawlies. They are full of life – mostly bacteria and fungus – but also many types of worms (no legs), spiders (8 legs), insects (6 legs) and centipedes (hundreds of legs). They’re all part of the composting process and birds like to eat many of them. Take a jar, a pair of tweezers and a magnifier and see how many living creatures you can find. Don’t forget to let them out again: the compost is their home!
• if you put stuff which you can compost in the garbage, it stinks. And it’s wasted too. It all ends up in landfill mixed with all the other mountains of stuff people throw away.

So you see composting is a great way to recycle and you can use the results to grow more plants.

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Tiki's interactive sustainability quiz

How Earth-friendly is your lifestyle? Are you a future-eater? Find out in my quiz! When you’ve started the quiz, click one checkmark to choose your answer. Have a pen and paper ready to keep track of your score.

And kids, I’m not stupid and neither are you. We both know there are two ways you can use this quiz:

you can use it as a game and try out all the answers, see the jokey pictures and listen to the funny sounds which go with them. But I hope you will also
go through it seriously and answer the questions as honestly as you can — choose what you really do, not what you think the right answer is. Otherwise the quiz is pointless!
You will probably want to know why I’ve scored the answers as I have. To find out, click the ? at the bottom left of each quiz window.

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Running to keep still

One thing to think about is ‘competition’. People feel they have to work harder and harder to be sure of keeping their jobs , to make their company ‘more competitive’. You hear it all the time, don’t you. It’s all about winning, cutting corners, making more stuff for less. You don’t hear about the losers. For every winner, there has to be losers. It’s this fear of becoming a loser that makes many people work almost all the time; 24/7. And this causes ‘stress’ — a new type of illness which makes some people crack-up completely! Yet some businesses work as co-operatives in which everyone helps each other rather than competes to ‘win’. Even very big companies have discovered ‘co-opetition’ in which they both compete and co-operate with other big companies.

Couldn’t humans be more co-operative and kind instead of aggressive and competitive? Slow down and enjoy your life!

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The Tale of the fisherman and the Tourist

A tourist looks on a most idyllic picture: a fisherman dozing in the sun in his rowing boat that he has pulled out of the waves which come rolling up the sandy beach. The tourist’s camera clicks and the fisherman wakes. The tourist asks: “The weather is great and there’s plenty of fish, so why are you lying around instead of going out and catching more?”
The fisherman replies: “Because I caught enough this morning.”
“But just imagine,” the tourist says, “you could go out there three or four times a day and bring home three or four times as much fish! And then you know what could happen?” The fisherman shakes his head. “After a year you could buy yourself a motorboat,” says the tourist. “After two years you could buy a second one, and after three years you could have a cutter or two. And just think! One day you might be able to build a freezing plant or a smoke house. You might eventually even get your own helicopter for tracing shoals of fish and guiding your fleet of cutters, or you could buy your own trucks to ship your fish to the capital, and then . . .”
“And then?” asks the fisherman.
“And then”, the tourist continues triumphantly, “you could spend time sitting at the beachside, dozing in the sun and looking at the beautiful ocean!” The fisherman looks at the tourist: “But that is exactly what I was doing before you came along!”

(slightly abridged from an original story by Heinrich Böll)

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Inequality: need and greed

Many people believe that the world already has too many people. They claim that the solution to this is birth control — where a man and woman choose to limit how many kids they have. Most people in rich countries have about 2 kids so the number of people in these countries isn’t growing much. It’s people in poor countries who have too many kids, they say. So the rich countries don’t have a problem. Right?

Wrong! The problem is that people in rich countries use far more than their fair share of things like fuel, food and anything else you can think of. A rich kid will eat and buy stuff which poor kids can only dream about. How do you feel about that?

• Almost half the world — over three billion people — live on less than $2.50 a day. [Source]
• Eleven chidren die every minute around the world because of poverty. [Source]
• Almost half of the world’s wealth is now owned by just one percent of the population.
• The wealth of the one percent richest people in the world amounts to $110 trillion. That’s 65 times the total wealth of the bottom half of the world’s population

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You don’t always have to hold back. If what you want is made from stuff which has been or will be recycled, there’s no problem. Some paper is completely recycled. Great! So are more and more other things. Buying food that’s organically grown is also fine because food grown that way is nature-friendly. Growing it works with natural cycles and so can be done for ever (as long as the sun shines). It’s sustainable. And because the sun does shine, it’s more and more easy to use electricity (power) that’s generated by renewable methods. That’s solar power, wind power, water power.

Many electricity companies now offer electricity supplies guaranteed to be from renewable sources. Right now, electric cars run on electricity stored in batteries. Soon, many vehicles may run on fuel cells which use hydrogen as a fuel to produce electricity. Neither battery nor fuel-cell-powered vehicles create any pollution themselves.

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Oh dear! There really are no easy answers, are there? As everyone knows, speed kills. So walking should be the safest way to get around with bikes a little less safe (because you can go fast down hills). But both biking (do wear a ‘hard hat’ to protect your head) and walking are very safe provided you don’t have to mix with cars and trucks. Unfortunately, almost all modern transport systems are built around fast, heavy motor vehicles which, so far as walkers, skateboarders and bikers are concerned are very dangerous. If a metal car weighing a couple of tons hits a walker at speed, the car gets a dent but the poor walker gets killed. To make matters worse, some people fit huge ‘bull-bar’ fenders to SUVs and pickups. These chunks of steel — ‘car jewellery’ really — make the chances of killing someone on foot or bike much greater even at low speed. They also make the vehicles that have them even more gas-guzzling than before. And when did you last see a bull in a city street?

I’m glad to say the message that motor vehicles and walkers or cyclists don’t mix is getting through. In some countries like Holland and Denmark, cycles now have special routes of their own in towns. More and more cycle paths are being made everywhere because sensible people are making sure that this happens.

You and your friends, together with your parents and their friends, can help make sure safe places and routes get built so that kids like you can walk or cycle safely to school or meet your friends. And maybe you can get your street made into a play-zone where cars are not allowed or where there are strict, very low speed limits. Then you could get out and do some skateboarding with your friends instead of being always stuck inside with the boring old TV or computer games! Pester power could work wonders if enough of you get together to change things. Go on… start a campaign: we want SAFE PLACES FOR KIDS TO HAVE FUN!

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Here are some useful sites. Why not check some of them out?

• Recycled Art Ideas for Kids Could you make an octopus out of an old sock? Or a mask out of a cereal box?
• Kids FACE – That’s Kids For A Clean Environment. It’s the world’s largest youth environmental organization, founded by a 9-year-old from Tennessee (USA) back in 1989
• Waste Watch – Waste less, live more!

And please avoid disappointment and don’t send me more links, no matter how useful you think they are. Lots of people do but I simply don’t have time to deal with them. Sorry!