What Kind Of World Will We Leave Behind For Our Children

As I look at our world today I can’t help but wonder what are leaving behind for our children. Will there be any polar ice caps? Will there be any animals left that aren’t in our local zoo? Will the beach be thirty yards more inland? Will the United States be a desert and Africa be lush farmlands? Will they have any trees left? Will the sci-fi worlds we see in movies about the future really be all there is left of this world?

Corporate greed. A recent Stanford study estimates the world could convert to 100% renewable energy by 2030. Do you think corporate America will let that happen? I don’t. So many people fight for what keeps them making money instead of what is best for the world and the people in it. Take cigarette companies for example. As late as the 1940’s there was proof that smoking caused cancer. As of 1994, all seven of the top cigarette making companies denied that smoking causes cancer. Smoking is said to cause 1 out of every 5 deaths in America. The tobacco industry destroys more than 500,000 acres of forest per year. If tobacco farmers grew food instead, they could feed more than 78% of the worlds 28 million malnourished people. In 2012, cigarette companies spent $27 million lobbying government agencies and members of Congress. Now I am not picking on the cigarette industry because you can look up just about any industry, including the health industry, and find where money is being spent to get their products to sell instead of doing the right thing and selling the right products.

Just think about that for a minute? What if tobacco farmers grew food and fed the world instead of tobacco? They would help the world but make less money. What if they spent $27 million on healthier options – growing food, planting trees, charity, getting water to third world countries? What if Anheuser -Busch or Doritos spent the $ 4.5 millon for a 30 second ad for the Super Bowl on something that benefitted the people in the world? I mean we all know who Anheuser-Busch is right? Does that $4.5 million really make someone want to drink there brand over someone elses? I don’t think so. That money could be spent more wisely.

We destroy one area and take out all the non-renewable resources only to move to another area and destroy it. We cut off mountain tops and leave sludge in its place. We deforest large areas of land and do not plant trees to replace them. We are releasing high levels of nitrogen and phosphorous into our water systems and oceans from fertilizer use. We water, even on rainy days, our grass areas by our exit ramps but yet many in this world do not have water to drink.

We take away farmland to put up more and more strip malls. Many of them are abandoned in ten years for new strip malls. We introduce new animals to new lands that wipe out the old animals, therefore changing the food chain.

We over fish, so we make fish farms. We take away our farm lands then we produce GMO’s to make the food grow faster, be resistant to weeds, insects etc because we have less land to farm. This then causes super bugs which are resistant to the weed killer and antibiotics. We give animals steroids to grow faster. We grow chickens that never see the light of day in overcrowded enclosed shelters. How will this all affect not only ourselves but our children as well? Only time will tell but from what I can see, it isn’t good.

There is hope. Companies like Chipolte – who quit selling pork at hundreds of locations because they found a supplier wasn’t meeting their animal welfare standards. They will not be using GMO foods. Chipolte’s core mission is food with integrity. By the way, Chipolte is still making nice profits. Other companies like Toms, who give away one pair of shoes to children in need for each pair of shoes bought, is making money. Chick-fil-A who many people said wouldn’t be succesful being closed on Sundays is very succesful. Sevenly donates a portion of each sale to charity. Their core statement is people matter. Sevenly is widely recognized as one of the nation’s leading “social good” companies, mashable.com just named Sevenly “America’s most social business” and “one of the Top 10 Stories in the First 10 Years of Facebook.”

You can do things the right way and still make a profit, keep the business healthy and help the world.