The prompt for this entry said: “Too much egocentricity and selfishness is showing in our world. Humans need to make a major shift of consciousness to stop harming ourselves and our planet”. And honestly, I couldn’t agree more. We live in a day and age where we have so much access to information, so many facts, news and scandals being thrown at our face that we end up suffering from Disaster Fatigue, which is what happens when our minds are bombarded with bad news.
We see heartbreaking news countless times per day. School Shootings. Police Brutality. Global Warming. Racism. Politics. So the impact of each individual event is decreased. We’ve seen the statistics; By 2050, the oceans could have more plastic than fish. How come are we not more terrified than we are? How are we not desperately throwing all of our money towards fixing this massive problem?
Well, I think that a lot of people can’t relate to this kind of issue. For example, as someone who lives in Costa Rica, individual U.S School shootings don’t leave a major impact on me. By this logic, someone who lives in, say, New York City, won’t care about the oceans either. They can’t relate to the issue; which is where I think the solution is. It’s not their fault that they don’t care; some of these people have never even seen an ocean in their lives…
There is no easy solution to this issue, and I won’t pretend that there’s an easy way to care about the environment. After all, it’s just one more disaster that fills our Social Media feeds and our Newspaper Front Pages.
CAS is a way for us to bring that understanding to other people, and acquire it ourselves. Admittedly, not a very large scope, but if one of the kids we took to the Mangrove grows up to be an environmental activist, than that’s a win in my book. I would encourage more schools to incorporate CAS or CAS-like programs, because really, One big group can’t make a difference. Only countless small ones can.
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