Being Good Ancestors

     "Our greatest responsibility is to be good ancestors." -- Jonas Salk - inventor of the polio vaccine.

     When I came across that quote recently, it instantly became one of my favorites. Here's another –

     "Too old to plant trees for my own gratification, I shall do it for my posterity." -- Thomas Jefferson. Considering the story about Jefferson's contemporary, George Washington and the whole cherry tree thing, maybe ol' Thomas' idea should have been considered reforestation.

     And lastly, here's a Native American saying that I like a lot - Treat the earth well. It was not given to you by your parents, it was loaned to you by your children. We do not inherit the Earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children.

     I don't know about you folks, but I never had much luck in the borrowing and lending department. When I borrow something, I'm usually pretty handy at finding some way to break it. And when I lend something, it seems as though I lend that ability as well. Perhaps Shakespeare had it right in Hamlet - "Neither a borrower nor a lender be; For loan oft loses both itself and friend, And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry."

     Matthew had a solution for the first part. Forget about the whole loaning concept. If someone asks you for something, give it to them and forget about it. Don't expect to get it back. Dagwood Bumstead and his neighbour Herb work on this premise. If you're not expecting something back, and you don't get it, you're not disappointed. And if it's returned, you're pleasantly surprised. What we like to call a win-win situation.

     Borrowing is another matter. Especially when we're borrowing from the future. Shakespeare was obviously a keen observer of human nature. The term "husbandry" isn't about a course on how to be a good spouse. (Not that it wouldn't be a good idea.) In fact, unless you're in the agricultural business, you don't hear the word much these days. Along with references to animal breeding, the dictionary says this about it: "responsibility for taking good care of resources entrusted to one".

     In other words, to get back to Shakespeare, the Bard says that when we borrow things we have a tendency to get a little slack about looking after them.

     Which may explain why we've over fished the oceans, hit peak oil production, and depleted the ozone layer. It's not that we don't care; it's just that we're sloppy.

     Now, you might think that it doesn't really matter. The end result is the same. No fish, no oil, no ozone. And eventually, no life.

     But in fact it matters a great deal. The first step toward fixing something is to understand why it's broken.

Abraham Lincoln once said "Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe." He was probably thinking about Jefferson and Washington.

     The point is, we need to understand why we're facing the environmental and social challenges that we are. It's easy to just blame material greed or religious self-righteousness. Tempting too, because it lets us point fingers at people. Especially people who aren't us.

     The idea of sloppy husbandry, however, offers us a different way to look at it. If our poor care of resources is a result of our practice of borrowing from the future, then perhaps the solution is as simple as Shakespeare's advice. Let's not borrow any more.

     Or at least, when we take Dagwood's saw back, let's replace the blade we broke first.

     And when we give the world back to our kids, maybe we could clean it up a little bit first as well.