I have just finished Tom Wessels The Myth of Progress and it has left me thinking about my own personal relationship with the earth. Am I doing enough? What can I do that would have the most positive impact for the environment as a whole? I feel that the key to finding a solution is education. It’s important for everyone to become more aware and educated about their own environment. By becoming more connected with your local environment and community, you appreciate more of what is around you in your everyday life. Knowing what animals and plants live in your surroundings allow you to see them as an interconnected part of your own life. Becoming more aware of what is happening in the environment around you makes you more cautious of the results of your actions. I think it is a lot easier to not think about the consequences of ones decisions and actions when one is uneducated about their impact. When you don’t know where something goes when you are done with, it makes it easier to not think or care about it. I think people are more likely to make positive decisions in terms of environmental issues when it hits closer to home. The more connected and educated you are, the more of a sense of pride in your surroundings you will have. If more people were aware and educated about the consequences of their actions they would be less likely to make decisions that have a negative effect on the environment. In this country a lot of people take for granted how easy we have it and how many resources it takes to sustain the American lifestyle. It made me think of a conversation I had with my cousin a couple of years ago. I had finished a can of coke and asked him where he kept his recycling. He told me that he didn’t recycle. He went on to say “we have been ripping apart this earth with machine guns for years and now we want to put a band aid on it to try and fix it, it too late to save the earth.” I thought to myself, is he right, is it really to late? I now know that he was wrong, it is not too late. The earth is a very resilient living system that can recover from our mistakes if we do something about it now. I feel that it is up to us to take what we learn and do our part to educate those that either don’t know or don’t believe. We can be the ones that lead a bifurcation of the existing paradigm towards a sustainable future. Wessel’s book states that “as species become more specialized, their efficient use of energy increases”, this is never more clear than in what is present today. We have the technology and knowledge to be an efficient, self sustainable species but do we have the drive, and are we willing to make personal sacrifices as a society to do so? We shall see.