The Bioneers: Radio Programming on Sustainability
On a drive to pick up my son this afternoon, I caught an episode of The Bioneers, a radio show covering issues in sustainability. Clever name, don’t you think?
This week’s speaker began by mentioning that she’s from Illinois, a state in which every public school classroom features a portrait of Lincoln. To her, this serves as an important reminder to school kids that before 1863, the entire US economy was built on the back of slave labor, a practice that we now regard as “unthinkable.”
But now, she pointed out, our current economy is built on chemicals that are part of grossly unsustainable and ecologically disasterous processes. The way we grow our food, manufacture our products , power our transportation, and generate our energy for various uses – all rely on chemicals that are poisoning us. We have the skyrocketing rates of dread diseases to prove it, but lack the political will to do anything about it.
“It’s clear to me that when people 100 years from now look back on the early 21st Century,” she said, “They will use the same word to describe this era as we do when we think of slavery: “unthinkable.”
Quite a concept.
I often try to look at our times from the vantage point of the future. It may sound like a pointless or impossible task, but it’s not as hard as one might imagine. We look back at the Inquisition, at bloodletting and leeching, at the Third Reich as the moral and intellectual horrors they were. But aren’t there idiocies in our own times that will be regarded as just as gross?
In any case, I hope you’ll take a few minutes and check out The Bioneers.
