Pascale Choueiri Saad

Yesterday, while driving, I was listening to Louis Armstrong’s famous song. I closed my eyes and saw trees of green, red roses too. I saw them bloom….
I saw visions of a magnificent planet, of fresh oceans and clean seas, horses galloping in wild spaces, children running in never-ending sunlit paths among green woods, wind-swept wheat fields, and meadows filled with red, blue, and yellow flowers…I could feel the warm sun, hear the singing birds, smell the sweet scent of honeysuckle carried on the smooth breeze, and I thought to myself, what a wonderful world….
It wasn’t long before the loud blast of a nearby horn woke me from my reverie, and at that very moment, the music stopped. I opened my eyes and realized that I was stuck in a huge traffic jam in the middle of dozens of cars, surrounded by huge masses of concrete buildings and atrocious noise pollution. No sight of any green, and no sight of blue. It was back to black and back to reality.
I felt trapped. What have we done?
It was some 66 years ago when Einstein gave a wake-up call by saying: “We are drifting toward catastrophe beyond conception. We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if mankind is to survive.”
And, 66 years later, in 2015, we are still destroying our planet, and we are responsible.
We humans, through the negligence that grows out of our state of denial, are destroying our planet. We spread pollution with our industry, our overpopulation, our fertilizers, and our insecticides. Our greed wreaks ecological havoc as a result of our unsustainable farming, our logging, and our exploitation of the world’s other natural resources. We are making our “home” (the Earth) unlivable, not only for ourselves but for our future generations as well. Our current consumption patterns are driving our natural resources toward irreversible tipping points.
We must learn to say NO to the latent, innate terror of consumerism. We need to consume less and carefully save what remains of this “wonderful world” before it becomes a lost paradise that we shall forever mourn.