| [GMW #2391] Living Lightly and Gently With Planet Earth Friday 10 February 2012, Editor: Easy| RobertMuller.org | Contact | Subscribe | Unsubscribe | Biography | World Core Curriculum | Store | NEW Facebook | Twitter | GMW Blogs: English | Portuguese | Spanish | Tagalog | Dutch | ~ Idea 1256 ~ I observe that the firms of the rich countries are exporting frenetically bad consumption habits to the poor countries. Where the latter used to consume a large variety of healthy fruit juices (naturales as they call them in Costa Rica) and local foods, today it is fashionable to drink carbonated sugared drinks, to eat hamburgers and to smoke American cigarettes. 18 December 1997 In locally made clothes they put labels "Made in America", because through advertisement which is cheap here, the people are programmed to crave for American products. A US citizen consumes 30 times what a person in a poor country consumes and leaves behind during a lifetime a mountain of garbage 4000 times his weight, against 150 times the weight of a person in a poor country. From the point of view of the Earth, while there is a population explosion in the poor countries, there is a worse consumption explosion in the rich ones. There are today 4.4 billion people in the poor countries and 1.2 billion in the rich. But the Earth could complain and say: since you the rich consume thirty times more of my resources, I consider that you represent thirty times 1.2 people, i.e. a population of 36 billion. And if the poor countries should someday have the same consumption levels and patterns as the rich countries, their 4.4 billion would have to be multiplied by 30, yielding a total of 132 billion! As you live your daily lives in the US and in other rich countries, you do not see this. But when you look at it from a world point of view, it is a major problem. Robert's The Miracle, Joy and Art of Living, Volume II Chapter 11 - Of Gratitude What riches I can and do extract from the mere fact of being alive! No wealth on Earth can ever match the worth of the miracle of life. Hence the need to ceaselessly express our immense gratitude to God. UN News Sources - UN Chronicle, United Nations News Service , UN Wire News Archive References: Earth Charter, Universal Declaration of Human Rights Rights of: Children, Women, Indigenous People To Be Written: Rights of Nature, Birds, Animals, Fish, etc. WORD FOR THE DAY We have thousands of opportunities every day to be grateful: for having good weather, to have slept well last night, to be able to get up, to be healthy, to have enough to eat. ... There's opportunity upon opportunity to be grateful; that's what life is. -- Brother David Steindl-Rast Books recommended by Robert are here. Other newsletters by GMW's editor can be viewed and subscribed to here. Subscribe to or unsubscribe from GoodMorningWorld.org | The first 4000 Ideas & Dreams For A Better World The Idea Dreams With An Index Idea Dreams by Volumes of 500 Idea Dreams Select Topic Index Idea Dreams listed by Topic |
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