Causes for concern

• Our industrial growth society is founded on dangerous and short-sighted assumptions and is likely to deplete and pollute the last reserves of life-sustaining resource on the planet; it should be revealed as such (see the GEO4 report, the Millennium Assessment and this from the IUCN)
• Materialism and our dependence on the debt-driven money economy are causing mental and physical ill health to us as individuals as well as environmental destruction. They are perpetuated by consumerist propaganda that needs to be exposed and countered
• Our competition-based, work-dominated culture is causing mental and physical ill health to us as individuals as well as environmental destruction. It is perpetuated by Darwinist assumptions about hierarchy and human nature that need to be exposed and countered
• Warfare and militarism is an avoidable, horrific aspect of our culture that is geared not to improving our security but to perpetuating economic and industrial dominance that benefit those in power: this needs exposing and correcting
• Our proprietorial attitude to knowledge perpetuates an elitist system of development and discovery, which benefits the privileged at the expense of the poor, stifles free and open scientific research, and often exploits or destroys local, traditional and indigenous knowledge to the extent that its true value is eroded or lost in the name of modernisation and profit
• Western civilisation perpetuates itself by means of violence and by environmental and social exploitation and if it continues along the same lines it will ultimately collapse (ref Jared Diamond, Derrick Jensen and Dmitry Orlov)
• The truths about our imperial society are revealed at its colonial frontiers, i.e. at the interface with those outside it. How we behave there, especially our push for and definition of ‘development,’ reveals much about the collective attitudes we hold; i.e. the nature of the centre is revealed at its edges (ref Hugh Brody, interview)
• Rather than tell it as it is, our media serve to perpetuate the above illusions, as they act in the interests of the corporate and political power-brokers. (Ref argument for manufacture of consent: Edward Bernays [and in a revealing 7-minute BBC video here], Chomsky, Media Lens, etc)
• The mainstream education system inculcates in our children a belief that the Western society’s systems of dominance and control, our culture and our imperial heritage are right, decent, and an inevitable product of ‘progress,’ in a way that discourages children from thinking with freedom and independence and cripples their faith in their intuitive faculties
• The loss of a spiritual dimension, especially the feminine side of spiritual views and practices, has resulted in or compounded our many addictions to unhealthy pursuits including of material gain, the pursuit of status, and dominating and controlling behaviours.