To the Editor,
Re: Raise the bar for the coming year, Opinion, Dec. 24.
I admire David Suzuki and agree that we must do much more to protect the natural world from being ruined by the activities of humans.
I fear though in our current consumerist, competitive, socialist and capitalistic world society, we are suffering from an illusion that we can have any significant power to end the destruction of our planet.
How can we have power to tell government to stop projects like the Enbridge Northern Gateway Project, when the government relies on the tax money from these sort of projects to pay the bills? It is our extreme dependence on government and its well-paid legions that forces all government levels to court big industry and to hand over power to corporate world dominion.
We need to begin to make the essential paradigm shift and become regionally self-reliant without the need for much world trade. World trade was to add a spice to life but not dominate it and we must be vigilant to remain totally Canadian owned and self-determined.
The more we get in debt and depend on government the more our society becomes impotent and powerless. It is better live very simply as opposed to live prosperously from the rapid exploitation of Mother earth.
It may be that our next evolution is to create self-reliant communities and regions that operate without money, debt, credit, or foreign ownership. Only then could we be free to live more natural self-determined lives in harmony with nature.
Holden SouthwardNanaimo