Why Aren’t We More Active?

One thought hit me as I was sitting at a cafe in Cuernavaca center. Why do we depend so much on the politicians and think that they can change the climate and answer all the questions surrounding the climate challenge. Why aren’t we more active?

Yes, I know the politicians are the ones with the signature power. But we have a lot of power too if we unite forces. Unfortunately, in society there is a serious and quite contagious disease going around. It’s the disease of helplessness,, the attitude of ” well I am only one person, what can I do?” and the complacent search for materialistic happiness. This disease has infected us and is potentially killing our future. Why do we ignore the fact that the earth needs our actions now!

It’s a well-known fact that the happy index is decreasing as we accumulate more things. The sentence between girlfriends, ”I am so depressed today, let’s go shopping” is common all over the world. For some shopping do give them an instant happiness-fix. But soon after they are just as miserable as ever.

Things do not make us happy. People, a sense of purpose in life and nature do. But we are too exhausted making more money so we can buy more stuff, to even spend time with someone or enjoy the nature surrounding us.

Instead, at the end of the day we sit down in our sofas and watch TV and zone out. But the television does not give you the distance you really want because there you get caught up in fake realities and the demands of a perfect life. The commercials tell us that we are not good enough,not thin enough, not successful enough and that we need to go shopping, spend money, spend our time in a mall. And we think that this is happiness. It is a fake reality. What it really does is polluting our environment, our health and mental health.

The attitude change must come now, starting with yourself then encouraging your neighbor, friends and family to do the same. Is it really that difficult to throw the bottles of wine in a recycling container or divide trash between ecological and normal trash? These simple actions can make a difference but we still have to see the environmental challenge as a collective responsibility to make this world more sustainable and equal, even though one start with small actions in our daily life. We can’t just sit around and wait for the politicians to sign some bad deal that will only benefit the wealthy countries.
Is this thinking too idealistic? But can we really continue the old way of thinking? Or is it better to go back to the real “old way of thinking”, to the times before conquests, industrialization and the search for natural resources? Even though that is practically impossible nowadays everyone of us has the possibility to respect and take care of nature, just as they did hundreds of years ago.

The Aztecs in Mexico spoke nahuatl, which means “talk harmonious”. Their language is based on the interaction with nature. They use nature metaphors to explain what happens to us in everyday life. I currently live in Cuernavaca and the real name of this town is called Cuauhnāhuac which means “ talking with trees”. When the Spaniards came, they did not try to understand the nahuatl language or the nahuatl way of thinking. The Spaniards could not pronounce the words so they “spanishized”them. They called this town Cuernavaca which literally means cow horn, nothing to do with the importance of the trees in this region. I am taking classes in nahuatl and what I understand more and more is that we in the rich countries have lost the ability to think about nature as our livelihood. Nature gives us water, food and beauty. We don’t see that anymore. We do see green but only in dollar signs.