Marianne de Zwart's Page

The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.
Mahatma Gandhi

As God first created the Earth, the plants and trees and the animals and finally human beings, giving the human beings the order to take care of the Earth, the plants and trees and the animals, ( Genesis ), a big responsibility is led on the shoulders of human beings.
Do we take that responsibilty ? Do we care about the Earth and all what lives upon it ?
Sometimes yes and often no.
The leaders of the countries of the G20 are coming together in Copenhagen in october now to discuss the climate on Earth.
There are so many influences on the climate. How to deal with it ?
We can start to take care of what is given to us amidst we live. Our own environment. The nature we live in. The animals who are our companions and the wild animals.
The plants and the trrees, that surround us. And the parts on Earth, where wilderness is. forests, mountains, valleys and last but not least the lakes and the oceans.
Water is one of the five elements. We consist of 70 % water in our bodies. The same is for the animals, be it dolphins or apes or insects or sea-anemones. Neither plants and trees can without water. In Africa is more drought. In other areas in the world are more floods, too much water. Ice is melting, so the sea level is getting higher, bad for the Lowlands.
The air, another one of the five elements, is needed for breathing. The CO2-level is too high. It seems to be the cause of the gap in the atmosphere of the Earth.
The ground, earth, soil, another element, is in some countries exhausted by agriculture or washed away by water, rain, where trees has been cut away, so they cannot hold the ground in place on the hills or mountains with their roots. Naked rocks and deserts are the result.
Fire, another element, burns evrything clean.
The space, the fifth element, is crowded in some places as in big cities and sometimes empty as in deserts.
How do we get the Earth in balance again ?
In Copenhagen they can discuss a lot, but we have to act ourselves. We all have the responsibility to take care of our environment, our habitat, the place where we live to start with. But we have also the responsibility of places elsewhere, if we get food or wood or oil from these places. Do we treat these places right ?
In Borneo, Sumatra and in Brasil in the Amazon-region forests are cut away for the wood to use for our houses. A tree in a forest forms a community with plants growing in or around it and with the animals which live in or nearby it for shelter or for fruit, for food. Take one tree away and a whole community is gone. In Sumatra and Borneo the Gorilla and the Oran Oetang are threatened species. In Brasil one still discovers unknown species of plants and of animals. So if forests are taken away, we don't even know what damage we cause. The sffect will be felt later, but then it is too late. Still one is taking big parts of the Amazon-forest away. One quarter of this forest is cut away since one started in the sixties in the last century. If this cutting progresses, the forest of the Amazon will be gone over 120 years. The soil is poor and used for agriculture, so it will get exhausted. Will this area be the next Sahara or Gobi-desert?
We don't think about our behavior how we treat the Earth or the oceans. The oceans are so big and deep, that we think if we throw our bar gage in the sea, it wil vanish by itself. But brave men, who searched at the oceans in places not often used for shipping routes how the condition of the oceans is. They found in the Pacific huge fields with a diameter of some kilometres full of pieces of plastic. Plastic is unsolvable. The plastic comes in the sea-animals with bad effect for their condition and health. Finally the pollution will come into the fish we eat.
We have to realize we are not the only one that matters on Earth. We need the plants and trees and animals and the ground, the soil, we harvest our vegetables and cereals from.
And we don't want to be washed away from the mountains, if it rains.
We want to breath fresh air and drink fresh clean water and eat fresh clean food.
It is up to ourselves to have the right attitude for treating our planet, our home.
In Copenhagen they discuss, we in the whole world are the caretakers of our home.
We have to decide to have the right attitude to have a healthy Earth and everything in and upon the Earth be it soil and all it contains like minerals, oil and rocks, or water or air or all the living creatures.
We cannot give away our responsibility about the Earth to the leaders of the G20 to decide what is right or wrong..
WE have to take our responsibility ourselves !
So let us toast for our healthy Earth and let us start today to take care of our home, sweet home, our sweet and only Earth !
Namaste.
Marianne..


This video shows what I mean.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5szT-6qB_0

The beauty and value of Amazon rainforests

http://youtu.be/43yvlrNl3Xc