Losing diversity and beauty - a metapersonal quandary

Sam has been reading a book which loosely classes people into three categories in terms of empathy and connectedness to others. The first category is kind of based in self, everything pretty much stems from the individual's own concern for their immediate personal needs etc... the next is interpersonal basically they have empathy for other people then there's this category, I think it was meta-personal. I think from what she described it encompasses that feeling of connection we have (or some of us have) for other living things.... or even places. 

I haven't read the book, I'm not familiar with the theory but I sure tend to feel a sense of loss when the environment I love is heartlessly reduced to a pile of rubble, broken trees and rotting folliage!

There is a beautiful native Gardenia I pass every day on my way to work. I noticed it a couple of years ago in the scrub beside Darwin International Airport. It's the only one I've ever seen. For most of the year it's a fairly nondescript woody shrub... but in the wet season and when it's flowering the foliage is full and thick and green and the flowers have the sweetest scent! Two years ago the location of the tree kept it well hidden but since work started on Osgood drive, the developers have crept closer and closer. Now the tree is in the direct path of a huge pile of clay fill which is being dumped in a pile right beside the remaining woodland. I can't bear to see this tree destroyed but I know that I must! I can't turn my back on a place I love! 

Already trucks have come so close to the tree that they've scraped bark off while dumping earth on the ground beside it. I am worried this beautiful plant may only have days left. 

I am hoping the tree will survive to flower once more this year so I can share just how beautiful it is. 

Losing it... for what?

My mind boggles and my heart breaks at the absurdity of our compartmentalized lives and the will for destruction of everything in the pursuit of personal gain!

I've just been reading a book titled 'Requiem for a Species', in which the very real, immediate and dire consequences of Global Warming are laid out with absolute clarity, yet when I step outside my door in the morning I look around and discover it's business as usual for all who should be concerned.

To rub salt into the would caused by the indifference of human beings. I cycle every day through bushland I have come to love only to find that it too is being devoured by the economic growth machine!

I have cried and I do cry when I witness what they are doing to the earth and to this place which I have a very real and very personal connection to. It seems no place may go unmolested in the age of mass consumption.

Images below are of land I am close to and ride through every day. I hope to document the beauty and the destruction over the coming months. If I had the power I would stop them, but I think I'd have all the impact of an insect against a windscreen.

Open woodland right beside current construction site.... about to be flattened! (16/08/16)

Native bee gathering pollen from Spear Grass flowers (Photo taken Wet season early 2016)

Spreading earth only meters away from the only Native Gardenia tree I've seen in Darwin (16/08/16)

The thin dirt path where Grevillia Grove used to be (Aug 2016)

Concrete pour (17/08/16)

Wildlife, bio diversity, beauty and all those things we think make life more tolerable on this planet aside. If we take the warnings of climate scientists seriously, then large scale construction needs to stop! Over consumption needs to stop! All our efforts must be turned to finding ways to live in a carbon neutral (or carbon negative) lifestyle or there will be no future for us.

What is?

Listening to Jed McKenna again, again, and here's the pressing statement that seems to pop up continuously in my life like a slap in the face to remind me I waste my days in Maya.

The darling and beautiful Maya... Who would ever want to look the other way? (with thanks)

 Here's the words from the beginning of tape 3 (Spiritual Enlightenment the damnedest thing)

“Truth exists my mind was shrieking, it doesn’t matter what it is or where it is. Somewhere somehow there is truth. I don’t care if it’s in Christianity or Judaism or Islam or the most despised cult in the deepest bowels of depravity. It exists and I will not spend another minute of my life flailing blindly around in the filth or miasma of the universe for any other reason than to find it.

The universe isn’t vague and ignorant, I am vague and ignorant.

Something is true and it doesn’t matter what it is. I am not going to be false any more. I have not even the slightest trace of the slightest reservation about the fact that I would rather suffer and die figuring out what is true than continue this life as a slave to lies and ignorance” 

Whew! Oh Yeh! What got this ball rolling again? Surrounded by lies, myth, deluded rationalization if only I could shut my eyes and enjoy the luxury of being white and living in a wealthy comfortable country. Damn!

What got me listening to that damned fool... so called Jed McKenna (a myth himself) Oh yeh that's right! I had to go and watch Apocalypse Now, again, again! 

Frustrated by dealings with politicians, hypocritical religios, business magnates, sellout, money grubbers and wasters of life and limb I felt compelled to watch that film again!

And 

Captain Willard said:

 "...It's a way we had over here of living with ourselves. We cut 'em in half with a machine gun and give 'em a Band-Aid. It was a lie. And the more I saw them, the more I hated lies."

And Walter E. Kurtz said:

"We train young men to drop fire on people, but their commanders won't allow them to write "fuck" on their airplanes because it's obscene."

"...And if I were to be killed, Willard, I would want someone to go to my home and tell my son everything. Everything I did, everything you saw, because there's nothing that I detest more than the stench of lies. And if you understand me, Willard, you will do this for me." 

And I got a glimpse, through a crack in the curtains, of truth; and Maya whispered in my ear... "Don't look there dear there's nothing for you in that, come back to me, be comfortable and in peace, don't trouble yourself with the lines that flicker across the screen, enjoy the show and relax."....


 But still the babies are crying and imprisoned in gulags on sinking islands in the pacific

Painting of " Ghulam Sakhi Hazara " Hazara artist .

Still the ancient burial grounds and remnant sanctuaries of green are bulldozed while politicians announce "Oh the cleverness of ME!"

The destruction of land preserved for conservation back in the 70s. Who knows what fate the graves

Hard fought for but easily lost (Land set aside for conservation and recognized site of a burial ground)

And still the oil companies fracture and poison the sacred ground under our feet

http://www.ecnt.org/campaigns/dont-frack-territory

Oh Maya darling... Morpheus if you were to offer me the blue pill now how tempted I would be!