Marcus O’Mullane, Byron Bay
More comfortable chairs, bigger houses, faster devices, another pair of branded underpants with endangered species printed on them to ‘raise awareness’ while 50 other species are wiped out of existence.
Worldwide, over the last 10 years, an increasing amount of all the wealth created is going to a very small number of people. Since 2009 the wealth of the 400 richest Americans (0.00025 per cent of their population) more than doubled to almost $3 trillion, while the total wealth of everyone else fell.
So why are we trashing the planet? What is all the land clearing, the mining, the oil spills, the billions of sharks slaughtered for their fins, the fracking, the habitat destroying industrial agriculture, the militarisation, the urbanisation, the road building, the factory fishing, the deforestation, the rape and pillage of the last remaining natural ecosystems for? Our world has created 8,700,000 species over the course of 4,500,000,000 years and we are destroying it to make that small percentage of morbidly wealthy people even more wealthy. Well that makes sense!
In less than the span of four average human lifetimes or 1/15millionth of the time it took to create the abundant Eden we found ourself a part of we have polluted, trashed, and consumed the life out of enough of the planet to tip the balance that supports every species of life.
Now we are facing existence in the fractured, broken, trashed, oil slicked, plastic filled nightmare of what is left of the beautiful pristine cradle we evolved in; the only place in the entire infinite universe where we can be sure life has evolved.
It took 4,500,000,000 years to create it and only 300 years to bring it to its knees. Is anyone else thinking WTActualF is going on right now? Is it time for drastic immediate action yet?
Or is it already too late? Are we too lazy, too psychologically broken? Or are we not sure that we even want a world where we or are not allowed to happily, endlessly consume as we have grown accustomed to?
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
