Our environmental symptoms aren’t like a mosquito. They’re like a flat tire while riding a bike: you have to stop and face them to solve them.
Some problems are like a mosquito. It may bother and annoy you, but usually not enough to keep you from what you’re doing. Say you’re walking and a mosquito bothers you. You may swat at it and try to kill it, but you can generally keep doing what you were doing.
Many people see our environmental symptoms as mosquito problems. They see them as bothersome, but not enough to turn away from living the life they wanted in their culture.
Other problems are like a flat tire when riding a bike. These problems won’t go away. They increase if unsolved: if you try to keep riding, you’ll break the bike. If you keep going, you’ll likely fall and injure yourself.
A flat-tire-on-a-bike problem you have to stop what you were doing, face the problem, and solve it. If you don’t, like if you treat them like mosquitos, you’ll injure yourself. You may not be able to return to what you were doing before.
Our environmental symptoms are flat-tire-on-a-bike problems. More precisely, flat-tire-on-a-bike-while-riding-along-a-cliff-edge problems. If we treat them like mosquitos, we’ll injure ourselves.
Decades ago people could figure we’d solve these symptoms later, hoping they might go away on their own. Today, if we don’t solve them, we will suffer.
Most importantly, we have to turn to face them. To continue on the path we were on leads to failure.
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