How are you and I going to contribute to COP-26 to help save our planet?

What is crystal clear from the past decades, is that if we all wait for our Governments to fix the planet it will be too late and there will be no beautiful Earth for our children and grandchildren to inhabit.  We are truly at an unprecedented tipping point for humanity, but not for the planet. The Earth has seen mass extinction many times before and recovered. Mankind, that incudes you and me and every other living soul on this planet, has to take the initiative and the responsibility to make changes in our lives to save the only place we have to live. We all have the Response-Ability, let’s use it. Most of the suggestions to fix the planet are long-term and require massive new investment in new technology or unacceptable demands on individuals that politicians dare not make if they are to stay in power. We don’t have that sort of timescale to stop the rot, we need action now or at least over the next year or two.  I did promote a month by month action plan two years ago entitled, “You Can Save The Planet!” that we could all follow to some degree to suit our individual lives. However not much has changed over the two years besides having to deal with the COVID pandemic, that is a part of the big problem, living in harmony with nature. There is a more serious discussion taking place now we are getting nearer to the critical tipping point, but that is what it is, more serious “Blah, blah, blah” as Greta Thunberg would say!

So what are you and I going to do to change this inaction?

If all mankind lived and ate like we in the West, especially as in the USA, we would need nine planet Earths. So effectively it will mean an even larger proportion of mankind will need to starve for the rest to live their lives unchanged. Wouldn’t it be great if there was a way to live that made a huge contribution to solving the Global Warming Problem, the Environmental Destruction problem, the Increasing Fresh Water Shortage, the devastating loss of animal, insect and bird species, loss of forest, that also decreased the possibility of serious risk from developing diabetes, heart disease, strokes, obesity and other chronic diseases, that would save us thousands of pounds on our food and extend our healthy active lives? 

Would we all be willing and happy to make such a change in our lives, I wonder?

So, the good news is there is a way to achieve all that but the bad news is that many would not be willing to make the change in their lives for it to work. How it would work is to simply eliminate one of the most loved yet most damaging foods from our diets. A food that accounts for as much Greenhouse Gas Production as all the International Aviation and/or Transport Systems, that is the major cause of deforestation, ocean and river pollution and depletion of fresh water supplies. This is meat production on the scale that is now a factory industry.  By eliminating or drastically reducing the consumption of meat we would be reducing Greenhouse Gas Production by over 10 metric tons per year per household and creating all the above additional benefits as well as saving ourselves thousands of pounds every year on our food bills by replacing the lost calories and nutrients with whole plant foods, fruits, vegetables, grains, nuts and seeds. Learn more about this concept HERE As someone once said when told this “That would be an extreme change to make!’ The answer a doctor gave was “Not as extreme as cutting open the chest to access the heart to insert a bypass stent!” Now, that would be extreme, as would our failure to stop the destruction of our beautiful planet, mankind’s only home. Michael Lingard BSc DO WFNut.Cert. Further information: “You Can Save The Planet!” "Diet and Climate Change - Cooking Up a Storm"