Happy Future!

A new year, a new decennium-again! Twenty-ten sounds like future. Life goes fast,

and it all started under the trees..
 Me as a newborn to a little girl grew up in a neighborhood literally under the oaks. Grandma lived in the same house, took us out in the oak forest to the talking old trees. It was a suburb area under the treelayer but it was close to the city center in an, in global terms, "average sized city" and my father didn't need a drivers licence. Both the sea and nature was around the corner. The summer place on the island in the sea, was only one hour from our home.

When I become older, I got 5 brothers and 2 sisters to take care of and play with. We always had something to do besides of ordinary hutt building and playing school, as climbing in the mountains at the seashore, running with the cows, teach the sisters to ride tiny horses, we might investigate the garbage from the ocean in the bays and in the wintertime we could build the biggest snow castles when everyone helpt.

Me, a person who loves nature as pure nature and urban nature, seaching to find the green spots in every city I go to, was probably rooted in the sustainable thinking there somewhere in my early years. With two separarate families I might got the feeling of helping other, so much as I can say that I want the best for people and the human species. My ethical beliefs for a healthy Earth with an amazing fauna and flora and happy kids playing around, is sometimes stronger than my primary needs, as food, which sometimes puts me in unwanted situations, but what to do?

Myself, in writing movement, 26 years old, stands now as a newly-graduated ecologist and an environmentalist into my heart, with a lot of work! And it must be done now, on planet earth.

My journey of deliberate action for a more healthy Earth, started at an age of 14 when I started to help the organization Animal Rights Sweden (then the Nordic Society Against PainFul Experiments On Animals) to distribute information downtown and in neigbourhoods. Starting with the laboratory animals and ended when I realized that we couldn't just boycot or buy different brands, we need to think completely different, this thought when I understood the connection of my eating habits with what is going on on planet earth and how much animals who have to live during violated conditions. So just as that, I stopped eating meat, fish and later dairy products.

When it was time for gymnasium, I chose to study to an animal career, and became interested in endangered animals in the Tropical forests and causes to. Proven by the close link to huge deforestration of Tropical forests from the enormous amount of wasted food when produce meat. Both big and small interactions from the species in the rainforest and my interest in small tropical animals lead me to ecology in the university, and with my broad view and interest lead me to human ecology and other interdisciplinary issues like consumtion issues, sustainable development and ecocities.

I was there, in the Tropical rainforest and saw thousand of miles of oil palms monocrops and even orangutans. And somewhere here in life I realized that it doesen't matter how much I know about plants, mammals or what I like; insects. If we want to do something about the planet's health, we must think about how people think and more over how and why they act as they do. We need to talk more than before with each other. Environmental problems are more about psychology than knowledge about ecology, it might happen that they also have some kind of relation to each other in a word "communication"- but in the end- it doesen't matter how much we know about the "true solution"- if we don't use the knowledge.

Now, almost 13 years from beginning of my journey, the World looks even worse. But awareness spread fast in the northern part of the world at this time. Can the 10's be the decennium when we solve this?

COP15, the climate meeting in Copenhagen dec-09 showed that we can not trust politicians to fix it. And if they do; what can they do? Prohibit people from driving their cars? Prohibit them to eat meat? Prohibit them to interact? I guess they don't act, cause they don't know what to do. And isn't it also as "the role of politicans to fix it" is a little bit as "business as usual"? We are at the point where we see that this is not working anymore, to fix the problem we can't use the same tools as we did to create the problems.

Therefore, people as ourselves should act by ourselves. But with no means completely alone, we can help each other if more people would know how to disseminate ideas and how to go from idea to action. It's all about communication, and time is limited.

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I would like to give every human the opportunity to live under the oaks, to have sustainability into their backbones, to go the same journey as me, but a little bit more simple! And with that; it should be easier.

To educate everyone would take too long time so we need therefore speed up a little. To build an environment for people where it's easy "to do right" is the challange for the future.



By the way, Happy TwoThousandandTen!