Sharing is Caring.
Watercolour pencils on canvas.
Ø 11”.

I, snails and a virus have helped to bring forward Overshoot Day 2020

Who knows me, also knows my every slithering and dampish thing phobia. If I try to remember the moment in which my obsession was born, I can only remember the day in which my grandmother sent me in the garden to pick up tomatoes and at a certain point, I found an explorer worm climbing my calf.

Another child, perhaps, would have been happy and curious to be visited by this peaceful animal, but I have gone mad and have continued to be so far, every time a worm or a snail crosses my way. Try to imagine my enthusiasm when I moved to London and I found a garden overrun by snails! But, mostly, can you imagine what I was thinking when I decided to make of it a vegetable garden? Pure madness!

Four years are passed and the phobia didn’t disappear, but I realized that every time I pick up vegetables, in particular lettuce, chard and spinach, I use every leaf, also the ones clearly visited from my dear snails. I observe their jagged holes and I feel happy. Of course, my happiness comes from their absence, but it is deeper: I realize that I am happy to share with those creatures not guilty of my obsession. I feel that even if I won’t touch one without screaming, the reason that I eat the same leaf they ate let me feel my spirit in peace with Nature.
I feel that this sharing brings me close to the Earth and to the understanding the Whole.

If we really want to be respectful of the Planet from which depends on our surviving, we need this comprehension. When we affirm that we want to save the Planet, we are certainly in good conscience but, perhaps, the failure of most people to commit it comes from their indifference. All that matters is our well-being but is it not clear that it needs the resources that gave humans the chance to exist and evolve?

When those resources will finish, the Planet will find new resources to survive. But will they fit us? Most likely, if there will be not the right conditions, we will become extinct, but not the Earth: she knows how to adapt and evolve herself. We are only her guests.
We need to understand this to seriously start a change, to save ourselves and the Planet. Or better, to defend the Planet to save the conditions that permit our lives.
Who thinks that our efforts are not necessary because the problem is not so severe as the environmentalists want us to believe, they don’t spite them but they are working for our extinction.

Yet so little would be enough.
A microscopic virus was enough to change our pace of life, forcing a change in our habits like reducing transports or the suspension of the deforestation and the overshoot day, after a long time, instead of going backwards, it advances.
Last year the overshoot day was reached on the 29th of July. This year is on the 22nd of August!
The sacrifice was hard and mostly unaware, but what matters is the result: we can be better, even without the pandemic. We know it because we have demonstrated it.
We made a lot of mistakes and now the sea will be more polluted by plastic, but this day is the demonstration that, while continuing to make mistakes, we can change things.
A lot of people went back as usual: continuing to waste, but the seed was planted. We have eaten the leaf together with the snails and something happened.

Also my colour palette, usually dark, it has coloured with joy: it is not hope, neither illusion. Probably we will become extinct anyway and on Earth will evolve, in our place, some other species.
But today I want to be happy because I know that we can do it and life can go on and if it will don’t happen, don’t mind: it would mean that we were a grain passing through the Universe, deleted by its stupidity.

To find out more about overshoot day:
https://www.overshootday.org/
https://www.overshootday.org/2020-calculation/


Sharing is Caring

Recently I noticed an increasing interest in plastic pollution on socials. Suddenly people have become aware of this giant decennial problem. It seems like it was raised in our consciousness the emergency to save our Planet and this seems like the biggest issue.
It is really a great issue and all we are doing for it is great, but becoming aware of this problem can be a remarkable distraction from bigger issues. And no one tells us what really is at the base of our Planet destruction if we don’t search it in the right places. Only if you want to find it.

“Environmental organizations, like other organizations, are not telling you the truth about what the world needs from us as a species” (Will Anderson, co-founder of Greenpeace Alaska, interviewed in The Sustainability Secret).

It is an alarming statement. Why does it happen? Perhaps because their greatest lenders are in some way inside this production chain? And what would happen if you say to people who help those organization that the main help is avoiding eating meat? How can you require to change their behaviour and expect to receive their help? The result is that people are involved in a lot of actions without having the main problem in their minds.

“We’ve basically completely stolen the world — the Earth- from free-living animals to use for ourselves and our cows and pigs and chickens and factory-farmed fish. The oceans have been even more devastated”. (Dr Will Tuttle, interviewed in The Sustainability Secret).

After watching the Cowspiracy movie (2014), and reading the book related to it, The Sustainability Secret (by Kip Andersen and Keegan Kuhn), I cannot be indifferent to the mechanism in which we are imprisoned by our own needs and habits.
We are too many on this Planet (and it seems like no one that has more than two children had understood the problem) and we have largely an animal product-based diet. It means that we need a very large amount of animals, but where are they?
We are almost 8 billion and wherever we are we see humans all around us. Why we don’t see everywhere all the animals we need to feed ourselves?
Because they are mainly hidden away in sheds to satisfy our disproportionate need for products that we often end up wasting. But we also need to feed them, so we need to grow plants. It means to create places in which grow plants, often destroying green areas like the forest, and use a quantity of water not only for the plants but also for all the production cycle.
At the end of this cycle, for example, to produce one-quarter pound hamburger is necessary 660 gallons of water! It is the equivalent of showering for two entire months!
Meat industry means imprisoned animals, deforestation, an enormous quantity of water wasted, pollution. Every one of them involves, in turn, a big network of further problems: drying up of aquifers, drought, greenhouse effect, raising of Oceans’ waters (waters that can no longer return potable).

“Animal agriculture is an environmental disaster that is being ignored by the very people who should be championing its awareness”. (Demostenes Maratos of the Sustainability Institute, interviewed in The Sustainability Secret).

Do you know that the pollution caused by animals is more than transports pollution?
“[…] the meat and dairy industries produce more greenhouse gases than all cars, trucks, trains, boats and planes combined. Worldwide, That’s 13 % for the global transportation sector compared to 18 % for livestock. Cows and other animals produce a substantial amount of methane from their digestive process. Methane gas from livestock has a global warming potential eighty-six times greater than carbon dioxide from vehicles”. (The Sustainability Secret).

We are searching for water on Mars. Soon there will be more drinkable water on Mars than on Earth!
I’m a great supporter of space missions. I think we can’t stop human thirsty of discovery, but it cannot be research of salvation from our self-destruction.

I don’t think it is necessary to completely renounce feeding with a diet that includes animal products.
What we need to understand is that we cannot think of consuming and wasting enough to endanger our Planet. If we really do not want to give up meat and derivatives, we only choose products that come from local farms, where we know that animals can live in a natural way, which also implies their use to eat, even if our compassion could make us make a more radical choice.
I don’t intend to look for the supermarket that sells certified products. I intend to go in person to see breeding and buy the products directly or at the farmers’ market. What does this mean? That if the animals will find their freedom, even if, I’m aware, relative, with the disappearance of the intensive farms there will be less meat and less fish available.
But we will have more drinking water (which, I remind you, it is NOT an infinite resource) and Earth will not be suffocated by the greenhouse effect.


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