The Global Community Tribunal

Justice for the People by the People

Dec 04 2007

Footprints leading to extermination

Posted by: admin in General

With the Xmas festive season approaching, I find myself a bit lazy and bored. So, in a moment of not knowing what to do with myself, I decided to measure my ecological footprint. What a shock!

According to the calculations I need three Earths to sustain myself. What is even worse is that my performance (or non-performance) more or less equals the average.

This got me seriously thinking. To justify my extravagance I reasoned that the scale which they use to measure my footprint is much too arbitrary. It does not discount what my worth to the global community is. Surely people of higher value should be cut some slack. George Bush and Gordon Brown surely use up much more ‘Earths” than I do. But they are justified to do so because they have very important jobs to do.

I then tried to calculate my ‘value’ within the greater scheme of things. I reckoned that, if I could proof that my (and a substantial number of other people like myself) value is significantly higher than millions (if not billions) of other people, I could surely justify my consumption. Naturally and in order to save this planet, we would have to reduce the global population drastically to make room for this additional consumption. That would be quite in order seeing that they are in any event worth much less and only using up valuable earthly capacity!

The result of my ‘personal value calculation’ however caused my second shock for the day! I could not find anything that made me more worth to Humanity than anybody else. Nothing! Except for making a living and taking care of my family I have done nothing that could qualify me for promotion to the higher bracket of human existence. If my initial reasoning had to go through, I would be one of those worthless buggers who will have to be exterminated to create more space for the extravagance of the higher value human beings.

So, what is the moral of the story? Either we do something (individually or collectively) that can change the course of human history – and in doing so justify our environmental footprint - or we reduce our impact on the environment. The only other alternative is that oxygen thieves like us be exterminated to make way for more deserving people who can justify their stay on this planet and within this global community!

J.C.Grobler.

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